If Not Trump, Who Will Cure the Rot? A Chicago murder wave and New York graft scandal are manifestations of political decay.By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/if-not-trump-who-will-cure-the-rot-1474668631
Ditto the murderer of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, whose 2013 killing was adopted as a symbol by the Obama administration. Her killer had also recently been released on a weapons charge.
Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson last month explained reality to the Chicago Tribune : Of the 1,400 people on the city’s “Strategic Subject List” of those believed responsible for its gun violence, most have been arrested and released multiple times on gun charges. By one count (that of the Chicago Sun-Times) 75% of those booked on gun violations in the first three months of 2016 were back on the streets by June.
“Clearly, [gun felons] don’t think there’s a consequence to their actions,” Supt. Johnson said in a public news conference. “And to be quite honest, we’re showing them that there’s not. If we’re not going to keep you in jail because you choose to use a gun, then what are we doing?”
In New York in the heyday of stop-and-frisk, these killers would not have been released—something noticeable even to a real-estate developer not otherwise known for the depth of his public-policy acumen.
Those convicted on firearms violations were hit with serious jail time. Even when aggressive stop-and-frisk didn’t result in a conviction, an illegal gun was confiscated, and word went out that packing an unlicensed weapon was likely to be unavailing given the city’s unrelenting focus on gun violators.
All this was part of a deliberate strategy in the 1990s to reduce New York’s then-towering murder rate. Chicago’s murder rate today is a bit of an anomaly in an America where crime has been dropping until recently, but it’s not a product of the city not knowing what to do.
To many liberal and African-American activists not living under immediate threat of gun violence, however, stop-and-frisk has become unacceptable. They reject the tactic because police, some of whom are white, would inevitably be stopping mostly black and Hispanic citizens on the street in search of illegal weapons.
Thus Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who sees his political career going down the drain due to the killings, has every reason to believe his career would only go down the drain faster if he took steps that he knows would save Chicagoans’ lives. If he has any doubt, he need only look at the New York Times ’s home page on Friday. Its headline on Mr. Trump’s endorsement of stop-and-frisk judged the most urgent lesson for the public to be: “Trump Crime Plan Seen as Hitting Minorities Harder.”
At bottom, it’s this rottenness of American political culture that allows Mr. Trump, for all his flaws as a candidate and human being, to find traction with so many voters. Not because he’s a uniquely attractive individual, but because he’s uniquely willing to violate the political taboos and challenge the status quo. Indeed, his most insidious offense may be his suggestion that some problems aren’t intractable. CONTINUE AT SITE
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