Watch the Democrats play while their cities bleed

Summary: America has two major political parties. This series discusses their indifference to the concerns of most Americans and their slow descent into madness. Today let’s look at the Democratic Party and the great American cities it governs.

Here’s a logo for many of America’s cities: Democrats run most of them.

They run most of America’s great cities, whose streets run with blood (less now than formerly, cold comfort to the relatives of the dead). The policy priorities of Party’s leaders are open borders (massive immigration, preferably from failed states), rights for the transgendered, police shootings, the Responsibility to Protect (wars to protect foreigners, not Americans), and identity politics. America’s cities rot and bleed while they focus on the interests of the wise, rich, and beautiful.

Be proud America! We lead the developed nations in high tech and homicides.
All of these are led by Democrats (except Tulsa).

Francesca Miraile at The Trace explains the details of this sorry graph, looking at Chicago.

“If some scholars of crime had their way, discussions of homicide rates would focus not on cities, but on the few urban neighborhoods where the phenomenon of murder inequality is especially stark. In St. Louis, which has had the country’s highest homicide rate since 2014, violence is concentrated within neighborhoods like the Greater Ville, where the homicide rate per capita is close to 300. According to police data, almost half of the city’s killings occur in only eight of its 79 neighborhoods. The unequal distribution of violence applies to Chicago, too. Five police districts, which contain only 8% of city’s population, recorded an estimated 32% of its murders in 2016.

“As in part years, a disproportionate share of Chicago’s homicide victims were young African-American men, killed in alleys and on street corners when an altercation was made deadly by the use of a firearm. A report released this week by the University of Chicago Crime Lab sought to identify what’s driving the spike in violence. It found that conditions commonly believed to influence gun crime — unemployment and poverty rates, availability of social services, mistrust in institutions, and public policy — did not change abruptly from 2015 to last year, and cannot directly explain the increase in murders. “One key implication of these data is the importance of a policy response that is focused on the core problem,” the report reads. ‘Violence concentrated largely in a moderate number of our most disadvantaged neighborhoods, carried out by teens and young adults in public places with illegally owned, and perhaps increasingly lethal, firearms.'”

Our acceptance of this bloodshed reveals our values as no pretty speeches by politicians can do. The aptly-named Hey Jackass website provides the people of Chicago with a running tally of the carnage. Every major American city should have one — mounted in central downtown!

Exceptional America!

Here is the WorldAtlas list of the world’s 50 most dangerous cities in 2015. America has four on the list! St Louis (15), Baltimore (19), Detroit (28), and New Orleans (32). No other developed nation has a city on the list. Amazingly, we don’t care. The lawless areas in our great cities was not even a major issue in the 2016 presidential election.

Conclusions

The Democratic Party’s stewardship of America’s major cities questions their fitness to govern. The high homicide rates — and their low interest in addressing this problem — are just symptoms. Many cities under their leadership remain locked into multi-generational spirals of decline. The Democrat’s misrule, often incompetent and corrupt, plays a large part in this story. Their disinterest in reform of their governance is a still heavier indictment. They play identity politics, declare sanctuary cities, and champion rights of the few transgendered while tens of millions of people suffer under their administration.

America’s tragedy is that the only other major party misrules in a different but also horrific fashion (see posts about the Republican Party and especially its powerful far-right wing).  But America need not stay on this path. See suggestions about what you can do: steps to a new politics for America.

For More information

For a broader and more detailed analysis, see “Carnage, Continued” by Rafael Mangual in City Journal, 14 September 2017 — “Before declaring victory in the War on Crime, consider America’s sub-cities.”

If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about guns & gun rights, about crime, about murder, about police violence, and especially these…

1. Do guns make us more safe, or less? Let’s look at the research.
2. Since 9-11 we have less crime but more fear of crime. A win-win for our rulers!
3. The number of children killed by guns in America makes us exceptional, not better.
4. News from England on the great experiment about gun rights.
5. Martin van Creveld asks: why do American kids kill?
6. America’s unspeakable problem: African-American’s crime rates.
7. Important: Remember the Republican’s great betrayal of America in the 1960s.

A reminder of the long struggle to produce the Civil Right revolution,
a story of lost momentum.

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
by Richard Rothstein (2017).

“Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law is one of those rare books that will be discussed and debated for many decades. Based on careful analyses of multiple historical documents, Rothstein has presented what I consider to be the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation.”
― William Julius Wilson (professor of sociology, Harvard).

From the publisher…

“In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation ― that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation―the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments―that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.

“Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as “brilliant” (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north.

“As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post–World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods.

“The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. “The American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book” (Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), as Rothstein’s invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past.”