One-Third Of The 2016 Spike In U.S. Homicides Came From Just 5 Chicago Neighborhoods

Authored by Thomas Lifson of American Thinker,

The full evil of the anti-cop hysteria pushed by left wing groups like #BlackLivesMatter will take many years to be understood, in no small part because of political and media support for the notion that racism on the part of cops is the sole cause for disproportionate numbers of black perpetrators in our crime statistics.

But every now and then, a statistic appears that cannot be easily dismissed. Jared Sichel of The Daily Signal brings one such figure to our attention.

Murders in the U.S. rose nearly 9% last year, and one-third of that increase came from just a few neighborhoods in Chicago, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of the FBI’s annual 2016 publication, Crime in the United States.

 

While violent crime (homicide, rape, assault, and robbery) also rose nationwide from 2015 to 2016 — over 4% — the data show the increase was not uniform, but rather concentrated in cities like Chicago and Baltimore.

(Chart per HeyJackAss!)

Other big cities, including Los Angeles and Washington, DC, saw meaningful declines in violence. So there is no broad trend, but rather local factors that must be accounted for. For instance:

Interestingly, the paper’s neighborhood-by-neighborhood analysis claimed that areas where homicides spiked had a “lighter street presence by police following officers’ high-profile killings of young black men.” (snip)

 

In Baltimore, violent crime rates were going down until 2015, when police officers “pulled back from a more proactive approach” following widespread city riots after the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who suffered a severe spinal injury while being transported in a police van on April 1, 2015, and died one week later.

But for the real statistical weight affecting overall crime stats, one has to look at Chicago, where the police have been under severe restrictions and where gang activity is out of control:

In Chicago last year, homicides jumped to 771, 58% higher than in 2015, and more than the number of murders in Los Angeles and New York combined. Half of that increase, the analysis showed, came from just five neighborhoods, and is largely attributable to gang warfare. In a “roughly four-mile radius of West Garfield Park,” for example, there are at least 30 gangs. (snip)

 

In Chicago, as in Baltimore, police became less proactive following protests against the fatal 2014 shooting of a black teenager, Laquan McDonald, by a white police officer, Jason Van Dyke, who has been charged with first-degree murder.

 

A FiveThirtyEight analysis found that in Chicago and other cities with high-profile deaths of black men involving police officers, a “pullback in policing was accompanied by a sharp increase in gun violence.”

All the anti-cop self-righteousness in the world won’t save one victim from gang violence. The BLM protestors, along the with hands up-don’t shoot crowd have been enablers of horrific violence that mostly is claiming black lives. Progressive politics often involves sacrificing the powerless for the purported greater good, even as the poseurs claim to be their righteous protectors.

Congress Passed A Bill To Deport Suspected 'Gang' Members - There's Just One Problem

Authored by Sarah Cronin via TheAntiMedia.org,

Last week the House passed a bill to expand the government’s ability to deport immigrants on the basis of alleged gang affiliation. 

Promoted by Republicans as a way to target members of gangs such as the transnational M13 gang, H.R. 3697, the “Criminal Alien Gang Member Removal Act,” amends the Immigration and Nationality Act by adding gang affiliation to the list of criminal offenses that qualify as grounds for detention and deportation.

The bill passed 233 – 175 with almost unanimous Republican support and now must gain approval in the Senate, where it is currently pending in the Committee on the Judiciary. While the bill still has yet to come to a vote in Senate, it has already gained the presidential nod of approval. Shortly following the bill’s passage, the White House Press Secretary published a statement applauding Congress’ decision, and the administration already affirmed that “If H.R. 3697 were presented to the president in its current form, his advisors would recommend that he sign the bill into law,” according to a  statement of administrative policy published last Tuesday.

The bill has received strong criticism from House Democrats and organizations such as the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who claim the bill provides the government with sweeping discretion to detain and deport immigrants using a broad and arbitrary label.

The bulk of the debate on the bill revolves around how it defines ‘gangs.’ The bill defines a gang as any group of five or more people that has as one of its primary purposes the commission of one or more specified criminal offenses. The bill goes on to expand on these ‘criminal offenses’ to include felony drug offenses, which would include the possession of marijuana. It also explicitly names the ‘harboring’ of undocumented immigrants as a crime.

