The War on Cops by Heather Mac Donald

Author:Heather Mac Donald
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781594038761
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2016-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

Official Chicago’s answer to youth violence has also opted for collective, rather than paternal, responsibility. As the Chicago school superintendent at the time of Derrion Albert’s murder, Ron Huberman developed a whopping $60 million, two-year plan to combat youth violence. The wonky Huberman, who had created highly regarded information-retrieval and accountability systems for the police department and the city’s emergency response center in previous city jobs, turned his passion for data analysis to Chicago’s violent kids. Using a profile of past shooting victims that included such factors as school truancy rates and disciplinary records, he identified several hundred teens as having a greater than 20 percent chance of getting shot over the next two years. The goal was to provide them with wraparound social services. (The profile of victim and perpetrator was indistinguishable, but targeting potential victims, rather than perpetrators, for such benefits as government-subsidized jobs was politically savvy.) The program would assign the 300 or so potential victims their own “advocates” to intercede on their behalf with government agencies and provide them with case management and counseling.

In some cities, it’s a police officer who visits a violence-prone teenager to warn him about staying out of trouble. Chicago sends a social worker. The Chicago Police Department has kept a low profile during the public debate over teen shootings, ceding primary accountability for the problem to the school system. This hierarchy of response may reflect Chicago’s less assertive police culture compared with, say, New York’s. “We’d marvel at how the NYPD was getting mayoral support” during Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s tenure, said a former Chicago deputy superintendent. “Mayor Daley is not a cop supporter; it’s no secret that he rules the police department with an iron fist.” The South Side’s black ministers also act as a check on more proactive policing. There have been few calls in Chicago for a more aggressive stop-and-frisk policy to get illegal guns off the street, and the police department hasn’t pushed to implement one.

Now, perhaps if Huberman’s proposed youth “advocates” provided their charges with opportunities to learn self-discipline and perseverance, fired their imaginations with manly virtues, and spoke to them about honesty, courtesy, and right and wrong—if they functioned, in other words, like Scoutmasters—they might make some progress in reversing the South Side’s social breakdown. But the outfit that Huberman picked to provide “advocacy” to the teens at a reported cost of $5 million a year, the Youth Advocates Program (YAP), couldn’t have been more mired in the resolutely nonjudgmental ethic of contemporary social work. “Some modalities used in this endeavor,” explained YAP, “include: assess the youth and his/her family to develop an Individualized Service Plan (ISP) to address the individual needs of each youth.” The organization’s CEO, Jeff Fleischer, tried further to clarify the advocates’ function: “If a family needs a new refrigerator or a father needs car insurance, it’s the advocate’s job to take care of it,” he told the Chicago Tribune. The reference to a “father” is presumably Fleischer’s little joke, since almost none of the Chicago victims-in-waiting will have their fathers at home.

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