Tag: urban crime

“Peacekeepers” in Chicago Provide New Definition of Peace

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The video in the linked article shows a Chicago street gang dragging a driver from his car to be beaten to a pulp and robbed.  But luckily a yellow-vested peacekeeper arrives on the scene.  These are community leaders or ex-cons who can intervene to prevent violence.  The peacekeeper intervenes by beating the victim in the face with his own cell phone.  Eventually the police arrived and swept up what was left of the victim and brought him to a hospital.

The peacekeeper was identified from the video feed and was found in possession of the victim’s wallet. It’s good to see that community activists are stepping up and teaching the youth of our cities how it’s done.

Using the victim’s phone as a weapon is reminiscent of that scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey when the ape-man experiments with the large animal bone and figures out what an effective tool for killing his prey it would be.  Inspirational.  We’re seeing evolution at work.  All that’s left is for a stew pot to be procured and the victim to be tossed in for dinner.

Peacekeeping indeed.

City releases video of ‘peacekeeper’ helping group attack and rob motorist in Little Village

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia – Part 1

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I figure I’ll see if this can have future installments.  After all Philly seems to be on a roll.  Imagine being a cop in that place.

Friends to the Rescue

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Ah, freedom.  There’s nothing like it.  The air smells fresher the food tastes better.  Even the damn birds sounded happier.  I walked out of a meeting this morning with the prospect of doing whatever the hell I want to do for next four days.  Finally.

Recently I talked about how the blue cities are on a trajectory to become like Detroit.  Coincidentally I read an article in a rag called Financial Times that claimed that the cities were currently suffering from a similar problem to what happened to Detroit.

“For decades, the beautiful Detroit downtown buildings of the late 19th and early 20th century stood nearly empty, thanks to a combination of racism, the loss of US auto-industry predominance, rising crime and violence, and white flight to the outer rings of the city.”

I love how the primary reason cited is racism.  Rising crime and violence is third.  So, the solution to the problem in the article is to turn the empty commercial space in New York and Chicago into residential and small business commercial space.

It’s like the woman who wrote this article is from Mars.   Hundreds of thousands of people have left New York and large numbers have left the other blighted cities since the George Floyd riots.  But she wants to fill up the empty glass and steel skyscrapers that fill downtown and midtown Manhattan, some of the most expensive commercial real estate in the world, with coffee shops and struggling actors?  Apparently, the author of this article watched too many episodes of “Friends” and thinks there are millions of Joey Tribbianis lining up to move back into the city.

And probably only actors and drug dealers are currently crazy enough to want to move into Manhattan.  Everyone else is either stuck there or getting out.  So, what gives?

Well, this is a finance magazine.  It’s currently predicted that the next financial sector that will succumb to the stagflation economy will be the commercial real estate market.  It’s natural that these finance types are hypothesizing how to prevent all of that value from evaporating when the bottom drops out of the urban commercial real estate market.

Of course, it wouldn’t occur to them to discover that the last time these cities were blighted by crime and violence the solution was voting for a law-and-order mayor and letting him restore order and prosperity to New York City.  That was Rudy Giuliani back in the 1990s.  I guess that’s too far back in ancient history for these geniuses.  Or maybe it’s just not allowed to think about anything like that.

The mindset of the writer of this piece is interesting.  She wants us to think that turning commercial real estate into rental apartments is a winning idea because a part of downtown Detroit has followed that idea and has “recovered somewhat.”  But downtown Detroit is no success story and it is a sad remnant of this former city of almost two million people.  Not since the Sack of Rome by the Visigoths has a more thorough job been done destroying a city.

But I think we could be seeing what the outcome will be for these cities.  Ruling out the rule of law and order we are left with creating a rump New York or Chicago in the center of the downtown where a small remnant of the city can exist, subsidized by billionaires and guarded by private security guards.  But Tribbiani better watch which way he walks when he leaves the Central Perk or it could be his last cup of bad coffee.

It’s Not Our Fault They Say

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The Atlantic had an article called “Big Cities Are Ungovernable.”  The writer’s thesis is basically that crime cannot be controlled by the mayors running these cities.

“But more than anything else, crime is weighing mayors down.”

Well at least he admits that.  Some lefty journalists are still claiming there is no crime problem.  The fact that Lori Lightfoot is being kicked to the curb after one term is almost solely because there is an epidemic of violent crime surging through Chicago.

“Crime is not, despite what some politicians might want you to believe, a uniquely urban problem. When violent crime surged around the nation starting in summer 2020, it surged in rural areas, too.

