Who's To Blame For Chaos In Chicago? Fingers Point At Everyone

CHICAGO — When hunting for whom to blame for looting that ravaged the rich part of town early Monday, finger-pointing leads the way.

Start with the police officials who say “misinformation” escalated a showdown between cops and neighbors after an officer shot a 20-year-old man with a gun near 57th and Racine in Englewood. They say that led to a “retaliatory” attack, allegedly fueled by a social media call to mob action.

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Move on to the Black Lives Matter Chicago activists, who say the police department’s deployment of hundreds of officers armed with “rifles, tear gas and batons” to intimidate and beat people for doing nothing more than being at the scene of a police-involved shooting.

“Chicago police continually proved they do not keep us safe — they only cause violence and escalation after the fact,” activists posted on Twitter.

Lori Lightfoot angrily pointed her mayoral finger at the looters who inflicted an “attack on our city.” She promised: “We’re coming for you.” She demanded that local law enforcement leaders not under her control dole out harsher punishments.

"We have made the case, we have the video, we have officer testimony. These people need to be held accountable and not cycled through the system. Judges that are holding these cases, you need to step up and be responsible,” Lightfoot said. “We can't continue to allow this to happen. … No one wants to hold people in jail because they are poor, but people who engage in this kind of criminal activity shouldn’t be spared prosecution.”

Top cop David Brown not so subtly nodded in the direction of Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx and Cook County judges for lax prosecution that he says has a direct connection to the uptick in brazen acts of violence and destruction, including Monday’s looting.

Foxx, who must be feeling attacked on all sides as her November re-election bid nears, made a rare appearance to point her finger at the fingers being pointed at her.

She blamed the pressures of living amid the coronavirus pandemic, national civil unrest and what she called an illegitimate quest for a single answer to the root cause of the shooting, looting and killings plaguing Chicago.

Ald. Ray Lopez (15th) wagged a disapproving finger at Lightfoot, Brown and Foxx for not working together to “own” the city’s problems, and refusing to listen to their critics, himself chief among them.

“Criminals already exploiting that schism between all of them, and are banking on their inaction and inability to do anything while they once again ransack the city,” he said.

All the finger-pointing is evidence that there's plenty of blame to go around. The political ruling class in a one-party Chicago can’t seem to agree on anything.

It's progressives versus centrists versus socialists, all of them Democrats. They offer too few solutions, balk at compromise, stick to pre-pandemic talking points and scream about what somebody else isn't doing to stop the chaos that has enveloped Chicago.

Whatever you think about Foxx’s prosecutorial philosophy, she’s right about the complex web of problems that plague Chicago.

Looting doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s a symptom of an urban cancer that has metastasized amid the coronavirus crisis and national civil unrest that’s threatening to destroy Chicago, the economic engine of our corrupt, fiscally failing state.

What Chicagoans need politicians to do is put their all-knowing fingers down and look in the mirror.

They all own this crisis. It's time to stop whining and work together.