Police reform is coming to Chicago – and it’s set to further pour gasoline on the city’s growing crime problem. If you thought police couldn’t do their jobs due to lack of support (and sometimes explicit opposition) from liberal leaders, at least one of those leaders now literally doesn’t want cops to be able to do their jobs.
As the New York Post reports:
Police officers in Chicago may soon require permission from a supervisor before pursuing a suspect on foot, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said.
Lightfoot promised to disclose details “soon” about a police policy change.
“No one should die as a result of a foot chase,” the mayor said.
Police methods have faced new scrutiny recently following the release last week of video footage from the March 29 police shooting death of 13-year-old Adam Toledo. The case has sparked new debate on police use of deadly force.
One is left to wonder what the point of having a police force even is if a suspect can escape with a healthy 6 mile-per-hour jog.
Basing public policy on extremely rare incidents is simply bad policy, and the hysteria driving these bad policies have been exacerbated by the media.
There’s an aphorism in journalism that explains just how the national news can warp our perception of events: “man bites dog.” A dog biting a man is an extremely common occurrence – something that wouldn’t be worth covering (for the same reason car crashes don’t tend to make national news). But a man biting a dog would be an oddity worth covering due to its rarity (such as why extremely rare events like plane crashes get coverage).
As a result, low probability events tend to get the most national coverage, and are more likely to provoke a national political response. We can see this when it comes to gun control; regular gang shootings that contribute to over 10,000 annual gun homicides get no coverage, but rare mass shooting’s that usually have a combined annual death toll below 50 lead to mass calls for gun control.
The fact of the matter is that as long as there are criminals (such as the aforementioned 13-year-old, who was armed and holding the gun up until 8/10th of a second before being shot, had gunshot residue on his hands from an earlier shooting, and had a Latin Kings tattoo), and they interact with police, there’s a guarantee that there will be police shootings. And even if such shootings were to become rarer (as they already are), the media will simply increase attention on the few shootings that remained to give the perception of an epidemic (as they already do). We saw that happen following the death of George Floyd – which happened in a year that police killings of unarmed black men totaled 18, down 50% since the Washington Post began tracking this data in 2015.
Yet the media presented these type of police killings as a rising threat – and an imminent one to the average black person’s safety – not something that only affected 1 in every 2.6 million people in that community that year.
Any police shooting involving a white officer and non-white suspect is now being used as an excuse to push a narrative that’s already set in stone. We’re seeing this play out in real time following the officer involved shooting in Columbus Ohio, where a cop saving a black teenager from being stabbed. When NBC covered it last night they deceptively edited the 911 call to leave out the part where the caller says a girl is “trying to stab us,” and they also didn’t show the knife in the attacker’s hand immediately before being shot.
Even after getting the verdict they wanted and advocated tirelessly for in the Derek Chauvin trial, the narrative must go on!
Matt Palumbo is the author of Dumb and Dumber: How Cuomo and de Blasio Ruined New York, Debunk This: Shattering Liberal Lies, and Spygate
