Often, the studies of crime center around statistics and graphs.
How many dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of crimes per hundred thousand people, or per million residents, per year, does it take for an area to make it into the newspapers as dangerous, or to scare away potential residents or investors from a region?
While such statistics can be valuable, sometimes it’s also worthwhile to cut through the statistics and look at a single, typical case, and see how that single case affects a real individual, a specific family, a particular neighborhood.
On Saturday evening, September 28, 2024, a young Chicagoan went to his gym on the north side for a workout – on a busy street, at dinnertime. Sometime between leaving the parking lot and returning to his car after exercising, criminals broke into his car – by removing the windshield! – and destroyed his dashboard in order to steal his Apple car radio.
I already know what you’re thinking. It’s Chicago; there’s always crime in Chicago, isn’t there? The solution is to move away.
And yes, moving away may be the simplest solution for an individual. But it hardly helps the state of Illinois, does it? And it certainly wouldn’t help those who are stuck here due to work or family. So let’s continue.
The victim of the crime happens to be a son of Eastern European immigrants; a young man with a good work ethic. He lives with his parents; he has a full-time job, and he drives a used car, so he did what young men have done for almost a century: he spent his hard-earned money to improve his car. He might not have a new car or a fancy one, but he takes care of the one he has, and now it has a good stereo so he can be proud of his music.
Until the stereo is stolen.
Now, Cook County is one of those places with a George Soros state’s attorney. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, it refers to a number of metro areas where George Soros funded radical soft-on-crime leftist campaigns for elected county prosecutor positions, successfully destroying the law enforcement efforts of such counties at one stroke. Chicago, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and dozens more large and midsized urban areas share this misfortune.
In these counties, the prosecutors aren’t interested in “minor property crimes,” which they usually define as thefts of under a thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise. These counties are therefore teeming with criminals who have stolen less than a grand worth of goods per crime, dozens or hundreds of times, and have no conviction record because the left has convinced enough of the electorate that such “minor” crimes aren’t worth prosecuting.
On top of this problem, Cook County and the entire state of Illinois have a number of other complications:
- They have done away with cash bail for most crimes, so the police don’t even hold most of the people they do prosecute; they let them go as soon as they’re processed.
- They have held a number of significant jail-emptying events in recent years to set free even those criminals who miraculously managed to get actual prison sentences.
- It’s a sanctuary state (and county, and city), so foreign criminals are invited to move here from all over the world; the welcome mat’s been rolled out for them.
- Even concealed-carry has been defanged in Illinois; you can get a concealed-carry permit, but the restrictions are so severe, it’s almost impossible to use it. About the only thing an Illinois concealed-carry permit will allow you to actually carry is the permit itself.
It is therefore little surprise that the state of Illinois is full of criminals, and even that some of them would feel secure enough in their freedom to break into this young man’s car and steal his stereo – on a busy street on a Saturday night.
But this is where paying attention to the math is important.
The stereo system cost several hundred dollars to buy and install (most such systems are between $400 and $1000 installed). The young man couldn’t afford a brand new car, so he did what Americans understandably believe is the right thing to do: he invested in improving the property he had, by having a good radio put in.
The thugs, however, stole his radio, leaving destruction in their wake – a broken windshield, a destroyed dashboard, Heaven alone knows how much total damage to the various electronics, from the airbags to the HVAC controls also mounted in that vicinity – just so they could steal the radio.
Fencing a used radio, the thugs will be lucky if they get $100 on the street for their trouble, much less than it’s worth.
But consider what this damage has done to the honest victim:
He has to file a police report and a car insurance claim, and get the car repaired. This will cost him at least a couple of days of work to manage, plus, in all likelihood, a number of taxi or Uber rides because a car without windshield or dashboard will not be drivable for some time.
The victim was planning on trading up to a better car in the next year or so. Now that his vehicle has been through all this, even after it’s restored, its trade-in value will drop. The market doesn’t reward a car for having a new dashboard; the market punishes the car for the fact, because one simply must assume that the car is less perfect after going through such a rebuild.
The victim is a young single male, and therefore in one of the highest-cost demographics for auto insurance already. He probably has a high deductible; his deductible in fact will likely be at least twice as high as the pitiful amount of money the thugs will get from their fence for the stolen radio.
And after considering his deductible, how much will this repair cost the insurance company, in total? We’re talking about a windshield, a complete dashboard, air vents and controls, lots of connections and meters for everything from the HVAC system to the display panel that were severed in the operation, tons of labor for this almost-complete interior rebuild, and of course, the replacement radio where we began.
It’s difficult to imagine the car’s restoration costing less than $3,000. It’s more likely north of $4,000. Maybe considerably north, depending on how much damage was done in the destruction of the dashboard, and on whether it’s an American or foreign car.
Will we then be done with all this? Of course not. Our victim has had to file a substantial claim on his auto insurance. That means he will be paying a few hundred dollars more per year for his insurance, maybe several hundred more, probably for the next three years.
All so that these thugs could get fifty or a hundred bucks from a fence.
When discussing politics in America nowadays, we analyze differently, describe differently, think differently, depending on whether we are of the Right or of the Left.
The Left might feel sorry for the victim here, but they likely feel sorrier for the thugs. “What could have driven them to this point? How sad that they only know this as a means of making money… If only someone had hugged them more when they were little…”
The Right feels sorry for the victim, but is particularly furious at the criminals, because the Right does the math. The Right can’t help it; the Right doesn’t grasp at different angles to puff up a crime, the Right sees all this clearly from the outset. All these real costs, real challenges, real damages jump out at us, and we can’t begin to understand how anyone could fail to notice any of these aspects.
The Right begins by thinking of the “Broken Window” fallacy illustrated by Bastiat and Hazlitt, then expands beyond it as we see the cascading damage done by such crimes.
The young man in our story, after all, is not alone in his suffering. This sort of crime happens every day in Cook County, perhaps every hour, sometimes every few minutes. The police report takes up police resources (even though there’s little to no hope of catching the criminal). The incident contributes to the insurance companies’ choices to raise rates for everyone in the area where the crime occurred.
Eventually as reports of this risk spread through the community, the health club and other retail establishments in the strip mall lose customers, and eventually either close up shop or move to safer environs. This renders the strip mall a non-performer, weakening both the neighborhood and the local tax base, contributing to growing urban and suburban blight.
Does today’s Democrat party recognize any of these truths, or do they stop listening after the cost of the radio, and shut their eyes and ears to the big picture?
Do they understand the situation at all; do they realize the unavoidable consequences if we don’t tackle the issue head-on?
It’s not hard to fix this problem, after all. The solutions are obvious:
Prosecute all criminals regardless of the dollar value of the crime, and lock them up – and keep them locked up – whenever you get a conviction. And stop encouraging the arrival of ever more foreign criminals through “sanctuary status.”
Why is there a crime wave? It’s not one thing, it’s many. The open borders, the worthless prosecutors, the emasculation of police, and the refusal to do the basic math proving that every single crime really costs thousands of dollars more than it may appear at first.
What’s perhaps saddest of all? The victim in this story was raised by proud legal immigrants who remember life in a communist country during the Cold War, a life they hoped to be free of, a life they never intended for their children.
They came to America for Constitutionally-limited government, and for the great protections offered by the Rule of Law.
But back home, nobody warned them about Cook County.
Copyright 2024 John F Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), are available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
His newest nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” was just released on July 1, and is also available, in both paperback and Kindle eBook, exclusively on Amazon.
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