Chicago’s mayor Rahm Emanuel stated late last week that he plans on hiring “hundreds” of new police officers to patrol the city’s streets in an effort to get an edge on crime. The plan was leaked by a city council member late Thursday evening and reported the next day, Friday—an ever-increasingly popular travel day that turns a three-day weekend into a four-day romp.
Ald. Pat O’Connor (40th) said the wave of police hirings tied to the mayor’s 2017 budget is aimed at confronting a severe manpower shortage in the Chicago Police Department that can no longer be addressed with runaway overtime.
The Chicago Sun-Times reported earlier this year that the Police Department spent a record $116.1 million on overtime in 2015 — up 17.2 percent from the previous year — to mask a manpower shortage that has mushroomed under Emanuel with police retirements outpacing hiring by 975 officers. [...]
O’Connor refused to say how the hiring blitz would be paid for at a time when Chicago faces a $137.6 million budget shortfall, the city’s smallest in a decade.
But, he argued that there is room to maneuver, now that Emanuel has identified dedicated funding sources to put all four city employee pension funds on the road to financial health.
The Chicagoist reports the mayor’s latest move didn’t go over well with activists in the city (as you can imagine) who have been calling for Rahm’s resignation over the execution of Laquan McDonald, and a re-routing of funding from police to social services.
Organizations such as the People’s Response Team/CopWatch, Black Lives Matter and Black Youth Project 100, posit that true safety and security in communities comes from living wage jobs, equitable education, housing that is affordable and not a threat to residents’ health. In other words, the basic necessities of life.
Look: We’re all adults here, let’s just state the obvious, shall we? The bulk, not all, but the bulk of Chicago’s crime can be attributed to the illegal drug economy: the trafficking and sales of narcotics that breeds competition between drug dealers. That competition is not settled in board rooms or courts of law—it’s settled in the streets of neighborhoods where families play, go to school, go to sleep, etc. The illegal economy is more lucrative, easier to break into, and more readily available than the legal economy in much of Chicago’s neighborhoods. This economy not only spawns competition, but envy and anger, which sometimes translates into robberies. Drug dealers, for all their flashy lifestyle, are at significant risk for having their “product” and their “profits” taken from them at gunpoint. We know they won’t be calling the police however, let’s not digress. All of this points back to activists’ contention that an economy that provides for the basic necessities of all in Chicago’s communities is the best form of safety and security, not police.
That’s a tall order. One that won’t be filled overnight. But the more the message is analyzed, and the less histrionics interrupting the message, the more sense it begins to make.