[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
The number of dead in their city quietly passed 300 even while Illinois Gov. Pritzker and Mayor Johnson protested President Trump’s plan to send the National Guard to Chicago.
In Chicago, a person is currently shot every 4 hours and murdered less than every 20 hours. As I write this, the death clock has already passed 300 and stands at 303. The number of people who have been shot is at 1,399 and by the time you read this, will be well past 1,400.
Pritzker, Johnson and other local Democrat leaders insist that there’s no crime emergency in Chicago even as last month 207 people were shot and 49 were killed.
President Trump says that there is.
Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Washington D.C. has led to a 38% drop in murders according to official figures from the D.C. mayor’s office.
In Chicago, a 38% reduction in murders over the rest of the year could save 150 lives. With 49 dead just over the last month, a temporary deployment could still save almost 50 lives.
So why are Pritzker, Johnson and Democrats so bitterly opposed to the idea? Why do they care so little about the lives of their constituents who are primarily members of minority groups?
Chicago’s murder victims so far this year were 76% black, 18% Hispanic and only 5% white. The majority of the lives that President Trump is proposing to save in Chicago are black lives.
Don’t black lives matter to Democrats anymore?
The same people who turned the country upside down over the drug overdose death of one violent drug-addled criminal who had robbed a minority pregnant woman at gunpoint shrug at hundreds of black people dying every year as if they don’t matter. And to them they don’t.
In 2024, 454 black people were killed in Chicago. Only 3 people were killed by police. The BLM activists who could recite the names of those 3, will never speak the names of the 451.
When Trump offered to save the black lives they wouldn’t save, the politicians claimed that those over 400 lives didn’t need savings and that having an Iraq-level death toll was just fine.
“We want to make sure and show off that there’s no emergency happening in Chicago,” Gov. Pritzker told reporters.
In the United States as a whole, the top 10 causes of death are all diseases, but in Chicago, murder is the 6th leading cause of death (out of 52), just behind diabetes. The numbers are even higher for black men.
That’s not normal.
Among black people, more are murdered than die of diabetes.
In 2022, at a time when politicians still harped on the pandemic, murder was close behind COVID as a leading cause of death for black people in Chicago.
Pritzker, Johnson and other Democrat politicians not only refuse to acknowledge the scale on which crime is happening in Chicago, but have played a major role in making it worse.
Pritzker’s ‘Pretrial Fairness Act’, which passed on a nearly party-line vote by Democrats, eliminated bail and turned the police into a revolving door escort service for criminals. President Trump’s move to abolish so-called ‘cashless bail’ can help end the revolving door for criminals that Democrats have created and start finally locking up criminals behind bars.
After several shootings and a series of assaults during which tourists ran for their lives in Chicago that happened just as he took office, Mayor Johnson protested that “it is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities”.
Chicago has artificially lowered crime statistics by shutting down programs like ShotSpotter, which helped detect shootings in progress so that after 860 alerts last year this year there are ‘none’ and through downward pressure to ‘charge down’ crimes, treating more serious crimes as lighter offenses, and by failing to solve serious crimes so that they’re never cleared.
Why do criminals keep killing people in Chicago? Because they have a nearly 9 in 10 chance of getting away with it.
In 2024, a suspect was charged in less than 16% of murders (with an unknown outcome at trial) while no suspect was charged in 79% of murders and there was a failure to prosecute in 4.2%.
And the Democrats made it that way.
Gov. Pritzker claimed that President Trump is “threatening to go to war with an American city.”
But the war’s already here.
Since the Black Lives Matter race riots endorsed by Pritzker and Johnson, when Chicago recorded 769 murders, the city is approaching 3,000 murders. More Americans have died in post-BLM Chicago than in Afghanistan and in several years, Chicago will have a higher death toll than the Iraq War. Rather than try to end the killing by fighting crime, Illinois Dems have done everything possible to enable a death toll higher than actual war zones.
The National Guard is coming to Chicago to save lives. Sending in the troops could save as many as 150 lives. Gov. Pritzker, Mayor Johnson and Illinois Dems seem to want them to die.
“Just a lovely day here,” Gov. Pritzker insisted on September 2nd. “No emergency, so Donald Trump understands, no emergency in the city of Chicago to send troops in.”
A day earlier, the total from the Labor weekend rolled in with 9 killed and 52 wounded. Even as Pritzker was claiming it was a lovely day and there was no emergency, a trucker was randomly hit while driving his truck on the Eisenhower Expressway, two men were shot in a drive-by shooting, a boat captain was drowned and a man was shot in the head.
There were also 71 violent crimes including 27 robberies, 31 assaults and batteries and a sexual assault to round off Pritzker’s lovely day.
And that was just another Monday in Chicago.