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Originally posted by ReVoLuTiOn76
This is not good. Military personal have no business doing a policeman's job.
This is not good. Military personal have no business doing a policeman's job.
In post-Katrina New Orleans, the Guard served a useful role staffing checkpoints to keep people out of sealed-off neighborhoods. That's a job a military force can do.
But the Guard isn't suited to fight drug violence and gangs. Guard units are not trained to collect evidence, obtain search warrants or help build criminal cases that can stand up in court. And they know far less about our city neighborhoods than do the police who are there every day.
Good police work is more than uniformed personnel stationed on the corners of dangerous neighborhoods. And it's certainly not military rifles and camouflage.
The Chicago Police Department is 2,000 officers short of what the city budget authorizes. We need more cops, not more soldiers.
But the numbers also show the police have been doing good work in many places. Murders have not increased in Austin, which adjoins the Harrison district, and are down 40 percent in Englewood. Overall, violent crime is down 35 percent in the city over the past 10 years.
Can the National Guard really do a better job?
Even if Guard units were called in, they would not stay for long. Chicago needs a permanent solution, one rooted in solving problems of poverty, poor schools and dysfunctional families.
It's tempting to yearn for the hero with the tin star to come to town and drive out the violence.
But that's not how the real world works.