Chicago’s Increased Homicide Rate, Black Lives Matter, and Media Bias

Ryan Wiseman Racial Issues

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In this article, I am going to compare two articles that talk about the increase in the homicide rate in Chicago in the year 2016. In order to help you understand how I see these two articles, and their biases, I would like to start out by talking about Black Lives Matter, and how this movement is important in understanding Chicago’s increased homicide rate in 2016.

Black Lives Matter

Let’s talk about Black Lives Matter. What is it? The Black Lives Matter movement began in 2013, about a year after George Zimmerman, a person who identified as Hispanic, shot and killed 17-year-old African-American Treyvon Martin, who was unarmed at the time. In 2014, the killing of Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri and the killing of Eric Garner by police in New York City, caused the Black Lives Matter movement to gain strength and caused a rise in anti-police protests as part of the movement. In 2015, it was the shooting of Freddie Gray by the Baltimore Police that became the center of media attention. The shooting of Philando Castile by a police officer in Minnesota in July 2016 is yet another example of an African-American being shot and killed by police. And these are just a few of the dozens of deaths of African-Americans by police in the years 2014-16. The movement also uses the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter in its online social media campaign.

The main argument of the movement, as found in the name of their movement, is that black lives matter. No black person should have his life taken away by police who are abusing their power as police officers. The claim is that we need to stand against the police because of their brutality against black people because they are human beings, and their lives matter, too. All lives matter, and so do black lives.

There are some problems with the Black Lives Matter movement as I see it, and it becomes increasingly clear in how society has been affected by this movement – particularly those that live in big cities throughout the United States and live in the parts of those cities that are predominantly populated by African-Americans. When the media portrays the affects of the Black Lives Matter movement in these areas, there is almost always a bias.

So, what am I talking about? To what affects on society am I referring? Let’s take Chicago for example. In 2015, there were 485 homicides in Chicago. Please note that about 80% of all homicides are black men. Then the Black Lives Matter movement took off, and you saw an increasing hostility to the police. From my white-person perspective, it appeared that the Black Lives Matter movement wasn’t really so much about valuing the lives of black people as it was a motivation to become anti-police (despite the fact that less than 1% of all shootings in the black community each year are by police). And how did the police respond?

The police reacted by backing off their aggressive police tactics, and trying a more cautious and diplomatic and “empathy-driven” approach to policing. Police officers don’t want to be in the next viral video showing up on YouTube, so they’ve been backing off and have become afraid of confrontation with any person who is misbehaving and acting in an aggressive and socially unsafe manner – especially if they come from the black community.

This backing off by police has emboldened criminals to become more aggressive, since they know they will now be less likely to be confronted and stopped by the police, and the result has been nothing other than catastrophic (my opinion) for the black community. This is the case not just in Chicago, but in other cities across the United States, including Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Baltimore, where the violent crime and homicide rates in the black community alone have skyrocketed since the advent of the BLM movement.

In 2016, the homicide rate in Chicago jumped upwards by 57%. It went from 485 homicides in 2015 to 762 homicides in 2016. In 2017, the homicide rate in Chicago was 678 – a little lower than 2016, but still substantially higher than in 2015 and before. Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Baltimore also saw sharp increases in the number of homicides for the year 2016. Sine then, the homicide rate has grown even more. It appears that black communities in these American cities no longer have to worry about the aggression coming from police, but are being terrorized by aggressive criminals in their own communities who are taking advantage of the back-off of police to make more money, expand their drug-selling territories, and robbing people, among other things. And these aggressive people right within the black community itself are far, far more aggressive, destructive, and murderous than anything they imagine the police ever did before the advent of BLM.

It’s interesting to note that in the 1970’s, African-Americans got so tired of skyrocketing crime rates that they mobilized for tougher punishments for crime. In 1986, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act was passed, which created much-harsher penalties for crack cocaine – all 16 black members of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Congressional Black Caucus, voted in support of the act, and the black community rallied around these representatives. For decades, the African-American community, most of which are just trying to live out their lives in peace, and don’t want to live their lives in fear of criminal activity and aggression, has worked with police to stop criminals so that their neighborhoods can be better and safer. African-Americans today are backtracking – my opinion – on previous efforts made by the black community to make their communities safer, and their backtracking is only making their communities worse.

So, how does the media portray this increase in homicides in cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Baltimore? It depends of which media source you are viewing. Let’s look at two examples now.

CNN

Let’s take CNN, a left-leaning news sourse, and their article “762 murders. 12 months. 1 American city.” which was published on January 2, 2017. It makes no mention whatsoever of the Black Lives Matter movement. It blames the problem on guns, despite the fact that Chicago has strict gun control laws – it blames the looser gun control laws in both Indiana and Wisconsin, which they claim allow the criminally-minded to cross the state border to purchase guns. The article also blames the problem on the economic struggles and lack of jobs, despite the fact that the unemployment rate has fallen, and despite the fact that the unemployment rate really represents the number of people chronically dependent on government social welfare programs who refuse to work. It also makes mention of segregation and lack of resources as possible reasons for the increase in homicides. But no mention of Black Lives Matter and its role in changing the police-criminal interactive environment.

The article does mention the deep distrust that many Chicagoans have of the police, and that criminals are no longer afraid of the police: “The violence in 2016 was driven by emboldened offenders who acted without a fear of penalty from the criminal justice system.” It does make mention of the police shooting of Laquan McDonald, and the protests that arose because of that, but that is the closest thing this article does to mention Black Lives Matter.

One of the big media biases that I see from news sources on the left is their omission of some information, and we see that in this CNN article in their “bias by omission.”

Daily Wire

Compare that to another article by the Daily Wire, a right-leaning website. In the article entitled “Black Lives Matter? 2016 Chicago Homicides Surge 57% to 762.” it makes mention of Black Lives Matter right in the title. It doesn’t back down from explaining the role they think the Black Lives Matter movement has played in raising the homicide rate in Chicago in 2016. It quotes former Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy: “So what’s happening, and this is ironic, is that a movement with the goal of saving black lives at this point is getting black lives taken, because 80 percent of our murder victims here in Chicago are male blacks.” The article goes on later by saying: “While no one will argue that a small number of police officers have been responsible for some tragic and unjustified shootings, there is also no question that the response from the national media, President Obama, and Black Lives Matter has been hysterical, dishonest, and an act of mercenary partisanship.” It goes on to talk about how the left-leaning media built a narrative that was not based on all the facts, causing increased hostility towards the police, and when the police backed off, led to more aggression by the criminally-minded, which led to more homicides. On top of that, the increased hostility towards police has caused, nationally, an increase in ambushes on police by 167%, leading to increased police killings.

There are a couple word choices that I didn’t like when it came to this article, and that had to do with referring to the left’s “jihad” against law enforcement, and using the word “hysterical” as mentioned above. They should’ve used different word choices there. This right-leaning article is guilty of “bias by labeling.”

Conclusion

So, there you have it. A comparison between a left-leaning article and a right-leaning article about the same information shows you how both sides can be guilty of some type of media bias and how both articles present information differently from each other. You can see that one media source commits the “bias of omission,” and the other media source commits the “bias of labeling.” When it comes to approaching the real reasons behind the increase in the homicide rate in Chicago, it appears that the CNN article won’t mention the real reason and tries to cover it up by presenting other possible reasons, whereas the Daily Wire article gets straight to the point, but presents that information too harshly.

Originally written in January 2018

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