By Frank Holmes, reporter
When things are going bad, most politicians blame the other political party—but not Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot: She blames her own citizens.
The Windy City, like most major urban areas across the country, has seen a wave of smash-and-grab robberies.
We’ve all seen the videos: A mob will rush into a store—or break through the window—and then start busting up display counters and walking out with fistfuls of the store’s most expensive goods. In many cases, the victims are the few high-end stores, like jewelry stores, that decided to remain open in these “underserved” areas.
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In the old days, a mayor would call out the gangs, call up the police, and put down the criminal activity.
But Lori Lightfoot, who is an ultra-liberal Democrat, is no ordinary politician.
When she sees huge robberies, she doesn’t blame the Republicans or the rich, or the criminals: She blames the victim!
She decided this crime wave wouldn’t happen if the stores would just stop expecting her to do her job and start hiring their own security.
“I’m disappointed that [Downtown Chicago retailers] are not doing more to take safety and make it a priority,” Lightfoot lectured her suffering constituents.
“We still have retailers that won’t institute plans like having security officers in their stores, making sure that they’ve got cameras that are actually operational, locking up their merchandise at night, chaining high-end bags. These purses can be something that is attracting a lot of organized retail theft units,” Lightfoot said recently.
The store owners might be surprised to hear this advice: They thought they paid taxes for the Chicago Police Department to keep them safe, or at least go after criminals once the crime happened… but Chicago’s left-wing leadership has stopped all that.
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Lori Lightfoot is more interested in forcing police officers to take the COVID-19 vaccination than she is in keeping gangs from taking your stuff… and it shows.
Chicago leads the country in the worst crime—murder—especially downtown, where the looting is taking place. By October, murders in the middle of Chicago’s downtown district had increased 220 percent over last year.
When murders and riots go on without any pushback, lesser crimes—like gang-style robberies—will follow. That’s bad news, because many of these gangs work hand-in-hand with national, or transnational, criminal organizations involved in everything from human smuggling to selling hardcore drugs like methamphetamine and fentanyl.
They see that no one is going to stop them in Chicago.
“Criminals take advantage of the weakest links, and right now Chicago looks like the weakest link,” said Rob Karr, the president and CEO of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association.
What if businesses took Lightfoot up on her plan and started hiring security officers? They might end up losing their inventory and their store to a lawsuit.
“If you’re committed to stealing, you know [store security guards are] not gonna lay hands on you. They’re not gonna effect some kind of a citizen’s arrest or anything else,” said talk radio host Buck Sexton. “Because in New York — I’m sure this is true in a lot of Democrat jurisdictions — if you get into a wrestling match with somebody who’s stealing, you may be the one that actually ends up getting prosecuted, right? ‘Oh, I wasn’t stealing! I was on my way to the register. He just tackled me outside the store.’”
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His co-host, Clay Travis, said if a guard tried to stop a crime, the victim might claim racial profiling. He knows the left-wing agitators so well that he even started to parrot the line they would feed the media: “He profiled me! I’m a minority and he saw me and he immediately tackled me and he’s racist and now I’m gonna sue!”
You can guess whose side Lori Lightfoot would take in that dispute.
But even if police were deployed and allowed to arrest these street criminals, how many would actually pay the price for their crime? “State’s Attorney Kim Foxx refuses to prosecute crimes, and cops have felt under attack for years,” said the editorial board of the New York Post. “It’s the city’s job to protect the public, but this pathetic city leader is now blaming the victims of brazen smash-and-grab attacks for her own failures.”
The New York-based paper summed up Lightfoot’s strategy to blame the victims for the crime spree her weak policies have created: “That’s chutzpah!”
Frank Holmes is a reporter for The Horn News. He is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”