(NEW YORK) MintPress – As global leaders and their delegations left Chicago on May 21, following this year’s NATO summit in the Windy City, Mayor Rahm Emanuel proudly declared it a success. “We are…a world class city that can put on a world class event,” he announced.
Yet for all of Emanuel’s pronouncements of glory, in contrast to what is happening in New York and Los Angeles, violent crime in the nation’s third largest city is soaring, in large part because of Emanuel and his policy choices, which have led to a double digit increase in homicides since 2011.
Overall, homicides in Chicago are up by 38 percent from a year ago, while shootings have increased as well. As of June 17, 240 people had been killed, mostly in shootings, in 2012, which is 66 more deaths than occurred in the same period last year.
And a majority of the deaths have been tied to Chicago’s rising gang warfare in some of its worst neighborhoods, not far from the gleaming skyscrapers and glistening waterfront where the NATO meetings took place, in the impoverished South and West Sides of the city.
The mayor struck a very different tone last week when speaking about that Chicago. “We’ve got a gang issue, specific to parts of the city, and we have a responsibility to bring a quality of life to those residents, and we are going to do it,” he said.
“My issue is not only the homicides and shootings,” he added. “It’s what it does to all the legitimate citizens in that community and the kids.”
Growing gangs problem
While Chicago has long had its fair share of gangsters, they used to be members of well-established groups. Now, they have since split along very different, much more fractured lines, especially in the last couple of years, and police say that today there are more than 600 factions.
And they seem to growing faster than Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy can dismantle their operations.
McCarthy, who was director of police in Newark and deputy commissioner of operations in New York before Emanuel hired him, maintains that the department’s new modus operandi includes building a strong knowledge within neighborhoods and is focused on the gang problem.
Some crime experts say it’s hard to pinpoint the cause for the spike in killings, but the mayor’s critics blame the spiralling gang problem on his budget decisions.
Budget cutbacks
After taking office, the mayor consolidated three police districts, combined the police and fire headquarters and slashed police spending by $67 million, mainly by removing more than 1,300 department jobs that had long gone unfilled.
Police union leaders maintain that Emanuel should have filled empty slots with additional officers, asserting that the city has been remiss in not filling hundreds of slots left by retiring officers in recent years.
“Every district in the city is running short on manpower,” said Pat Camden, a Fraternal Order of Police spokesman. “It’s penny-wise and dollar foolish.”
Superintendent McCarthy said that the department is hiring officers for jobs vacated by retirements, but some 450 positions are currently unfulfilled.
Emanuel has said he is using his experience in Washington with the 1994 crime bill, which provided billions of dollars for prevention programs, to direct resources beyond police work and towards the root causes of gang violence.
The mayor has added $8.5 million collected from unpaid debts owed to the city for thousands more summer jobs and positions for campers in the city’s park district and apprentice programs. The city is also working with community groups to build residents’ ability and willingness to speak out and work with authorities.
He has also introduced a new bill on the possession of marijuana that would mean adults caught with a small amount of the illegal drug would receive a fine instead of being arrested, which would allow police to spend more time going after big drug dealers and gang leaders and less time on the streets and in courtrooms. Chicago police make about 20,000 low-level marijuana possession arrests a year.
NATO preparation
Compare that approach to the one Emanuel took ahead of NATO, when city officials were bracing for thousands of protesters, including Occupy groups, unions and anti-war activists, all of whom pledged their demonstrations would be peaceful, to descend on Chicago.
In the months leading up to the summit, the Chicago police spent more than $1 million on riot gear, including a controversial long-range acoustic device (LRAD), a sound cannon used to disperse crowds.
The city also enlisted the help of hundreds of additional police officers from Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Charlotte-Mecklenburg, NC as well as seven hundred troopers from the Illinois State Police to provide support for its 3,100 strong force.
Some of the very protesters Emanuel feared led a peaceful march to his North Side home the day before the NATO leaders gathered in order to protest against other recent budget cuts, ones that included the closure of seven mental health clinics in the city.
The crux of the demonstrators’ message was that the mayor should rethink his priorities.
The following day, after clashes between riot-gear clad police and anarchist demonstrators near the convention center where President Barack Obama and others were meeting, Emanuel praised the ability of Chicago police to keep the peace.
“They did a tremendous job under a very stressful situation,” he said. “They made every one of us proud of the finest police department in this country.”
Unfortunately, Emanuel hasn’t given his officers sufficient resources to do so when the media circus has left town and the cameras aren’t rolling.