Progressives are up in arms over a particular phrase President Trump used during his inauguration address. Donald Trump described the high number of killings going on in major U.S. cities, many of which, like Chicago, have been under Democrat leadership for decades, as “American carnage.” The Manhattan Contrarian’s Francis Menton reports that in an editorial the day after the Trump’s speech, The Times wrote that the president “waxed apocalyptic in imagining the prevalence of crime in the nation’s cities.”
“Imagining?” Mr. Menton asks, “How is it possible to use any word other than “carnage” to describe this situation?” From Mr. Menton on his collected statistics on the murder rates in several of America’s murder capitals–“all under solid Democratic Party control for generations:”
These statistics are not difficult to find, and the links are in that post. In a nation where the overall murder rate for the country is about 5 per 100,000, and where the largest city (New York) has an even lower rate of about 4 per 100,000, we find a murder rate of 60 per 100,000 in St. Louis, 44 in Detroit, 50 in Baltimore, 42 in New Orleans, and 30 in Chicago. To put that in some perspective, if New York had a murder rate like that of St. Louis, instead of about 300 murders last year, it would have had about 4500! And in Chicago, if it could lower its murder rate to be near that of New York, then instead of the nearly 800 murders it suffered last year, it would have been more like 100. These are extremely dramatic numbers. And about half or more of the victims are black men.
I’m sorry, but the carnage in many American cities is not a subject on which it is OK to pretend it doesn’t exist because you oppose everything President Trump says and you want to protect the guys on “our team.” It’s not OK because cities like New York and (to a lesser degree) Los Angeles have demonstrated that it is eminently possible to get a murder rate down to well less than 10 per 100,000 despite a population that includes large numbers of blacks and other minority groups. (The murder rate in LA in 2016 was about 7 per 100,000.) If New York and LA can do it, then the other cities like St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, New Orleans and Chicago have no excuse any more. Why their voters don’t throw out the entrenched (Democratic Party) power structure, I have no idea.
Read more here.
What should the Feds do about the Chicago ‘carnage’?
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