Chicago mayoral hopeful Rahm Emanuel is promising to put 1,000 more police officers on the streets by putting cadets in desk jobs, cracking down on medical abuses ,and renegotiating a policy that allows officers to take 365 sick days every two years, reports the Chicago Sun-Times. He vows not to “divide the city” by realigning police beats or reallocating officers from lower-crime districts to those that need more protection.
Emanuel is promising to dump Police Superintendent Jody Weis to improve morale and reverse what he calls a “culture of preventive policing” where officers are “not doing their job because they don't think anybody has their back.” He wants to pull the rug out from under the plan that Weis hopes to execute before his $310,000-a-year contract expires March 1 – to shift police from low-crime districts to high-crime ones for the first time in 30 years. Weis told aldermen during City Council budget hearings that he would have a “reallocation plan” by Dec. 31. Weis would not respond to Emanuel's comments, but he previously said “nothing speaks to morale like results,” noting there have been almost two years of straight month-to-month crime reductions, and the 2010 homicide total was the lowest in 45 years.