The Atlantic

Chicago's Police Aren't 'Overly Politically Correct'

President Trump’s assumption that law-enforcement officers in Chicago are too restrained gets the city’s challenges precisely backward.
Source: Andrew Nelles / Reuters

On Wednesday, the president of the United States threatened Chicago with federal intervention if it fails to bring down its homicide numbers. Mangling recent homicide statistics, President Trump said he would “send in the Feds” if Chicago did not  “fix the horrible ‘carnage’ going on.”

Later, in an , Trump elaborated on his threat. The nature of Trump’s contemplated intervention remains unclear, but the president offered a hypothesis for why Chicago is facing so much deadly violence.

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Atlantic

The Atlantic5 min readAmerican Government
What Nikki Haley Is Trying to Prove
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Nikki Haley faces terrible odds in her home state of
The Atlantic7 min readAmerican Government
The Americans Who Need Chaos
This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here. Several years ago, the political scientist Michael Bang Petersen, who is based in Denmark, wanted to understand why peop
The Atlantic3 min read
They Rode the Rails, Made Friends, and Fell Out of Love With America
The open road is the great American literary device. Whether the example is Jack Kerouac or Tracy Chapman, the national canon is full of travel tales that observe America’s idiosyncrasies and inequalities, its dark corners and lost wanderers, but ult

Related Books & Audiobooks