Notice the claim that it’s not just the cities being afflicted.  The dishonesty of this is typical.  The same criminals who have taken over the cities are now expanding into the suburbs and exurbs to compensate for the flight by businesses from these same cities.  But it’s not the cities’ policies that are at fault.  It must be someone else who is responsible.  It must be Trump’s fault!

“Like presidents who are punished or rewarded for the performance of an economy over which they have little control, mayors don’t have that many levers to control public safety, yet voters will punish whoever is in charge as they search for improvement. The rise in violence was a nationwide trend, underscoring the minimal effect of municipal policies on keeping residents safe. COVID, which seems connected to some of the crime increase, was nationwide too.”

More lying.  Mayors have no control over crime!  We’re suppose to forget when and why all this began.  The Democrat mayors and governors forced their police departments to stand down while the George Floyd rioters sacked and burned the downtown areas of almost all the major cities under their jurisdiction.  This dimwit even manages to blame COVID for the surge in crime.

“A mayor can try to hire more police officers or reform the department, but that’s slow. She can seek new leaders, but Chicago, for example, has churned through police superintendents recently to little effect.  …  A mayor can try to address root causes through economic development, but that, too, is slow and subject to larger trends.”

And here is the final dishonesty, There’s no quick solution to the problem.  Adding police or hiring new police leaders is slow and won’t result in a rapid decrease in crime.   Blah, blah, blah.  These lies are absurd.  Reestablishing law and order is as simple as telling the police officers that they are allowed to do their jobs again.  Firing Soros elected prosecutors, reestablishing police qualified immunity from prosecution and announcing all this to the general public would result in an enormous change in the amount of crime going on in the cities.

Now, granted, the prisons would be filled to capacity very quickly.  Many criminals are morons and before they have a chance of adjusting to the new reality, they will be swept up in the new police activity.  So new prisons will be needed.  But that’s a good thing.  Taking homicidal maniacs off the streets should be job one for any law enforcement department.

But this article wasn’t written for you or me.  It was written for Democrat residents of these cities currently plagued by rampaging criminals.  They’re being told that the criminals looting and assaulting them indiscriminately on the streets of these benighted metropolises really aren’t the fault of the mayors.  No, it’s just unavoidable bad luck.  Some mysterious force, possibly Trumpian in origin, is responsible for their cities being overrun by criminals of mostly one ethnic identity and that the mayors are completely blameless and helpless in its onslaught.

Based on Lori Lightfoot’s recent electoral ouster even Democrats don’t believe this jazz.  High profile Democrats have to make the correct noises in public, like the writer of this fantasy piece.  But all but the most totally brain-washed remember the Summer of George Floyd and the Democrats’ total surrender of their urban constituents to the fury of the rampaging but mostly peaceful arsonists, looters and thugs.

We’re three years into this new normal.  The cities are changed in a way that cannot be ignored or explained by arguments like those provided by the writer of this present piece.  To fix things the Democrat voters will have to admit defeat and give control over the levers of government power to people who will make law and order a priority.  Republicans.

Frankly we’re not there yet.  It still must get significantly worse.  Possibly when the Lord Humongous first takes to the air waves and declares himself the supreme overlord of New York City and orders the first human sacrifices at City Hall then maybe even the Democrats will admit they’re in over their heads.

Personally, I’d like it to go on for another two or three years.  I’ve always thought of cannibalism as the correct metric by which to judge where we are in terms of civilizational collapse.  Until you can openly get human meat at the local butcher shop, we aren’t even close to hitting bottom.  So, I try to exhibit patience.  We’re not there yet.  But we’re getting there.

Chicago Can Elect a Tough on Crime Mayor or They Can Have Chaos

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John Kass’s news site is where I go if I want to know what’s left of Chicago.  He has other folks writing on his site now and someone named Steve Huntley gave an update on the mayoral election going on.  So the cretinous incumbent Lori Lightfoot is currently ranked fourth in a field of eight.  And because of various nefarious associations, the usual mobbed up candidates are not the leading candidate.  It so happens that an actual law and order type,  Paul Vallas is in the lead and believed to be headed into the runoff.  Bestill my beating heart!  So, if Vallas becomes mayor and hires a bunch of cops and allows the cops to arrest people for crimes what happens when odious state’s attorney Kim Foxx just refuses to prosecute them?  Well, they’re right back on the street killing, assaulting and robbing the general public I guess.

