Pubdate: Thu, 24 Feb 2005
Source: Joplin Globe, The (MO)
Copyright: 2005 The Joplin Globe
Contact:  http://www.joplinglobe.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/859
Author: George Will, Columnist
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Chicago

BATTLING DRUG GANGS IN CHICAGO

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. 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.

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.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake