It’s just a single day in Murder City, USA — and, yes, we need the police

Do America’s cities need police? Some progressives want to replace police with social workers, but we doubt that includes the people in Chicago who witnessed or were victimised by a crime rampage on a recent single day in Murder City, USA.

Eighteen people in Chicago were murdered on May 31, marking the city’s most violent day in at least 60 years. Over the span of that spring weekend, 85 people were shot, 24 fatally. As rioters ransacked businesses across the city, gangs exploited the chaos and the overstretched police force to steal and kill.

“We’ve never seen anything like it, at all,” Max Kapustin, the senior research director at the University of Chicago Crime Lab, told the Chicago Sun-Times. “When (the police department) has to turn its attention elsewhere and there’s suddenly this vacuum that opens up, you also unfortunately see a picture like you saw with (last) weekend where you see an absurd amount of carnage, people getting injured and killed.”

The victims included John Tiggs, a 32-year-old father of three who had gone to a store to pay a bill about noon. Shots broke out in the store as looters robbed shops across Chicago’s South Side. Mr Tiggs was killed by a bullet to the abdomen.

Angelo Bronson, a 36-year-old father of two young children, had been visiting family in Chicago from Washington DC, when killed in a drive-by shooting. “Just about the last person I could have thought this would happen to was Angelo,” said his longtime friend Ali Evans.

Most victims were young black males, and so are most of the suspects. But several of the slain were young black women. Danyal Jones, a 30-year-old black woman, was standing on her front porch when shot in the chest by a passer-by. Keishanay Bolden, an 18-year-old student at Western Illinois University who was studying to become a correctional officer, was reportedly shot during an argument. She had written a paper last year about gun violence in her neighbourhood.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot said the city’s emergency call centre received 65,000 calls on May 31, about 50,000 more than during a typical day. Police were called in to work overtime but stretched thin amid the widespread and indiscriminate attacks on businesses in low-income, minority neighbourhoods.

Progressives protest when black men are unjustly killed by white police officers, but the sounds of silence prevail when blacks are killed by criminals. Before the recent riots, Chicago had recorded 200 murders and 826 shootings this year, 22 per cent and 14 per cent more respectively than last year.

Bad cops need to be punished for misconduct. But the lesson of Chicago, and so many other cities, is that police are essential to protect minority communities from violence that thrives in an atmosphere of disorder.

The Wall Street Journal