I’m not very hopeful that the cities have learned their lesson  it probably will take quite a bit longer for folks in the blue states to take the plunge and demand a return to civilization.  We’ll probably have to wait until cannibalism breaks out in a big way.

To be continued.

The Gloves Are Off In The Chicago Mayor’s Race

Baltimore and Philadelphia – Real Life Clockwork Orange

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Two recent headlines demonstrate unmistakably that some of our cities are solidly ensconced in third world lawlessness.  In Philadelphia a pack of seven feral children beat a 73-Year-Old Man to death with a traffic cone.  And in Baltimore a “squeegee-man” shot and killed one of his “customers.”

Reading either of these stories brings home what the reality is for residents of these two cities.  Philadelphia has a district attorney that will not prosecute even violent felons.  The chance that he will prosecute these minors for murder is slight even if they are ever found.  As for the squeegee killer, no one saw him and it doesn’t sound like law enforcement is even looking for him.  The tone of the article is more about finding good paying jobs for “squeegee workers” which leads me to wonder if there are now squeegee women.  You go girls!

These two stories coming on the heels of the Harlem bodega worker who was charged with second degree murder for stabbing a man who assaulted him in his store bring home the fact that Barack Obama was successful in using a race-based color revolution to destroy America’s cities.  He unleashed the Justice Department to strip away the police shield that protected law-abiding residents of these cities from the feral under-class that Democratic city governments breed with their dysfunctional schools and welfare programs.

And these three examples are just this week’s sample.  Any week you can find cases just as brutal and hopeless.  Murder has skyrocketed and the percentage of crimes solved has plummeted.  It’s obvious that the police don’t even bother to look for the criminals because the Soros-funded prosecutors won’t even indict them.

Eventually there may be such a backlash among minority residents that actual law and order city government may be elected.  Or maybe it won’t.  There is such a thing as a tipping point.  If a large enough percentage of normal people leave the city it can disintegrate to where there aren’t any capable people left to run it.  If the city becomes economically unviable then the rich will flee altogether.  At that point city services will deteriorate to the point where the working and middle class also flee.

What’s left then, is Detroit.  The city will be run by whatever local grifter can corral enough votes in the election by promising to hire his supporters into city government.  Of course, the city will sink into bankruptcy and the state will control the purse strings in the background.  Eventually trees will start growing in streets and whole blocks will disappear into small forests that sane people would never come near.

Up till recently Detroit was the cautionary tale.  Places like New York and Chicago had avoided the fate of Motown back in the nineties.  But now it seems like there will be further examples.  Philadelphia and Baltimore look like the standouts.  Each of them has sunken pretty deep into lawlessness and there don’t seem to be any mechanisms to lift themselves out by their bootstraps.  The police force, the voters and the district attorney in each city are already solidly locked into their part in this drama.  The voters haven’t shown any willingness to vote out lawless prosecutors and the police aren’t going to risk prison by arresting criminals especially if they’ll only be released anyway.

The only interesting aspect of this destruction of cities is for any relics of old America still trapped in these places.  Will Independence Hall with its Liberty Bell have to be disassembled brick by brick and moved to Harrisburg?  Will the Orioles have to be airlifted out after a double header by a special forces battalion using attack helicopters and miniguns?

There is a fight on for the future of America.  2022 and 2024 will tell us whether we can vote our way out of this mess.  Pessimism says no.  Fraud and the stupidity of suburban women threaten to allow the Democrats to stay in power.  Optimism says yes.  Empty store shelves and 9% inflation say Congress flips in 2022 and the White House in 2024.  I’m going to stick around and see.  Won’t take long.

California, Drowning in its Own Stupidity, Starts Flailing

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What happens when a ship of fools hits an ideological iceberg?  Well, if the ship is California and the iceberg is reality, various things.  The true believers assemble on the deck and ask the band to play Grateful Dead jams.  If you are one of the captive normies you head for the life boats.  And if you’re in-between you start to panic and rethink the unsinkable nature of the ideology you’ve been fed.

For the last few years, the normies (and some not so normal) have been fleeing California by the millions.  Mostly this has been a combination of toxic policies that makes life there difficult and ultra-expensive.  Things like endless wild fires, clogged and crumbling roads, rampant crime, limited job opportunities, shortages of water and electricity have gone from frightening to unavoidable.  The impossibility of living a middle-class existence on an upper middle-class income has driven out the young.  And the old are cashing out their over priced homes to live on that value in more moderate cost areas like Nashville and Salt Lake City.

