Comment: It's Just Life in the Big City...

"Burn, bitch!"

"Burn alive, bitch!"

That is what a fifty year old man with roughly seventy prior arrests reportedly shouted as Chicago police took him into custody, a day after he doused a twenty six year old woman in gasoline and set her on fire on a Blue Line train in the Loop. The victim, a young woman named Bethany MaGee, is still in a hospital bed with burns over 60% of her body.^[1] She was doing what hundreds of thousands of us do every week in this city. She was riding the train home.

A few nights later, a few blocks away, Chicago tried to do what it always does this time of year. Thousands poured into the Loop for the official Christmas tree lighting. The park was full. The Christkindlmarket was also having its annual opening at Daley Plaza. State Street had its holiday lights and buskers. The postcard version of the city is still real.

Then the shots started.

In the space of about an hour, under the Chicago Theatre marquee and within easy walking distance of the tree, two separate shootings left a fourteen year old boy named Armani Floyd dead and eight other young people wounded, nearly all of them teenagers.^[2] Police say around three hundred youths swarmed the area, five guns were recovered, and officers were injured dealing with what one retired chief flatly described as "complete lawlessness."^[3] Families who had been filming their kids under the lights ended the night sprinting for cover, dragging them behind planters and police were sprinting through crowds that, minutes earlier, had felt like a Norman Rockwell painting.

By the time the weekend was over, the Loop had another body on its conscience. Early Sunday morning, about 5:45 a.m., while most of the city slept off the chaos, a group of Venezuelan migrant teens walked past a homeless man who was bedded down in the alcove of a restaurant on South Wabash with his shopping cart, his tools, a Halloween skeleton mask, and his cat. Prosecutors say the boys decided to turn him into sport. One grabbed his mask. Another carried a metal rod. A sixteen year old, Wuinayker Rodriguez-Vasquez, allegedly kicked him from behind. Then came the blows with the rod, and finally the knife, driven into the left side of his back. A passerby found forty nine year old Bradley Obeirne’s body in the alcove two hours later.^[4]

So in the space of a single week, in the same small patch of downtown, Chicago produced a solemn trifecta. A young woman burned alive in a train car. A fourteen year old boy shot to death under the Christmas lights after the tree ceremony. A middle aged homeless man stabbed to death next to his cart and his cat. The commuter. The kid. The man with nothing. Different backgrounds, different stories, one basic fact. The city failed them.

All three of these incidents were preventable. They were not mysteries of human nature. They were the predictable result of public policy, written and enforced by people whose names appear on our ballots. They exist because our mayors, governors, legislators, prosecutors, and judges built a set of rules that keeps dangerous men on the street, treats criminal mobs as a public relations problem, and pretends that compassion means never drawing a hard line. The woman on the train, the boy at the tree, the man in the alcove did not stumble into some unavoidable fate. They ran head first into the results of years of bad choices by people who asked us for power and then refused to use it to protect them. A system that will not jail a man with seventy arrests, that treats mass downtown disturbances as a nuisance instead of a line in the sand, and that invites thousands of migrants here without vetting or guidance or any serious plan to discipline or integrate the young men among them, then acts shocked when idle, unsupervised young men with no stake in the city or its people turn violent, is a system built to fail in exactly this way. None of this is an accident. They are chosen outcomes. It is what you get when ineffective and feckless, unserious and reckless, negligent and craven elected officials treat public safety as an afterthought.

The reaction from official Chicago has, of course, been familiar parody. Talk about "setbacks" and "long roads" and "root causes." Talk about guns from out of state and underfunded programs and how complicated all of this is. Remind everyone that crime is down on some chart compared to some year if you squint just right. Then close with the old shrug that has become the soundtrack of our decline.

"It's just life in the big city..."

As if someone yelling "burn alive, bitch(!)" on a Blue Line platform after seventy prior arrests is an unavoidable act of God. As if kids bleeding out on State and Dearborn right after the Christmas tree lights up is simply the cost of urban living. As if a group of bored teenagers stabbing a homeless man awake on Wabash is just one of those unfortunate things that happens in a city this size.

