The death count from the insanity that is Chicago's gang-filled inner-city continues to rise.  (74 shot, 11 dead – just this past weekend – including victims aged 11,  12, and 13).  The mayor's response is to push through a Black Lives Matter/ACLU-drafted change in how the city is policed that follows those organizations' favored principles.

Heather Mac Donald at CityJournal:

Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and Illinois attorney general Lisa Madigan recently celebrated the issuance of a 232-page draft consent decree for the Chicago Police Department, possibly the longest police consent decree ever written.  Among numerous other red-tape-generating provisions, it requires the CPD to revise its protocols regarding "transgender, intersex, and gender non-conforming individuals," to make sure that the CPD policies properly define these terms and that officers address intersex, transgender, and the gender non-conforming with the "names, pronouns and titles of respect appropriate to that individual's gender."  Last Thursday, a so-called anti-violence march shut down Lake Shore Drive to demand that the CPD hire more black officers and that City Hall spend more on social programs in the black community.

Meanwhile, the pattern of mayhem continues to spread. 

New York City, still relatively safe (as it has be since the Giuliani-Bratton team raised the cost of even minor crime in the city back in the '90s), is now seeing an increase in the type of crime that is destroying the quality of life in large parts of Chicago.

Baltimore now has an even higher rate of bloodletting than does Chicago – brought on largely by the same anti-policing strategies pushed by the BLM movement and the ACLU.

Stronger policing, not weaker policing, is what is needed.  But in truth, even that is at best a stopgap measure – one that can hope only to slow the spread of the ever increasing death and destruction.

Is a real, lasting solution possible?  What would such require?

Beyond the glittering skyline, Chicago's West and South Sides drench themselves in blood.
Photo credit: Dalton Reed via Flickr.

Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald cuts to the chase:

Policing is only a second-best solution to the anarchy in inner-city communities. The best solution is a culture of marriage that expects boys to take responsibility for the children they conceive.

She continues, "As long as more than three-quarters of Chicago's inner-city children are raised without their fathers, black-on-black violence will continue."

But years of closely following this story tell her that politicos and media will pay little attention.  Or not at least until "the numbers are too egregious to ignore."

Aren't seventy-plus shootings over one weekend in one city "egregious" enough?

Apparently not.

Just think of who politically controls these cities – and has largely done so for several generations.  Then none of the above, as terrible as it is, is reason for surprise.  For it is they, more than anyone else, who have created the inner-city culture making life in key parts of America increasingly hellish.