But last night we got to see the in-betweens reacting to the utter madness that has been unleashed in the last two years by the combination of BLM policies and Soros funded district attorneys.  Last night ultra-progressive San Francisco voted to recall Chesa Boudin by a 60% to 40% margin.  This continues the trend where all the school board members up for re-election were booted out because of their fanatical anti-white and radical anti-meritocratic agenda outraged parents especially Asian-Americans.

In addition to this election, we saw Los Angeles, the epicenter of everything fake, advance a fake Democrat to the brink of being their new mayor.  Rick Caruso, a billionaire and Republican, switched party flags to run as a Democrat and is the top vote getter in the primary that will see him compete in November for mayor.  Both Los Angeles and San Francisco are reeling from the effects of the crime epidemic that followed the BLM riots in 2020.  Homelessness has become endemic and neighborhood stores are shutting down under the weight of endless smash and grab robberies.  The regular people are frightened and confused as to how to return to normal life.

But the elites and other true believers are still telling anyone who will listen that all is for the best in this best of all possible Californias.  And to confirm that fact Governor Gavin Newsom took more than 56% of the vote in last night’s primary.  Well, after all what does a governor have to do with tackling crime and homelessness?  And he did do such a great job with the pandemic.  And he does have really great hair.  But it’s going to be long hot summer and if the rolling brown outs and the wildfires really start to take their toll, who knows, maybe the in-betweeners may decide they can’t afford to keep Governor Nuisance for another four years.

As an outsider, I prefer to see California continue to stew in its self-appointed insanity.  And even the change of a few mayors and DA’s and even a governor won’t fix California anytime soon.  What might do the trick is when the last of the legacy nuclear power plants are soon decommissioned.  Once the cost and the reliability of their electricity falls off the cliff and their mandate for battery cars goes into effect then the clownish aspect of their policy decisions may finally break the back of the true believers.  But that’s a ways away.  So, in the short term enjoy the music on the deck, California.

Brooklyn Subway Attack – Get Out of the Cities

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Some kind of a mass casualty event went on this morning in a Brooklyn subway train that spilled over onto the 36th St subway stop in Sunset Park.  Looking at the footage maybe it was a smoke bomb followed by a handgun volley.  There are supposed to be fifteen people injured.  At least a couple look like gunshot injuries.

When all is said and done maybe no one will know who, what, or why this happened.  The NYPD’s capabilities have been seriously degraded.  And whatever the FBI says will be suspect.  The takeaway for me is New York City will soon be comparable to Mexico City or Rio de Janeiro.  A large city with some remaining cultural icons that is infested with crime and horrible poverty.

Thanks Democrats.

Gangsters in Chicago Let Illinois Governor Know Who’s in Charge

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You can’t make this stuff up.  Even Al Capone couldn’t run amok like this.

“A crime spree unfolded recently in Chicago that evoked a scene from “The Godfather.” In one of the more memorable moments in movie history, the Corleone family leaves a severed horse’s head in the bed of the fictitious movie mogul Jack Woltz as a sign of their power. Earlier this month in the Windy City, thieves broke into two northside stores and stole cash registers. They emptied the contents and then dumped the empty registers on the front lawn of Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s private home in Chicago’s swankiest neighborhood.”

And:

“Consider, for example, that Chicago saw six children shot this past Tuesday in just a matter of hours. The violence commenced with the afternoon murder of a 15-year-old high school freshman, Caleb Westbrook, who was killed in broad daylight as he walked home from school on Chicago’s west side. The ages of the victims shocked even a city very accustomed to war-like street violence. Chicago “won” the dubious title of America’s deadliest city in 2021, with almost 800 total murders, the most in over 25 years. The death toll could have been higher but for expert emergency room skills in Chicago hospitals, because over 3,500 people were shot in Chicago in 2021. Local health care workers have become so proficient at treating gunshot wounds that the U.S. military sent  medical staffers to Second City hospitals to train before deployment to war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

I’m glad to hear that Chicago is reaching Mogadishu level so quickly.  As I’ve often said it will take rampant cannibalism to finally force the inhabitants to admit they’re wrong about police and crime.  Bring it on, bring it on, bring it on.

Mike Simonelli Appears on Fox News to Condemn Manhattan DA

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If you remember last month I linked to my friend Mike Simonelli’s book, Justified Deadly Force.

Last week he was invited onto Fox News to comment on the new Manhattan DA’s policy of refusing to prosecute anything short of murder.  My favorite bit is his answer to the DA’s question on how do we define a criminal.