Chicago 500th Homicide

Off Topic Politics and World Issues
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Never stop learning!

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Well said no question that you are right.

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About the Chicago Schools - I’m an educator so this is interesting to me. Hey, even the Huffington Post taking the Chicago Public School and the teacher’s unions to task.

Stats from the Huff Po Article:

Four out of 10 Chicago Public School (CPS) freshmen don’t graduate.
91 percent of CPS graduates must take remedial courses in college because they do not know how to do basic math and other schoolwork.
Only 26 percent of CPS high school students are college-ready, according to results from ACT subject-matter tests.

But then this
 Sigh


WSJ Hillary Clinton’s School Choice.
She Used to Support Charters. Now She’s for the Union Agenda.

"
In Mrs. Clinton’s 1996 memoir, “It Takes a Village,” she wrote that she favored “promoting choice among public schools, much as the President’s Charter Schools Initiative encourages.” And here’s Mrs. Clinton in 1998: “The President believes, as I do, that charter schools are a way of bringing teachers and parents and communities together.”

But now Mrs. Clinton needs the support of the Democratic get-out-the-vote operation known as teacher unions, which loathe charter schools that operate without unions. The AFT endorsed Mrs. Clinton 16 months before Election Day, and the NEA followed.

Shortly after, in a strange coincidence, Mrs. Clinton began repeating union misinformation: “Most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids,” she said on a South Carolina campaign stop in November. But Mrs. Clinton used to know that nearly all charter schools select students by lottery and are by law not allowed to discriminate. The schools tend to crop up in urban areas where traditional options are worst. A recent study from Stanford University showed that charters better serve low-income children, minority students and kids who are learning English.

There’s an irony in Mrs. Clinton’s pitch that schools should simply share best practices. In 2005 the United Federation of Teachers started a charter school in Brooklyn, N.Y., to prove that unions weren’t holding up success. The school rejected the hallmarks of charter schools like New York’s Success Academy: order, discipline and other concepts progressives view as oppressive. Principals, for instance, were renamed “school leaders.” So how’s that experiment working out? Grades K-8 didn’t meet state standards last year and closed.

Mrs. Clinton’s switcheroo follows the pro-union turn of the Democratic Party platform. This year’s original draft was at least mildly pro-reform, but the final version opposes using test scores to evaluate teachers, encourages parents to opt out of testing for their kids, and endorses multiple restrictions on charters that would make them much less effective.

The education planks caused Peter Cunningham, an assistant secretary in President Obama’s Education Department, to lament that the platform “affirms an education system that denies its shortcomings and is unwilling to address them.” He called it “a step backwards” that will hurt “low-income black and Hispanic children” in particular.

In this election year of bad policy choices, the Democratic retreat from school choice and accountability is the most dispiriting."

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It’s not just Chicago schools failing, Los Angeles Unified is now letting students graduate with D’s.

“Students who got Ds should not be denied diplomas because the school system has not provided enough help for them to meet the higher standard, board members said.”

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Sad. So many of these kids really aren’t given a chance.

Stats from an Illinois Policy Report -

“Thirty-eight percent of students at Chicago’s lowest-performing elementary schools are considered chronically truant.” That stat comes down to families who are failing to get little kids to school.

“Students at Chicago’s lowest-performing high schools drop out at nearly 12 times the rate of average Illinois students – 36 percent compared to 3 percent, respectively. According to the 2009 U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, adults age 25 and older who dropped out of high school or had not earned a GED earned up to 41 percent less than those who had.”

  • You have to wonder why so many of these kids are unemployed, right?

@Dr_Pangloss - About what you said about these small networks that are involved with most violence, there are something like 60 active gangs in Chicago?

I read that Chicago has such a history of corruption that you can actually take a Chicago Corruption Walking Tour?

