In response to Republican US Senate Candidate Andy Martin's call for martial law in Chicago, I have to step back and honestly ask which Chicago he is talking about. The one in the United States is doing no worse than usual (perhaps better in some respects) while, in this country, I was reasonably certain use of Federal troops and National Guard for simple crime control was still illegal. Not only that, but a heavy-handed armed response to current gang violence is calculated to inflame race relations worse than Chicago's violence in the '60s--- nearly twice the crime rate of today.

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Andy Martin's frantic press release comes in the wake of a report by journalist Mark Brown on the recent death of Chicago student, Derrion Albert, by after-school gang violence. Gang violence in Chicago, particularly that affecting teenagers, has been in the media quite a bit recently, but I do not think that hardly anyone in the media has taken a step back to really look at the situation.

 

The latest slaying of an innocent African-America child should be a wake-up call to the Chicago Mayor and Illinois Governor. If the city and state cannot provide African-Americans with basic personal safety—the ultimate human right—why are these officials in power?

 

If necessary, President Barack Obama should send federal troops to protect the right to life of every Chicago child. There cannot be two standards of life, one for minority neighborhoods and another for non-minority neighborhoods.

First of all is the presumption that the current situation is some sudden, new threat which puts all of civilization in danger. Yes, gang violence is bad, young people being killed is very bad, but how does the current situation compare to Chicago's past? Is this situation extraordinary? Is it in fact even worse than usual?

In a word, "no". Chicago's current levels of violence are considerably lower than historical levels. The FBI reported 510 murders in 2008 vs. 468 in 2006 (18.025 per 100,000 and 16.37, respectively), which is an increase over the last two years. However, there were 851 in 1990 and 970 in 1974 (29 per 100,000)! Violence in Chicago is on a long downward slope from the 1960s and, as with most of the United States has been trending steadily down from the 1990s even though Chicago remains quite high for the whole US (5.4 per 100,000 in 2008) which includes a large number of rural towns with very low crime rates. To top it off, the Chicago Police report a 13.1% drop in violent crime for the first half of this year and a continuing downward trend through August.

I use murders specifically here because Chicago's statistics for forcible rape do not meet FBI standards, are excluded from the FBI's annual report, and therefore throw off the statistics for violent crime as a whole, but violent crime numbers seem to show no different picture, anyway.

So, basically, this political candidate wants to set fire to the Constitution and declare war on Chicago because of decreasing violence. Further, although statistics show that the overwhelming majority of violent crime victims in Chicago are minorities and a disturbing number youths, the overwhelming majority of perpetrators are of roughly the same composition. He speaks of armed "camps" of gangs as if they came from a foreign country rather than the fact that they are composed of Chicago's own youths. So, in the name of better race relations, this guy wants to send American soldiers (many of whom are white) into black neighborhoods to shoot, beat, and arrest black children in and around school grounds where hundreds of innocent children would be in the near-background. How long would it take for a "friendly-fire" casualty of an 11-year old black kid to cause race-riots across the US? If I were a US soldier, this would be my personal nightmare scenario.

As Marvin Brown points out, children are joining and associating with these gangs for protection from other youths and other gangs. The military forces would be interposing themselves in-between these clashing groups where the line between actual criminals and citizens, including children, trying to "get by" would be fatally blurry. Black youths would then be stuck between supporting the occupying soldiers and being attacked by gangs or supporting the gangs and being attacked by soldiers--- a similar free-for-all to what has occurred in Beirut, Somalia, Baghdad, etc.

For a good example of how well authorities typically separate the sheep from the goats in these circumstances, one has to look no farther than this last weekend in Pittsburgh were law-abiding students who had no idea what was going on and were attempting to leave the area were beaten by police because protesters were marginally rowdy in another part of town. Multiply that by gang-guerrilla warfare against an occupying federal force.

So why harp on this one guy's suggestion instead of simply ignoring it? For one, because he claims to be a Republican and, by extension, a conservative, i.e. "restrained in action," and this proposal nowhere fits the definition. Second he claims to be doing this in favor of improving race relations, which is a ridiculous and dangerous statement if it gains traction. And, third, because it is part of a disturbing and growing trend on the "right" and the "left" to propose increasingly violent and authoritarian government intervention to just about every problem, including the "War On Drugs" which created the gangs in Chicago in the first place. This is consistent neither with the ideals of "Democracy" nor "Republicanism".

But in the end, perhaps this man is not making this suggestion because he believes the military will solve the problem where the local mayor has not, but rather to simply capitalize on the families of victims and the pain of ghetto youth to gain political traction in largely Democratic Illinois. Like many of today's politicians, they prefer to divide us with panic-strewn rhetoric rather than to talk about how we can make our communities stronger and encourage our youth to take other roads beyond selling drugs and joining gangs.

Violence is higher in these urban areas for real and identifiable reasons, among them the fact that black people, especially men, I believe, have allowed themselves to be convinced by white people that they are "no good," incapable of being strong leaders, good fathers, providers, teachers, and role models. White society around them, meanwhile, has leached the areas of local industry, jobs, community, and purpose. Our War On Drugs has made illegal drugs the only source of income for many urban blacks (and quite a few rural whites) and the urban gangs the only societal structure young blacks can belong to. Until and unless these issues are fixed, until and unless we stop using welfare to encourage single-mother families, the violence will not go away. It is not so much that gang violence has radically increased, but rather that it has not dropped in step with violence across our society... and it won't unless we start handling the problems very differently.