by William F. Jasper
“Chicago is in a death spiral and it’s quickly turned into a city that caters strictly to criminals who target the innocent.” That is the charge leveled by Keith Thornton, a Chicago 911 dispatcher/trainer and emergency medical technician, who appeared on Fox News on May 19 to lambaste Mayor Lori Lightfoot and prosecutor Kim Foxx for the escalating crime, chaos, and violence that are destroying the city.
“It’s crazy here in Chicago,” he said. “It’s done, the city is done. If we don’t get new people in these positions to lead the city, the city is done.”
“It’s all because of the mayor and her cronies who support her and who are right underneath her in her administration,” Thornton charged. Under Lightfoot and Foxx, he said, Chicago’s Cook County was becoming “Crook County.”
Mr. Thornton’s appearance on Fox & Friends First with host Carley Shimkus came in the aftermath of another deadly week of lawlessness that featured a wild melee in which a mob of hundreds of teens rampaged through Millennium Park, one of the Windy City’s most popular tourist attractions. The rioting teens blocked streets and climbed atop cars and city buses. No arrests were made because Lightfoot and Foxx have repeatedly sent the signal that they’re not interested in prosecuting criminal behavior, and police have learned that actually doing their job of arresting lawbreakers only exposes them to both physical danger and legal peril, as well as media persecution. During the Millennium Park mayhem, 16-year-old Seandell Holliday was shot and killed near Chicago’s famous sculpture known as “the Bean.” A 17-year-old has been charged with Holliday’s murder. But Holliday was only one of 33 people shot, five fatally, in violence across Chicago that weekend.
“Blood on Her Hands”
It is a story that has become all too familiar in Chicago. And this was not the first time Keith Thornton had come out swinging at Mayor Lightfoot for the carnage she has helped unleash on the city. Last December he took to Facebook to charge that the mayor has “blood on her hands” for the rampant crime her administration has brought about. “It is outrageous. And I’m not happy. You say Chicago, people are afraid like it is a death zone…. Several of my officers who texted and said that they were scared, they’re tired of this nonsense, they have no backing, and are scared being out there by themselves,” Thornton said in his Facebook posting.
“The blood is on her hands,” Thornton said in a subsequent television interview. “Every child and every youth and adult and elderly person that is shot, killed, pulled out of vehicles because of carjackings with AK-47s, that is on her hands, and it’s absolutely shameful…. You are the mayor, do your job, it has not been done!”
There is indeed much blood on Mayor Lightfoot’s hands. Chicago, which was notorious for violent crime before she assumed office in 2019, has gotten dramatically worse under her “progressive” agenda. “The year of 2021 ended as one of the most violent on record in Chicago, as a rise in the number of shootings left more people dead than in any single year in a quarter century, according to statistics released by the police department on Saturday,” the Associated Press reported. “According to the department, 2021 ended with 797 homicides,” the AP report continues. “That is 25 more than were recorded 2020, 299 more than in 2019 and the most since 1996. And there were 3,561 shooting incidents in 2021, which is just over 300 more than were recorded in 2020 and a staggering 1,415 more shooting incidents than were recorded in the city in 2019.”
Blue Flight, “Mass Exodus”
Mayor Lightfoot’s tenure, coinciding with the COVID-19 lockdowns and mandates and the BLM-George Floyd riots, has seen a mass exodus of veteran officers from the Chicago Police Department (CPD). The statistics are frightening. Chicago’s ABC7 Eyewitness News reported on May 10, 2022, that, according to the CPD, 900 officers left the force in 2021 and only 51 joined. It was the worst of a continuous three-year super-attrition. In 2019, 619 officers left and 444 joined. In 2020, 705 officers left and 116 joined. “There is a mass exodus,” says Chicago Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) President John Catanzara. “It’s caused, in part, by burnout and fatigue, leaving a smaller number of officers to fight a citywide surge in violent crime.”
“In theory, we are probably 2,000-plus under our all-time high,” Catanzara said. “That doesn’t make anybody safe, that doesn’t make the streets safer which the last two years of homicide numbers show. That doesn’t make our officers any safer, it leads to exhaustion.” And it is only getting worse, as the remaining officers have to shoulder an increasing burden. Three weeks before the Labor Day 2022 weekend, Chicago’s ABC7 reported that the CPD had canceled all days off, in preparation for potential trouble. “An internal CPD memo obtained by the ABC7 I-Team Monday night, and now being read at police district roll calls, orders that all days off be canceled for one full week between May 24 and 31,” the television station reported. Additionally, the memo stated that officers may also be put on 12-hour work shifts during that time “if operational needs arise.”
“According to the police department order, the upcoming holiday will require that officers work straight through their regularly scheduled off days,” ABC7 reported. Understandably, police officers are frustrated. “The escape from this job and the tragic things we see on a daily basis, to be able to go on vacation or even just spend time with your family at a barbecue, it is decompression time that is sorely needed,” said FOP’s John Catanzara. In addition to the exhaustion, the increasing danger to police officers on the streets, and the constant demoralizing attacks by politicians and the media, Chicago’s police officers have been faced with vaccine mandates. Many have chosen to leave, rather than take the experimental and potentially dangerous “vaccine” jabs.
