IT’S NOT GARRY McCARTHY’S FAULT

2/24/13

The Chicago City Council’s Black Caucus is starting to put pressure on Mayor Rahm Emanuel to fire Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy.   According to 21^st Ward Alderman Howard Brookins, chairman of the Caucus

“If things don’t change and we get closer to the election, I won’t be able to stop my members from calling for his (McCarthy’s) head because the public is calling for our heads.  The clock is ticking on all of us.”

One can understand the frustration of Chicago’s residents, especially those who live in the areas hardest hit by crimes.  In January alone, 42 murders were committed in Chicago, the most in over ten years.   This came after a 16% jump in homicides in 2012.   Those of us fortunate to live outside what might be called, without too much exaggeration, the killing zone are perhaps a bit scared by the crime wave in the city and embarrassed at what it is doing to our city’s international reputation.   But those who live in the most affected areas are outright terrified, and they are letting their aldermen know it.

Superintendent McCarthy makes a convenient scapegoat for the problems afflicting this once, but now only in the eyes of its most fervent friends, great city.   But the convenient thing is usually not the right thing, and this is especially true in this case.   The problems behind the homicides are way beyond the control of Garry McCarthy.   Three of those reasons, in increasing degree of depth, come immediately to mind.

--Chicago doesn’t have enough cops and all the shifting of assignments and other sleights of hand engaged in by Superintendent McCarthy and Mayor Emanuel cannot change the arithmetic.  More police are retiring than are entering the police academy.  We cannot increase the number of new officers because the city is broke.   Chicago is broke because Mayor Daley spent the city into oblivion with grandiose plans apparently designed primarily to enrich those closest to him and perhaps ancillarily to benefit the city.   The externals were taken care of; the city looks beautiful, or at least better than it used to, in most places.  But beneath the surface, the city was rotting.  That rot manifested itself not only in the city’s deteriorating infrastructure but also in the neglect of basic services, like hiring enough police officers.  

Mayor Emanuel has done nothing, other than the aforementioned shell games with police assignments, to remedy the problem.   While he insists he will not raise taxes, he has no qualms about raising other fees, such as water bills and more ancillary items.    But the revenue goes elsewhere…to infrastructure in the case of the water bill increases but also to such trendy piffles as something called Choose Chicago with its ambiguous mission of promoting tourism; see my 2/21/13 piece CHOOSE CHICAGO…OR CHOOSE MORE POLICE OFFICERS?   Garry McCarthy cannot hire more police officers; only Mayor Emanuel can hire more police officers.

Chicago still has a higher ratio of police officers to population than New York or Los Angeles.   This suggests that some long term reforms are needed in the deployment of manpower.   But that is a long term issue; the city has to address the crime problem NOW.

--While not enough people mention it, at least not openly, Mayor Daley’s grand plan to tear down the high rise CHA public housing projects did more to increase crime in the city and the suburbs than anything else in the last ten or twenty years.   Mr. Daley trumpeted this plan as a kind of humanitarian gesture, freeing people from the grip of the often crime-ridden, run-down replacement slums that were the CHA projects.  One suspects, though, that the people who benefited most were friends of the Mayor in the real estate world, who wanted for development what had become the prime locations on which the projects sat.   

Whatever the motives, and whether or not the former public housing residents benefited from having their CHA apartments replaced with Section 8 vouchers, there is no doubt that the spreading throughout the city and suburbs of the criminal element that made life so miserable in the projects exacerbated crime throughout the city.    Areas that had formerly had relatively little criminal activity, especially black middle class neighborhoods like Chatham, are now having horrendous crime problems.   And nothing has improved, indeed, things have gotten worse, in areas like Englewood that have had crime problems for decades now.

At least when the projects were up and operating, crime was, to some extent, isolated and concentrated and could be more easily controlled by focused police details.   Now that crime has spread throughout the city, it is much more difficult to track and counter.   We are talking unpleasant trade-offs here, but trade-offs that indeed exist and must be considered.

--The Reverend Jimmy Daniels, a Chicago pastor who supports Superintendent McCarthy, said

“I’m 100% behind the superintendent.  The problems are the parents…absent parents.  The (City Council Black) caucus and the ministers need to stop blaming the mayor and the police superintendent.   The gun alone doesn’t shoot people.  People shoot people.”

Some might be quick to reject out of hand what Mr. Daniels and prefer to attack him as a pawn of the Mayor.  Yours truly thinks he might be too quick to exonerate the Mayor.  But all of us would do well to consider the wisdom of what Reverend Daniels is saying; when the family is broken, no politician or bureaucrat can have much impact on the problems that result.  

Scapegoating is easy.   When the team is losing, fire the coach.   When the business is losing money, fire the CEO.   When crime is up, fire the police superintendent.   But the appearance of action, in the form of scapegoating, often serves as a means of rationalizing not taking the much more difficult actions that have a chance of addressing the underlying problems.

See my two books, The Chairman, A Novel of Big City Politics and The Chairman’s Challenge, A Continuing Novel of Big City Politics, for further illumination on how things work in Chicago and Illinois politics.