Chicago, New York Heading in Opposite Directions on Crime; Where Does Milwaukee Stand?

To judge by some of the political rhetoric last fall, violent crime must be surging in our nation’s cities. Is that true? The answer may depend on which city you are talking about, and which neighborhood within that city.

Consider the contrast between Chicago and New York. The Windy City had about 762 homicides in 2016, while the Big Apple had just 334. The difference is shocking, especially when you consider that New York has three times Chicago’s population.

To some extent, the contrasting figures from 2016 reflect longstanding trends. Although murders did spike in Chicago last year, New York has been doing better than Chicago on this score for a long time. The two cities had essentially identical per capita homicide rates in the late 1980s, but New York’s fell much faster and further than Chicago’s in the 1990s. New York has maintained a wide advantage ever since.

Still, the dramatic widening of that advantage in 2016 should be of great concern to Chicagoans. The chart below indicates the trends in recent years, based on FBI data. Note that the two cities moved in sync from 2013 through 2015: homicides down the first year, basically unchanged the next, and then up a little in 2015. However, in 2016, even as Chicago’s homicides shot up, New York’s dropped back down to where they had been in 2013 and 2014.

One should not get the sense, however, that one faces a dramatically elevated risk of violence throughout the Windy City.  

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A New Era: The Rule of Law in the Trump Administration

Well, here we are, January 20, 2017, and Donald J. Trump has been sworn in as this nation’s 45th president, though he achieved that position by losing the popular vote by the widest margin of any winning candidate in recent history (2.9 million more people voted for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton), and he arrives at his new position with the lowest approval rating of any president in recent history.

As numerous others before me have written, President Trump’s campaign was not traditional in any number of ways, and I expect that his presidency will follow that trend. For some, that’s been the whole point. For others, that’s a less-than-inspiring harbinger. I wrote this summer about my concern about the candidate’s rhetoric, proposed policies, and the rule of law.

Though he has since backed off some of his campaign promises (for example, about having a special prosecutor investigate rival Clinton for her use of a private email server—a favorite chant at his rallies was “Lock her up!”), nothing since that time has changed my view. I continue to believe that the president won’t be appreciably different from the candidate.

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Dick Enberg Offers Insights into the Incredible Al McGuire

Here’s a detail about Al McGuire you likely don’t know: Among his many habits, he liked to lie on the floor. Often, when he was in a hotel room, he would sleep through the night on the hard tile floor of a bathroom.

Here’s another one that carries more weight in showing what made McGuire such an amazing person: When he would drive from his home in Brookfield to Marquette University, there was a place where the route called for him to turn left and head for downtown. Once a month or so, he would turn right instead, with no destination in mind, determined to spend a hunk of time wherever he ended up, just exploring and immersing himself in real life.

That latter habit gave rise to one of the things McGuire would say to people: Take that right hand turn sometimes. Do things differently sometimes. Do the unexpected.  Experience life to the fullest.

These were among anecdotes and insights into the legendary Marquette basketball coach offered Tuesday by one of the nation’s best known sports broadcasters, Dick Enberg, during an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” program at Marquette Law School.

McGuire coached the Marquette team from 1964 to 1977, ending his career with Marquette winning the NCAA championship. For almost 20 years after that, he was an analyst on national telecasts of basketball games, paired with Enberg as the play by play announcer. The two became close friends.

After McGuire’s death in 2001, Enberg wrote a one-man play about McGuire. It is returning to the stage in Milwaukee, with a run at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s Stackner Cabaret from Jan. 20 to March 19. The revival of the play brought Enberg, who recently retired after a six-decade career that included broadcasting just about every major sports event, to Milwaukee and to Marquette, which he called “my adopted university.”

Enberg said McGuire was “the most incredible character in my 60 years (as a broadcaster) that I’ve ever met.” He added, “There’s no one in second place. He was by far.”

McGuire, Enberg said, was incredibly complex. “He didn’t mind being controversial,” Enberg said. “He was distrustful, paranoid even sometimes . . . . He didn’t want too many people to get in his electrical field.” It took a while, but McGuire let Enberg inside his life.

McGuire was “a street genius that saw life so differently than all the rest of us,” Enberg said. He said that McGuire would see things happening on the street and offer deeply insightful explanations of what was going on that Enberg had missed.

Enberg said no one could coach a basketball game better than McGuire. He could work the players, the referees, and the crowd like no one else.

“I really do think about him every day,” Enberg said.

In the course of the hour-long program, Enberg also offered observations about his own career. Among them:

Baseball is the best game for an announcer. Enberg, who was the long-time voice of the San Diego Padres, said that if you can announce baseball well, you can announce anything.

The Wimbledon tennis tournament was his favorite sports event overall – and he saw just about every major event there was. He said he fell in love with Wimbledon, from the grass courts to having the best men and women tennis players in the world competing for two weeks to the drama of center court.

His favorite sports figure? There are so many good answers, Enberg said. He said John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach at UCLA, was “the greatest man I ever met,” except for Enberg’s own father. Baseball great Ted Williams was a huge childhood hero for Enberg and he got to know Williams in later years. A chance to have breakfast with Williams and chat casually, “how good is that?” Enberg asked. And golfer Arnold Palmer, “you felt you were in with royalty every time you were around him.”

As for one of his broadcast trademarks – the use of the phrase, “Oh, my” – Enberg gave examples of how many different ways it can be used, including at moments that are thrilling, dismaying, surprising, and tense. He said he used the phrase because it fit so many situations and because “the holies” (as in holy cow, holy Toledo, and holy mackerel) were already taken by other announcers.

Video of the program may be watched by clicking here.

 

 

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