At Issue: Sending in the Feds
Ald. Anthony Beale of the Far South Side 9th Ward may have had the most germane response to President Donald Trump’s threat to “send in the Feds” if Chicago can’t do something about its rising murder rate. “What does it even mean?” Beale asked. “It’s so vague.”
The Chicago Sun-Times reported that the White House “did not respond to a request for clarification on what he meant by ‘send in the Feds.’”
Trump may have intended nothing more than to stir things up and distract attention from real policies his administration is rolling out. If so, he succeeded, albeit briefly.
Reporters tried to lay out what the options for federal intervention were — and corrected Trump’s false charge that two people were killed in Chicago while former President Obama gave a farewell address at McCormick Place on Jan. 10.
After Trump tweeted about the 24 percent increase in homicides so far this month, hundreds of police officers in tactical, gang, saturation and mission teams had regular days off canceled for the weekend. “If the number of killings for January were to come in lower than last year, that would allow [Mayor Rahm] Emanuel to try to counter Trump’s narrative,” the Chicago Tribune pointed out.
A police department spokesperson said “the staffing adjustment was unrelated to recent attention” from Trump, the Tribune reported.
And two days after Trump called on Emanuel to “smarten up” and “toughen up,” the mayor held a huge media event at the 7th District police station in Englewood to tout a new “smart policing strategy” involving new surveillance cameras and gunshot detection technology monitored at a “crime-fighting intel center” in the station.
Emanuel is spending $1.1 million for two intelligence centers to monitor surveillance cameras in the 7th and 11th districts on the South and West Sides.
The ACLU cited a recent Inspector General report that found the city is not enforcing its own rules about surveillance cameras — particularly in police stations, where there’s no control over who can use the cameras. “Until the city has adequate privacy policies, follows them, and conducts audits to make sure they are followed, there should be a moratorium on new cameras,” spokesperson Ed Yohnka told View From the Ground. “In any case, there should be public hearings before new cameras are installed in any neighborhood.”
At the Intercept, Jamie Kalven of the Invisible Institute talks about Trump’s tweets and recent developments in Chicago, which present “an opportunity for Mayor Emanuel to assume a national leadership role” on the issue of police reform.
VIOLENCE AND JOBLESSNESS
“The increase in gun violence from 2015 to 2016 was much larger than for other crimes, and the surge came suddenly,” with numbers rising sharply in January of 2016, researchers from the University of Chicago Crime Lab wrote in the Sun-Times. The reason for that isn’t clear – including the role played by a dramatic drop in the number of street stops by police officers that same month; reducing the number of stops hasn’t impacted crime rates in other cities.
But the Crime Lab researchers say it’s clear that reducing violence will require major investments, including perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars for social programs and tens of millions of dollars on improving policing.
New York and Chicago had similar murder rates a generation ago, but since then New York has experienced a sustained decrease in its murder rate, now almost 90 percent lower. “Many experts believe that a variety of policing changes were responsible for a large part of that drop, including big increases in the number of police, and world-class training for both new and experienced officers.”
“The question is whether Chicago will make the investments necessary to address this problem,” they write — and “whether Chicago will follow in thefootsteps of New York or go the way of struggling cities such as Baltimore, Detroit and St. Louis that suffer even higher murder rates than Chicago.”
Meanwhile, Chicago is “a national leader in joblessness among young people, particularly young black people living in highly segregated neighborhoods wracked by violence,” the Tribune reports, citing a new study from the Great Cities Institute at UIC. And the city is making “scant progress” on the problem.
Setting Chicago apart from other large cities are “severe racial disparities” in youth joblessness. In Chicago, the gap between African Americans and whites in their 20s who were out of work and out of school was three times the national average. And Chicago’s racial gap appears to have gotten worse in the past decade.
Five neighborhoods accounting for a third of homicides last year had jobless rates ranging from 79 to 92 percent for teens and 49 to 70 percent for young adults, the Tribune reported.
“If [President Trump] wants to involve the federal government in helping to address our problem of violence, then send us federal dollars for summer employment, jobs programs and dollars to revitalize our neighborhoods,” said Teresa Cordova, director of the institute and co-author of the study.
IN THE NEWS
Field trainers: The Chicago Tribune reports that two officers currently in training to become field training officers were involved in fatal shootings which have cost the city millions of dollars in legal settlements. Both shootings appear to have violated CPD policy on shooting at vehicles.
DOJ’s recent investigation of CPD found that its field training program “undermines effective and lawful policing,” in part due to a flawed selection process for field training officers that overlooks most disciplinary infractions.
Raoul Mosqueda shot and killed Darius Pinex as he tried to drive away from a traffic stop in 2011. The city paid $3.5 million to Pinex’s family after Mosqueda gave testimony that was contradicted by recordings of police dispatches, raising doubts about the lawfulness of the traffic stop.
Michael St. Clair II shot William Hope Jr. to death in a traffic stop in 2010. A federal jury awarded Hope’s family $4.6 million after ruling that officers unlawfully detained Hope and used unlawful force.
Pinex’s mother joined activists Monday protesting Mosqueda’s promotion.
Another torture case: The Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission has ruled that Javan Deloney, currently serving a life sentence for a 1991 triple murder, was tortured into confessing by detectives supervised by Cmdr. Jon Burge. Last year the commission found that one of Deloney’s co-defendants, Ivan Smith, was tortured. The commission has 250 claims pending, including 74 related to Burge.
Among dozens of wrongful conviction lawsuits currently pending against thecity, at least two involve allegations from the Burge era, a city attorney told theCity Council’s Finance Committee. The city has spent over $100 million on Burge-related litigation.
Murder clearance rate drops: CPD’s already-low murder clearance rate dropped further last year, WBEZ reports. Chicago detectives closed less than 20 percent of last year’s homicides — “an extraordinary figure” and “very low clearance rate” according to one criminologist. The rate has dropped steadily since the 1990s, when CPD closed two-thirds of its murders within a year – a rate close to national averages.
Cellphone surveillance: Attorney Jerry Boyle filed a federal lawsuit on Jan. 12 charging CPD’s secret cellphone tracking system violates individual privacy and should require a warrant. Police intercepted information from Boyle’s cellphone during a protest in 2015, according to the lawsuit. CPD spent more than half a million dollars on cellphone tracking technology from 2005 to 2010, according to Boyle.
Law Department sanctioned: A lawsuit in which city attorneys once again face sanctions for failing to produce evidence is raising questions regarding thethoroughness of a recent review of the department by former U.S. Attorney Dan Webb — and whether changes the department has implemented since then go far enough.
Consent decrees: In the wake of Trump’s nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions as attorney general, local police unions across the country say they want to renegotiate consent decrees they decry as ineffective and burdensome, Reuters reports. That would be a mistake, according to a former Justice Department attorney writing for the Marshall Project, who cites comments by rank-and-file officers among evidence that consent decrees work to improve policing.
