Illinois’ Democratic leaders insist they don’t need President Donald Trump’s help to fight crime, but the facts keep proving the opposite.
Labor Day weekend saw a mind-numbing 54 people shot in Chicago, seven fatally — more than twice last year’s toll.
And though murders in 2025 are down a bit from the 2024 level, they’re still four times higher per capita than in New York City.
No wonder Trump calls Chicago a “hellhole” that could benefit from a federal intervention, including a National Guard deployment.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson fiercely oppose that. Johnson even ordered police not to cooperate with federal agents, just as the Department of Homeland Security gets set to step up immigration enforcement in his city.
Clearly, these Democratic leaders don’t want to fix the problem; better see Chicagoans die than cooperate with Orange Man.
Is there any better proof that crime is a choice? After all:
- When Trump sent National Guard units to DC, crime plunged practically overnight. The city actually went 12 days without a single murder. Even Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser admits “the surge of officers” enhanced DC’s cops’ efforts and has taken steps to make it a more permanent arrangement.
- New York City’s experience in the 1990s and since absolutely proves that proactive policing can sink crime rates across the board — even as more recent state and city anti-policing “reforms” sent crime edging back up after 2019, only to be reversed again as NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch restores (for now, anyway) the emphasis on quality-of-life policing.
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That is: It’s not simply that Pritzker and leaders of other crime-plagued jurisdictions should be begging for extra, free-of-charge law-enforcement help.
It’s that they’re actively choosing pro-crime policies: For example, Johnson last week insisted “incarceration” is “racist” and “immoral” and “not the way to drive violence down.”
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom is refusing to budget funds to enforce tougher-on-crime measures the state’s voters last year passed overwhelmingly (despite his opposition) last year.
National Guard or not, tolerating high crime is a political decision — and most Democratic pols keep making the wrong choice.