Reps Fritchey and Ford want Governor Quinn to mobilize the IL National Guard to help deal with insane levels of violence in some Chicago neighborhoods. http://www.suntimes.com/...
I don't know exactly how I feel about this. I wonder about the levels of knowledge of basic police procedures are present in the various Guardmembers who would be deployed. I worry about the optics of a police state presence in a major American city. I also worry about the victims of the present levels of violence.
The fact is, I live just a few miles from some of these violent neighborhoods. I live in Berwyn, just 6 blocks west of the Chicago city limits. It's not a posh neighborhood, Berwyn is both multi-cultural and middle class, not nearly as prosperous as Oak Park, it's nothern neighbor. However, I have not witnessed any violence nor do I live my life under a siege. Neither do folks on the North side of the city. If you don't live in an affected neighborhood or have friends or relatives from one, the violence can seem as remote as Iraq or Afghanistan.
So on the one hand, I worry about turning areas of the city that are already severely damaged and under-resourced into areas that appear to be under occupation. But as someone who does not live in one of the areas affected, I don't feel as though I really have a strong right to an opinion.
People are dying in these neighborhoods. They're doing due to violence as a result of the drugs trade, as a result of petty grievances, as a result of territorialism gone mad, as a result of whole host of issues probably having at least peripherally to do with the fact that the worst of the violence is in the poorest neighborhoods where hopelessness is just part of the air.
The city is in budget straits so more money for more police is probably not going to be forthcoming, and anyway the police tend to be more a reactive force than a proactive one. It's possible that the cameras all over the city can be used to get a grip on some of the crime, but even that is not going to do a whole lot. No one has the money for providing opportunity to downtrodden neighborhoods, and anyway an awful lot of the violence is committed by people who already have criminal records and therefore are not going to be likely to be easily employed.
SO, is the national Guard the solution? I don't know but the violence levels have got to be brought down.