Guest column–Matt Rosenberg: As Deadly Crime Mounts,
Liberal, Educated Hyde Park Gets Schooled on Epistemology
By Matt
Rosenberg
I grew
up in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, home to the University of Chicago. My
Dad taught there. In our apartment building’s elevator, we’d encounter
neighbors like Saul Bellow and Milton Friedman. At the university, urban
affairs was central. It’s where the Chicago School of sociology was developed.
Today there are special research centers on Chicago crime and education.
Epistemology
too has been taught and debated here; that branch of philosophy with ancient
roots, and several definitions. One has to do with the study of the limits of
knowledge, including what can we actually do with it? As crime
surges on local streets, the University’s president says the school’s expert
policy arsenal will be deployed anew to fight violence. But we’ve long known a
lot; yet done too little.
Hyde Park
has had five murders in 2021 versus none last year; Chicago 715 this year by
early last week, versus 496 in all of 2019. The most recent U of C student
slain is 24-year-old Dennis Zheng, brutally killed for the quick $100 sale of his stolen cell phone and
laptop. Arrested for the murder was an 18-year-old paroled for armed robbery and carjacking as
a juvenile.
Hyde Park
now suffers from emerging laws of the street due to the city’s spiraling deadly
crime. There’s a temporary relocation effect as weary combatants seek less
harsh climes for a breather. But their sociopathy follows.
“People
in Hyde Park and downtown are easier targets,” Northeastern Illinois University
urban communities professor Lance Williams told the Chicago Sun-Times.
Downtown shootings by October’s end were up more than 200 percent from the
first ten months of 2019, car thefts up 51 percent, and sexual assaults 35
percent higher. Business leaders are rightly worried continued crime will
dampen economic growth and activity, downtown and citywide
Four
years running, 80 percent of Chicago murder victims have been Black. As are
most top local officials. They should elevate actual problem-solving on crime –
which is Chicago’s existential threat. But they augment rather than ease the
troubles.
Hyde Park
resident and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle offers no more than bromides. After Zheng’s
killing she pledged to “revisit my outreach to relevant stakeholders to bring
everyone together and establish real world results.”
But
Preckwinkle, the chair of the Cook County Democrats who presides over political
endorsements for judges, helped set the course when she backed new state
law removing 15-to-17-year-olds from mandatory adult
prosecution for armed vehicle hijackings. Too often, young
carjackers convicted as juveniles get little or no detention and then parole or
probation, but are later charged with new crimes up to and including murder.
Preckwinkle
heads a government with dysfunctional courts and a gun-shy prosecutor.
Under
Cook County’s Chief Judge Timothy Evans, Chicagoland’s local courts are a
revolving door. His “bail reform” regime set loose in 2017 has amounted to
quick release on low-cash or no-cash bonds for men charged with violent crimes.
All too often they’re right back at it. Carjacking, shooting, even killing.
In 2020 a
five-time felon out on low-cash bond for new weapons charges was charged anew,
with two counts of murder. This after allegedly losing his temper and shooting
two victims at an outdoor party – Michael Mickey and his aunt Lunyea Wilson –
while wounding three. A snatch of conversation was reported to have triggered
him. Let’s be clear: it wasn’t for want of single-payer health care, or college
tuition – claims typical of today’s causality claptrap.
Two
members of a carjacking crew that killed retired Chicago firefighter Dwain
Williams in Morgan Park on the South Side were out on low cash bond for pending
serious offenses including carjacking.
A
juvenile out on bond after smashing a suburban gun store window and allegedly
stealing a large cache of weapons, then was charged with murder for fatally
stabbing drugstore clerk Olga Calderon, the mother of two young children, at a
Milwaukee Avenue Walgreen’s in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood.
By
mid-July of 2021 some 3,508 Cook County defendants, almost three quarters charged with violent crime or gun-related
offenses, were free on electronic monitoring before trial, versus
503 per day in 2010. That included 100 charged with murder, versus just 19 five
years earlier in 2016, before bail reform.
The mess
also traces to Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx. An in-depth newspaper probe revealed her
office had dropped 6,500 more prosecutions of serious crimes in her first three
years than her predecessor in her last three years. This included charges of
aggravated battery, sex crimes, shootings, and alleged murders.
Plea
deals by her prosecutors are a scourge. Like Dennis Zheng, a 73-year-old Black
grandfather and veteran named Keith Cooper was allegedly killed by a young
offender in Hyde Park last summer who’d been previously convicted for
carjacking. Cooper had been buying groceries for dinner with his daughter and
granddaughters.
Chicago
Mayor Lori Lightfoot blames elevated murder rates for Blacks on white-driven
“systemic racism” and guns. She blames Covid for fresh looting
downtown and in Chatham on the South Side after the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict,
and says an alderman calling for stronger crime prevention by Chicago police,
is “ill-informed.” In her world, Blacks have no agency.
Yet
Lightfoot’s endless tap-dance is what is racist; an institutionalizing of low
expectations. A mayor must set the tone, and be the glue. A mayor must use the
bully pulpit to preach on two-parent households, the vital role of police, more
NGO training programs in the construction trades, more microlending to
ex-convict entrepreneurs, and more and better school choice.
A mayor
must also use the powers of office to enable robust police foot patrols in
high-crime neighborhoods and emerging trouble spots. Manpower matters.
Attrition and unfilled vacancies tell us the environment for policing in
Chicago is toxic. That rot starts on the fifth floor of City Hall, and encompasses
the city’s race-hustling class
Innovation
can be leading-edge stuff, like the Chicago Neighborhoods Initiative
microlending program based in Pullman, including ex-cons who start delivery
companies to feed off the Amazon economy. Or training programs in Woodlawn for
Black female electricians at Rev. Corey Brooks’ Project H.O.O.D.
But
– especially in older Northern cities stuck in the failed politics of the past
– it requires a return to basics. Like the gospel of engaged and
accountable parenting.
America’s
struggling cities, particularly Chicago, must innovate at the real speed of
life. Or they will all but die.
Matt
Rosenberg is the author of What Next, Chicago? Notes of a Pissed-Off Native Son.” Parts of this column are adapted from the
book. He also writes at ChicagoSkooled. He lived in Chicago for 30
years, and returns frequently. He has worked in media, public policy, and
communications since serving on the undercover team of the Mirage Tavern
investigation in 1977. Reach him at chicagoauthor2020s@gmail.com