The new Police Superintendant is re-vamping the community policing concept.
Community residents complain about a "siege mentality", I hope the new community policing efforts work but I don't have a lot of hope for it.
One of the basic problems is that when someone commits a crime, that criminal has a gradmother, mother, several sisters, brother, cousins, aunts and uncles in the community and those people don't cooperate with police.
There's always a lot of sympathy in the community for their children and relatives that are committing crimes.
The community policing policy means police have to be in the community, but Chicago police are not. They're in their sqaud cars rushing from one serious crime to another - that's all they do, they rush around responding to really serious crime. The only way they will be able to do community policing is to hire more officers.
Fraternal Order of Police spokesman Pat Camden is on the record saying that their plans aren't going to work. He's characterized the CPD as being in a manpower crisis. The department loses 50 officers a month to attrition, the city doesn't hire to replace them, leaving police short-handed on the street.
Camden has said “Their strategy is a total failure,”
As far as gun control... it's a lose lose situation no matter what. Rahm Emanual will say that the deaths are proof that lax gun laws in neighboring states are killing inner city youths. If just one gun shows up as being stolen from somewhere else in Illinois Emanual will renew his call for registration, and assault weapon ban in Illinois as well as a tax on ammo. He'll also say that Chicago's crime problems can't be solved in a vacuum, that lax gun laws elsewhere are fueling Chicago's violence. The new Police Superintendant Garry McCarthy said as much already.