It’s taken more than a year, but at long last Chicagoans heard Mayor Brandon Johnson unequivocally lay blame for the horrifying gun violence plaguing Chicago where it belongs — on the people shooting the guns and killing their fellow Chicagoans.
The mayor spoke in anguish about the bloody Fourth of July weekend that featured three mass shootings, including one in which two women and three children were shot in a South Side home in the early-morning hours of July 4. The two adult women and an 8-year-old boy died.
All told, at least 109 people were shot, and 19 of them lost their lives over the five-day holiday weekend, Chicago police reported. None of the perpetrators of the mass shootings are in custody as we write.
“This is a choice. The choice to kill. The choice to kill women, the choice to kill children, the choice to kill the elderly,” Johnson said during the Monday news conference. “These are choices that the offenders made and they calculated. We are holding every single individual accountable for the pain and for the torment that they have caused in this city.”
Yes.
At long last, in the words of this mayor, those who shoot to kill fellow Chicagoans have some agency over their actions. And should be held accountable and punished.
No more equivocating about the decades of disinvestment in South and West Side neighborhoods that Johnson often has cited in somehow explaining why people are drawing guns and killing their fellow human beings.
Week after week, Chicagoans are being gunned down at social gatherings. In homes. In front of schools. In parks. Pretty much anywhere.
Yes, Johnson on Monday repeated his disinvestment theme, too. He added a new wrinkle to that theme as well, weirdly tying the current state of the South and West sides to the 1968 election of Richard M. Nixon.
Apparently referencing President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, the mayor said, “We had a chance 60 years ago to get at the root causes (of violent crime). And people mocked President Johnson, and we ended up with Richard Nixon.” (Note to the former social studies teacher-turned-mayor: Lyndon Johnson opted not to run for reelection in 1968, not because his war on poverty was unpopular but because of his widely disliked prosecution of the Vietnam War.)
But those observations were not the emphasis. Johnson was angry and distraught. As he should have been and as are Chicagoans who survive these assaults, as well as those who live in fear in the violence-afflicted neighborhoods.
Mayor Johnson’s significant change in tone represented baby steps, to be sure. As we’ve written before, public safety is a crisis and should be treated as such. So many of Chicago’s woes are tied in one way or the other to public safety. Among them: population decline, economic stagnation, budgetary pressures and a national reputation that is about as low as it can get. There are substantial resources available from the business community, nonprofits, endowments and others to tackle this issue. But they’re crying out for leadership, which so far has been weak.
Let’s hope Johnson’s changed messaging is a fresh start.
The first step to developing an effective strategy to fight this battle for Chicago’s soul, as Johnson aptly put it on Monday, is to declare war on those causing the trouble. The source of most of this carnage is street gangs, pure and simple. This city desperately needs a plan to combat them, and at least as importantly, the will to fully execute that plan.
Johnson and police Superintendent Larry Snelling called for more federal help in controlling the flow of illegal guns into the city and for more federal resources to help the victims of mass shootings after the fact. Johnson also called on people living in the neighborhoods hardest hit by gun violence, including Austin where he and his family live, to provide more help to police in identifying the shooters when these appalling crimes happen.
All well and good.
After months of stating that Chicago can’t “police its way” out of its violent-crime disease, Johnson finally crossed the first threshold to getting a handle on this mayhem, and that was to point the finger of blame where it belongs — at criminals, not some systemic conspiracy.
Better policing isn’t all that’s needed, but it surely is a critical component. Keep it up, Mayor Johnson. Don’t stop now.
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