- As City Council budget hearings continued Wednesday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel was trying to deflect aldermanic calls to hire more police officers than already planned for next year.
CBS 2 [...] reports the fight against crime on the streets of Chicago might become a fight inside City Hall.
In 2011, there were 432 murders in Chicago all of last year, and there have been 426 so far this year.
So we might manage to pass 2011's totals in October leaving us two entire months of "bonus time." But don't worry, these brainiacs have it all figured out:
- During the Police Department’s budget hearing on Wednesday, Ald. James Balcer (11th) asked McCarthy, “Can you please tell me what is the difference about Chicago, and why we are seeing this level of violence?”
“That’s a big picture question,” McCarthy said.
And that's a bullshit answer.
- Ald. Ricardo Munoz (22nd) asked McCarthy, “Can you help me understand what you believe to be full-strength?”
“Full-strength” is a term McCarthy and the mayor have been using recently, when discussing the number of police officers they want on the street.
Emanuel and McCarthy said that means having 12,500 officers on the streets by the end of 2013.
12,500, which is 1,000 under the numbers we had just about ten years ago.
Here's a laugher of an admission from Rahm:
- The mayor wasn’t ignoring the aldermen who want more cops than he’s already planning to hire, but said said at an unrelated event on Wednesday that he’ll keep the force at full strength while putting more cops on the street, by using about 600 officers he’s already shifted off desk duty since taking office last spring.
“The police officers weren’t doing policing, they were doing paperwork. They were doing very good paperwork, but they weren’t doing policing. We’ve put them on the street,” Emanuel said. “And since that time burglaries are down 15 percent, auto thefts are down 14 percent, sexual assaults are down 8 percent.”
Rahm is hoping no one is noticing he's counting those officers twice. You and McJersey already moved those guys...or so we thought. Could it be they're lying again? Crime isn't down - it isn't being reported because people figure they have better things to do than sit around for 2 or 4 hours waiting for a car that might never show up. Call volume is up how much? OEMC overtime is how far over budget? We're busier than ever and can't catch a break - that isn't because crime is down. We're undermanned and crime is still ongoing.
And finally, get a load of this statement near the end of the article:
- Aldermen pushing for more cops might soon find themselves butting heads with the mayor and McCarthy over this issue.
“There’s no studies that show that more cops means less murders. It’s what those officers are doing,” McCarthy told the aldermen.
Maybe not, but we have a pretty strong empirical case that says if you're down over a thousand cops, the homicide rate ends up climbing. We'll leave it to the readers and pundits to figure that one out.