January 4, 2017
Addressing Chicago Violence
President
Obama will give his farewell
and good riddance speech on
January 10 in Chicago, the town where the community organizer-in-chief began
his political rise. He will attempt once again to cement his legacy by
recreating history in his image. He will make his speech against the background
of what is arguably the world’s most beautiful skyline and the world’s most
hideous violence.
Chicago,
one of the toughest gun control cities in the United States, ended 2016 with 762 homicides, the most in two decades
and more than Los Angeles and New York City combined. While President Obama has
addressed every mass shooting as another reason for stricter gun control, he
has little to say about the carnage in his hometown, and it is not likely he
will address it in his self-serving and narcissistic farewell speech.
President-elect Donald Trump has, tweeting on Monday night.
"Chicago murder rate is record setting -- 4,331 shooting victims with 762
murders in 2016,” Trump tweeted. “If Mayor can't do it he must ask for Federal
help!”
Chicago
does indeed need federal help, particularly in the area of federal prosecution
of gun crimes. As Investor’s
Business Daily has noted,
a recent study showed that despite rising murders and gang violence, Chicago
ranked dead last in federal gun crime prosecutions:
A murdered Chicago teen's mother attends the president's
speech on gun control, not knowing federal gun-crime prosecutions have in fact
dropped on his watch — with the Windy City bringing up the rear.
Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton, the mother of murdered
15-year-old Chicago teen Hadiya Pendleton, was one of 20 mothers who lost
children to criminal violence who were at the White House last Thursday to hear
President Obama speak once again on the need for gun control.
Obama met with her and some of the others in a small group
before his formal remarks and told them "how serious this issue really is
and something needs to be done about it," she said.
But President Obama did not tell this group that Syracuse
University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) shows that the
Northern Illinois district ranked 90th out of 90 in prosecutions of federal
weapons crimes per capita.
David Burnham, co-director of TRAC, states their analysis
says that according to case-by-case U.S. Justice Department information
obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, there were 52 federal gun
prosecutions in Illinois North (Chicago) in 2012, or 5.52 per million in
population.
By this measure, compared with the 90 federal judicial
districts in the U.S., the prosecution rate in Chicago was the lowest in the
country.
If
President Obama had a son, he might have looked like Amari Brown, the little
boy killed by a bullet intended for his gang-banger father on the streets of
President Obama’s Chicago in yet another bloody Windy City weekend. As theChicago Tribune reported, over the Fourth of July
weekend in 2015, Amari Brown was one of the ten that were killed among 55 that
were shot.:
Among
those killed was 7-year-old Amari Brown, shot in the chest as he watched
fireworks near his father's home in Humboldt Park late Saturday
night. Police say they believe the attack was aimed at the father, whom
they described as a ranking gang member.
Former
Chicago Police Superintendant Garry McCarthy got it right when he
observed that Amari Brown was another victim, not of police racism, but of gang
violence and a revolving door justice system:
Antonio Brown, who police say is a ranking member of the
Four Corner Hustlers street gang, has been arrested 45 times on charges ranging
from gun possession to burglary, and is not cooperating with detectives in
their investigation into the slaying of his son, Amari Brown, police said.
McCarthy said that the elder Brown's last arrest was in
April for gun possession after leading police on a vehicle pursuit. Brown was
later released on bail in that case, Cook County court records show.
"If Mr. Brown is in custody, his son is alive,"
McCarthy, flanked by several police officials and other officers, told a room
full of reporters at the Harrison District police station on the West Side on
Sunday afternoon. "That's not the case. Quite frankly, he shouldn't have
been on the street."
A lot
of criminals shouldn’t be out on the streets, particularly those convicted of
gun crimes. Many gun and gang crimes in Chicago are drug related President
Obama has commuted the sentences of many drug offenders, including those who possessed a gun during the commission of their crimes:
President Obama on Thursday commuted the sentences of
nearly 100 federal inmates doing hard time, and almost one in five were in jail
partially because of the illegal guns they carried…
Of those who had their terms commuted this week, 19 were behind bars on a
combination of drug charges that also involved firearms possession -- often
multiple counts -- usually by a prohibited possessor…
The President commuted 111 federal prisoners in late August, in which a number of
those with firearms charges were featured. Earlier the same month he did
likewise for 214 inmates including56 with gun felonies.
