Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Thursday presented a much anticipated three-part crime-fighting plan to tackle the city’s devastating violence.
Advertisement
“No matter who you are, what your background is, where you live in Chicago, this fight belongs to all of us”, the mayor said.
However, activists who have called for additional community resources and leadership changes said resources should be used elsewhere.
Chicago has seen a dramatic rise in the number of shootings and homicides this year.
Chicago officials have already announced plans to add more police, expand the use of body cameras and add training for officers.
The sworn officers will be hired over the next two years, bringing the department’s total number to about 13,500.
The Chicago Sun-Times on Tuesday reported Emanuel’s plans for a two-year hiring blitz meant to add 970 officers, the biggest hiring surge at the department since the mid-1980s.
There has always been a cry in the city not only to replenish the vacancies in the Chicago Police Department, but also to put more cops on the street. “And we all know that this partnership has been tested in Chicago”, he said.
But Shari Runner, president of the Chicago Urban League, is strongly against the notion that parents or “absentee fathers” should be held responsible for the city’s violence problem.
Emanuel devoted some time in the speech to acknowledging the breach in trust between residents and the police force in the wake of the McDonald video, and the tensions that have marred attempts to tamp down crime over the last 12 months.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, right, delivers his new public safety plan to combat gun violence for the nation’s third-largest city as police superintendent Eddie Johnson, left, listens at the Malcolm X Community College Thursday, Sept. 22, 2016, in Chicago. An analyst with credit-rating service Moody’s said Chicago would need to raise more than $1 billion in annual pension contributions just to break even with expenses.
What’s missing is how the cash-strapped city will fund the officers.
The recruiting surge was a reversal – or perhaps a re-reversal – for Emanuel, who campaigned for his first term on a pledge to add 1,000 officers, then shifted the goal to putting 1,000 officers “on the street” by dissolving special tactical units and shifting officers off desk jobs and onto patrol.
“Fighting crime requires a partnership between the police and the community”, Emanuel said according to the remarks.
Expanding the city’s mentoring programs and calling for more Chicagoans to be mentors were also specific focuses. Is Chicago ready to be a mentor? The Gangster Disciples is ready to be a role model.
“You give the kids of the city of Chicago a positive alternative with a caring adult, they’ll go the positive route”, Emanuel told reporters Wednesday. More than 500 Chicagoans have been killed so far in 2016.
Both Solis and fellow Alderman Howard Brookins Jr. said that whatever the cost for the new plan, it might not add up to all that much more money than the city is already paying in overtime. “That investment is what signals hope. and it demonstrates that these places are worth living”.
Others question why only add more officers.
“The mayor does not have a clue in regards to what it will take to reduce killings and shootings in Chicago”, says Tio Hardiman of the group Violence Interrupters. The former White House chief of staff said Wednesday that the approach to crime in the city has to be comprehensive.
Johnson said he did not receive details from the mayor’s office about how the city would pay for what his spokesman later said was the largest hiring effort since at least the 1990s, only that the mayor had assured him it could be done.
“We’re at a tipping point”, she says.
“He knew all along there was a need”, he said.
“If he doesn’t, then he’s done for”, says Cobb, adding that “it can not be business as usual”.
Solving this crisis of community violence in Chicago requires something from the city’s leader that he typically isn’t inclined to do, says Cobb.
Advertisement
They say the board Emanuel is proposing is a farce because they believe it will be controlled by the mayor and does not have a set budget.
