By Gary Washburn and David Heinzmann, The Chicago Tribune
In what Mayor Richard Daley is expected to bill as a major initiative to reduce the city’s alarming number of homicides, 450 gang crimes officers will be reassigned to help stem the tide of killings, City Hall and Police Department sources reported Monday.
Meanwhile, a new 100-officer “immediate response” unit will provide saturation patrols in areas where gang turf wars and other mayhem threatens to erupt. But the boundaries of the department’s 279 beats are expected to go virtually unchanged despite calls from some community leaders for a wholesale overhaul that would shift regular patrol officers from low-crime areas to more dangerous ones.
Under the new approach, gang crimes specialists now spread among the department’s 25 districts would be concentrated in five police “areas"--much larger geographical jurisdictions--in a strategy apparently designed to get them to violent hot spots more efficiently and in greater numbers.
Gangs and their participation in the drug trade are “the main source” of the disturbing homicide numbers and they are the main focus of the new efforts, said a city official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
City’s murder rate leads U.S.
One architect of the new plan is Matt Crowl, a senior mayoral aide and former federal prosecutor who was recruited in January with a mandate from Daley to lower the city’s murder rate.
Through May, Chicago’s total of 236 homicides was 11 percent higher than the comparable period of 2002. And a recent spike in violence pushed Chicago past the nation’s two largest cities, New York and Los Angeles, in the number of killings. As of Monday, Chicago was seven homicides ahead of last year’s pace.
Although New York has nearly three times the population of Chicago, and L.A. has 800,000 more residents, Chicago has had close to the same number of murders as the two cities in recent years. In 2001, Chicago had the most murders of any city in the country.
Putting gang crimes officers under more centralized control would be “a step in the right direction,” said Mark Donahue, president of the Fraternal Order of Police. Since the citywide Gang Crimes Unit was disbanded several years ago, intelligence efforts have faltered, he said.
The old unit “had a handle on the gangs. They were able to track the gangs and, once you track them, you track the narcotics trafficking as well. Since then, the organized gangs are back to the full strength and organization that they had in the late `80s and early `90s.”
The unit was disbanded after investigators discovered that one of its members, Joseph Miedzianowski, operated a drug ring in concert with gang members. Miedzianowski was sentenced in January to life in prison.
First Deputy Police Supt. Philip Cline traveled to both New York and Los Angeles recently in an attempt to come up with new strategies for Chicago.
“Apparently what he learned from the folks out there is that (beat realignment) was not the way to go,” the city official said. “He learned they have done everything but realign. New York has not (changed) beats in about 30 years.”
Police officials said in January that a redeployment plan would include a redrawn beat map.
A beat is a geographical area within a district. In simple terms, high-crime beats tend to be smaller and more heavily patrolled. Aldermen who represent violence-plagued neighborhoods have been seeking a remap that would bring them more officers.
Aldermen from relatively safe neighborhoods, meanwhile, have resisted the notion of any change that would leave their wards with bigger beats and, thus, fewer patrol officers.
Creation of the immediate response team could cost each district four officers, sources said. The unit, with handpicked members, would saturate developing hot spots as needed in an attempt to short-circuit violence.
Crime information will be reviewed on a daily basis under the new effort as analysts tap the department’s computerized data system to spot potential trends, officials said.
Officers would be deployed “ahead of the crime wave ... based on trends so they can get there before the violence hits,” said one source. “If there is a shooting in one area, they anticipate retaliation and put officers there before it happens.”
Meanwhile, the effectiveness of school police patrols is being studied to determine whether some of the officers assigned to them should be redeployed elsewhere. But nothing has been decided yet, the source said.
Focus on prevention
Police spokesman David Bayless said that officials will announce “a series of anti-violence” measures at a Tuesday morning news conference, but he declined to provide details.
Chief of Patrol James Maurer also declined comment on the new plan. But he said the department is trying to perfect methods already in use. “We just keep working at it. None of this stuff is brand new,” he said.
Indeed, police began testing pieces of the new plan more than a month ago. On May 8, Supt. Terry Hillard launched added patrols in the Englewood and Back of the Yards neighborhoods in response to the shootings of two children caught in gang crossfire. The focus was in an area around the common borders of the Englewood, Deering and Chicago Lawn districts where there had been a number of shootings. Officials employed mostly tactical, special operations and saturation teams of officers.
Separately, in the hours after a Latin Kings leader was slain June 4 at a barber shop in the heart of Vice Lords turf on the West Side, police scrambled tactical teams onto the streets in beefed-up numbers to quell the threat of retaliation.
Daley, Cline and Hillard--who has announced he will retire in August-- are expected to attend Tuesday’s news conference.
The mayor has been telegraphing at least some of what is expected to be announced.