How Donald Trump Fixes Chicago

Donald Trump's pitch to the black community of "What do you have to lose?" is not doing much. Because they do have something to lose. Or at least they believe they do.

If unemployment in some black community is 20%, they could pick up another 20. If the quality of care at a local hospital stinks, that hospital could vanish, and they'd have no local care. If the schools are terrible, at least the schools aren't disappearing. Any or all of these may happen if a Republican president is elected. It's a silly belief, but it's one the Democrats have done an excellent job of convincing the black community of. So if Hillary Clinton is the lying little Devil sitting on a cartoon character's shoulder, whiter than white, and while she may have fallen on her head so many times she has to wear a football helmet and a neck brace riding on Air Force One – they're still going to vote for her. And even if they're tempted to vote for Trump over the issue of crime, they can't see any way in which he can fulfill his promise to stop the shootings in the inner cities. Neither, to be honest, can the white or Hispanic voter. Yet hold on to your hat, because that might in fact be the issue that, once it's dragged out of the weeds, might get everybody in the black community listening – "ears on," as we used to say. It could even become even a new "signature issue" Trump may ride to victory in November, much as his determination to build a wall carried him to victory in the primaries. Because there is a way everybody, except the appalled liberals, can see how he can fulfill his promise to stop the shootings. Declare that on his first day in office, he'll start a "gang war." Us against them. Not "use all legal means" to disarm and destroy the criminal gangs killing people in the inner city, not jaw-jaw about programs to reduce the poverty that supposedly encourages criminal behavior, not bore us with focus group points about how to improve the education of urban youth, but promise to beat those inner-city gangs to a bloody pulp using means that Hillary Clinton, in the absence of some bribe from a lobbyist, wouldn't ever consider. There are five major ways in which Trump can batter the thugs, and they're all tried and true. Chicago agreed to a rule for its police that requires officers making a stop to fill out an ACLU-crafted form so their stops can be analyzed, and officers disciplined, for racial profiling. As a result, police stops have dropped from over a hundred thousand a year to thirty. But police have to be able to talk to people freely and follow their nose in these conversations in order to effectively resist street crime. So tear up the ACLU's form and every similar form anywhere in the country. The most successful method of getting guns off the street quickly is stop-and-frisk. The ACLU doesn't like that, either. But pass whatever laws you have to to implement it everywhere – or as Rudy Giuliani showed, just do it. Parolees account for an enormous amount of crime in New York and Chicago and elsewhere. Don't come up with new standards; don't study the issue. Just stop all parole. Let murderers and thugs serve out their sentences. Donald Trump taking this one position alone will change the conversation. Implement Project Exile, a program in which anybody committing a crime with a gun does an automatic five years in a federal prison far away from his home turf. This worked before in northern Virginia and will work again elsewhere. Provide federal "snitch money." Allow all police officers with no reference to higher authority to pay cash rewards (a hundred or two hundred dollars) to street people who provide information that leads to the seizure of a gun in the hands of a minor or felon. And that's it. Just the declaration of a gang war will have Americans everywhere beating their chest. After all, the Texas Rangers are tougher than the Bloods, the U.S. Marshals tougher than the Crips, the NYPD, the Chicago and Dallas and a thousand other local departments tougher that the Latin Kings, and certainly tougher, better trained, more dedicated than any drug cartel or single-purpose drive-by thug loosing off rounds at random in some crowded neighborhood. Do it, Donald – carry the election with more black, Hispanic, and white votes than anyone ever thought possible, and save the lives of thousands of innocent children, mothers, and men at the same time. Declare a "gang" war. Or at least that's how a seventy-one year old but still very handsome man living on America's oldest Main Street sees it. Richard F. Miniter is the author of The Things I Want Most, Random House, BDD. See it here. He lives and writes in the colonial-era hamlet of Stone Ridge, New York, blogs here, and can also be reached at miniterhome@gmail.com.