Leaders in Lincoln Park say they could stomach a plan to consolidate two area-police stations, as long as the move doesn’t draw down officer presence in the neighborhood.

As part of his proposal to cut a financial path through an expected $635.7 million deficit in next year’s city budget, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced last week that he intends to implement a number of facility mergers within the city’s police and fire departments in the coming months.

In addition to combining the main headquarters for both forces, Emanuel stated that he plans to dissolve three police districts in the city — the 19th District “Belmont” station on Chicago’s North Side, the 13th District office on the West Side and the 21st District station on the South Side — and merge the territories into nearby districts, consolidating the respective stations in the process.

The mayor said this move, along with a host of cuts in other services, would allow the city to make investments in infrastructure, “while creating a $20 million safety net in the City’s Rainy Day fund,” all without raising sales and property taxes.

The entire reorganization of the two departments would net the city a total of $82 million in savings, according to an Oct. 12 release from Emanuel’s office.

Chicago Police Department Supt Garry McCarthy threw his weight behind Emanuel’s proposal, suggesting that the merger would free up officers from administrative duties and allow for “more boots on the ground working in districts.”

“This consolidation plan will create a strong and sustainable organizational structure, allowing officers to perform their duties more effectively and with less bureaucracy,” wrote McCarthy in a statement on Friday. Earlier this month, McCarthy and Emanuel advanced a promise for added foot patrols by announcing that nearly 140 Chicago police officers would be relocated from jail lockups to district beats.

Reactions to Emanuel’s plan have been swift and critical from some camps.

Within days of the announcement, nearly 1,500 residents had signed an online petition calling for the continued operation of the Wood station in the 13th District.

“Removing this station would diminish safety in our neighborhood by removing guaranteed police presence,” the petition read. The webpage for the petition included a letter from Ald. Scott Waguespack (32nd), one of the many leaders whose wards overlap the district, in which he stated his opposition to the plan.

But CPD spokeswoman Sarah Hamilton said that the consolidations would do anything but bring down police efficiency in the affected communities.

“The number of officers on the street working in the districts will increase as a result of this consolidation — in fact, the consolidated districts will have the highest number of police officers in the city,” she wrote in an email.

And that outcry hasn’t reverberated on the North Side, where the proposal would see operations at the 19th District’s Belmont station, 2452 W. Belmont Ave., be packed up and relocated to the 23rd District’s Town Hall station at 850 W. Addison St., in the city’s Wrigleyville area.

Ald. Michele Smith (43rd), whose ward bleeds into the bottom half of the 19th district, said that, in a way, the plan could be a benefit to her constituency.

“The 23rd District headquarters is actually more convenient to us than the 19th [District] headquarters,” she said. “It’s a little closer.”

Smith noted that the move would also reduce the number of districts in the ward from three to two stations.

“It might ease communications for us, and in fact draw a little more attention to the southern half of the [23rd] district,” she said.

The alderman said that when she spoke to McCarthy on the possible consolidation, the superintendent had assured her that there would be “no impact on the level of policing” in the ward.

“Therefore, my initial response is to let them do what they need to do to administratively run their department,” Smith said.

That pledge could be the key to wider support for the proposal from Lincoln Park residents, who have routinely fought back at the mere mention of policing cuts in the neighborhood.

That’s because they’ve got a lot to lose. Between 2000 to 2009, incidents of aggravated assault and battery with a firearm in the area decreased by 72.2 percent, dropping from nearly 140 incidents annually to less than 40 a year, according to CPD data. Reported robberies fell 31 percent during the same period.

Last year, when former CPD Superintendent Jody Weis suggested that the department should redeploy units from lower crime districts into higher crime areas in the city, neighbors in the North Side district were quick to warn against backpedaling.

At the time, Lincoln Park resident Brad Hart said that tinkering with the area’s cop configuration could loosen the neighborhood’s strong grip on crime.

“We pay a lot for that, and we expect to see that,” said Hart, who serves as the chair of the Crime Prevention Committee for the Wrightwood Neighbors Association, in December.

But Hart, whose group is served by 19th District police, recently told Skyline that he didn’t feel as threatened by Emanuel’s vision.

“If there’s fat in the police department that can be cut, then great,” he said. “We are just concerned about losing police coverage.”

Hart said that he was aware of about 215 police officers currently working beats in the 19th District — a figure that he didn’t expect to go down as a result of the plan.

“We can pretty much live with that,” he said.

McCarthy is expected to meet with residents in the 19th District in the next few weeks to discuss the consolidation.

---

By Tom from Lakeview
Posted: 01/30/2012 9:29 PM

You can't know the neighborhood too well if you identify Clark St. as Lincoln Ave.