Crime Calculus a Catastrophe in Democrat Cities

Numbers are being crunched along with the bodies, and the woes for citizens living in Democrat-controlled cities racked by runaway crime just keep multiplying.

An Illinois website called Wirepoints laid it out plainly on Sept. 5. “The decision to commit a crime in Chicago has never been easier. Criminals are almost guaranteed to profit because the chances of getting caught and punished have collapsed to near-zero,” the research and commentary site wrote. The authors were willing to show their math.

Odds Overwhelmingly With Lawbreakers

“The chance of getting arrested in Chicago for a major crime collapsed to just 5 percent in 2022. It was already a low 10 percent just four years ago,” Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner observed. “More than 68,000 major crimes were reported in Chicago last year. Only 3,228 of them resulted in arrests. Wirepoints’ calculations are based on the Chicago City Data Portal: Crime – 2001 to Present.”

Wait, there’s more:

“The arrest rate for criminal sexual assault? Just 3 percent. Ditto for Motor Vehicle Thefts. Burglaries were at only 4 percent and Robberies, 5 percent.

“For thefts over $500, the chance of getting busted is even lower, at just 1 percent. There were just 201 arrests out of 20,041 crimes reported last year. And you’ll avoid arrest 96 times out of 100 across any form of theft, which The New York Times recently reported.”

Amazingly, the possibility of getting caught and facing prison time -- a traditional deterrent for those mulling committing a crime -- has become so insignificant in the Windy City that it is no longer a serious consideration. This means it is truly open season on law-abiding residents of the third-largest city in the United States.

Crime Pandemic by the Pacific

Meanwhile, in Seattle, the picture is every bit as bleak. On Aug. 31, the Seattle Police Department stated that the Pacific Northwest city had reached 50 homicides for the year, with four months remaining on the calendar. Seattle had 52 homicides in all of 2022.

Criminals “no longer fear the police because they understand that the police are literally handcuffed for being able to effectively do our jobs so they’re emboldened," Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) President Mike Solan told KOMO radio.

“Officials with the SPOG estimate the department has lost around 600 officers since 2020,” the station reports.

“Public safety is on the precipice of falling further behind and I think our community is really at risk here," Solan added.

While woke Chicago may be unwilling to enforce the law, progressive Seattle is flat-out unable to, no matter how it may feel about “criminal justice reform” at the moment, due to the severe manpower shortages caused by the wave of officer departures.

The effects are the same.

“There’s people out there that think that they’re not going to get caught," Jim Fuda of Crime Stoppers Puget Sound told KOMO. “I mean, you see it in the robberies that are going on and even the children that are stealing cars, and now the home invasion robberies are up.”

More than 3 million people, the combined populations of these two leftist cities, are being left completely vulnerable to every form of crime imaginable, from the vexing annoyances of everyday theft to the unspeakable horrors of sexual assault and murder.

Where does it stop? Sadly, nothing is going to change until this plague hits those responsible for allowing it to fester where they live. We take no joy in relating that a highly placed Minnesota progressive political official has just received such a dose of hard medicine.

‘In the Driveway of Our Home’

“Look at my face. These criminals will not win. We need to take back our city. And this will not be the last you hear from me about this.” So wrote Shivanthi Sathanandan, the 2nd Vice Chairwoman for the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, i.e., the Democratic Party, in the North Star State.

Sathanandan said she was “violently carjacked” on Sept. 5 while with her children “in the driveway of our home in Minneapolis.

“Four very young men, all carrying guns, beat me violently down to the ground in front of our kids. The young men held our neighbors up at gunpoint when they ran over and tried to help me. All in broad daylight,” Sathanandan exclaimed.

“I have a broken leg, deep lacerations on my head, bruising and cuts all over my body. And I have rage.”

But where was this rage when you and your fellow Minneapolis Democrats were putting the regular citizenry in harm’s way?

Yes, Sathanandan was among the progressives who fashionably called for the elimination of the Minneapolis Police Department in the wake of the death of George Floyd in 2020.

“Say it with me. Dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department,” she wrote in a Facebook post at the time. “It has ‘systematically failed the black community,’ so it’s ‘time to build a new infrastructure that works for all communities.’”

“Social justice” preening can be an emotionally rewarding experience for leftist political figures. But reality strikes like a punch to the face.

Unfortunately, Sathanandan has now received that punch and much worse. It will likely have to be this way in modern war zones such as Los Angeles and San Francisco as well. It seems those seeking to turn America into Brazil to satisfy radical and/or elitist political agendas won’t be pulled away from their self-satisfying agendas until the blood starts to wash up on the luxury vehicles parked inside their gated communities.