Garry McCarthy says the intelligence is there. It’s just a matter of getting the information to beat officers so they can anticipate a retaliatory gang shooting.

“We’re going to get our head around this thing and we’re going to turn it around is what it boils down to,” McCarthy told reporters on Monday. “If we were sitting here saying we don’t know what’s going on, we don’t know what to do, that would be a different situation. We know what’s going on. We’re putting pieces in place to make sure we can stem this tide.”

via CBS Chicago.

So if I understand this correctly, McCarthy is saying that he believes beat officers are supposed to be able to “anticipate a retaliatory gang shooting”?  The problem thus far has been that “It’s just a matter of getting the information to beat officers.”

This is a most amazing pile of tripe.  I can’t believe CBS published this without any follow-up comments.  I guess they’re the new PR dept. for City Hall and McCarthy.

1. It’s the beat officers who do predict when a retaliatory gang shooting is going to happen; soon after a previous gang hit.
2. The beat officers are so busy going from call to call that there is no time to be “policing” the gang members until something bad happens at which time they get the call.
3. All the special units which used to handle these gang matters were dissolved by Rahm in order to “put 1,000 25 new cops on the street.

Manpower is an issue:

[FOP talking head Pat] Camden says the department loses 50 officers a month to attrition, leaving police short-handed on the street.

“I don’t think they’ve hired 600 officers in the past five years,” he said.

Worse, Rahm (and Alderman Beale) have specifically planned to reduce the number of police on the street.

Police Supt. Garry McCarthy told the Chicago Sun-Times earlier week that he’s been asked to cut $190 million from the Police Department’s $1.3 billion-a-year budget and would only get halfway there by eliminating 1,400 police vacancies.

via Chicago Sun-Times Sept. 02, 2011.

And for those who don’t remember, these were not police who were working, these were vacancies.  Open budgeted spots where Daley was too busy with flower boxes to bring on new officers.

CPD is short manpower & we’re all suffering because of it.