Chicago pays people for getting shot
A fascinating question I’ve long wondered about is how much would the demographics of Chicago change if its current black neighborhoods weren’t so unsafe. The Obama Administration (e.g., first two Obama chiefs of staff Rahm Emanuel and William Daley, along with Obama’s money woman Penny Pritzker) originated as as a movement by white Democratic insiders to tear down central Chicago’s black housing projects like Cabrini-Green while buying off enough black support. This scheme actually worked pretty well from the perspective of Lakefront liberal yuppie Chicago, but outer black neighborhoods didn’t improve and might have gotten even shootier.
The current mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, seems like he doesn’t want to risk Chicago improving because it might drive out his voting base.
Hizzoner has started an interesting program that pays people for getting shot by criminals. Not surprisingly, Mayor Johnson's voting base is 39 times more likely per capita to get a payout from the taxpayers:
From WGNTV in Chicago:
Chicago expanding program that pays gunshot victims to more areas of city
by: Gaynor Hall, Andy Koval
Posted: Jun 20, 2024 / 10:49 AM CDTCHICAGO — The City of Chicago is expanding its program that pays eligible gunshot victims to more neighborhoods.
Gunshot victims can receive up to $1,000 in financial assistance as well as up to $1,000 for temporary relocation-related costs. Eligible Chicago families who lost a loved one to homicide can receive an additional $1,500 in financial assistance to support funeral or burial costs, according to the city.
The program was launched in Dec. 2022 for the neighborhoods of East Garfield Park, West Garfield Park, Englewood, West Englewood and New City.
Mayor [Erick] Johnson announced Thursday that the program is expanding to 10 more neighborhoods — Auburn Gresham, Austin, Chicago Lawn, Greater Grand Crossing, Humboldt Park, North Lawndale, Roseland, South Lawndale, South Shore and West Pullman.
“I am proud to expand this impactful program and holistically support our residents who suffer from the trauma of gun violence,” Mayor Johnson said. “While we invest heavily in strategies that prevent violence from happening in the first place, we also want to make sure that those already impacted by violence get the support that they need. The ESVF program provides much-needed resources to promote healing in our communities and among the families that have been affected by violence, offering a lifeline that will lead us to a safer city. My administration continues to invest in our people and communities through the People’s Plan for Community Safety to build a united and stronger Chicago.”
The CDC reports death data by counties as its smallest geography, so I don’t have CDC WONDER figures for the city of Chicago. But here are the gun homicide victimization rates by race for Cook County, which has a little over twice the population of its county seat, Chicago. In Cook County, blacks died by gun homicide in 2018-2022 at almost 39 time the rate of whites.
Increasingly, progressives talk about “violence” like most people talk about weather … except that we can, of course, do far more about climate change than we can to discourage blacks from shooting each other. Because that would be racist. Or something.
Brandon Johnson- Chicago. Erick Adams- NYC Mayor. I think you combined the names.
Chicago homicide rate, since 2016: 25-to-30 per 100,000 population (except for a reprieve between about late-2017 and May 2020).
In the 1920s to early 1930s, the peak-"gangster" era (as semi-fictionalized in the Untouchables movie), the homicide rate only hit about 15 per 100,000. A high rate for a White population.
The long-run average before Black in migration was 5-to-10 per 100,000, also pretty high for a White population.
Caveats for cross-time comparisons are that with modern medicine, the early-20th-century rates would be several points lower (i.e., more gunshot victims and such would survive), and would also be revised down for any age-adjustment (younger average-age populations will always have higher homicide rates). Old Chicago was never particularly dangerous by today's standards.
What Chicago became after the mid-1960s crime rise is something unrecognizable, strange, troubling, post-Western. Dangerous, in many ways, in that families would tend to want to get out. Large areas of the city proper never returned to White-Western standards of normalcy. A creeping-rot Third-Worldization visible in the homicide-data.
Some parts of the city have near-zero homicides (gangs specifically targeting Whites in their neighborhoods, South Africa style, has not apparently yet happened). But the overall homicide rate implies a lifetime-chance of death by homicide of 2%, to 2.5% for the hypothetical statistically-median person who spends a lifetime in Chicago. It's such a shame, and a further shame that it's allowed to continue by the leaders of that city.