I love this city. I have spent most of my life defending it. On any given week, I have moments that feel almost magical. A perfect fall afternoon on the river. A bartender who knows your name. Kids laughing after a game. A neighborhood restaurant where the owner walks the room and you can feel how much he cares. The people who still live here are, by and large, some of the best people you will ever meet.

I know, dear reader and neighbor, that's what makes it so hard to admit. Because once you say, "We have a serious problem," it feels like you are betraying the place and the people you love. It feels like you are giving ammunition to every uncle who has ever cracked a joke about Chicago yet never stepped foot here. I understand the instinct is to say, "It is not that bad," or, "Every big city has crime," and change the subject.

But the reputation is actively harming the very people we claim to be protecting. You and I may know how wonderful this city can be, we may still see the magical nights and the good neighbors, but there are families who no longer come in for dinner and a show because they are tired of the logistics and the fear. There are corporate headquarters that tip the scale toward another city instead of choosing Chicago. There are conferences and major events that quietly cross us off the list. That is not abstract. Those are real tables not filled in River North, real hotel rooms not booked, real shifts not worked, real tips not earned. You can hate money all you want, but this is real money that is no longer flowing to real people in this city. Money that could help us fix streets, fund schools, and actually address some of the root causes you like to talk about.

Admitting that does not make you a bad person. It does not mean you are rooting against Chicago. It means you are honest enough to see that your life, and the lives of the people around you, are getting harder because the city cannot get its act together on public safety. It means you understand that "life in the big city" is not just a phrase, it is a story that employers and families and tourists tell themselves when they decide to go somewhere else.

See, there is a difference between loving a place and agreeing to be gaslit by it. Especially by those as obtuse as these in charge and who fill your social media feed. These are not random storms. They are the direct and predictable result of political choices, judicial decisions, and a criminal justice philosophy that treats violent repeat offenders and violent mobs as something that must be managed, not stopped. Chicago’s leadership is very good at explaining why they are victims of forces beyond their control. The only people they never seem to see as victims are the ones who end up in burn units and body bags.

That is what this piece is about. Not the comforting fiction that "life in the big city" explains all of this, but the uncomfortable truth that we have chosen to tolerate far more than any serious city should.

And if you want to understand why, you start with these three scenes together, not as isolated tragedies but as the same story told three times. A system that refuses to incapacitate the dangerous, a political class that hides behind statistics and slogans, and a city that has been trained to shrug and move on.

The System Lit The Match

The story of the Blue Line attack is the clearest example of a preventable horror. Federal documents and local reporting show that the man accused, fifty year old Lawrence Reed, has been arrested roughly seventy times in Cook County and convicted in more than a dozen cases.^[5] In 2020 he was convicted of aggravated arson for trying to set the Thompson Center on fire just before Governor J. B. Pritzker was scheduled to give a COVID briefing, and he received probation.^[6] At the time of the train attack, he was on electronic monitoring for allegedly knocking a hospital social worker unconscious in a psychiatric ward.^[6:1]

Prosecutors say they asked a judge to detain him. Cook County Judge Teresa Molina-Gonzalez declined and put him on an ankle monitor instead, telling the assistant state’s attorney, "I cannot keep everybody in jail because the State’s Attorney wants me to."^[7] Months later, Judge Ralph Meczyk relaxed Reed’s monitoring conditions so he could spend more time out of the house for "church activities." Court and monitoring records now show that Reed repeatedly violated his curfew and movement restrictions, that the chief judge’s office was warned about it, and that on the day of the attack he had been out of his home without permission for more than twelve hours before he boarded the Blue Line.^[8]

In other words, this was not a man who slipped through the cracks. This was a man the system knew very well, whose risk was obvious to anyone willing to read his file with honest eyes. Judges had multiple chances to say, "Enough." They did not take them. Reed then took a plastic bottle, filled it with gasoline at a station, walked into a CTA car behind a young woman he did not know, and turned her into a torch. Federal prosecutors are now the ones who finally treated him like the threat he clearly was, charging him with terrorism and locking him up.

If you want a symbol for how Chicago handles its most dangerous people, that story is it. A man so volatile he is too risky for a psych ward at one moment is still somehow, in the mind of our local courts, safe enough to wander the trains at night. A man with a documented history of arson and violence is handed an ankle bracelet and a curfew, then ignored when he blows through both. We lit the match and then acted surprised when something caught fire.

The Mob At The Tree

The shootings outside the tree lighting are messier in detail but no less telling. The Loop was flooded with officers that night. The city knew that teen "takeovers" and downtown mobs have become a regular feature of the civic calendar, especially around big events. They happened under the last mayor. They are happening under this one. The pattern does not require advanced analysis.

Pack hundreds of unsupervised teenagers into a confined space with very little fear of consequences, add social media, throw in a few firearms, and see what happens. The answer, again and again, has been broken windows, police injured with mace and stun guns, innocent bystanders assaulted, and gunfire.^[9]

After Armani Floyd was killed and eight others were wounded, Mayor Brandon Johnson called the shootings "a setback" and framed them as a reminder of the "long road" to the city he wants to build. He said there were too many guns and too many young people who do not value their own lives or the lives of others. That last part is true enough. But it also conveniently leaves out the role of leadership in teaching people that their actions have consequences. CBS News+1

We have spent years sending the opposite message. Mass downtown disturbances are treated as a public order problem to be managed, not a moral line that must be enforced. Arrests, when they happen at all, rarely turn into meaningful consequences. The same kids know they can come back next weekend and try again. The rest of the city learns a quieter lesson. It hears those shots in the context of all the other shots and decides it is safer to stay home.

The Man In The Alcove

The murder of Bradley Obeirne is the smallest story in scale. No viral video. No tree lighting crowd. No national headlines. Just a man sleeping in a doorway near Wabash and Adams with his cart, his tools, his cat, and his Halloween skeleton mask, and a group of teenagers who saw an opportunity to amuse themselves.

Prosecutors say the boys were Venezuelan migrants. One grabbed Obeirne’s mask. Another swung a metal rod. A third drove a knife into his back. He was forty nine years old and homeless. The attack was, in the prosecutor’s telling, random. Obeirne was not wanted for anything. He was simply there. CWB Chicago+2X (formerly Twitter)+2

Random is the word everyone uses. Random attack. Random violence. Unpredictable act. It sounds honest, but it is not. It suggests that nothing could have been done, that nobody could have seen this coming, that you live in a giant casino where we all take our chances in the great spin of fate.

If you talk to people who live and work downtown, that is not how it feels. It feels like the inevitable point on a curve that has been rising for years. It feels like what happens when you tell people, over and over again, that nobody really gets punished anymore, that public space has no rules, and that anyone who suggests otherwise is some kind of reactionary. It also feels like what happens when city leaders treat illegal immigration as a virtue signal instead of a responsibility when they welcome young men into a broken system with no plan to guide or restrain them.

Chicago, like many cities, opened its doors with lofty promises but few serious structures. These weren’t children with families fleeing war. These were unsupervised teenagers left to roam a city with no support, no discipline, and no accountability. The result wasn’t opportunity, it was tragedy.

The Politics That Made This Possible

When critics of Illinois’ SAFE-T Act warned that ending cash bail without a serious replacement standard for dangerousness would be "a massive threat" to residents, they were treated like hysterics.^[10] Governor Pritzker signed the bill, praised it as a civil rights milestone, and scolded dissenters. The mayoral class in Chicago has supported the same general philosophy for years, which is to empty jails on the front end, minimize incarceration on the back end, and trust that services and non-profits will magically absorb the risk.

Let me be clear. There are important debates to be had about cash bail and over-incarceration. Nobody wants a system where poor non-violent defendants sit in jail for months because they cannot scrape together a few hundred dollars. The problem in Cook County is that the pendulum did not simply swing back to fairness. It shot past fairness into fantasy.

