“Black Friday” in Chicago was marked by protest in the heart of the retail district — the Magnificent Mile of North Michigan Avenue — over the fatal shooting of a black teenager by a Chicago Police Department patrolman. The chum in the waters of publicity drew the “Reverend” Jesse Jackson, the Chicago Teachers Union president and the district’s own elected Democrat, Rep. Bobby Rush. But that exposed the truth: Black lives matter only when the blame falls on law enforcement or another “enemy” of the Left’s “community.”

Nothing in The Patriot Post will come close to condone or justify excessive force or blatant racism in any law enforcement effort — or any other organization. However, the level of absurdity that this protest achieves in ignoring a malignant problem won’t pass without notice.

The protests stem from the arrest of Officer Jason Van Dyke last Tuesday. He was charged with first-degree murder for the Oct. 20, 2014, shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, a black male armed with a knife and with a toxicology report showing he was high on PCP. McDonald had been tracked for “nearly a half-mile, from a trucking yard where he had been breaking into vehicles through a Burger King parking lot and onto busy Pulaski Road,” according to the Chicago Tribune. Officer Van Dyke apparently emptied his 16-round pistol upon exiting his squad car in the multi-car pursuit of the now-deceased.

The Chicago Police Department dash-cam videos will be critical in this case.

But where is Officer Jason Van Dyke? He’s in jail awaiting justice. So why the riots and protests? Obvious questions have to be asked of Jackson, Rush, the Chicago Teachers Union and the angry protesters regarding this one death.

Are you angry only when a white cop shoots a black young man?

Of the 321 blacks listed as homicide victims in Chicago through Nov. 21, how many protests were held in their honor?

When do you admit the failure of decades of institutional leftism on America’s urban poverty plantations?

Equally, questions must be asked of the “leader” of the Democrat-run Windy City, Barack Obama’s best pal Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who has been openly challenged for his administration’s changes in recording crime statistics and classifying homicides.

From January to December 2014, there were 2,587 shooting victims in Chicago. From January through Nov. 29, 2015, there have been 2,724 shooting victims. Yet the city’s “crime index” shows a downward trend, based on Emanuel’s formulas. Are you, Mr. Mayor, cooking the books?

Investigative reporting and audits have found underreporting of crime and a change in the classification of homicides under Emanuel’s hand-picked CPD Chief Garry McCarthy, yet the murder rate per 100,000 residents of Chicago is still nearly four times the national average. Mayor Emanuel et al, when will you confess to your policy failures in dealing with violent crime?

Emanuel’s administration also fought to have the video of McDonald’s death kept from the public — and succeeded for 13 months. Why? It might have cost the mayor his re-election last year.

The high-profile protests that choked away Christmas shoppers on Black Friday served their purpose: Make a statement to fit a narrative that there is rampant police brutality and blatant violence against black citizens. But the inconvenient truth is laid bare by The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley, who is black. Earlier this year, in regard to Baltimore’s unrest, Riley said:

“Blacks are about 13 percent of the population, yet commit half of all murders in this country. Blacks are arrested at 2-3 times their numbers in the population for all manner of violent crime, all manner of property crime. If we want to reduce tensions between [blacks and] law enforcement in these communities, we have to do something about these crime rates. If we want to reduce negative perceptions of young black men in society, we have to do something about behavior that is driving those perceptions. … We love to talk about the black incarceration rate and how outrageously high it is as if it has no connection to the black crime rate. I think you can’t talk about one without talking about the other.”

The citizens of Chicago have an opportunity here. They should awaken and demand answers from their elected leaders for generations of failed policy.