What Chicago really needs
Easter weekend was Chicago’s bloodiest since New Year’s, with 45 shootings, at least two of them fatal — a bad sign heading into the warmer months.
The Windy City’s only consolation is that it’s doing better than last year: 915 shootings so far, vs. 955 in the same period in 2016. Homicides are also down, from 171 to 166.
But the numbers are still higher than New York’s, though Chicago has about one-third the Big Apple’s population.
And the NYPD continues to bring its own crime stats down, year after year — progress it’s continued to deliver (with occasional setbacks) ever since 1993, when then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton fundamentally changed the city’s course with the shift to community policing strategies and CompStat accountability for managers.
Chicago’s leaders keep talking a good game: “We cannot afford to lose another generation to the gangs and to the streets and to the guns and to the violence,” said Mayor Rahm Emanuel last year as he announced a three-part plan to combat crime. Maybe his voters are happy with those slightly lower numbers . . .
After two decades-plus of rising safety, New Yorkers approve of the NYPD’s results so strongly that even uber-progressive Mayor de Blasio hasn’t tried to turn back the clock. Maybe Chicago needs to elect a Rudy-style Republican to really turn the tide.