The mayor and the police superintendent are announcing a new crackdown on crime in two of Chicago's toughest neighborhoods. Statistics show that 25 percent of all Chicago shootings happen in the Englewood neighborhood on the South Side and the Lawndale neighborhood on the West Side, so that's where 100 more officers will go.
Officers will be pulling over people on the streets and sidewalks, looking for drugs, guns and gang members. The new initiative in police Districts 7 and 11 is called "violence reduction". The officers will come from the gang enforcement and narcotics units.
"It has a lot to do with geographical accountability," Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said. "For the eight or nine months, we have been here we have been deploying more policemen into the districts, holding the district commanders accountable for what's happening. This is the next phase. This is geographical accountability for our gang enforcement unit, our narcotics unit and our detectives."
McCarthy said several zones in the targeted districts will be focused on for "saturated enforcement," and some violent narcotics locations will be targeted by the narcotics division.
The policing effort will join with social services, faith-based and community organizations, McCarthy said.
With the redistribution of resources, advocates are concerned some neighborhoods will lose police coverage, but McCarthy said that would not be the case.
"We're not walking away from one neighborhood to save another. Every neighborhood in the city will have narcotics enforcement, every neighborhood in the city will have gang enforcement personnel geographically accountable for what's happening there," McCarthy said. "This is focusing our resources on people, places and things."
McCarthy said part of the plan will also be a method of prosecution under which certain individuals will be focused on more highly for prosecution for all their crimes.
"Once you become a victim or an offender of gun violenc,e you become four times more likely to be involved in it again. So it's never really a mystery who it is who is going to be the shooter or the victim of the shooting. It's usually people whoa have been involved before," McCarthy said.
In addition to crime efforts, the police force has been coming under scrutiny for its preparation for May's NATO and G8 summits in Chicago. Critics have said the police department isn't adequately training and supplying its police.
McCarthy said the department has been learning from other cities that have held the summits and is prepared.
"We're told by the folks at the national level who have done this in the past that our training is above and beyond anything they have seen in municipal police departments. We already have a plan, even though we can't finalize it because we have to wait for the footprints and the specifics of who is going where, but we're read to go. This is going to be an exciting time in the City of Chicago," McCarthy said.
