Lori Lightfoot’s Lament - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Lori Lightfoot’s Lament
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Pennsylvania Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon is one of the congressional Dems who sponsored the Mental Health Justice Act. The bill would give incentives to police departments to replace emergency responders with mental health professionals to respond to crimes with individuals who have “behavioral” issues.

Scanlon was carjacked at gunpoint and, because she wasn’t injured, we can say it’s poetic (and political) justice.

Scanlon is typical of the Democrats who have tried (and in places succeeded) in defunding the police. Those people tolerate — and thus encourage — criminal behavior.

We saw this through a summer of riots caused by Black Lives Matter and Antifa in places such as Seattle and Portland. Rioters were, for the most part, not even arrested far less prosecuted. When rioters declared a police-free “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” the idiot mayor of Seattle, Jenny Durkan, proclaimed the rioters “patriots.”

When asked when order would be restored, Durkan said everyone should just enjoy “a summer of love.” People were beaten, businesses were looted, and everything went fine according to Durkan.

The worst examples of this sort of thinking are Chicago and its mayor, Lori Lightfoot. Chicago’s citizens have suffered over 700 murders this year, and the toll is still rising. This year in Cook County, there have been over 1,000 homicides. About 80 percent of the victims are black. We don’t know the racial makeup of the perpetrators because only about 45 percent of murders are solved in Chicago.

With a population of 2.7 million, the thousand-plus murders work out to about 30 per 100,000 of population. That’s still far behind places such as Tijuana, Mexico, where the murder rate is 105 per 100,000, and Tripoli, Libya, where it’s 176 per 100,000. Chicago’s statistics — and many other cities’ — are, however, outrageous within the United States where law and order supposedly prevail.

So what do Lori Lightfoot and her DA, Kim Foxx, want to do about it?

They want AG Merrick Garland to send more Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents to Chicago to bring more gun-related cases to federal court for the next six months. Lightfoot claims the city has begun a big crackdown on illegal guns and admits the city has a lot more to do on that front.

In 2020, during the anti-police riots across the country resulting from the Minneapolis death of George Floyd in police custody, Lightfoot promised to cut $80 million from the Chicago police budget. She was following the lead of other cities such as Minneapolis, the city council of which wanted to replace the police with social workers. (Voters defeated that plan in a referendum last month.) In June 2020, New York’s Bill de Blasio wanted to cut $1 billion from the NYPD budget. He backed down from that proposal.

Notice, please, that Lightfoot is not calling for more action by the Chicago police or DA Foxx in arresting and prosecuting the murderers. She only wants the feds to seize illegal guns — those for which permits haven’t been issued — from the streets. That’s the sort of incompetence Joe Biden is famous for.

Foxx is infamous for dropping charges against all sorts of criminals for all sorts of crimes. You will remember that she dropped the original charges against race-attack hoaxer Jussie Smollett, who was later convicted after an investigation showed her earlier action was completely unjustified.

According to an August 2020 report in the Chicago Tribune, “During Foxx’s first three years as the county’s top prosecutor, her office dropped all charges against 29.9% of felony defendants, a dramatic increase over her predecessor…” Those charges included many of murder. That report also stated that a total of 25,183 people had their felony cases dismissed under Foxx.

As a December 5 Wall Street Journal editorial pointed out, Lightfoot’s relations with the Chicago police have been strained, at best. She sued the CPD when many officers refused her vaccine mandate and later dropped the suit only after a judge enjoined her enforcement of the mandate. As the WSJ pointed out, Lightfoot coddles the local teachers’ union who stayed home due to COVID while the cops remained on patrol.

Criminals are the most protected and coddled among the Democrats’ constituencies. You can see the results across the country. Twelve major cities, from Philadelphia to Portland, have suffered record-breaking murder rates this year. They have suffered those murders because local mayors and prosecutors don’t want to enforce the law.

We’re still seeing cities and states take that approach to criminal behavior. In California, the great number of organized looting crimes is causing hundreds of stores to close. Never fear, however, because the San Diego police department decided that “looting” is a racist term. From now on, they’ll call it “organized robbery.”

Criminal behavior can always be ignored or coddled, or others — who have no responsibility to enforce the law — can be blamed for it. Lightfoot blames retailers for not doing more to protect their stores. On December 5, she said, “We still have retailers that won’t institute plans like having security officers in their stores, making sure that they’ve got cameras that are actually operational, locking up their merchandise at night, chaining high-end bags. These purses can be something that is attracting a lot of organized retail theft units.”

So it’s up to the stores to provide armed guards rather than the city to provide more police patrols to catch the bad guys?

City officials such as Lightfoot and Foxx have proved themselves unfit for public office, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be voted in again and again.

Lightfoot was elected in 2019 and her term in office runs until 2023. She will probably be reelected. Kim Foxx was reelected in 2020 and she, like Lightfoot, will probably be reelected yet. They will be challenged by Republicans who have zero chance of winning because Chicago is entirely dominated by progressive Dems who evidently value criminals’ votes more than those of law-abiding citizens.

It’s no wonder that gun sales have skyrocketed again this year. If the police won’t protect you, you have to do the best you can to protect yourself, your family, and your business.

Governors and mayors, like Washington’s Jay Inslee (who tolerated the Seattle riots) and Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot, should be recalled or defeated at the ballot box. But they won’t be. It’s just as Thomas Jefferson said: the government you elect is the government you deserve.

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