At least she’s not blaming “racism.”
Police in Chicago say that more than 50% of carjackings in the city are carried out by juveniles. And Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot knows just what the problem is.
“There are too many young people in this room that feel unloved, and we need to change that if we are going to change the trajectory of their lives,” Lightfoot said at a town hall with Chicago youths at Harold Washington Library on Saturday.
That’s actually a very Christian way to look at the problem, so we shouldn’t laugh at her — yet.
Finding love is not the problem. Despite most black families living in communities at or near poverty level, there is an abundance of love from mothers who head up a majority of most households. It’s not a problem of finding love as much as it is finding suitable male role models for young black men to follow.
Lightfoot said Chicago cannot “arrest ourselves” out of crime increases, Fox 32 reported.
The mayor suggested back in February that the city’s carjacking spikes were linked to remote learning sparked by the coronavirus.
“We started seeing this rise in cases in 2020. And I’ll be frank and say in Chicago there was a correlation we believe between remote learning and the rise in carjackings,” she said at the time.
She’s right. Chicago can’t just arrest everyone who commits a crime. It wouldn’t help anyway because the prosecutors would simply allow the suspects to walk without bail.
Shootings and homicides are down in the city so far this year. There were 508 shootings as of the end of March this year, compared to 582 shootings during the same time period this time last year. There have been 128 homicides so far this year, notching a 7% decline over the same time period last year.
Other crimes, such as carjackings, are on the rise. There have been about 433 carjackings in the city this year and 72 vehicular hijacking arrests. There were about 425 carjackings during the same time period in 2021.
It’s great that violent crime is down in the city. But in order to achieve that decline, Lightfoot had to make a complete 180-degree turn on policy to add police officers instead of taking them off the street, bring back special units that were disbanded because they were arresting too many black people, and stop listening to the ACLU and Black Lives Matter about police “reform.”
If she had done that at the beginning of her term, there’s a chance Chicago might have weathered the summers of 2020 and 2021 with far fewer homicides.
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