What about Chicago, Mr. President?

Published 12:08 am Friday, September 30, 2016

The year-end statistics showed there were 468 murders in Chicago in 2015 compared with 416 the year before, according to the Chicago Tribune. This is a 12.5 percent increase. There were approximately 2,900 shootings in 2015 which represented a 13 percent increase from the year before and 29 percent more than in 2013. This gives Chicago the dubious distinction of having more homicides than any other city, regardless of size, in the United States.

In other news involving the two recent police shootings of two black men, President Obama released a statement lamenting the shootings, saying, and I quote, “All Americans should be troubled where police officers shoot and kill young black men.” In preparation of this column, I searched diligently for statements from Obama lamenting the murder of 468 people in Chicago. I could not find any statements from the president on this state of affairs.

On a similar note, Black Lives Matter hasn’t staged, to the best of my knowledge, any protests in Chicago related to 468 murders in 2015. Let’s look at the racial breakdown of murders so far in 2016. So far this year, Chicago has seen 263 murdered blacks as compared to 60 Hispanics and 17 whites and other races. This is a four times higher murder rate than all other races combined. Black Lives Matters’ silence on the bloodletting in Chicago is deafening. Is this because police weren’t involved? Or is it because the majority of the murders were the result of black on black violence? The reason probably doesn’t matter since the victims are just as dead.

Here’s another statistic that you might find interesting: In 2014 and 2015, there were a total of 30 police-involved shootings as compared to well over 2,000 deaths of victims of all races during that same period.

Compare this to this sad national statistic: Over the last 10 years in the United States the annual average number of police deaths has been 49.6 per year.

This column has focused on Chicago but it could easily have been about St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans, Detroit, etc. So why is there so much focus on a handful of police-involved shootings, most of which are evidentially found to be justified? It is my sense that they are easy targets (no pun intended). They do their jobs every day under the glaring light of public scrutiny and media and now under the watchful eye of body cams.

God bless the men and women of law enforcement. We support the thin blue line!

Werner and Mary Braun live in Dalton. He is the retired president of the Dalton-based Carpet and Rug Institute.