Top cop McCarthy tells aldermen of plan to close three stations, redeploy officers

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Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy announced the redeployment of 114 police officers to districts throughout the city as part of the Administration's ongoing effort to strengthen the safety of Chicago's neighborhoods during news conference at Broadway Armory, 5917 N. Broadway, Wednesday, September 14, 2011. | John H. White~Chicago Sun-Times.

Updated: October 27, 2011 8:35PM

Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy tried Thursday to sell skeptical aldermen on Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to close three district police stations in 2012 and reallocate officers without realigning police beats.

If the City Council agrees to close the Wood, Belmont and Prairie district stations, McCarthy argued that the newly-consolidated stations would emerge as the top three in the city when it comes to number of officers assigned. They are: Wentworth, Monroe and Town Hall.

In marathon testimony at City Council budget hearings, McCarthy said the three targeted districts were chosen not only because they are three of the city’s oldest stations, but also because they’re in the “lower tier” when it comes to manpower, reported crime and geographic area.

“Combining the districts, we create three mid-level districts as far as geography and crime is concerned. In each case, we’re saving about 20 officers who are doing administrative duties. And each one of the newly-created districts — the 12th, the 2nd and the 23rd — now rank Numbers 1, 2 and 3 as far as officers assigned,” he said.

After the consolidation, the top 12 districts when it comes to number of police officers assigned-per 1,000 population will be: the 7th, 11th, 15th, 6th, 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 4th and 10th.

“Clearly, clearly high-crime areas,” he said, noting that 14 districts will have more than 300 police officers.

McCarthy further noted that 583 or 66 percent of the 881 officers redeployed since Emanuel took office have been assigned to a dozen districts that have experienced the greatest number of shootings.

The argument that Emanuel has accomplished the equivalent of beat realignment without the political controversy seemed to work with Ald. Anthony Beale (9th), former chairman of the City Council’s Police Committee.

“I’ve been fighting for resource reallocation for a number of years. Now, you can see the results of that effort. If we had done this a few years ago, how many lives we could have saved,” Beale said.

But, he warned, “We still have a long way to go. We need to take it to the next level.”

Ald. Danny Solis (25th) suggested that police beats be realigned every ten years, just as ward boundaries are redrawn to coincide with the U.S. Census.

Chicago’s 25 police districts are carved into 285 beats with a patrol car assigned to each.

Emanuel’s first budget calls for closing three police stations for the first time in 50 years. It also calls for consolidating police and detective areas from five to three, merging Police and Fire Department headquarters and specialized units and eliminating 1,252 police vacancies.

Instead of engaging in the annual “charade” of budgeting for police officers the city has no intention of hiring, Emanuel plans to hold open only 100 vacancies — enough to hire “at least two” classes of police recruits. It will be the first police hiring since September, 2010.

During Thursday’s hearing, McCarthy also disclosed plans to use donations to a soon-to-be-created police foundation to re-establish a crime lab within the Chicago Police Department.

“It takes between six months and eight months to get back ballistic hits from the [state] crime lab. That’s a big problem for me because that’s basically past history. We need real-time turnaround,” McCarthy said.

“If we can get ballistics matches in real-time, [Chief of Detectives] Tom Byrne is gonna have a much easier job solving those crimes. They’ll lead us to who has the guns.”

Donations will also be used to retrofit “blue-light” surveillance cameras in high-crime areas with gunshot detection technology. That’s something that’s been promised for more than a decade, but never delivered.

“I’m not one to talk about things and not do them. I want it done better and I want it done yesterday,” McCarthy said.

“In communities where people have given up hope, they don’t even call the police when shots are fired. As a result of having gunshot technology in the right places, we are responding to shots fired calls without a 911 call and making arrests of people with guns. That’s really important to me.”

Under questioning from aldermen, the superintendent also fleshed out his plan to change the way police detectives are assigned cases.

“They’re going to a geographically-based model within the areas, so that a detective is basically accountable for crime in one district, rather than receiving cases all over an area, and narcotics is moving to the same model,” he said.