This means, theoretically, that any organization that helps, shelters, or hires undocumented immigrants could be considered a gang, and thus any immigrant member of such group could theoretically be detained or deported as a gang member.

The National Immigrant Justice Center’s recent policy report explains: 

“For example, the government could attempt to designate a church group that elects to offer shelter to an undocumented immigrant as a gang. Similarly, a fraternity whose members use expired identification documents to purchase liquor or engage in initiation rites or a Fortune 500 company that employs workers who may or may not have irregular documents could also fall under this definition.”

The government already has a history of liberally applying the ‘gang’ label. Just ask the Juggalos, a fan group of the Insane Clown Posse. They took to the streets Saturday to protest the FBI’s designation of their group as a gang in the bureau’s National Gang Threat Assessment report back in 2011. The fans and the band have been fighting to clear their name ever since. The issue even ended up in court last year when the Clown Posse sued the FBI for withholding documentation about the gang classification of their fans.

In a revealing profile about the group, Vox writer Dylan Matthews explained that the parallel would be to criminalize someone for being a “Belieber”(Justin Bieber fan) or a “Swiftie” (Taylor Swift fan). While perhaps ridiculous in theory, the classification has had serious consequences for group members, causing some fans to lose their jobs and, in some cases, their parental rights because of their affiliation with the so-called ‘gang.’

In the case of H.R. 3697, the consequences of alleged gang affiliation would be much more dire — as in no-bond mandatory detention.

“Mandatory detention refers to a provision of the INA that states that non-citizens with certain criminal convictions must be detained by ICE. People who are subject to mandatory detention are not entitled to a bond hearing and must remain in detention while removal proceedings are pending against them,” explains a policy handout by the Immigrant Law Research Center.

H.R. 3697 would expand the terms of mandatory detention, which the ACLU considers a clear violation of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. It also transfers the discretion of determining bond eligibility from the Attorney General to the Secretary of Homeland Security.

“[The bill] grants the Department of Homeland Security massive discretion to designate a group of people as a ‘criminal gang,’ based on secret evidence, and without meaningful judicial review,” the ACLU writes in their vote recommendation and analysis of the bill.

While the practice may appear unconstitutional, it wouldn’t be the first time the government has sanctioned detention without trial. During the War on Terror era, the government adopted the practice of ‘indefinite detention’ whereby suspected terrorists can be held without charge or trial. Despite facing challenges in Congress and in the courts, indefinite detention was signed into law as a provision of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, where it remains in legal standing today.

In the same way the War on Terror became a catch-all justification for constitutionally questionable policies, it seems that the vaguely defined threat of immigration and ‘criminal aliens’ will be this administration’s keyword for getting around civil liberties.

US Launching Sunday Raids To Arrest Illegal Immigrant Gang Members

With Trump desperate for a distraction from the daily Russian collusion media onslaught, and perhaps under the advice of his brand new counsel, Reuters reports that U.S. immigration agents are set to launch nationwide raids next week to arrest teenagers who entered the country without guardians and are suspected gang members, as part of President Donald Trump"s crackdown on illegal immigrants. The raids, targeting teenagers 16 and 17-years-old, will begin on Sunday and continue through Wednesday.

Trump, who campaigned on the promise of tough immigration enforcement, has made deporting gang members, especially those belonging to the El Salvador-based Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, a top priority.

"You have a gang called MS-13. They don"t like to shoot people. They like to cut people. They do things that nobody can believe," Trump said at a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa last month. In a May speech, the president promised the gang would be "gone from our streets very soon, believe me."

And while the crackdown was to be expected as part of Trump"s previously stated intentions, where the administration will promptly get in trouble with civil rights defenders, are the selection criteria to decide who is and isn"t an alleged gang member : according to Reuters, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement "said in a statement that a person can be identified as a gang member if they meet two or more criteria, including having gang tattoos, frequenting an area notorious for gangs and wearing gang apparel."

