Chicago is once again the scene of mass protests, this time the result of a video dramatically showing black teenager Laquan McDonald being fatally shot by the police. The officer who shot McDonald 16 times has been charged with first-degree murder.
That hasn’t dampened either the anger in the black community or law enforcement concerns that police officers may be ambushed in retaliation as gang members seek to capitalize on the discord. The demonstrations have mostly been peaceful so far, though sometimes tense. One young protester was filmed staring down police officers, getting right in their faces and occasionally shouting, “Shoot me 16 times!”
Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel hasn’t escaped scrutiny or blame. The former chief of staff to President Obama helped block the release of the video that showed crucial details about the shooting. “Rahm Emanuel’s learning what happens when you ignore half the city,” claims a headline in the Huffington Post.
Emanuel saw his popularity wane in minority precincts even as he won a second term as mayor earlier this year. “If voters had seen [the McDonald shooting video], he wouldn’t have been re-elected,” wrote Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass. “So it all worked out for him.”
The last time Chicago protesters showcased an emerging divide in the Democratic Party was 1968. The scene was the party’s presidential nominating convention. Then the clashes were between the police and those demonstrating against the Vietnam war. The Democratic mayor was Richard Daley, an old school machine politician, and he even more emphatically sided with the cops.
Like Chicago 1968, the political reverberations may be felt far beyond the Windy City. To millions of Americans watching that years Democratic National Convention at home, it signaled a party out of control and incapable of governing. That’s an image the Democrats largely shed by the time Bill Clinton assumed the presidency, often by embracing the incarceration-boosting policies now reviled by protesters in the streets. Emanuel is a veteran of the Clinton administration.
Which lessons will Hillary Clinton learn more from, the success of her husband’s Sister Souljah moments or the backlash against Emanuel? The forces that protested outside the 1968 Democratic convention and those inside the 1972 convention who captured the nomination for George McGovern arguably face less institutional resistance within the party than ever before.
What’s unfolding in Chicago, like what happened in Ferguson this time last year, could also have implications for the Republican Party. A broad cross-section of the GOP, ranging from Christian conservatives to young libertarians, have embraced criminal justice reform and begun to turn against mandatory minimum sentences.
These Republicans could do so because their voters trust them not to be soft on crime and because falling crime rates have convinced them law and order will not suffer. Crime rates continued to fall last year, though some cities have experienced recent spikes in certain crimes, including murder. Whether this means anything for the long-term crime trends remains the subject of debate, but it could alter public perceptions in ways that convince Republicans to take a harder line.
National Democrats are quick to take the most politically correct line on any racially tinged controversy, while Donald Trump seem hell-bent in leading whatever Republicans will follow headlong toward the opposite extreme. Pitiful Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley has apologized for saying “all lives matter” while Trump has all but encouraged physical confrontations between his supporters and Black Lives Matter activists, finally getting one.
It wouldn’t be the first time the debate has bifurcated between insensitivity toward minority complaints and a stubborn insistence on seeing genuine concern about crime and quality of life as coded or even explicit racism.
The last twenty years have considerably lowered the temperature on these issues, but tensions seem ready to come to a boil once again.