But hey, Mayor Lightfoot is not worried since she has her own personal police protection units. As the Chicago Sun-Times reported earlier this year, while she was overseeing the demolition of the CPD and endangering everyone else in Chicago, Lightfoot created a special unit to protect herself and her “wife.” “Nearly two years ago, the Chicago Police Department quietly created a special unit to protect Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s home and City Hall and oversee her personal bodyguard detail,” the Sun-Times reported. “Unit 544 began with a handful of officers and has grown, as of March 21, to a roster of 65 officers, five sergeants and a lieutenant, city records show.” That’s 71 total. But wait, there’s more! “Like previous Chicago mayors,” the Sun-Times continues, “Lightfoot also has a separate personal bodyguard detail, which includes about 20 officers, the records show.”
Mayor Lightfoot has 90+ officers providing her with 24/7 protection, so what’s to worry about? Like other “progressive” politicians sheltered in their protective bubbles, she is oblivious to her own hypocrisy. This hypocrisy with regard to crime and policing extends to her COVID-19 mask, vaccine, distancing, lockdown, and stay-at-home mandates, which she was caught violating multiple times, even while threatening to cite, arrest, and jail common citizens for violating her edicts on these issues.
Increasing Danger
On August 7, 2021, 29-year-old Chicago Police Officer Ella French was shot and killed while conducting a traffic stop. Her partner, Officer Carlos Yanez, Jr., was shot in the head four times. Miraculously, he survived, and with heroic struggle has managed to regain many of his physical abilities, although he lost an eye and still has bullets lodged in his head.
The National Fraternal Order of Police, which represents more than 346,000 U.S. law enforcement officers, notes that a “historic” 346 police officers were shot in the line of duty in 2021 — 63 of whom were killed. “The number of officers shot in the line of duty last year is up from 312 officers shot in 2020, 47 of whom were killed, and 293 shot in 2019, 50 of whom were killed,” according to an FOP analysis.
“As we have said before, the recent erosion of respect for law enforcement and anti-police rhetoric has fueled more aggression towards police officers than what has been seen in previous years,” National FOP President Patrick Yoes said in a press statement.
According to the FOP, “ambush-style” attacks — events in which officers are shot at without any warning or opportunities to defend themselves — “were up 115% in 2021 compared to 2020, with 130 officers shot in 103 ambush attacks.”
“The attacks on law enforcement officers during 2021 were a harsh reminder that our law enforcement officers are not just in harm’s way due to the dangerous nature of their profession, but that they are the targets of cowardly individuals whose sole motivation is to injure or kill a law enforcement officer,” FOP President Yoes said. “Despite all of this, the brave men and women of law enforcement will continue to hold the line, stand in between good and evil, and work tirelessly to protect the communities they serve.”
Rogue Prosecutor Kim Foxx
Even more culpable than Mayor Lightfoot for the carnage in Chicago is Kim Foxx, the state’s attorney (district attorney) for Cook County, which encompasses Chicago. She oversees the nation’s second largest prosecutor’s office, with nearly 700 attorneys and over 1,000 employees. Foxx was the first of the “reform prosecutors” to be elected under the Marxist “Justice & Safety” scheme hatched by subversive billionaire George Soros.
As The Washington Post said regarding her 2016 election victory, Soros had “plunked $300,000 into a [political action committee] created to elect Kim Foxx.” Despite Chicago’s rising crime wave during her first four-year term, she was re-elected in 2020, thanks to massive infusions of outside cash from Emily’s List and $2 million from the Soros-funded Illinois Justice & Safety PAC. Foxx would pioneer the use of “reform” terminology to excuse criminal activity and give violent felons a “Get Out of Jail Free” card: structural racism, restorative justice, systemic oppression, reimagining policing, mass incarceration. During the BLM/Antifa riots of 2020, Chicago police arrested thousands of rioters. But Foxx declined to prosecute them, ascribing their criminal actions to “righteous anger” and “collective grief.” Even the most violent thugs can count on leniency from Foxx. The Chicago Tribune found that “Foxx’s higher rates of dropped cases included people accused of murder, shooting another person, sex crimes, and attacks on police officers — as well as serious drug offenses that for decades have driven much of Chicago’s street violence.”
The Soros Chaos Machine that has worked so demonically well in Chicago was then duplicated in additional prosecutor races across the country: Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Rachel Rollins in Boston, Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore, Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, George Gascon in Los Angeles, Kimberly Gardner in St. Louis, Alvin Bragg in New York City, and more. But there is evidence that rising anger over the spiraling crime may overcome the Soros dark money that is funding the destruction of our communities. In Los Angeles and San Francisco, credible recall efforts may remove Gascon and Boudin from office. And fed-up voters in other cities may do the same. Let us hope so — and work to make it so.