Emanuel: Police 'Slow To Respond' To Street Gang Split Behind 2012 Murder Rate

By Chuck Sudo in News on Feb 28, 2014 4:40PM

Mayor Rahm Emanuel was in Washington Monday for a conversation at the Brookings Institution with New York Times columnist David Brooks. The discussion followed the usual national narrative about how Emanuel is driving Chicago forward as a—wait for it—“world class city” with nods to the mayor’s initiatives to reform schools, establish Chicago as a tech hub and reduce crime when Emanuel said something sure to endear him with police officers.

Brooks steered the conversation to Chicago’s 2012 homicide rate, the national headlines that resulted and asked Emanuel to “walk us through” his response to it. Here’s what Emanuel said.

“We made some changes in the police department. I don’t think we were totally where we needed to be. . . . We had arrested the gang leadership (in) part of my tenure correctly. . . . So there was no leadership in these gangs. And they had broken down and dissolved and there was internecine gang warfare,” the mayor said.

“So it wasn’t two gangs fighting each other. It was two groups inside of these gangs fighting each other for turf with leadership that was much younger than 30. They have a different perspective. And we as a police department and as a city, [were] slow to react to that.”

Emanuel then said Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy and top Police Department brass were able to implement new crime fighting initiatives like the “saturation” techniques deploying extra cops in high crime areas “once we caught on what we were doing.”

The spike in homicides two years ago and the violence between gang factions was a determining factor in the alarming 2012 homicide rate. (WBEZ’s interactive map of street gangs listed 59 gangs split into 625 factions, with many of those splinter groups fighting each other.) Sun-Times Washington correspondent Fran Spielman, who attended the discussion, called this a rare example of Emanuel publicly admitting a mistake. But it may not sit well with a Police Department under constant public scrutiny for how it combats gangs, is understaffed and stressed out while McCarthy’s quick-response policy relies heavily on police overtime pay that has the financial analysts who grade Chicago’s bond ratings concerned about the long term public safety issues that haven’t been addressed.

Chicagoist has embedded the full discussion below.