Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is at her wits’ end trying to solve the problem of gang violence in the city. First, she took a couple of thousand police officers off their beats believing that the cops were the problem.
When she found out how silly that was, it was too late. Then she had to hire a couple of thousand more police officers just to bring the force up to strength. That’s proved to be easier said than done — even if more police officers were the only problem.
It’s not. The drastic reduction in arrests for almost all crimes points to a police force demoralized by politicians who don’t support them, intimidated by a civilian oversight board that more often than not takes the side of criminals, and discouraged by a state’s attorney who allows criminals charged with serious crimes to go free.
Much of the crime problem in Chicago can be laid at Lightfoot’s doorstep. She keeps trying to make guns harder to get for law-abiding citizens while gangs rob residents blind. So Lightfoot has decided to hit gangbangers where it hurts: their wallets.
Lightfoot wants to sue gangbangers to tap into the tens of millions of dollars in illegal profits that the gangs take in every year. It’s a seductive solution. Gang money could be used to pay the victims of their crimes.
But the Victims’ Justice Ordinance has run into several snags in the city council. And the usual suspects — civil rights and police reform advocates — are on the other side on the issue.
The major problem is that gang members hide their profits with innocent family members — grandmothers and mothers being the favorites. This makes it impossible to get all but a fraction of the gang’s income.
Despite the personal outreach, however, Lightfoot has so far failed to gather enough support for her so-called Victims’ Justice Ordinance, which would allow the city to sue gang members and attempt to seize their assets. Days after Lightfoot launched her effort to personally lobby aldermen, two City Council allies moved to delay a vote on the ordinance, and she hasn’t brought it back for consideration.
When asked about the delay, the mayor has said she needs to “educate” members about the importance of the legislation, which faced criticism from all sides of the political aisle.
Fraternal Order of Police President John Catanzara previously blasted the plan as a “waste of everyone’s time to pretend she is doing something of substance.” Civil rights lawyers, meanwhile, argued the city would end up violating people’s civil rights and seizing property from grandmas who aren’t involved in gang life, creating more problems down the road.
The gang leaders may be, for the most part, uneducated. But they’re smart enough to hire crooked attorneys and shady accountants to do their work for them. Lightfoot’s plan never had a chance.
I really would like to give some credit to Lori Lightfoot here because at least she’s trying to do something to break up the power of the gangs and disincentivize gang membership. That’s more than most big city mayors can say, particularly in Baltimore. But with that said, the plan makes very little sense. What she has managed to do, however, is unite nearly everyone in law enforcement and the municipal government for once.
Nobody seems to like this plan. The police unions have scoffed at it as a waste of time and resources that will produce little or nothing. Democratic aldermen have warned that trying to do this will only end up “seizing property from grandmas who aren’t involved in gang life.” Lightfoot herself has admitted that the city will need to be able to demonstrate to the courts that City Hall can “meet the burden of proof” and have the appropriate standing to bring such suits.
This is not a problem of too many guns on the street, although getting tough on criminals who carry a firearm after having been convicted of a crime would be a good start. Nor is it a problem of police being too tough or too lenient.
The problem is in the lack of enforcement of the law at every level: police, judges, and prosecutors. The only way we’re going to escape this problem and keep our freedom is to use the tools given to us by the Constitution in a fair, consistent manner.
Getting away from that simple formula is what got us in this mess in the first place.