Current
Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson recently pleaded for stricter penalties for repeat
gun offenders after a Chicago Police commander was gunned down:
Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson renewed his
call on Friday for stricter penalties for gun offenders after a police
commander was shot at while working on the South Side…
The violence hit close to home late Thursday when Noel
Sanchez, commander of the South Chicago police district, was shot at while
working the streets in the 8800 block of South Saginaw Avenue. The gunman fled
to a nearby home, touching off an hourslong standoff with a SWAT team before
five people were taken into custody early Friday. Multiple guns were also
recovered.
Johnson cited the incident as an example of how gang
members have become more emboldened, in part because of what the superintendent
considers lenient penalties for gun offenses…
Johnson spoke once again in favor of proposed legislation
in Springfield designed to make it harder for judges to impose light sentences
for repeat gun offenders. The goal of the legislation is to ensure that they
face several years in prison.
He singled out a 21-year-old man as an example of why the
legislation is needed. The man was arrested in February on a felony weapons
violation and sentenced to seven years in prison in April, police said. But he
was assigned to boot camp and was already out on parole Aug. 22 when he was
arrested again for gun possession in the West Side's Austin community.
Fear
not, Superintendant Johnson. There’s a new sheriff in town and help is on the
way. President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice will have your back and
that of your officers. Gun offenders will be prosecuted vigorously and Attorney
General Jeff Sessions will be looking to enforce the laws to put gun offenders
in jail, not blaming police for their racial insensitivity.
Trump
has also called for the deportation and incarceration of illegal alien
criminals, including those belonging to gangs like MS-13, who come into the
U.S. across an unsecured border, many becoming gang members in our urban areas. NBC5 Chicago reported Trump’s linkage of illegal
aliens and gang crimes in Chicago:
Donald Trump said he thinks a lot of “gang members” in
America, particularly in Chicago, Baltimore and Ferguson, are illegal
immigrants and, if he becomes president, “they’re going to be gone.”
“A lot of the gangs that you see -- it doesn’t hopefully pertain
to you guys so much -- but when you look at Baltimore, when you look at Chicago
and Ferguson and a lot of areas, you know a lot of these gang members are
illegal immigrants,” he said during an interview with Mobile, Alabama radio
station FM Talk 1065. “They’re going to be gone. We are going to get them out
so fast, out of this country so fast.”
Lock
them up, Donald, lock them up. Obama and Rahm Emanuel haven’t
Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer
whose pieces have appeared inInvestor’s
Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the ChicagoSun-Times among other publications.
US police killed more than 1,150 in 2016
US police killed more than 1,150 in 2016
US police killed more than 1,150 in 2016
By Gabriel Black
At least 1,152 people were killed by police in the United States in 2016 according to the tracking site killedbypolice.net. While the total number of killings documented is slightly down from 2015’s total of 1,208, police continued to kill at the rate of three people every day.
The number of people killed by police every year in the United States far dwarfs those killed by police in every other major advanced capitalist country. In 2015, for example, US cops killed 100 times more people than German police, despite the US having only about four times Germany’s population. Meanwhile in the UK only 14 people were killed by police in 2014.
Paul Hirschfield, a sociologist at Rutgers University, found that the US police shot and killed at a ratio of 3.42 people per million inhabitants per year. In contrast, Denmark had a ratio of 0.187; France, 0.17; Sweden, 0.133; Portugal, 0.125; Germany, 0.09; Norway, 0.06; Netherlands, 0.06; Finland, 0.034; and England and Wales, 0.016.
The overwhelming and often deadly violence meted out by American police is, among other things, an expression of the brutal and tense state of class relations in the US. Large sections of the working class live in or near poverty with basic needs like clean water, nutritious food, a job, healthcare, a good place to live and an education beyond reach.
