Analysis: Police beat realignment by any other name
From Chicago Sun-Times
Quote:
By redeploying scores of new officers to high-crime districts, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has managed to accomplish in less than five months what hasn’t been done since 1985.
Without using the dreaded terms “beat realignment” or “police reallocation” that touch off a political firestorm, he has achieved the same goal by redeploying to high-crime districts so many of the officers once assigned to specialized units and desk jobs.
On Thursday, the mayor bragged about the increases he has brought to four crime-ridden districts: Englewood, 68 additional officers; Chicago Lawn, 62; Calumet District, 55, and South Chicago, 80.
“That’s just a smattering example of applying the resources to where the crime problem was,” the mayor said.
Police Supt. Garry McCarthy was asked whether he has accomplished the goal of beat realignment without the controversy. “I sense a trap in there somewhere,” he said.
Turning serious, McCarthy said when you fight crime by “examining trends, deploying resources and holding people accountable” through the Compstat program, beat boundaries don’t matter.
“Crime trends cross over beat boundaries. They cross over district boundaries. And they cross over area boundaries. And where that happens, we blur the lines and attack it that way. The shape of the beats, the size of the beats almost becomes irrelevant,” he said.
Chicago’s 25 police districts are carved into 285 beats with a patrol car assigned to each.
In 1992, a consulting firm hired by then-Mayor Richard M. Daley recommended that the department realign beats for the first time since 1985 and shift them periodically to correspond with changes in crime, service calls and population.
Police superintendents have been promising to follow that mandate ever since, but it never happened.
That’s because aldermen representing middle-class wards on the Northwest and Southwest sides, where crime is lower, would stand to lose beats — and, in turn, squad cars — to poorer districts with more crime.
Before being dumped by Emanuel, former Police Supt. Jody Weis drafted a plan to reallocate police resources to higher-crime districts.
Emanuel killed it. He argued that shifting officers away from lower-crime districts in his North Side political base to higher-crime South and West Side districts would only divide Chicago.
At the time, Ald. Anthony Beale (9th), former chairman of the City Council’s Police Committee, reacted angrily. He’s not angry now.
“I applaud the mayor for attaining the partial goal without having the political fallout,” Beale said Thursday.
