Political Sniping Won't End 'Carnage' in Chicago
And, three, to Trump's conservative following, I am sure his mention of "the Feds" was interpreted as code for martial law, which is the sort of draconian measure that often is favored by people who don't actually live in the affected neighborhoods.
Hardly a week goes by that I don't hear from a concerned reader who wants to know why martial law has not been imposed to retake violence-plagued streets on the city's South and West sides.
It's not that kind of crisis, I tell them. Chicago's South and West sides are not Aleppo or Mosul, although on a noisy night they can sound like it. Armed troops are useful in quelling riots or guerrilla uprisings. Chicago's recent violence tends to come from domestic quarrels or petty beefs between small neighborhood cliques that turn violent, experts say, and lead to retaliatory shootings.
The city had 762 homicides last year, higher than New York and Los Angeles combined. But morale is so low in the department, according to the Chicago Tribune, police street stops have fallen by 82 percent over the previous year.
That's one of the messages in a year-long review that the U. S. Department of Justice recently released. It describes long-standing patterns and practices of excessive force, civil liberties violations and poor training of officers.
Result: toxic relations between police and the communities they serve. Witnesses don't cooperate, crimes don't get solved and police officers are further endangered.
National Guard can assist police in some situations, but most of them are not trained to be police. Putting them on the streets could invite more abuses that make police community relations even worse.
The Trump administration could help Chicago buy more equipment, hire personnel and beef up community policing training programs to gain more neighborhood cooperation.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel welcomes White House help. The city's too broke for him to afford to say anything else.
Unfortunately, Trump said back in August that Chicago's crime problems could be solved by "being very much tougher." Why? He says he was told by "very top police" that a tougher stance could end the city's violence problem in a week.
Right. If that were true, it would have happened long ago. The elections are over. It's time for Chicago and the White House to drop the politics and pick up some practical solutions.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
(c) 2017 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
