The Illinois prison population has dropped from almost 40,000 in 2019 to 27,000 two short years later, while violent crime rates have skyrocketed. Is this a good thing?
I'm a supporter of releasing folks for minor crimes, but Kass describes an epidemic of violent dangerioius people who are being released on to our streets. Another pie thrown in the face of our law abiding citizens and the police who get thrown under the bus.
Who deserves the blame for this? Lightfoot and Gov Fatso presided over this folly with the help of Boss Preckwinkle who runs the local gov (& our mayor) like a Mob Crime Boss. Shame on them. BTW George Soros who bankrolls progressive law/order candidates all of the US deserves much of the blame. I wonder how George would feel if Bruce Diamond went after him?
To be more specific, we need to stop releasing dangerious people onto a helpless public. Criminals have rights, but apparently victims dont?
Can Holiday Shopping Co-Exist With Violent Crime?
By John Kass
November 19, 2023
The young woman wasn’t thinking about what would happen to her as she walked through Chicago’s elite shopping district on the Magnificent Mile.
The world was beautiful. It was just after 2 p.m. on Monday. People were out, shopping, getting into the holiday season. She was walking, talking with a friend on a beautiful day. She is just 23-years-old, an airline flight attendant, and here’s what she wasn’t thinking about:
She wasn’t thinking about brain damage, or being in a coma at Northwestern Hospital. She wasn’t thinking of her family weeping through Thanksgiving.
I read about the savage crime at CWB Chicago, the indispensable crime web site. It was under the headline, “Charges filed, victim remains unresponsive following log attack on the Mag Mile”
I’ve put a link to the CWB Chicago story in the first sentence of this column. And I urge you to share it with your friends, especially now.
I’m a subscriber. Why? Crime is a major issue, when downtown real estate fails, the city will fail. And the metropolitan newspapers went woke years ago, around the time of the Black Lives Matter riots that destroyed downtown. The papers stopped caring about crime, even to the point of refusing to run police mug shots of suspects. They were afraid of being called racist. Like other important institutions, the papers neutered themselves. I know. I was there.
Downtown has never recovered. I took the lede image from the website with permission from CWB Chicago managing partner Tim Hecke, who wrote the riveting story about the attack.
That young woman had everything in front of her, right there in front of the Burberry Store, 633 N. Michigan Avenue. I loved that store. I worked for 40 years on Boul Mich, when that store was an island of civility, a store that still speaks to excellent, classic British good taste and tradition.
That’s when the violent savage, reportedly a career criminal by the name of Bruce Diamond, made his move.
Yes, a savage. She didn’t know him. He came at her unprovoked to ruin her life. He rushed at her impulsively, without thought, in a completely savage act. Please don’t play the politically correct snowflake with me. If we can’t name the thing, then how can we responsibly deal with it, like adults? I use the word only based on his behavior. It was incredibly savage.
His weapon was a thick log that he threw at her “like a javelin,” as she chatted with her friend, police and witnesses said. She never saw him coming. He used that log, taken from a holiday display outside a local Starbucks. It was about 3 feet long and a witness said it was thick about, 8 to 10 inches in diameter.
He used it to smash her in the face. He threw it at her head from a short distance away. He just walked up and unleashed on her. She went down. Immediately. Police saw it happen.
There was blood running from her ears and her nose. As I write this, she is still in intensive care unresponsive, as the chattering idiots of local TV news are doing their happy-talk bit, excited about the Michigan Avenue “Festival of Lights” parade. When I was a boy it was called the Christmas parade. But that was deemed offensive to some. It got in the way of commerce. Now it is a holiday festival of lights, with minor celebrities and politicians waving to the crowd of shoppers.
She wasn’t one of them.
The happy-talk TV journos were too preoccupied with satisfying their bosses and advertisers to bother mentioning the 23-year-old flight attendant hit in the face with the log or worry about her family or her friends.
In Heck’s CWB Chicago story, prosecutors said she “sustained bruising, swelling and bleeding to her brain, a hemorrhage, and a fracture to her left mastoid.”
CWB reported that court records show Diamond had been “AWOL for more than two years from a misdemeanor battery case” against him in 2022. He beat someone inside a store in the 200 block of North Dearborn. How badly? We don’t know. Records were incomplete.
And recently he had been in Ohio, where he achieved 21 criminal convictions there since 2011. How many young women did he smash in the face? How many men? It’s unclear.
What is clear is Chicago and Cook County are sanctuaries for violent repeat offender criminals, ever since Kim Foxx was elected Cook County State’s Attorney in 2016. She ran as the anti-cop Democrat who was backed with millions of political dollars by hard leftist George Soros.
She and her political partner and mentor, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, chair of the county Democrats, promised to lower the population of the Cook County Jail.
Theirs was a racial argument, the basis of which was that that racial minorities (meaning black and brown people) were being unfairly targeted by police for arrests. This, even though racial minorities were involved in most of the violent crime, and their victims were racial minorities.
But those racial minorities who were victims of the thugs weren’t important to the Cook County Democrats.
The Preckwinkle Foxx argument won favor among the hard left of the Chicago media, and from most Democrats. Even former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who vowed to stop Foxx, buckled under the racial pressure and backed Foxx for reelection.
Voters were tired of Lightfoot, and Preckwinkle’s other protege, Brandon Johnson, was elected mayor with muscle from the Chicago Teacher’s Union, which serves as Boss Toni Preckwinkle’s new machine.
Now, Johnson too is under pressure on account of the crime issue. In a recent poll two out of three voters give him unfavorable ratings. He’s as low as Rahm Emanuel and Lightfoot. He’s under pressure to deal with crime, but his progressive hard-left politics are in the way. The pressure builds on him.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s having more of his panic attacks.
The new Illinois Policy Institute poll gives Johnson only a 28 percent approval rating. He talks and his speeches threaten his political critics, and he blusters and postures, but the city is still awash in crime. He’s done little if anything about it.
Who is going to shop downtown now?
Without sales revenues, the downtown business district will wither away. It happened years ago in Detroit. It is happening now in Chicago. People won’t spend money if they’re not safe.
I suppose there are some who will go. My wife won’t go downtown. A friend’s wife–she was a flight attendant and a ballet dancer–won’t pay for the privilege of being a victim of brutal violent crime.
I worry about my sons’ girlfriends, both lovely young women. I think that most fathers are concerned. I won’t spend a dime down there. If Mayor Johnson can’t protect the people, why should we help him fill the city revenue treasure box?
The Christmas shopping season can’t co-exist with people like Bruce Diamond pouncing on 23-year-old women on Michigan Avenue. Sales will die and so too, downtown real estate.
Still, when I post this, I’m certain that Johnson’s hard left Bolshevik cadre will come out and attack from the safety of the social media shadow.
I’m also certain that Chicago media will not link Boss Toni Preckwinkle to the growing epidemic of crime, or connect the dots to Soros and Kim Foxx. Those who are responsible for the anarchy and chaos won’t be held to account. And that is how a city dies.
And I’m also certain that media will ignore the young woman in the coma at Northwestern Hospital, as her family and loved ones gather and think of the bleak Thanksgiving holiday to come.
God bless and protect her, that young girl in the coma, a victim of Chicago’s savagery.
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