So writes Emily Badgers at Mother Jones:
Chicago has suffered over the past few months from a particularly bad case of the twin maladies of summer in the city: heat and crime waves. In the last week of August alone, 82 people were shot in Chicago, including as many as 19 over a single mid-week night. As a depressing indicator of just how common this news had become, the local media was reduced to reporting the shootings in bullet-point form.
The Chicago spree, as unusually severe as it has been, mimics a pattern that researchers (and police officials and, heck, just about all of us) have long observed. When temperatures go up, crime often does, too (last summer’s startling London riots were partly blamed on the weather). Theorizing about Chicago’s “Bloody Summer” back in July, William Bratton, the former top police official in Boston, New York City, and Los Angeles, put it this way in the Wall Street Journal:
Also influencing this year’s surge in violence: The most brutal part of Chicago’s winter was that it barely came. With winter warm and spring starting early, people filled the streets in some of the toughest neighborhoods rife with drug gangs. Violence that typically comes with the heat of summer got an early start.
Bratton didn’t draw this conclusion himself, but it doesn’t take much of a leap in logic to connect crime and heat waves with one broader explanation for Chicago’s warm winter and early spring. That would be climate change.
Well, using MSNBC’s rule that Chicago is code for “black” and is racist, this is one of the most racist pieces ever on global warming. To suggest that blacks will commit crimes because it’s too hot is disgusting. I hope Mother Jones Washington bureau chief and MSNBC regular David Corn ,who buys into the racist codeword theory, sits this reporter down and lectures her on her racism.
Badgers does leave out why it’s only Chicago that is experiencing this global-warming-induced murder spike while New York City, for example, is not. Could it be that good government and competent police have more to do with the murder rate than the weather?
The whole thing here.