Chicago’s transit chaos shows the cost of a grievance-driven politics: when enforcement is always racist, everyone else just gets less safe.
The Legacy of Jesse Jackson Makes All of Us Less Safe
If you ride the trains or buses in Chicago with any regularity, you don’t worry about microaggressions.
You worry about being maced, mugged, or shoved onto the tracks—or, in one grotesque recent case, set on fire.
That’s the lived experience of Chicagoans navigating the Chicago Transit Authority and Metra. Not academic theory. Not seminar-room sociology. Reality.
So naturally, when a modest pilot program is introduced allowing the transit agencies to suspend individuals who assault conductors, spit on drivers, punch random riders, or otherwise turn public transportation into a Thunderdome audition, what does the Chicago Tribune decide is the story?
Not whether the program works.
Not whether it can be enforced.
Not whether it deters crime.
No.
The story, apparently, is that it’s racist.
Because roughly 90 percent of the approximately 40 individuals suspended under the program are black or Hispanic.
Forty people. In a city of nearly three million. On a transit system carrying hundreds of thousands daily.
That’s the scandal.
Hellbound and Down 