George Will: Taking the streets back

[Tyler Durden]

Uh...lemmee guess..."Force monopolies?" No wait, I think the word "micro" 
occurs on line 36 and then the word "payment" appears on line 78...

-TD

>From: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com>
>To: osint at yahoogroups.com, cypherpunks at al-qaeda.net
>Subject: George Will: Taking the streets back
>Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 09:13:31 -0500
>
><http://www.townhall.com/columnists/georgewill/printgw20050224.shtml>
>
>Townhall.com
>
>Taking the streets back
>George Will (back to web version) | Send
>
>February 24, 2005
>
>CHICAGO -- He looks like the actor Wilfred Brimley -- round as a beach
>ball;  grandfatherly gray mustache -- but Philip J. Cline, this city's
>police superintendent, is, like his city, hard as a baseball. And as they
>say in baseball, he puts up numbers.
>
>      Actually, he and his officers have driven some crucial numbers down.
>Last year homicides reached a 38-year low of 448, 25 percent below 2003's
>total of 600, which was lower than the 2002 and 2001 totals of 654 and 668.
>
>    Nationally, homicides declined steadily after the peak of
>dealer-on-dealer violence in the crack cocaine epidemic of the late 1980s
>and early '90s. But the decline was slow in Chicago, where in 2001, 2002
>and 2003 it ranked second, first and second among cities in the number of
>murders, not just the murder rate. In the last third of the 20th century,
>Chicago violence killed more than 28,000 people -- the population of many
>Illinois towns.
>
>      In an American city, as in Baghdad, which is about the size of
>Chicago, the key to policing against violence is intelligence and other
>cooperation from a population that trusts the police. Which means, Cline
>says, replacing random patrols with strategic deployments of officers.
>
>      He says 50 percent of Chicago's homicides are gang-related. Gang
>membership, now an estimated 65,000 strong, used to be a rite of passage
>for young men. Now it is increasingly a career choice for men turning the
>gangs into business organizations selling drugs and investing the proceeds
>in, among other things, real estate. One-third of the drug customers are
>suburbanites.
>
>      Video on a police department laptop displays facets of the problem.
>One clip shows dealers giving away, in broad daylight, free samples to
>droves of potential customers. Another clip shows mass marketing as
>customers, again in midday, are walked, in groups of several dozen, across
>a street to a playground to make their purchases. Another clip shows a
>violent felon being released from Joliet prison, heading for Chicago but
>first visiting Indiana, thereby violating his terms of release. He was
>rearrested two hours out of prison. ``A land speed record,'' says Cline.
>
>       Fewer than 10 percent of Chicago murder victims are white. And as a
>mordant student of murder says, ``There's always a correlation between
>homicides and ice cream trucks.'' Most victims are killed in hot weather,
>from May to October, mostly in July and August, when people are mingling --
>and often drinking -- on stoops and street corners, and are irritable.
>
>      The crime-infested Robert Taylor high-rise housing projects on the
>South Side have been closed and the Cabrini-Green project on the near North
>Side is being closed, which means a jostling for social space among
>displaced drug dealers. Cline says there were about 100 open-air drug
>markets in the city last year. Police closed about half of them, producing
>more displacements as markets opened elsewhere in the city. This process is
>frustrating but constructive because it means some slowing of the drug
>trade. But it can also cause an uptick in violence as dealers contest
>desirable turf.
>
>      Cline says that when 100 markets are each pulling in $5,000 a day,
>serious money is at stake. Some of the money buys the guns that settle
>struggles for turf. Last year police seized 10,509 guns -- 29 a day. They
>probably will seize as many this year; they did in 2003. But this is not an
>exercise in bailing the ocean: Stiff sentences for gun possession, and
>stiffer ones for firing a gun, put a high price tag on regarding a gun as
>fashion necessity for the well-accessorized young man.
>
>       Last year about 18,000 of the inmates released from Illinois prisons
>came back to Chicago; perhaps 25,000 will this year. Some of the returning
>convicts come home expecting to reclaim their shares of the drug business.
>Some of the younger dealers will decide it is easier to kill them than
>accommodate them.
>
>      A new ``shot spotter'' technology can detect the trajectory of a
>bullet and direct a camera that scans 360 degrees. Soon there will be 80
>such cameras watching strategic intersections. There is nothing
>surreptitious about this -- indeed, the cameras have blue lights and
>Chicago Police Department logos. The CPD wants dealers to know the area is
>being watched. The cost of the cameras is paid by seized assets from
>dealers. So, Cline says contentedly, ``they're paying to surveil
>themselves.''
>
>       Cline says the message to the neighborhoods is: ``We will take the
>corner back. You must hold the corner.'' Again, as in Baghdad.
>
>--
>-----------------
>R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
>The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
>44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
>"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
>[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
>experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'