According to recent reports, mental health professionals will be sent out to respond to some 911 calls in Chicago instead of cops.
The city is launching a two-part ‘alternative response’ pilot program this fall that takes more of a ‘public health approach’ to respond to 911 calls, especially when it comes to mental health emergencies.
Amid a surge in crime in many major cities, the number of Chicago cops that have retired this year has already surpassed all of the retirements in 2018 and is on track to be the highest number in the history of the department.
According to a report from Chicago Sun-Times, between January and June, some 363 officers quit, and another 56 were expected to retire this month.
If the trend continues, the mass departure will even dwarf the 560 retirements last year, when swathes of officers quit amid protests over the police murder of George Floyd and demands to defund the police.
With only around 13,000 cops remaining, Chicago’s 117,000 gang members now outnumber officers by roughly 10 to one, at a time when the Windy City is facing a surge in homicides and shootings.
Police leaders across the US have said they are struggling with the increase in shootings and homicides. They’re also trying to grapple with mass retirements, fewer employees, and difficulty in recruiting new officers to help.
Despite the graduation last month of 19 recruits, the Minneapolis police department is still down more than 200 officers — nearly one-quarter of its authorized strength last year of 889.
Chief Medaria Arradondo told the committee that 105 officers left the department last year, which is more than double the average attrition rate. And so far this year, 155 officers are on leave and are not available for duty.
City data show in January the number of working police officers dropped from 817 to 638. That includes the officers on leave.
According to a recent ruling by a Hennepin County judge, Minneapolis must hire more police officers by next year.
According to a recent study out of SJ Quinney College of Law, American cities
are witnessing significant declines in some forms of policing, which in turn is producing exponential homicide spikes.
According to the study, the recent spikes in homicides have been caused by a “Minneapolis
Effect,” similar to the earlier “Ferguson Effect, directly after the protests.
In February of 2019, activist Alma Anaya and other left-wing activist organizations pushed Chicago’s cook county to completely dismantle their gang database, claiming the database was ‘racially discriminatory.’
The Cook County Board voted to destroy the county’s gang database, and then put in place legal guidelines to make sure the database can’t be restarted.
Experts say that the reason gang databases have a disproportionate amount of people of color, is because most gang members are people of color.
According to the national gang center, a government website, almost half of the 32,000 gangs in American are made up of mostly black and Hispanic Americans.
According to most economists and criminologists, the reason for the surge in homicides is indeed due to police ‘backing down’ from enforcement in the face of public backlash. Police across the nation are either retiring at record rates, or transferring out of Black majority cities due to stigma caused by the protests and riots. The cost of policing for them outweighs the benefits, especially with the push for the removal of qualified immunity.
The new crime reporting system released by the FBI shows that the murder rate in almost every city in the United States is at the highest levels in over twenty years.
After looking at reported quarterly data from roughly 12,000 agencies in various cities and states, experts came to the conclusion that in 2020, the country saw more homicides since 1998.