Under former State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, the office made a point of filing fewer felony charges, diverting more cases, and relaxing enforcement in the name of racial equity and reform.^[11] Supporters insist that her approach did not drive the city’s violence. Critics point to many high profile cases where offenders with serious histories were released or given light treatment, then went on to harm more people.^[12] What is not in dispute is that there is now a culture in Chicago in which declining to prosecute is treated as a moral good in itself, regardless of downstream cost.

Judges have absorbed that culture. If the elected prosecutor is reluctant to throw the book at anyone, and the political class constantly warns you not to be "too tough," it becomes easier and easier to convince yourself that the man who knocked out a social worker in a psych ward is a good candidate for an ankle monitor. Until he is not.

The SAFE-T Act did not create Lawrence Reed. It did not pull the trigger outside the Chicago Theatre, and it did not put a knife in Bradley Obeirne’s back. What it did, along with a broader set of policies and attitudes, was send a clear message to everyone involved in the system that restraint of dangerous people is something to be avoided whenever possible. That all else equal, you should let them walk.

The same logic applies to immigration. We are told to open our borders and suspend disbelief, to ignore the basic fact that young men, unmoored from family or structure, are often the likeliest to cause harm. When you bring thousands of people into a city already strained, and you do it without rules, without screening, and without the will to act when things go wrong, this is what you get.

We are seeing the results of these theories in real time.

Life For Everyone Else

If you talk to business leaders in this city, you hear a different version of "life in the big city." Ken Griffin took Citadel’s headquarters, thousands of jobs and billions of dollars, to Miami and has spent the past few years shedding his Chicago real estate at a loss. He cited crime and political dysfunction as major reasons for his exit and recently described Chicago’s trajectory as that of a "failed city state."

McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski, whose company is still based here, says crime is "seeping into every corner of our city," that it is making it harder to recruit talent, and that many of his employees are afraid to come downtown or ride transit to the office.^[13] He has asked publicly what the city’s plan is and has not gotten a convincing answer.^[14]

You do not have to like Griffin or Kempczinski to recognize the signal they are sending. They are the kind of people every major city needs some number of if it wants tax revenue and jobs. They can live and work anywhere. They are looking at the same stories the rest of us are, looking at their own employees getting mugged or carjacked or simply refusing to come in, and deciding that "life in the big city" is an excuse they do not have to accept. They can go find another city.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. When a family from the collar counties decides the hassle and fear is not worth it anymore, it is the hostess and the server and the stagehand who pay the price. When a convention quietly moves to Orlando or Nashville instead of McCormick Place, it is the hotel housekeeper and the cab driver and the guy loading freight at the docks who lose out. When a company nudges its headquarters to Dallas or Miami, it is not just some billionaire on a plane, it is hundreds of mid level employees and support staff who never even got to cast a vote on the decision. They are the ones who bear the cost of our reputation. They are the ones who suffer when we shrug and say, "It's just life in the big city."

The city can put whatever spin it wants on its crime charts. On the ground, people are voting with their feet.

"There Are Only Victims Here," Revisited

A few years ago, after another horrifying incident, I wrote a piece titled "There are only victims here." The argument then was that Chicago’s leadership had discovered a way to talk about violence where everyone and no one is a victim at the same time. Social services are victims of history and lack of funding, offenders are victims of poverty and racism, and the neighborhoods are victims of disinvestment. The politicians are victims of forces beyond their control. In that framework, the only people who never quite count as victims are the ones who get shot or burned or stabbed.^[15]

Nothing about this past week suggests that our leaders have learned anything since. Listen carefully to the official statements and you will hear the same pattern. The mayor is a victim of "too many guns" and a long, hard road. The governor is a victim of a cruel cash bail system that forced him to sign the SAFE-T Act to make things fair. The prosecutors are victims of structural injustice that requires them to pull back on charging. Judges are victims of overcrowded jails and political pressure not to be "too harsh."

Everyone in power has a speech ready that explains why they are trapped. Everyone in power can explain why their hands were tied when it came to the guy with seventy arrests, the mob of teenagers at the tree, the group of migrant boys with a knife and a metal rod on Wabash.

