- In this Sunday, Aug. 5, 2018 photo, evidence markers sit on the ground at the scene where a boy was killed after being shot in the abdomen while riding his bike in Chicago. Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson plans to discuss the weekend violence during a Monday news conference. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune via AP)
- In this Sunday, Aug. 5, 2018 photo, evidence markers sit on the ground at the scene where a boy was killed after being shot in the abdomen while riding his bike in Chicago. Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson plans to discuss the weekend violence during a Monday news conference. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune via AP)
- In this Sunday, Aug. 5, 2018 photo, a man wipes his eyes outside the Stroger Hospital in Chicago, after leaving the emergency room due to overwhelming crowds of family and friends of shooting victims. Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson plans to discuss the weekend violence during a Monday news conference. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune via AP)
- In this Sunday, Aug. 5, 2018 photo, two women cry outside the Stroger Hospital in Chicago, after they were asked to leave due to overwhelming crowds of family and friends of shooting victims. Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson plans to discuss the weekend violence during a Monday news conference. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune via AP)
Gunshots and sirens filled the streets of Chicago over the weekend. Between Friday evening and Sunday night, 63 people were shot in separate incidents, ABC 7 reported. Ten were killed in the attacks, Chicago police said. In one two-and-a-half-hour stretch, 25 people were hit in five different shootings.
The grim news out of Chicago only added to the city’s image as one of the most troubled American metropolitan areas. The gunplay reignited debates online about how the stop to flashes of violence, and, as the smoke was clearing, one surprising voice jumped into the debate.
Taking a breather from his dizzying gig as President Donald Trump’s attorney and cable news surrogate, Rudy Giuliani addressed the shootings in a series of tweets. The former New York City mayor threw his support behind Garry McCarthy, the former Chicago Police superintendent who is currently running to unseat Mayor Rahm Emanuel, whose name he spelled wrong. Although he also initially spelled McCarthy’s first name wrong – “Jerry” – Giuliani told his followers that McCarthy, who served as a New York Police Department official while Giuliani was in office and crime rapidly dropped in New York, was the one who could clean Chicago’s streets. Giuliani cited McCarthy’s work with CompStat, the data-driven tactic championed by the NYPD in the 90s.
“Chicago murders are direct result of one party Democratic rule for decades. Policing genius Jerry McCarthy can do for Chicago what I did for NYC,” Giuliani said. “He was one of the architects of Compstat. Slashed homicides over 70 percent. Tens of thousands of lives saved.”
He ended his statement with a Trumpian Twitter flourish.
“MAKE CHICAGO SAFE AGAIN! He can do a lot better than Mayor Emmanuel who is fiddling while Chicago burns.”
But on Sunday Giuliani’s wasn’t just plugging a former colleague, he was engaging in a longtime Republican political tradition. For more than 50 years, GOP lawmakers have fashioned tragic urban violence into a political weapon to turn on Democrats. It’s a strategy that’s paid off considerably for Republican candidates, from Nixon to Trump, and Giuliani himself.
Richard Nixon was the first to significantly leverage crime on the campaign trail. According to Politico, the nation’s crime rate exploded between 1960 and 1970 by 176 percent. In his 1968 bid for the White House, the former vice president pitched his campaign to the “Silent Majority” of Americans, the “non-shouters, the non-demonstrators, that are not racists or sick, that are not guilty of crime that plagues the land,” as he termed them.
The law and order rhetoric became the centerpiece of the campaign. As the Wall Street Journal noted at the time, Nixon ” tells a whistle-stop rally in Deshler, Ohio that in the 45 minutes since his train left Lima, one murder, two rapes and 45 major crimes of violence had occurred in this country,” while blasting his opponent Hubert Humphrey as a defender of “the policies under which we have seen crime rise to this point.”
Ronald Reagan picked up the same lesson. Beginning with his 1966 run for California governor, Reagan preached a “tough on crime” stance in the face of growing social unrest. In his 1980 presidential campaign, he amplified the same message. He won, Walker Newell argued in a 2013 article in The Berkeley Journal of African-American Law & Policy, “in substantial part by successfully manipulating racial divides in voter preference.”
“Backing up his belief in an expanded federal role in crime control, Reagan presided over significant expansions of the federal role in criminal justice, especially in the area of drug policy and enforcement,” Newell wrote.
When Giuliani ran against New York Mayor David Dinkins in 1993, he also tapped anxiety over the city’s high crime rate. The former prosecutor’s form of “law and order” campaigning specifically centered on the “Broken Windows” theory, the idea that an aggressive crackdown on minor crimes will lead to an overall reduction in broken laws.
“It’s the street tax paid to drunks and panhandlers,” Giuliani said during his campaign, explaining the crimes he wanted to target as mayor. “It’s the squeegee men shaking down the motorist waiting at a light. It’s the trash storms, the swirling mass of garbage left by peddlers and panhandlers, and open-air drug bazaars on unclean streets.”
Once in the mayor’s office, Giuliani combined the “Broken Windows” theory with CompStat, a statistic-heavy approach to tracking crime. It was during this era the mayor worked closely with McCarthy, who rose to the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of operations (although crime did drop dramatically in Giuliani’s tenure, statistics show New York’s numbers had begun to fall during the Dinkins administration, according to PolitiFact).
McCarthy’s time in New York paved the way for his job as the top cop in Chicago. He eventually lost that job in December 2015 after the fallout from the Laquan McDonald shooting and other bad headlines for the department.
The rising homicide rate in Chicago following his ouster was the main driver behind his decision to run against his former boss Emanuel as a “conservative Democrat,” as he told the Chicago Tribune.
Success. Please wait for the page to reload. If the page does not reload within 5 seconds, please refresh the page.
Enter your email and password to access comments.
Invalid username/password.
Please check your email to confirm and complete your registration.
Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login first for digital access. Here’s why.
Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.
-
Maine
Maine lobster industry to receive nearly $14 million in federal aid
-
Franklin
Fire chief to stay on until a plan is developed to replace him in Livermore Falls
-
Maine
Expect great weather for enjoying the water and fireworks this weekend
-
Community Sports
Four JKA Maine Karate Academy athletes to represent Team USA at WUKF Karate World Championship
-
Crime
Wells man pleads not guilty to murder in 2-year-old niece’s fatal shooting