Last weekend alone, nine Baltimoreans were gunned down in cold blood. As of last night, the number of homicides in "Charm City" has hit forty....month-to-date.
If only that were an isolated exception, instead of being simply the most recently publicized instance of a trend that is metastasizing coast-to-coast:
Gun violence is climbing in the nation's cities, marking a likely end to the twenty-year national decline in the crime rates, because of changing laws that make it more difficult for police to do their jobs, according to a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.
"Crime is the worst I've ever seen it,' said St. Louis Alderman Joe Vaccaro during a City Hall hearing earlier this month, writes Heather Mac Donald, a Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute in her article.
In St. Louis alone, shootings are up by 39%, robberies by 43%,and homicides by 25%.
St. Louis is not the only city seeing increases. According to Baltimore police, gun violence in that city is up by more than 60% over last year, with thirty-two shootings occurring over Memorial Day weekend alone, making May the most violent month the city has experienced in the past fifteen years.
Homicides were up by 180% in Milwaukee by May 17th, over the same period from last year. In Atlanta, murders went up by 32% by mid-May, and in Chicago, homicides went up by 17% and shootings by 24%. New York marked a murder rate rise of nearly 13% and gun violence by 7%, and violent felonies in Los Angeles went up by 25%, MacDonald writes.
Even worse, neighborhood level crime climbed even more, with shooting incidents going up by 500% in New York's East Harlem Precinct.
That is the effect; here is the cause:
MacDonald said the rise in crime may be because of the growing unrest over the nation's police departments in recent months, following the deaths of unarmed black men including Ferguson's Michael Brown and Eric Garner in Staten Island.
The deaths have brought riots, and the murders of police officers has also gone up. MacDonald notes that Barack Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder have "embraced the conceit that law enforcement in black communities is infected by bias," and the media is also putting out a stream of stories about the "alleged police mistreatment of blacks."
As a result, she said, almost any police shooting that involves a black person "no matter how threatening the behavior that provoked the shooting," brings angry protests, and acquittals of police officers for using deadly force often brings violence, with the result being what St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson has called the "Ferguson effect."
This means police are backing away from enforcement activity while the criminal element feels empowered, said Mac Donald, pointing out that similar "Ferguson effects" all happening nationwide as police scale back on proactive police actions.
"Any cop who uses his gun now has to worry about being indicted and losing his job and family," a New York City police officer told MacDonald. "Everything has the potential to be recorded. A lot of cops feel that the climate for the next couple of years is going to be non stop-protests." [emphases added]
"Couple" of years? I'd say it's just begun, Officer, particularly if Barack Obama opts to extend his tenure in office beyond what the Twenty Second Amendment permits, which would do much to help explain the full-court press that is and will be on over the next 601 days to spread his intended race war as far and wide as humanly possible. Michael Brown in Ferguson (St. Louis), Eric Garner in New York City, Dontre Hamilton in Milwaukee, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Tony Robinson in Madison, Wisconsin, Malissa Williams and Timothy Russell in Cleveland - different incidents where police fault ranged from non-existent to considerable, but all linked to the same false Narrative ("racist" local police) and strategy (demonize, discredit, and federalize local law enforcement), aimed at the same endgame: incite and spread so much violent civil unrest and upheaval that O has a ready-made excuse for declaring and imposing nationwide martial law sometime before the first Tuesday of next November.
Not the most likely path to an illicit third Obama term, but the "Ferguson effect" keeps one more such option open, right alongside another financial panic a massive terrorist attack, or a devastating cyberattack.
Besides, it's not like they're mutually exclusive.
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