Well, note that:
Gov. JB Pritzker said Saturday state officials have not sent nor gotten any requests from the federal government about offering assistance amid reports the Pentagon is planning a military deployment to Chicago that could send a few thousand National Guard troops as soon as September as part of President Donald Trump’s efforts to crack down on crime.
But nothing official wrt travel warnings for visitors at this moment.
The Illinois Governor ought to start trolling the President by asking why he is not deploying troops to harder-hit-by-crime Memphis.
[Moderating]
This is borderline. Memphis being harder hit by crime than Chicago is a fact. What the Illinois governor ought to do is not.
The FQ seems to have been answered, right? It’s a sanctuary city and it’s not out of control.
I’m not sure “sanctuary city” is really anything but an RW slur / snarl term. Yes, there is a reasonably agreed definition, but the purpose of the term is to be hate-filled propaganda. And there’s nothing factual about that stuff.
Let’s dig a little deeper into the data.
I’ll sort by violent crime and present #1, #10, Chicago, and the safest city on the list.
| Number | City | Total Crime | Violent Crime | Pop |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Memphis, TN | 9456.19 | 2501.28 | 613,207 |
| 10 | Dayton, OH | 5707.53 | 1139.2 | 134,857 |
| 92 | Chicago, IL | 4029.75 | 539.85 | 2,638,698 |
| 200 | Worcester, MA | 16.48 | 16.48 | 212,425 |
| Chicago vs Memphis | 42.6% | 21.6% | 430.3% | |
| Chicago vs Dayton | 70.6% | 47.4% | 1956.7% |
Crime data is pretty noisy and somewhat error prone. But the percentages indicate that the perceptions reported in the OP are ignorant. Chicago has a fifth of the violent crime of Memphis and moreover half the violent crime of the city ranked #10 on the list. The Worcester data is suspicious (violent crime=total crime): I suspect an artifact of some kind. Let’s look at number 190: Gilbert, AZ has a population of 277,527, a violent crime rate of 132.24, and a total crime rate of 1103.68. It has a quarter of the violent crime of Chicago and 1.4% of the violent crime of Memphis.
The perceptions of the OP’s friend are not unusual, but they are wildly at variance with the underlying reality.
No, that’s not true. It means a city where the local law enforcement will not cooperate with federal authorities on immigration matters, and potentially even has explicit laws protecting undocumented immigrants. It’s not like “woke” which is weaponized as a slur meaning “stuff I don’t like.” Sanctuary city does have a factual description, even if the details differ between cities.
Cities like Chicago, San Francisco and Portland describe themselves as sanctuary cities, it’s not just right-wing media using the term. RW media might consider the concept of protecting immigrants to be evil and therefore use it in a hate-filled manner, but that’s about them, not about the term itself.
Setting aside that she has her ‘facts’ wrong, this is quite simply part of a much larger macroeconomic trend, spurred by things like COVID, Work From Home, and e-commerce. It’s far from a Chicago-specific issue.
Three cites:
What can Chicago learn from retail vacancies in other global cities?
Thanks for those links.