The state, in turn, has responded with brute force, cutting access to basic social services and spending billions of dollars upgrading and militarizing the nation’s police force. This has included the mobilization of the National Guard and the imposition of states of emergencies to quell protests against police violence in recent years.
The United States is a country where fraud, bribery, deception and outright theft, all on a massive scale, are standard business practices for the major banks and corporations. Meanwhile the working class is held to an entirely different standard, in which execution without trial by a police officer is an increasingly common punishment for the smallest of misdemeanors.
The end of the year is an opportunity to assess this mass loss of life and clarify the political issues at stake in this state sanctioned murder.
According to the Washington Post, which runs its own database on the amount of people shot and killed by police (not just killed), 24 percent of the victims of police shootings and killings were black in 2016. That is 232 people out of 957 total shot and killed. In 2016 African Americans were shot at a rate double their percentage share of the total population.
While the media discussion around police killings and the protests by the Black Lives Matter organization has focused on the disproportionate rate at which blacks are killed by police, the largest share, 48 percent, are white.
As the World Socialist Web S ite has emphasized, “Blacks are killed by police at a much higher rate than their proportion in the population, an indication that racism plays a significant role, but the number of white victims demonstrates that class, not race, is the more fundamental issue.”
The exclusive focus on race by the pseudo left and the Democratic Party establishment conceals the most fundamental issue, that of class.
While the Post does not track the class of those killed going through each killing, though, case-by-case, one would be hard pressed to find people from the upper classes, let alone better off sections of workers and professionals, regardless of the color of their skin. Those who are killed are often from the lowest sections of the working class, and often its most vulnerable layers: the unemployed, the mentally ill, those living in the poorest neighborhoods, both rural and urban, and the homeless.
For example, of the 957 killed, 240 had clear discernible signs of mental illness—that is, 25 percent of the victims.
Of the victims, 441 were not armed with a gun, 46 percent of those killed. One-hundred seventy people were armed with a knife. And, 44 had a toy weapon of some kind. Forty-seven were neither armed nor driving a car in a way the police deemed dangerous.
Sixty-five were driving cars, causing the police to categorize the vehicle as a weapon. However, in many instances there is no evidence to show that a vehicle acted as a weapon. For example, Christian Redwine, a 17-year-old white male, was shot after a car-chase in which Redwine crashed. He was unarmed and was suspected of stealing the vehicle.
Another notable fact is that 329 of the victims were fleeing, about 34 percent of the victims.
These cumulative statistics show the willingness of police to quickly kill people who pose little to no threat to them.
Police killings should be considered in the broader context of punishment for the most vulnerable and impoverished. In the United States, over 2 million people are in federal or state prisons. Furthermore, 4.75 million are on probation or parole. This means that about 7 million people, 3 percent of the adult population, have been or are in prison.
As in the case of police killings, many of these people have been locked up for shoplifting, grand theft auto and robbery. Many others are incarcerated for drug possession and use.
While millions of destitute and hopeless people in the US are brutally punished for relatively minor infractions, the real criminals, those in the Bush and Obama administrations responsible for wars of aggression that have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands in the Middle East, as well as the bankers who crashed the economy in 2008, have reaped the benefits of their much more serious crimes.
No amount of police training, community engagement or racial bias classes will end police killings. The deaths are borne out of much more fundamental political and economic realities than what this or that police officer feels and thinks. In 2017, amidst a worsening political and economic crisis, the state will be even more ready to kill, harass and imprison the poorest section of the population.
AMERICA: One paycheck and two illegals away from homelessness.
"The economists found that the pre-tax share of national income received by the bottom half of the US population has been cut nearly in half since 1980, from 20 percent to 12 percent, while the income share of the top one percent has nearly doubled, from 12 percent to 20 percent."
