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| Ward09.com |
Mayor Rahm Emanuel was urged Wednesday to permanently reassign police officers to gang-ravaged South Side and West Side districts instead of taking the political path of least resistance and assigning 600 additional officers only temporarily.One promise, with the permanent reallocation of police officers to the city's hot spots we shouldn't have any bait trucks. Go into these hot spots aggressively but it's not necessary to be tricky like that!
“We cannot continue to just move things around temporarily to get us past the weekend. We need a bold approach to make the entire city safe by putting `em where they’re needed and not where they’re wanted,” said Far South Side Ald. Anthony Beale (9th), former chairman of the City Council’s Police Committee.
“You go downtown and you still see an officer on every corner. You see `em on the Riverwalk. If you go into the community, you don’t have that same presence. We need to make this entire city safe and move those resources around from one end to the other.”
Beale said the reallocation that police Supt. Eddie Johnson promised two years ago — but failed to deliver — can be accomplished without putting North Side police districts at risk.
Whether aldermen will stand for it in the runup to the 2019 election — or whether Emanuel would risk the political fallout — is another story entirely.
“They’re gonna scream bloody murder. I get that because they feel that their community is being sacrificed, and it’s not,” Beale said of his colleagues.
“Our city has a black eye, and we need to heal that black eye. Sometimes, you have to piss some people off in order to do the right thing. Leadership is about making decisions that are unpopular. It’s an unpopular decision to move officers away from certain areas. But it will be beneficial to the entire city.”
What do you all think? Will more police in the city's hot spots put a dent in the gun violence?
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