- Brian Jackson / Sun-Times Media
- Mayor Rahm Emanuel, accompanied by police superintendent Garry McCarthy, discusses his crime-fighting strategies with state legislators in September.
During his first campaign for mayor four years ago, Rahm Emanuel kept talking about police.
But within weeks of taking office, Emanuel stopped talking about hiring cops. Instead, over the course of his first term, the number of officers on the force dropped from about 10,900 to 10,600. And the mayor responded to violent crime not by investing in community policing but by calling for stricter gun laws and blaming legislators who balked.
Emanuel raised residents’ expectations about crime-fighting from the beginning. Soon after his election he picked Garry McCarthy to serve as police superintendent. McCarthy had spent a stint as the police chief in Newark after 25 years on the force in New York City, during which time crime had fallen dramatically.
On February 11 McCarthy announced the arrests of two young men for the killing. The alleged triggerman, Michael Ward, had previously been caught with a gun and sentenced to probation. McCarthy called that an outrage and declared that gun offenders should be required to do serious prison time.
State senator Jacqueline Collins was one of the legislators who signed on. Her south-side district includes a number of neighborhoods hit regularly by gun violence, and she appeared at a press conference with the mayor and police superintendent to back longer mandatory sentences. “I’ve been an antigun advocate,” she says. “I grabbed for the quick fix too.”