SOARING POVERTY IN AMERICA’S OPEN
BORDERS
TRUMPERNOMICS FOR THE SUPER RICH:
“In the US, the working class will confront a government unlike any other in American history, which will continue and intensify a decades-long social counterrevolution overseen by the Democrats and Republicans. The incoming Trump administration is manned by billionaires, generals and arch reactionaries. It is a government of, by and for the oligarchy, committed to destroying every remaining gain won by workers over the past century.”
December 29, 2016
OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS:
Build the La Raza Democrat Party base with open
borders, no ID to vote Democrat, no E-VERIFY and NO DAMNED LEGAL NEED TO APPLY.
Keeping wages DEPRESSED with endless hordes of
looting Mexicans invading keeps these corrupt politicians’ paymasters on Wall
Street generous$.
"Republicans
should call for lower immigration to stop the Democrat voter recruitment.
But more importantly, all Americans should call for lower immigration in order
to offer a better opportunity of finding jobs for those millions of their
fellow Americans of all political persuasions who would like to work."
MILLIONS OF AMERICAN
JOBS HANDED OVER TO ILLEGALS ALONG WITH BILLIONS IN WELFARE.... AND THE PARTY
HAS JUST BEGUN!
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY
PLATFORM:
NO DAMNED LEGAL NEED
APPLY!
VIVA
LA RAZA FASCISM? THEN VOTE DEM!
"Republicans should
call for lower immigration to stop the Democrat voter recruitment. But
more importantly, all Americans should call for lower immigration in order to
offer a better opportunity of finding jobs for those millions of their fellow
Americans of all political persuasions who would like to work."
Violence in the Halls, Disorder in the Malls
The holiday hooliganism traces back to the Obama administration’s destructive efforts to undermine school discipline.December 29, 2016
Public safety
Judging by video evidence, the participants in the violent mall brawls over the Christmas weekend were overwhelmingly black teens, though white teens were also involved. The media have assiduously ignored this fact, of course, as they have for previous violent flash mob episodes. That disproportion has significance for the next administration’s school-discipline policies, however. If Donald Trump wants to make schools safe again, he must rescind the Obama administration’s diktats regarding classroom discipline, which are based on a fantasy version of reality that is having serious real-world consequences.
The Obama Justice and Education Departments have strong-armed schools across the country to all but eliminate the suspension and expulsion of insubordinate students. The reason? Because black students are disciplined at higher rates than whites. According to Washington bureaucrats, such disproportionate suspensions can mean only one thing: teachers and administrators are racist. The Obama administration rejects the proposition that black students are more likely to assault teachers or fight with other students in class. The so-called “school to prison” pipeline is a function of bias, not of behavior, they say.
This week’s mall violence, which injured several police and security officers, is just the latest piece of evidence for how counterfactual that credo is. A routine complaint in police-community meetings in minority areas is that large groups of teens are fighting on corners. Residents of the South Bronx’s 41st Precinct complained repeatedly to the precinct commander in a June 2015 meeting about such street disorder. “There’s too much fighting,” one woman said. “There was more than 100 kids the other day; they beat on a girl about 14 years old.” In April 2016, a 17-year-old girl in Coney Island, Brooklyn, Ta’Jae Warner, tried to protect her brother from a group of girls gathered outside her apartment building who were threatening to kill him; one of the group knocked her unconscious. She died four days later. At a meeting in the 23rd Precinct in East Harlem in 2015, residents asked why the police hadn’t stopped a recent stampede of youth down Third Avenue. In April 2012, a group of teens stomped a gang rival to death in a Bronx housing project.
The idea that such street behavior does not have a classroom counterpart is ludicrous. Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic males of the same age. The lack of socialization that produces such a vast disparity in murder rates, as well as less lethal street violence, inevitably will show up in classroom behavior. Teens who react to a perceived insult on social media by trying to shoot the offender are not likely to restrain themselves in the classroom if they feel “disrespected” by a teacher or fellow students. Interviews with teachers confirm the proposition that children from communities with high rates of family breakdown bring vast amounts of disruptive anger to school, especially girls. It is no surprise that several of the Christmas riots began with fights between girls. School officials in urban areas across the country set up security corridors manned by police officers at school dismissal times to avoid gang shootings. And yet, the Obama administration would have us believe that in the classroom, black students are no more likely to disrupt order than white students. Equally preposterous is the claim that teachers and administrators are bigots. There is no more liberal a profession than teaching; education schools are one long indoctrination in white-privilege theory. And yet when these social-justice warriors get in the classroom, according to the Obama civil rights lawyers, they start wielding invidious double standards in discipline.