Meanwhile, the people who actually bled this week are not invited to those conversations. A twenty six year old woman who will now live with burns across her body. A fourteen year old boy whose friends and family will never see him again. A homeless man whose cat and shopping cart were still there when the police arrived.

If you keep treating the people who make decisions as the real victims, and the people who suffer those decisions as background noise, you end up exactly where we are now.

What Serious Cities Do

So look again at what "life in the big city" has meant in Chicago this month.

It meant a woman riding the Blue Line home could be turned into a human torch by a man the courts already knew was dangerous, a man who had been arrested around seventy times over thirty years, and we were told this was tragic but not really anyone’s fault. It meant you could take your kids to see the Christmas tree and a fourteen year old boy could end up dead in the street a few blocks away while City Hall called it a "setback" on the long road to some better future. It meant a homeless man could be kicked awake, beaten with a metal rod, and stabbed to death by teenagers walking through the Loop at dawn, his cat and his shopping cart left behind, and it is already being folded into the usual weekend violence roundup.^[16]

If you accept that, then yes. This is just life in the big city. That is the deal. A steady drip of terror on trains, riots around downtown events, and random killings between the high rises, all explained away as the inevitable byproduct of density and diversity and modern life. You keep paying your taxes and your parking tickets. You keep voting for the same names. You keep telling yourself every other big city is just as bad.

But serious cities do not talk that way. A serious city does not shrug off an attack on its transit system in the heart of its downtown as the cost of doing business. A serious city does not treat hundreds of teenagers rioting through the Loop, seven kids shot outside the Chicago Theatre, and one of them dying on Dearborn as an unfortunate bump on a "long road." A serious city does not look at a homeless man stabbed to death next to his cat on Wabash and decide that the real victim here is the mayor’s political narrative. Chicago Sun-Times+2CBS News+2

A serious city draws a hard line and tells the small number of people who delight in violence that their experiment is over. That means judges who say "no" instead of "one more chance" when they are staring at rap sheets that read like encyclopedia volumes and Walgreens' printed receipts. It means prosecutors who stop treating the decision to decline charges as a moral achievement and start using the laws they already have. It means a governor and a legislature who are willing to admit that some of their proudest reforms have made things worse, and that the first duty of government is to protect the innocent before it rescues the guilty. If that requires secure psychiatric beds instead of endless street releases, more prison space for repeat violent offenders, or rewriting laws that make pretrial detention possible again in obvious cases, then that is the price of being a serious city.

Because here is the part nobody in power likes to say out loud. You cannot fix anything else in Chicago until you fix this. You will not fix the budget while you are driving out your tax base and your employers. You will not fix the schools while kids learn that downtown is where you duck and run. You will not fix the business climate while national headlines read like a warning label. As long as ordinary, peaceful Chicagoans, suburban families, and everyone from everyone else believe in their gut that the commuter, the kid at the tree, and the man in the alcove are all on their own, the rest is fantasy.

"It's just life in the big city" is not an explanation. It is an admission of surrender. Chicago does not have to surrender. We can decide that women should be able to ride the train without being turned into examples. We can decide that kids should be able to see the Christmas tree without sprinting for cover. We can decide that even a man sleeping on cardboard with a cat for company is owed basic safety in the city whose sidewalks he calls home.

The question is not whether crime exists. It always will. The question is whether you are willing to live with this level of cruelty and chaos and still sneer at anyone who calls it unacceptable. If your answer is yes, then own it. Look your neighbors in the eye and admit that their blood, and their children’s blood, is an acceptable cost so that you never have to change your vote or your mind. Say it out loud to the woman on the train, to the parents at the tree, to the man in the alcove. Tell them this is the price they pay so you can keep feeling enlightened at dinner parties and virtuous on social media.

If your answer is no, then it is time to stop shrugging, stop repeating that tired line about life in the big city, and start acting like citizens who believe their city is worth fighting for.

Chicago has been on fire before, literally and figuratively. We know how to rebuild. The first step is always the same.

You put the flames out.

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