The city has something like 80+ years of being run by one political party. I have to wonder if anytime you have one party in control for that long, you’re going to have increased corruption, be it crony capitalism, big labor, organized crime or all of the above. Those often end up being the same thing. We can hope that when we live in an area with a healthy two-party system, you get less power accumulating over time in terms of politicians setting up backroom deals, opportunities for graft, cronyism. It’s also one of the reasons to support term limits.

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Completely agree with that. We can talk about policy choices all we want (and for good reason too), but the longer power sits within 1 party unopposed the more rampant corruption grows, above and beyond normal political sins.

I am also a huge believer in term limits.

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I get some of this from talking to my dad who is finishing his second (and last) term as a County Commissioner. He’s a Dem in a predominantly Democrat area. Anyway, he’s come across quite a bit of corruption there, and this is a poor rural area. Really. We started joking about hoping he wasn’t going to end up in the trunk of a car. I can just imagine what Chicago is like, where there is serious money at play, opportunities for graft, etc


I think when there’s a mix between the parties, you’re more likely to have some check and balance where they will hopefully call each other on unethical behavior, keep each other in check. And where one party tends to have a blind spot, hopefully the other side will see it. Kind of a sweet story. My mom temporarily changed her political party to Democrat to vote for my Dad in the primaries. She said, “If all Democrats were like your dad, I’d always vote Democrat.” I love my parents.

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Sad but true. There’s a reason they call it the Chicago Machine.

Also your parents sound awesome

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A big reason for the corruption is the Structure of the local government in Chicago.

You can call 1 guy, your Ward Representative, and that guy can do anything you need in the neighborhood. From getting a pothole in front of your house filled, to changing the zoning laws so you can start your business. This is very “effective,” but a Ward Rep with that kind of power can grant awesome favors. The “corruption” is the natural result of the system.

It goes back to Roman times, and the Patron System. 1 connected dude who did favors for all the people in his neighborhood. Who pay him tribute.

Just like the Mafia.

The Progressives (Teddy Roosevelt/Woodrow Wilson) saw this as a major problem, and made an effort to reform the way local governments function. In more modern systems, Representatives are elected “at large” or city wide, instead of by Ward. And a Rep is prevented by the rules from even talking to a department head. No one person can make zoning decisions, and Reps don’t hire anyone.

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Thank you! They are pretty cool.

I’m really proud of my dad for stepping up to serve in his retirement. Some of his stories have blown us away though. Everything from county officials paving their private driveways with county equipment, to one guy actually putting his new golf clubs on the county credit card, to people giving themselves big bonuses as they leave for state offices, to profiting from land sales for civic projects, to assessors undervaluing their friend’s property values to lower their tax bills, to people hiring their relatives 
 on and on. It’s not exactly the level of the Clinton Cash documentary, but you know if this much stuff is happening in one little county, you can imagine what’s going on in Chicago.

As an aside, if you guys you haven’t read the book, the Clinton Cash documentary, is on youtube. Just Wow. If even a fraction of that is real, then Hillary and Bill would fit right in in Chicago.

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You gotta expect nepotism and a little honest graft. That stuff is the reward for going to all those boring meetings. I bet your dad knows at least one place to get a free coffee.

The golf clubs are crossing the line.

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Hah, FlatsFarmer! For sure. And the comments you made about the history of Ward Reps were really interesting.

How about a Puff Family Charitable Foundation? If Bill can make 1.4 million for two speeches, I should be able to at least get a couple thousand bucks out of this deal. Dammit! Obviously, the Puffs do not know how to “do politics.”

About Chicago, hopefully their bestest ever community organizer is about to be back on the case. It sure sounds like there are some communities that need his help.

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I really liked this movie and now thanks to you it is ruined.

Leave it to a Marine to lay waste to anything Army likes!

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This thread made me think of this.

If you really want to understand the history of urban poverty, and the social and economic factors at work in these violent neighborhoods.

The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies
Rejecting the Moynihan report caused untold, needless misery, by Kay S. Hymowitz

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I wanted to link to another article, but hit a paywall. Here’s just a piece of it. Heather Mac Donald has written a series of Op Eds for the WSJ. This one. How Chicago’s Streets Became the Wild West__The Ferguson effect, failed city leadership and an ill-advised deal with the ACLU have made the city ever more dangerous.