The best solution to such alleged teacher racism, according to the Obama Justice and Education Departments, is to pressure teachers to keep unruly students in the classroom rather than removing them. This movement goes by the name of “restorative justice;” its result has been anarchy, adding a school-to-hospital pipeline to the school-to-prison pipeline. The St. Paul school district has been in the restorative-justice vanguard. Assaults on teachers tripled in 2015, reports Katherine Kersten of the Center for the American Experiment; one teacher sustained a traumatic brain injury, while another required staples in her head. Melees of 40 to 50 people (resembling the mall violence) are common, according to Kersten; roving packs of students attack isolated individuals. One high school issued emergency whistles to teachers. (Kersten has a full-length feature story on the St. Paul schools in City Journal’s upcoming issue.)
Over the last year, a Seattle school district in the throes of “restorative justice” experienced an alleged gang rape and several student deaths. Criminal charges, including murder, were filed against a group of students not yet out of middle school, reports the Seattle Times. Teachers’ unions in Fresno, Des Moines, New York City, and Indianapolis have all lodged complaints about the anti-discipline philosophy, according to Education Week. The Fresno teachers signed a petition pointing out that students are returned to class after cursing at teachers and physically assaulting them, without suffering any consequences. Fresno’s teachers have been injured trying to stop fights; some are retiring because teaching where severely disruptive students cannot be dislodged has become impossible. In Des Moines, students now hit and scream at each other and their teachers, reports the Des Moines Register.
Undeterred by such news, the Obama administration has rolled out reams of material for combatting supposed teacher racism. Since 2014 alone, it has produced a School Climate and Discipline Guidance Package, a Rethink Discipline Public Awareness Campaign, a Resource Guide for Superintendent Action, a National Resource Center for School Justice Partnerships, a template for “School Climate Surveys,” and a “Quick Guide on Making School Climate Improvements.” The DOJ is “investing” $1 million (read: showering money on left-wing consultants) for the Pyramid Equity Project, which is supposed to establish national models for addressing issues of implicit bias in early learning programs.
Naturally, federal litigation has followed. Just this month, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division imposed a consent decree on the Watson Chapel, Arkansas, School District, after suing it for racially discriminatory school-discipline practices. Those practices “prevent students of color from reaching their full potential,” according to Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta. A federal court will continue to have jurisdiction over the school until the DOJ declares it in absolute compliance with the decree, a process anticipated to take three years.
Given this threat of lawsuits, it’s no wonder that district superintendents dismiss the rising violence and announce that restorative justice is “working.” It’s certainly “worked” to reduce expulsions and suspensions—in Seattle, by a whopping 77 percent from 2013 to 2016. Never mind that students aren’t learning and teachers are at risk.
The Trump administration must tear up every guidance and mandate in the Justice and Education Departments that penalize school districts for disproportionate rates of school discipline. Absent clear proof of teacher or administrator racism, Washington should let schools correct student behavioral problems as they see fit. Students in classrooms where disruption is common are far less likely to learn; that is the civil rights problem that should get activists’ attention. Taxpayer dollars should not be funding specious federal crusades against phantom discrimination; school districts might have more resources if their local taxpayers were not also being hit by federal levies, which are redistributed around the country in the delusional pursuit of “social justice.” Until the two-parent family is reconstructed, classrooms remain the only hope for socializing children and for preventing the teen violence that broke out across the country this Christmas. Schools can only accomplish that civilizing mission, however, if they are allowed to insist on strict rules, respect for authority, and consequences for misconduct.
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