Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy vowed Monday to make sure officers are positioned to prevent downtown attacks like the weekend beating of a Michigan man attending a furniture convention here.
McCarthy also said the police department could have a “couple hundred” officers work overtime in neighborhoods throughout the city this summer to keep a lid on shootings, which spiraled upward in the first quarter of 2012.
McCarthy said he knew of three downtown mob attacks over the weekend, including the Michigan man jumped on North State; a couple robbed on the CTA Red Line, and a man beaten in the Gold Coast area.
- Chicago police on Monday outlined a new crime-fighting initiative.
Officers who are regularly making arrests and writing tickets will be able to get more time on the street and overtime pay, according to a memo released by the Fraternal Order of Police.
The move comes after a particularly violent weekend in Chicago, with at least eight dead and more than 40 injured in shootings throughout the city and a string of wilding incidents in the downtown area.
The "Violence Reduction Overtime Initiative" begins Thursday, and officers will be able to work Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays on their regularly-scheduled days off and scheduled furlough days.
Evidently, you sign up, you report to 61st and Racine, they deploy you. Anywhere.
Our dream would be to see everyone turn it down until there's a firm commitment to hire officers. That won't happen because (A) everyone needs a bit of money in these troubled times and (B) there's already a class of 200 on tap to be announced in the next week or three as a new part of Rahm's "strategy."