Pubdate: Thu, 24 Feb 2005
Source: Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal (MS)
Copyright: 2005 Journal Publishing Company
Contact:  http://www.djournal.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/823
Author: George Will

HARD AS A BASEBALL, CHICAGO'S COP RULES TOUGH

CHICAGO - He looks like the actor Wilford Brimley - round as a beach
ball; grandfatherly gray mustache - but Philip J. Cline, this city's
police superintendent, is, like his city, hard as a baseball. And as
they say in baseball, he puts up numbers.

Actually, he and his officers have driven some crucial numbers down.
Last year homicides reached a 38-year low of 448, 25 percent below
2003's total of 600, which was lower than the 2002 and 2001 totals of
654 and 668.

Nationally, homicides declined steadily after the peak of
dealer-on-dealer violence in the crack cocaine epidemic of the late
1980s and early 90s. But the decline was slow in Chicago, where in
2001, 2002 and 2003 it ranked second, first and second among cities in
the number of murders, not just the murder rate. In the last third of
the 20th century, Chicago violence killed more than 28,000 people -
the population of many Illinois towns.

Chicago and Baghdad

In an American city, as in Baghdad, which is about the size of
Chicago, the key to policing against violence is intelligence and
other cooperation from a population that trusts the police. Which
means, Cline says, replacing random patrols with strategic deployments
of officers.

He says 50 percent of Chicago's homicides are gang-related. Gang
membership, now an estimated 65,000 strong, used to be a rite of
passage for young men. Now it is increasingly a career choice for men
turning the gangs into business organizations selling drugs and
investing the proceeds in, among other things, real estate. One-third
of the drug customers are suburbanites.

Video on a police department laptop displays facets of the problem.
One clip shows dealers giving away, in broad daylight, free samples to
droves of potential customers. Another clip shows mass marketing as
customers, again in midday, are walked, in groups of several dozen,
across a street to a playground to make their purchases. Another clip
shows a violent felon being released from Joliet prison, heading for
Chicago but first visiting Indiana, thereby violating his terms of
release. He was rearrested two hours out of prison. "A land speed
record," says Cline.

Fewer than 10 percent of Chicago murder victims are white. And as a
mordant student of murder says, "There's always a correlation between
homicides and ice cream trucks." Most victims are killed in hot
weather, from May to October, mostly in July and August, when people
are mingling - and often drinking - on stoops and street corners, and
are irritable.

The crime-infested Robert Taylor high-rise housing projects on the
South Side have been closed and the Cabrini-Green project on the near
North Side is being closed, which means a jostling for social space
among displaced drug dealers. Cline says there were about 100 open-air
drug markets in the city last year. Police closed about half of them,
producing more displacements as markets opened elsewhere in the city.
This process is frustrating but constructive because it means some
slowing of the drug trade. But it can also cause an uptick in violence
as dealers contest desirable turf.

It's serious money

Cline says that when 100 markets are each pulling in $5,000 a day,
serious money is at stake. Some of the money buys the guns that settle
struggles for turf. Last year police seized 10,509 guns - 29 a day.
They probably will seize as many this year; they did in 2003. But this
is not an exercise in bailing the ocean: Stiff sentences for gun
possession, and stiffer ones for firing a gun, put a high price tag on
regarding a gun as fashion necessity for the well-accessorized young
man.

Last year about 18,000 of the inmates released from Illinois prisons
came back to Chicago; perhaps 25,000 will this year. Some of the
returning convicts come home expecting to reclaim their shares of the
drug business. Some of the younger dealers will decide it is easier to
kill them than accommodate them.

A new "shot spotter" technology can detect the trajectory of a bullet
and direct a camera that scans 360 degrees. Soon there will be 80 such
cameras watching strategic intersections. There is nothing
surreptitious about this - indeed, the cameras have blue lights and
Chicago Police Department logos. The CPD wants dealers to know the
area is being watched. The cost of the cameras is paid by seized
assets from dealers. So, Cline says contentedly, "they're paying to
surveil themselves."

Cline says the message to the neighborhoods is: "We will take the
corner back. You must hold the corner." Again, as in Baghdad.

George Will writes for The Washington Post.
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MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin