HEATHER MAC DONALD: Back to Bedlam.

Chicago had a harbinger of its current depolicing situation in 2012. Chicago police superintendent Garry McCarthy had disbanded a city-wide, anti-gang task force that advocates had criticized for allegedly making too many stops in minority neighborhoods. Homicides soared, ultimately reaching 500 that year. South Side residents begged for the reconstitution of the task force and the resumption of stops. “We have had enough,” the grandmother of a murder victim told the Telegraph, afraid to give her name for fear of retribution. “The older folks are terrified. We need the police to crack down on them. Responsibly yes, but forcefully.” A local city councilman, Willie Cochran, said that his constituents “wanted a more aggressive force engaging these terrorists on the streets.” His community was “ready to stand by the police” in the face of complaints about “racial profiling,” Cochran added. McCarthy reconstituted the unit in 2013 and the shooting epidemic cooled. (This connection between depolicing and crime has been repeatedly confirmed empirically, most recently in a study of Justice Department police consent decrees.)

The activists’ standard charge against cops in the post-Ferguson era is that they are peevishly refusing to do their jobs in childish protest against mere “public scrutiny.” This anodyne formulation whitewashes what has been going on in the streets as a result of the sometimes-violent agitation against them. Cops are routinely cursed and screamed at; sometimes bottles and rocks are thrown. “In my 19 years in law enforcement, I haven’t seen this kind of hatred toward the police,” a Chicago cop who works on the South Side tells me.

Read the whole thing. But it shouldn’t surprise anyone that a return to ’70s-style policing and attitudes towards law enforcement would bring a return of ’70s violence.