Civil order – the freedom to go about one's business free of worry about personal safety – is slipping away in Chicago.  The city's murder rate is world-famous but had been confined to a few neighborhoods.  Now criminals are so unburdened by fear of the constabulary that even in the posh parts of town, crime is metastasizing.

Now comes a story that is horrifying in its exposure of how thin the blue line has gotten in the Windy City.  From CWB Chicago:

So, a guy died yesterday.

He pretty much washed ashore at Montrose Beach. The Tribune says he was "found floating."

He repeatedly seized on the beach. Convulsing. Breathing, it seemed. Or not. It's awkward, trying to tell if someone's breathing or just trying their damnedest to.

The blood frothing from his mouth came from his lungs, mixed with nibbles of his own tongue.

Montrose Beach.

The man was taken by ambulance to a hospital, where he died.  But:

The stupid thing – and by stupid thing we mean "Chicago thing" – is that no police officer ever showed up at the beach.

In fact, no police officer actually took on the man's case until nearly an hour after he died.

Oh, don't [get] us wrong. Dispatchers tried to assign the drowning call around 2 p.m. But every 19th District cop was tied up, assigned to other duties – like watching the mayor's house.

This may strike you as odd, but while that man was dying on the sand, there were seven cops doing essentially nothing in the same police district. Two were assigned to sit in front of Mayor Rahm Emanuel's house at 4228 N. Hermitage. Another two were committed to sitting in the back of the mayor's house. Another two were assigned to a roving car that circles the mayor's home. And the seventh was the sergeant in charge of the mayor's castle guard.

Police are in short supply in Chicago because pensions eat up the money budgeted for police protection.

So a dying man is hauled away without the presence of a single police officer to ask questions of the witnesses and begin an investigation on the spot to figure out how the man came to be floating in Lake Michigan.  He just died and was hauled away.  Meanwhile, the Praetorian Guard does its duty protecting the Maximum Leader.

It's a story that would be commonplace in many third-world hellholes.  Now it is coming to our shores.