Rahm's two biggest scams
“Have you changed the way you measure statistics?” one reporter asked. “I don’t buy the premise of the question,” Emanuel answered and quickly moved on. -- Chicago Magazine
The mayor and his two chiefs, schools CEO Byrd-Bennettand top cop Garry McCarthy, have put together a couple of scams any 3-card-Monte hustler or professional illusionist would be proud of.
The first and most callous is his rigging of crime stats including body counts from Chicago's killing fields, then used to celebrate supposed "record lows" in city gun violence even while shootings in the city's black and Latino neighborhoods were at or near all-time highs. It all laid out beautifully in the first of a two-part series by Chicago Magazine's David Bernstein and Noah Jackson.
The first and most callous is his rigging of crime stats including body counts from Chicago's killing fields, then used to celebrate supposed "record lows" in city gun violence even while shootings in the city's black and Latino neighborhoods were at or near all-time highs. It all laid out beautifully in the first of a two-part series by Chicago Magazine's David Bernstein and Noah Jackson.
Meanwhile, the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil pols on Chicago’s City Council have mostly accepted the police department’s crime numbers at face value. So have most in the media. You can hardly turn on the news without hearing McCarthy or Mayor Rahm Emanuel proclaiming unquestioned: Murders down 18 percent in 2013! Overall crime down 23 percent! Twelve thousand fewer crime victims! “These days, everything is about media and public opinion,” says one longtime officer. “If a number makes people feel safe, then why not give it to them?”
Many officers of different ranks and from different parts of the city recounted instances in which they were asked or pressured by their superiors to reclassify their incident reports or in which their reports were changed by some invisible hand. One detective refers to the “magic ink”: the power to make a case
