Chicago police Supt. Jody Weis recently told City Council that he will unveil a plan to redeploy units from lower crime districts into higher crime areas in the city by the end of the year.

In the North Side’s 18th District, the frequency of crime is nothing likely it used to be.

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 data from the Chicago Police Department. Reported robberies fell 31 percent during the same period.

Ald. Vi Daley (43rd) would like to maintain that trend.

“We need to keep the same manpower in our community,” said Daley, whose Lincoln Park neighborhood falls within the district.

In addition to keeping rowdy late-night bar patrons at bay, Daley said that police presence in her ward is an active deterrent for car and home break-ins.

Muggings are also still a problem on Daley’s turf, as many residents who carry iPhones and other expensive items are easy prey for thieves looking to turn a quick buck.

“I need that visibility and the businesses need the protection,” she said.

But the troubles in Lincoln Park seem relatively innocuous when compared to the culture of violence that exists in neighborhoods just a few miles south of the district.

Because of that reality, Daley’s jurisdiction and others like it might see a decrease in CPD presence in the next year, as a controversial plan to reassign Chicago’s police force across the city could pull officers from the streets of the North Side.

These officers are assigned to the department’s 279 beats — small, bounded areas, usually no bigger than a few blocks, patrolled by a single police vehicle.

The proposal for officer relocation comes at the tail end of a dismal year for violent crime in Chicago, where the number of homicides will likely toll over 400 in 2010. Last week, two CPD officers — one off-duty — were killed in separate incidents on the South and Southwest sides, bringing the tally to five slain police officers this year.

During a budget hearing in late October, Weis promised that the reallocation would “better balance the workload of our officers throughout the entire city,” as quoted in an article by the Chicago Sun-Times.

“We will reallocate our resources to address where the crimes actually are,” he said.

The department currently staffs 11,187 police officers, down by 400 since 2005, according to data recently collected from the city by the Chicago News Cooperative.

South Side leaders who stand to gain police have hailed the policy. Ald. Anthony Beale (9th), whose territory encompasses the Roseland and Pullman neighborhoods, said that the plan was long overdue.

But the pitch has been met with disdain by aldermen in predominantly white areas of the city, such as Ald. Tom Allen (38th), who warned that the policy would further drain CPD presence in his neighborhood, which is already suffering from the loss of beat officers reassigned to anti-violence units, he said.

Allen’s doubts may have been confirmed by a recent of analysis of police data by the Sun-Times, which concluded that Weis’ proposal could be a bad turn for communities on the North and Northwest sides.

The study — which looked at district-by-district figures based on the frequency of 911 calls and “radio assignments pending” calls, also known as “RAP” events — revealed that these areas had the lowest volume of calls.

That report showed that areas on the South and Southwest sides were home to the highest call levels, meaning that a reallocation plan could be a blessing for these neighborhoods in need of additional coverage.

But for Lincoln Park resident Brad Hart, that logic doesn’t sit well.

“We believe that we are a lower crime area because of the police presence that we do have,” said Hart, who serves as chair of the Crime Prevention Committee for the Wrightwood Neighbors Association, a resident group in the DePaul area.

Hart’s organization is one of many in the city that hosts meetings through the CPD’s Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy program, an initiative that encourages resident involvement in addressing criminal activity in the community.

The reduction in police presence has already started in his neighborhood, he said, as the CAPS forum, which until recently was held every two months, has been cut back to quarterly meetings. The scheduling change was made, said Hart, because some of the police who attended the meetings were assigned to other beats.

If this trend is augmented by further officer departure, Hart said, the strides that police have made in curtailing crime in the neighborhood could be undone over time.

“People come to our area because it’s safer than a lot of other places in the city,” he said. “We pay a lot for that, and we expect to see that.”

Weis’ plan in effect stirs an old debate among city leaders and police officials; one that probes the option of designating new beat boundaries to reflect needed coverage within the department’s districts. But regardless of historic spikes in crime and several similar proposals mad in the past, the CPD hasn’t redrawn its beats in decades.

Such an action would have varied implications for leaders like Ald. Walter Burnett Jr. (27th), whose ward runs through a spectrum of crime-affected areas.

From East Garfield Park — where nearly 1,500 accounts of aggravated assault and battery were reported in 2009 — and the comparatively safe pockets of Greek Town, to the once heavily-patrolled Cabrini Green public housing block on the Near North Side, Burnett’s jurisdiction serves as a cross section of where focus from the city’s police force has been and where it might be heading in the coming years. Burnett could stand to lose and gain from the proposal — but he doesn’t see it that way.

“All communities right now are becoming a little challenged with crime,” he said. “In my higher crime areas, [residents’] lives are literally in danger. In lower crime areas, the biggest thing is people breaking into cars.”

Burnett said that the reallocation plan “makes a lot of sense,” and suggested that focusing on eradicating criminal threats in the neighborhoods from which they are sourced might prevent them from bleeding into other parts of the city.

He equated the reallocation plan to the annual reassignments that the department doles out during heavily trafficked events such as the Taste of Chicago and the city’s many ethnic parades.

“It’s nothing unusual from what the police department has been doing anyway,” said Burnett. “The only difference is that now they’re addressing it more toward violent crime in a community.”

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By Boyee from Mid-North (Lincoln Park)
Posted: 12/03/2010 8:15 PM

Lincoln Park still needs cops, also! All the muggings by people coming to the neighborhood from the South and West sides need to end and police presence can help make that a reality.