(New York Post) Chicago is the murder capital of America — with someone shot every two hours and someone killed every 17 hours. So far this year, 353 victims, most of them black, have been murdered in Chicago. The homicide rate is five times higher than New York’s.
“Democrats wanted to hold the convention somewhere safer, but Beirut wasn’t available,” quipped one wag.
A weeklong facade
Of course, none of the unpleasantness will be visible to the 35,000 conventiongoers and 15,000 media descending on Chi-town this week. The DNC has built a big wall around the convention area that they refuse to build at the southern border.
Mayor Brandon Johnson has temporarily suspended his “anti-racist” crime policies and ordered his city’s beleaguered cops to enforce the law for once so that everyone will go home saying that Chicago’s crime wave is a MAGA conspiracy theory.
“There are extraordinary efforts to make sure the Democratic convention is safe and protected, whereas people outside the bubble are being murdered on a weekly, daily and hourly basis,” says Gianno Caldwell, the Fox News political analyst whose 18-year-old brother Christian Beamon was murdered in Chicago in a still-unsolved 2022 shooting.
“Chicago has become the wild, wild west,” says Caldwell, who has dedicated himself to helping victims of violent crime in his hometown through his foundation, the Caldwell Institute for Public Safety.
“Having grown up on the South Side of Chicago I understand how progressive policies are systematically killing innocent lives . . . The city is hurting, and hurting even worse under Brandon Johnson and [Gov. J.B.] Pritzker. Looking purely at the numbers of shootings and people being murdered today, Chicago is much different to when I was growing up.”
He says the families of shooting victims feel helpless. “If you’re a poor family in great despair there’s nothing you can do. You don’t even have the resources to get a funeral together.”
And he points to the disparate nature of justice in the city. Two teens were charged in June with a single misdemeanor after attacking a couple in downtown Chicago so savagely that the wife lost her unborn baby.
