Killings up because mayor let CPD wither: police union official

Mayor Rahm Emanuel wears the jacket for Chicago’s 50 percent spike in homicides and shootings because he allowed police manpower to dip dangerously low, before reversing course with a hiring surge that will be difficult to execute, a national police union chief charged Tuesday.

“When the mayor wants to look at who should ultimately bear the brunt of the blame for things that have gone wrong with public safety in Chicago, the first place he should look is in the mirror,” said Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police.

“Police officers are running from call to call because they’re short-staffed and there are nowhere near enough investigators to follow up and catch perpetrators. He was the mayor and the department has gotten smaller. The threshold responsibility of any elected official is to provide safety. He has not done that. He runs that department like an arm of his political operation with far greater attention being paid to rhetoric and optics than to the reality of the situation on the street.”

Adam Collins, Emanuel’s communications director, could not be reached for comment.

For five years, Pasco noted that Chicago has relied on overtime — to the tune of $116.1 million last year — to mask a manpower shortage that has mushroomed under Emanuel with police retirements outpacing hiring by 975 officers.

“Overtime is great until you overtime officers to exhaustion. Overtime should be a supplement — not a solution. If you’ve got all the officers you need, you don’t need overtime,” he said.

“Why does the department have less officers today than it did [in 2011] if Rahm has been doing such a great job?”

The City Council will vote Wednesday on an $8.2 billion budget for 2017 that Emanuel describes as “built around” public safety.

It calls for filling 471 vacancies, keeping pace with rising retirements, and still hiring enough police officers in 2017 to add 250 patrol officers, 37 sergeants, 50 lieutenants, 92 field-training officers and 100 detectives. That would raise an abysmal clearance rate for homicides and shootings.

On Tuesday, Pasco questioned Emanuel’s ability to deliver on that ambitious promise in a Police Department still under a sweeping federal civil rights investigation triggered by the police shooting of Laquan McDonald.

“It would be extraordinarily difficult under any circumstances and particularly difficult, given the fact that so much has been done to besmirch the reputation of the Chicago Police Department,” Pasco said.

“This constant drumbeat of media and political criticism of the effectiveness of the department and the conduct of some officers has had a deleterious effect on the perception of the department. When that happens, it makes it more difficult to recruit and train qualified applicants. He has a mountain to climb. We can only hope, for the sake of the citizens of Chicago that there is some level of success.”

Exacerbating the problem is what Pasco called the “total politicization” of the Chicago Police Department under Emanuel’s watch.

The most glaring example of it, Pasco said, was Emanuel’s decision in 2015 to fire his only police Supt. Garry McCarthy in the unrelenting furor over the mayor’s handling of the Laquan McDonald shooting video.

But the political manipulation of the Police Department started long before McCarthy was sent packing, Pasco said.

“If mayor is not giving the police chief room to do the job the way he or she has experience or training to do, you’re going to have political decisions made. I believe that to be the case in Chicago. I don’t believe McCarthy had a lot of room to maneuver and, ultimately, he was fired,” Pasco said.

“He was fired — and there was a certain inevitability to that — because of the mayor’s failure to accept responsibility for the public safety crisis in Chicago. He was fired in the midst of a furor that started with concerns over public safety and several high-profile incidents involving police officers. He ultimately was not responsible for the tape not having been disclosed. But, somebody needed to go at that time and it wasn’t gonna be Rahm Emanuel. Everybody is expendable except Rahm Emanuel.”

McCarthy refused to comment on Pasco’s claim that the Chicago Police Department has been “totally politicized” under Emanuel’s five-year watch.

He referred a Chicago Sun-Times reporter to the comments he made about Chicago Police officers being “hamstrung” in a New York Post story comparing the drop in crime in his native New York City to the surge in crime in Chicago.

“They’re not getting out of their cars and stopping people. That’s because of all the politics here,” said McCarthy, former chief of operations for the NYPD.

“In Chicago, performance is less important than politics. It’s called `The Chicago Way’ and the results are horrific.”