The Democratic National Committee presented its 2024 convention site as a show of confidence. “Chicago is a world-class city that looks like America and demonstrates the values of the Democratic Party,” Brandon Johnson, then mayor-elect, said in the DNC’s April 2023 announcement.
Fast-forward to this July 4. Over the four-day holiday weekend in Chicago, 19 people were fatally shot and more than 100 wounded by gunfire. One of them, 8-year-old Bryson Orr, was killed along with two women in a drive-by shooting. This wasn’t unusual. On Memorial Day weekend, 10 people lost their lives to gun violence, including 5-year-old Reign Ware. On Father’s Day weekend, more than 70 people were shot and eight killed. The child victims this summer include 7-year-old Jai’Mani Amir Rivera, fatally shot in the chest while walking to a neighbor’s house on June 18. A 3-month-old boy named Jemimah—his parents, fearing for their safety, have kept the family name out of the news—was shot in the chest on July 27 while riding in a car and remains in critical condition. On Thursday, a 3-year-old boy was grazed by a bullet fired by an adversary of his father.
Juveniles are well-represented among perpetrators as well as victims. Sixteen-year-old Raysean Comer has been charged in Jai’Mani’s murder. On July 8, an 11-year-old girl and three other minors allegedly assaulted and robbed a 63-year-old man on a subway train. Teenagers populate the gangs that use stolen cars and weapons to commit back-to-back carjackings.
Is this what happens when you govern in accord with the “values of the Democratic Party”? Convention speakers will likely argue that crime has gone down since Joe Biden and Kamala Harris arrived in the White House. In Chicago as of July 28, there had been 29 fewer homicides than during the same period in 2023, an 8% drop, and 76 fewer shooting incidents, a 5% drop. But those decreases don’t begin to erase the crime spike that began with the George Floyd race riots of 2020. The seven major felonies tracked by the federal government were up 55% in 2023 compared with 2019. Through July 21 of this year, major felonies were up 53% from the same period in 2020.
Mr. Johnson’s explanation for Chicago’s anarchy: racism. “Black death has been unfortunately accepted in this country for a very long time,” he said after the July 4 shooting spree. Indifference to “black life,” Mr. Johnson maintains, led to “generations of disinvestment” in black communities. The teens who rampage on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, beating and stomping on passersby and breaking car windows, have been “starved of opportunities in their own communities.”
After Memorial Day weekend 2023, when 11 people were killed and at least 30 more shot, Mr. Johnson reminded the city that “poverty didn’t go away over the weekend.” Communities have been “disinvested in and traumatized,” he added, and “you are seeing the manifestation of that trauma.”
It is hard to square that claim of poverty with the ubiquity of smartphones among juvenile looters and shooters. Social media is the police’s friend, since youthful gangbangers often post videos of themselves showing off their guns and stolen money. As for “disinvestment,” Chicago has been pouring billions into high-crime neighborhoods for decades. Illinois has thrown in hundreds of millions more over the past 5½ years, dedicated to therapy, job training, substance-abuse counseling and other social services to little avail.
Mr. Johnson will find a kindred spirit in Ms. Harris. Ms. Harris, too, believes that systemic racism “seeps into every part of American life,” to quote a 2020 address. In an April 2021 speech, she said that Floyd’s death showed America the “racial injustice” that keeps the country from “fulfilling the promise of liberty and justice for all.” Like Mr. Johnson, Ms. Harris also blames the lack of “investment” for crime. “If you want safe communities,” she said in the 2020 address, “you have to invest in the health of those communities.”
As California attorney general in 2015, Ms. Harris implemented “implicit bias” training for police officers, the first such statewide program in the country. She wants more police departments to come under federal consent decree for alleged civil-rights violations. She rejects the idea that putting more cops on the street improves public safety. She opposes trying juvenile gang murderers as adults, and she opposes extended sentences for most convicted felons who commit a third felony.
Ms. Harris can even take partial credit for Chicago’s crime policies. In 2016 then-Attorney General Harris co-chaired a transition team for Kim Foxx, the newly elected Cook County state’s attorney. The team’s report urged Ms. Foxx to address “racial inequalities in the justice system,” in part by cutting back on the “destabilizing overincarceration” that plagues “communities of color” and in part by further limiting the detention of juvenile criminals. Ms. Foxx immediately followed California’s lead and declared that her office would stop prosecuting felony shoplifting for all thefts under $1,000. Property crime skyrocketed. Avoiding disparate impact on black criminals became the guiding philosophy of Ms. Foxx’s tenure.
Convention-goers this month may be deprived of a full demonstration of Mr. Johnson’s depolicing philosophy. Despite its depleted ranks, the Chicago Police Department will flood the convention zone with manpower by eliminating officers’ days off and requiring back-to-back shifts.
A disfavored technology has been granted a temporary reprieve. ShotSpotter uses audio sensors to alert the police to gunshots, the vast majority of which aren’t called in to 911. (On July 24, for instance, ShotSpotter alone notified the police of a wheelchair-bound man who had been shot in the back.) Mr. Johnson had refused to renew ShotSpotter’s contract, claiming that the technology leads to overpolicing of black neighborhoods. The company was ready to pull out in February 2024, but Mr. Johnson insisted on a temporary extension of its contract through August. Apparently racial justice isn’t as urgent as electing Democrats.
While conventioneers may be insulated from the Chicago way, if Kamala Harris becomes the next president, the country may not be so lucky.
Ms. Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of “The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe.”
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