As such, the raids represent a departure from practices during the Obama presidency, when minors could be targeted for deportation if they had been convicted of crimes, but were not arrested simply for suspected gang activity or membership. This time mere suspicion -i.e. gang tattoos and apparel -  will be sufficient "probable cause." USCIS told Reuters it does not comment on plans for future law enforcement operations, but that it focuses on individuals who pose a threat to national security and public safety.

Minors apprehended entering the country without a guardian are placed in custody arrangements by U.S. Health and Human Services, often with a family member living in the United States. And while various law enforcement agencies maintain databases of individuals suspected of having gang affiliations, but the lists have come under fire from civil rights groups, the same groups will be in uproar over what is about to happen, especially if the sweeps end up netting a material number of illegal immigrant "targets."

"This is troubling on several levels," Hincapie said. "For one, the gang databases in places like California are rife with errors. We have seen babies labeled as potential gang members."

Immigration lawyer David Leopold of Ulmer & Berne said innocent children could be swept up in the raids.

"In many cases, children don’t freely decide to join a gang. They are threatened by older gang members and forced to get a gang tattoo if they live in a certain neighborhood," he said.

Well, starting Sunday that same tattoo will switch from an asset to a major liability.

In addition to minors, the raids planned for next week will also target parents who crossed the border illegally with their children and have been ordered deported by a judge, as well as immigrants who entered the country as children without guardians and have since turned 18, according to the memo. "The document directs field offices to identify people in their areas that meet the criteria."

In 2016, the Obama administration targeted those two groups in raids that sought to deter a surge of illegal border crossings by families and minors that began in 2014. Obama, however, directed immigration agents to prioritize for deportation only those who had committed serious crimes or had recently entered the country. The result was a steep drop in criminal alien deportations under the previous president.

The remaining illegal immigrants were expected to become eligible, predictable voters.

“Someone Tagged Her Like An Animal”: Doctor Removes RFID Chip From Patient That WASN’T Crazy

This article was written by Daniel Lang and originally published at The Daily Sheeple.

Editor’s Comment: This is the stuff nightmares are made of. Most of us can conceive of the grim and lifeless time when governments and corporations will use implanted microchips as the ultimate form of identity, as a digital wallet, and as a physical tracker of everything you do, and everywhere you go.

But fewer have thought about the ways it is being used now, off the books by drug gangs and sex traffickers, and by intelligence agencies and secretive operations. Victims are being tracked and traced as inventory, as cattle, and it is a chilling symbol for the future of humanity if this stuff takes hold. No amount of convenience will compensate for the power to control others that this technology creates.

They Thought She Was Crazy: Doctor Extracts RFID Chip From Sex Trafficking Victim

by Daniel Lang

If someone walks into a hospital and claims that they’re being tracked, and that they need to have a tracking device removed, there’s a pretty good chance that they’re going to be sent to a mental institution instead. However, according to a doctor who wished to remain anonymous to protect his patient, that very situation occurred last October and it didn’t end how you might expect.

The patient in question was a 28-year-old woman who claimed that she had a GPS tracking device planted in her body. Normally a patient like that would be regarded as crazy, but this woman appeared totally sane, and she had an incision mark on her side. So the doctor decided to check her out anyway. The medical staff at the hospital were stunned when they finally gave her an X-ray.

Embedded in the right side of her flank is a small metallic object only a little bit larger than a grain of rice. But it’s there. It’s unequivocally there. She has a tracker in her. And no one was speaking for like five seconds — and in a busy ER that’s saying something.

It turns out that it wasn’t a GPS device, but an RFID chip. “It’s used to tag cats and dogs. And someone had tagged her like an animal, like she was somebody’s pet that they owned.”

In a way, that makes it even creepier than a GPS device. RFID chips have a very short range. To be useful for tracking someone’s position, they would have to be kept confined in an area where the right equipment is in place to send or receive signals from the chip. The doctor would later discover that this woman was a victim of sex trafficking.

Science fiction has been warning about the potential of tracking devices for years, but usually in reference to how the government might use this technology. It just goes to show that the way humans use technology in the real world is often stranger (and creepier) than fiction.

This article was written by Daniel Lang and originally published at The Daily Sheeple.

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Author: Daniel Lang
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Date: March 22nd, 2017
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