Quote:
Originally Posted by sentinel
Kim Foxx has got to fuckin GOOOOOOOO
Lori Lightfoot sucks and also has to go
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I think a lot will agree with this. At the same time, I have a problem with some of the optics of some of the business community leaders on this one. Either they're blind, dumb, or both. I agree that the crime rate for multiple types of crime is way too high as many people will. And parts of downtown have seen an increase in these things which is obviously the opposite of good. I'd say the crime rate has been way too high for a very long time.
However -- why they chose NOW (last year or 2) to speak up and not even 5-6 years ago is beyond me. Things were just as bad in 2016 and 2017 if not worse and most of them said absolutely nothing, at least to this extent. Then all of a sudden you have a bunch of online talking heads (and a few on the radio) saying things and they just wake up to it? My issue with these people is they have no solutions - all they want to do is talk about it and that's it. It's an election year and like usual, most of these people offer no solutions. And I'm not a LL fan at all, but if you're going to criticize at least have some viable solutions. Otherwise it just sounds like you're trying to destabilize the city/region for unknown reasons.
There were more homicides, shooting victims, robberies, aggravated batteries, and rape at this point in both 2016 and 2017 than there have been in 2022. The only one that is more today than those previous years is aggravated assault. Literally every other violent crime type today is actually lower than it was in the same time period of 2016 and 2017. So why did they choose to say next to nothing back then? These years were very big spikes from the previous years especially from 2013 and 2014 and yet there wasn't a lot of chatter in this regard. Maybe what they say is true (my small org alone has moved multiple people from the coasts this year alone to Chicago) but acting as if all of a sudden things are too high from a city-wide perspective is showing just how blind they are without social media chatter.
I do think downtown has an issue currently with shootings, for sure, and some other gun crimes, but again - some of these crime trends started before 2020. Thru 9/6, Loop and Near North Side combined had more robberies in 2017 and 2018 than 2022, and 2019 was almost identical (just barely below). For aggravated battery, 2017 and 2018 are not much below 2022, and 2019 actually hade more of it than 2022. Shootings are the thing that is obviously the biggest issue facing downtown. If you want to compare now to like 2014 then obviously there's more robberies as well but my point in all of this is - the business leaders are way late to the party in terms of when some of the increases actually started to happen (in the entire city and also downtown for some of this stuff).