Most victims in the current crime wave are already known to police. Four-fifths of the Memorial Day shooting victims were on the Chicago Police Department’s list of gang members deemed most prone to violence. But innocents are being attacked as well: a 6-year-old girl playing outside her grandmother’s house earlier this month, wounded by gunfire to her back and lungs; a 49-year-old female dispatcher with the city’s 311 call center, killed in May while standing outside a Starbucks a few blocks from police headquarters; a worker driving home at night from her job at FedEx, shot four times in the head while waiting at an intersection, saved by the cellphone at her ear.

Police officers who try to intervene in this disorder often face virulent pushback. “People are a hundred times more likely to resist arrest,” a police officer who has worked a decade and a half on the South Side told me. “People want to fight you; they swear at you. ‘F— the police, we don’t have to listen,’ they say. I haven’t seen this kind of hatred towards the police in my career.”

Antipolice animus is nothing new in Chicago. But the post-Ferguson Black Lives Matter narrative about endemically racist cops has made the street dynamic much worse. A detective told me: “From patrol to investigation, it’s almost an undoable job now. If I get out of my car, the guys get hostile right away.” Bystanders sometimes aggressively interfere, requiring more officers to control the scene.

In March 2015, the ACLU of Illinois accused the Chicago PD of engaging in racially biased stops, locally called “investigatory stops,” because its stop rate did not match population ratios. Blacks were 72% of all stop subjects during a four-month period in 2014, said the ACLU, compared to 9% for whites. By the ACLU’s reasoning, with blacks and whites each making up roughly 32% of the city’s populace, the disparity in stops proves racial profiling.

This by now familiar and ludicrously inadequate benchmarking methodology ignores the incidence of crime. In 2014 blacks in Chicago made up 79% of all known nonfatal shooting suspects, 85% of all known robbery suspects, and 77% of all known murder suspects, according to police-department data. Whites were 1% of known nonfatal shooting suspects in 2014, 2.5% of known robbery suspects, and 5% of known murder suspects, the latter number composed disproportionately of domestic homicides. Whites are nearly absent among violent street criminals—the group that proactive policing aims to deter.

Despite the groundlessness of these racial-bias charges, then-Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy and the city’s corporation counsel signed an agreement in August 2015 giving the ACLU oversight of stop activity. The agreement also created an independent monitor. “Why McCarthy agreed to put the ACLU in charge is beyond us,” a homicide detective told me.

On Jan. 1 the department rolled out a new form for documenting investigatory stops to meet ACLU demands. The new form, called a contact card, was two pages long, with 70 fields of information to be filled out. This template dwarfs even arrest reports and takes at least 30 minutes to complete. Every card goes to the ACLU for review.

The arrangement had the intended deterrent effect: Police stops dropped nearly 90% in the first quarter of 2016. Criminals have become emboldened by the police disengagement. “Gangbangers now realize that no one will stop them,” says a former high-ranking official with the department. People who wouldn’t have carried a gun before are now armed, a South Side officer told me. Cops say the solution is straightforward: “If tomorrow we still had to fill out the new forms, but they no longer went to the ACLU, stops would increase,” a detective said.

For more about The Ferguson Effect. This is a piece she wrote for Imprimis

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Jan-March 2015:
157, 346 investigatory stops
1,413 guns seized
Around 80 killed

Jan-March 2016:
20, 908 investigatory stops
1,316 guns seized
123 killed

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One (1! )Utah Meth-Head gets stopped and searched, and We say “Fuck the Supreme Court!”

105,00 Black guys stopped and searched, and we say “Fuck the ACLU!”

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Wow. Look at how many more deaths have happened since police have pulled back on their investigatory stops.

But don’t worry. Looking at the results rarely factors into the logic. It’s all about the feels.

Can you imagine having the ACLU monitor all day to day police stops?