Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom In Chicago
This also isn't a Chicago specific problem as I hear about it in the local news in Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston and Oakland. . . the street takeover thing is pretty much a pandemic related phenom where there are more streets that are quieter than normal and people are simply not intimidated by law enforcement. . . the shit-show on Saturday/Sunday night here on Wacker and Columbus should have been shut down before it got started, but there you have lots of out of town hood folk who don't feel like CPD is going to respond - and probably don't care. . . it's not enough that they are getting stiffer sentences because only a handful of people are getting pinched. . .
I can't even imagine WTF is going on up in Boystown. . . that shit doesn't even make any damned sense to me. . . the LL regime and the cops have failed at providing basic safety measures. . . it's way above my pay grade, but it's a fucking mess to be sure. . .
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Agree. If you spend time in other cities and on their social media you'll see a lot of the same rhetoric and things are going on elsewhere no matter what their actual crime levels are. When we were in NYC that started happening - not to the level in Chicago - but still to a point that made people think they were in the worst city in the world. It legitimately caused a lot of people to move. Now there was a bleed over of events there just like Chicago but NYC still remains one of the lowest crime rate cities in North America on the level of Toronto (way lower than Chicago in terms of murder rate for example). One of our friends moved from NYC to Oakland, and before she moved a number of months ago she was telling me how she was worried about NYC. She had no idea that Oakland has a much higher violent crime rate. A place 22X smaller than NYC with maybe like only 1/3 the number of murders.
There is a ton of manipulation out there and after doing huge deep dives into a number of things on crime, I know a lot of it is pretty political in nature. I have seen various outlets compare crime to say 2019 for a neighborhood to show that a particular type of crime is up. And then for another crime they compare to 2018. Well for that first time, if they compared to 2018 they'd see that things were flat or even a little down and further down if you went back a few more years and trending down over time with a few upticks here and there. And the other crime maybe that's true for 2017 that it was higher, so they only show back to 2018. Not much consistency in terms of reporting and it's obvious it's on purpose because then it would undermine the main point they want to set across. It's manipulating how data is reported, not always in a consistent manner, to get people to feel a certain way. There is some truth to various aspects of it but then that is taken and put into a partial context to make people believe things are worse than reality. I think too many people literally believed that because they weren't hearing about every event 5+ years ago that nothing was happening. Now that there's ultra micro news down to a building level, they think things are worse in ever regard than *ever* before.
At the same level, yeah I agree. There have been eye opening increases in murders and shootings in some areas that should be addressed. The administration seems pretty shitty at it. This is a problem going on in most cities in the US right now. Milwaukee right now for example has quite a bit higher rate than Chicago. Philadelphia has almost as many murders as Chicago with 1.1M less people, and the number of people shot there is only 200 or 300 lower than Chicago at again, 1.1M less people. That's not to T these things in Chicago but the entire country right now has some issues and it's specific to guns. In most areas of the city there's not more people being robbed than even 4 years ago, but there are more people being robbed with guns (just an example).
It's all messed up and it's not going to end anytime soon. There's a lot of misinformation out there and it's being actively shown to people to manipulate. I'd say tons of people are doing it and not necessarily just one side of the spectrum for the record.