Race And Murder In Chicago

In Chicago on Tuesday, current Mayor Lori Lightfoot lost her bid for re-election. In a race where only the top two finishers would advance to the final round, Lightfoot finished third, with 17.1% of the vote. Of nine total candidates, the top two vote-getters were Paul Vallas (33.7% of the vote) and Brandon Johnson (20.3%). Those two will now compete in a runoff in April.

The New York Times, which provided those voting data, described Lightfoot in its February 28 report as someone “whose outsider status and promises to enact sweeping reforms propelled her to office four years ago,” but who “saw her popularity plunge as homicides reached generational highs and as Chicago struggled to rebound from the pandemic.”

It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person. A fair summary of Lightfoot’s term is that she totally failed to deal with Chicago’s most pressing issue, which is crime — particularly the horrifying rate of murders of young black men. And when called out on that issue, she reacted by accusing anyone who opposed her of racism. Frankly, she is despicable.

Charles Blow of the New York Times — a progressive and very sympathetic to Lightfoot — interviewed her four days before the election, and reported on the interview in a column today. Needless to say, Lightfoot took the opportunity of speaking to Blow to accuse the apparent frontrunner in the race, Paul Vallas, of racism. (Vallas was the only white candidate among the nine in the contest.). From Blow’s piece:

Vallas had run a tough-on-crime, law-and-order campaign in which he told one crowd that his “whole campaign is about taking back our city, pure and simple.” Lightfoot called the remark “the ultimate dog whistle.” In our interview, she was brutal in her racial assessment of Vallas: “He is giving voice and platform to people who are hateful of anyone who isn’t white and Republican in our city, in our country.”

And in the immediate aftermath of the election, the New York Post quoted Lightfoot as follows:

“I’m a black woman in America. Of course,” she replied when asked by a reporter if she had been treated unfairly.

Sure, Lori. And just how bad is the carnage among young black men in Chicago? The data are not necessarily easy to find, because this is one of those subjects that is systematically suppressed by the government press. But if you take time to do some research, what you find is truly astounding.

In March 2019, the Children’s Research Institute of the Children’s Hospital of Chicago put out a big Report with the title “Adolescent Firearm Homicide in Chicago 2013–2017: Young Black Males at High Risk.” Admittedly, this Report came out just as Lightfoot was getting elected four years ago, and it uses data from a five-year window before she was in office. However, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment, there is every reason to believe that things got even somewhat worse on her watch. Key finding:

In 2016, Chicago’s overall adolescent firearm homicide rate was about three times the national rate, while Chicago’s black male adolescent firearm rate was nearly 50 times the national rate.

They provide the following chart of homicide rates for the five years analyzed:

Now 365.3 per 100,000 is a truly astounding homicide rate. The overall homicide rate for Chicago has run around 25-30 per 100,000 over the last decade, which is very high, but less than a tenth of the 365. The nation’s true murder capitals — places like Detroit, Baltimore and St. Louis — rarely exceed an overall homicide rate of about 50 per 100,000. A rate of 365 per 100,000 means that over a five year period a black male adolescent in Chicago stands nearly a 2% chance of getting murdered.

The Children’s Hospital Report also provides maps by year of the neighborhoods in Chicago where the murders of black adolescents took place. Here is the chart for 2016, the worst of the years in the study. Colored shading indicates higher homicide rates, with the darker colors designating the highest rates:

If you know your Chicago neighborhoods, you will quickly recognize that all the most dangerous neighborhoods are the most heavily black areas.

Did things improve on Lightfoot’s watch? There is every reason to believe that things got even worse. Station WTTW provides the following chart of murders in Chicago by year from 1999 to 2022:

Chicago had set a then-record of 778 murders in 2016. But after some declines before Lightfoot took office, the number of murders went back up to 776 in 2020, and then hit a new record of 802 in 2021 — both on Lightfoot’s watch. There was a modest decline in 2022, although WTTW reports that other categories of crime continued to increase. There is every reason to believe that the proportion of the murders involving young black men did not improve during Lightfoot’s mayoralty.

As noted many times previously on this blog, in the late 1980s and early 1990s New York City had a murder rate in the range of 25-30 per 100,000 — comparable to Chicago’s rates over the past decade. During the Giuliani and Bloomberg mayoralties from 1994 to 2013, the murder rate here went all the way down to 4 per 100,000 (before rising back to about 6 per 100,000 under Mayor de Blasio). New York has shown how it is done. If New York can do it, Chicago has no excuse. Approximately 400 +/- murders of young black men in Chicago each year over the past four years are blood on Lori Lightfoot’s hands.

Meanwhile, in a piece at Outkick, also from today, Ian Miller notes a few of Lightfoot’s other “accomplishments”:

• “She supported defunding the police, asking for an $80 million budget cut after the summer of 2020.”

• “Her COVID authoritarianism was outrageous, embarrassing and disgraceful. Beyond many other mandates, she seemingly took joy in eliminating the ability of unvaccinated people to ‘live life’ as they wanted.”

• “She was also, unsurprisingly, an early believer in the Jussie Smollett hoax which came just before the 2019 election.”

And it goes on and on from there. It would be very hard for Chicago’s next Mayor to be worse than Lightfoot.