- Of course, many factors contribute to an uptick in urban violence. But the current crime wave raises questions about the decisions made by McCarthy—an outsider who came here armed with a playbook of policing strategies he learned on the East Coast—and the man who has been his primary supporter, Mayor Emanuel. Why don’t the crime-fighting strategies that worked so effectively in New York and Newark seem to be working here? And if they aren’t working, why isn’t McCarthy changing them? If the violence continues at the same troubling rate, the city will surely demand answers, and McCarthy, who was once compared to George Washington, John Wayne, and Braveheart, could receive a much less flattering title: ex-superintendent.
The article runs four pages and covers a lot of ground. There's a bunch of self-aggrandizing BS, some decent anecdotes, some biting insight and commentary.
There's also an incidental clue to why homicides are climbing following Phil Cline's successful drive to keep the numbers under 500:
Even so, it’s hard to argue with the effectiveness of specialized units. Consider what happened when Cline began using them to target gangs, guns, and drugs in certain neighborhoods on the South and West Sides. Chicago went from being the murder capital of the nation in 2003, with 601 people killed, to 453 the next year (see "Murder Capital of America?"). That was the first time since the 1960s that fewer than 500 murders had been recorded.
Homicides remained under the 500 mark until 2008. The previous fall, in the wake of ongoing scandal involving the rogue officers, Dana Starks, the interim superintendent between Cline and Weis, shelved the specialized units. Homicides began to rise. After Weis took the job, he convinced Mayor Daley in September 2008 to reinstate the units, promising that, as chief, he’d implement better training and more accountability.
Interesting. After SOS was disbanded in 2008, homicides jumped above 500. After MSF was instituted and increased in size, homicides dipped back under 500 for the 3 succeeding years.
Now in 2012, after MSF is gone and citywide units are a fading memory, guess which number is creeping toward 500 again? It's almost like having a few hundred guys and gals that you could deploy on a nightly basis to hotspots actually kept the retaliatory killings to a minimum.