With story after story breaking, tying Emanuel to a police cover-up over the shooting of a black teen, the bloody beginning for 2016 has been equally damaging to the mayor and the Chicago Police Department, according to an AP story published Monday.
In a news release yesterday, the Police Department reported 51 homicides were committed in the city last month as compared to 29 in January 2015. Even worse, the number of shooting incidents rose more than 100%, from 119 last January to a whopping 242 last month. The number of shooting victims closely mirrored shooting incidents with 136 people shot last January and 292 shot last month in Chicago.
As the city devolved into a record-breaking spree of homicides and shooting incidents, Chicago’s leaders from the mayor to the police have been unable to determine what is driving the violence. “We can’t put our finger on” specific reasons for the increase, the city’s interim police superintendent, John Escalante, said. Escalante did say the sharp increase in gun violence coincided with an equally dramatic decrease in the number of street stops made in January. While “street stops” diminished the department has struggled to regain public trust following the release of a video of a white officer fatally shooting a black teen.
The city and its Police Department recently changed policies, adding lengthier forms for police to fill out after making stops. Prior to the new policy, relatively brief contact cards were required to be filled out by officers after making a stop. The added lengthy paperwork necessary after each encounter with a potential suspect dramatically slowed police work in the city, according to the interim chief. Escalante added that gang conflicts are fueled by social media, however that is the case in most large cities in the country because access to social media is readily available.
Escalante says the added paperwork takes longer for officers to fill out, and it could be preventing them from making more stops. He said officers are going through training now to help them deal with the new forms. It is not clear how the double workload of officers having to attend extra training to fill out forms while having to fill out longer forms is affecting their work.
Chicago has become notorious for its extreme gun violence since 2012 when homicides streaked past 500 killed, much higher than any other city in the country. Chicago’s Police Department responded by instituting new crime-fighting measures and spending millions of dollars on overtime for putting more officers on the street. The measures saw homicides fall to around 400 in each of the next two years and in 2014 the city saw the fewest homicides in decades.
However last year the number of homicides and shooting incidents spiked again. While 2016 starting out logging the bloodiest January at 16 years, Escalante said officers have expressed concerns “about being the next viral video. Even when they’re doing something right, they’re concerned that their actions will be questioned and they will be the one that goes viral.”
It is unclear how the leaders of Chicago plan to protect residents of the city from violent crimes other than filling out longer forms and attending classes to assist them in doing so. For his part, in October, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said officers are going “fetal,” pulling back and second-guessing themselves for fear that scrutiny of their actions would get them into trouble.
