$1.13 Million Per Homicide

That's what it cost to reduce homicides last year as compared to 2012:

• Homicides dropped 18 percent in Chicago last year and crime overall was down 16 percent, according to statistics released by the police department this morning.
  
  The decline in homicides was a more modest 5 percent when compared with 2011. The department reported 435 homicides in 2011, 503 in 2012 and 415 in 2013.
  
  Shootings across the city dropped by 24 percent from 2012 and 16 percent from 2011, according to the department's numbers. Sexual assaults were down 6 percent from last year, robberies down 12 percent, serious battery down 16 percent, burglaries down 22 percent, motor vehicle thefts down 23 percent, thefts down 3 percent.
  
  The reductions came at a price: Nearly $100 million in overtime pay, triple what was budgeted for 2013.

One has to wonder, however twisted it may be, were the lives saved actually worth $1.13 million each? Is each and every life saved capable of generating $1.14 million worth of value to society as a whole? Cynics that we are, we highly doubt it.

We do like the second paragraph though - someone finally acknowledging what we've been saying for quite a while now - 2012 was the aberration. 2013 would have been just another in a progressive series of reductions of annual homicides going back three or four years....if Shortshanks and Rahm hadn't gutted the Department by 2,000-plus officers via attrition/reduced hiring and McMurder hadn't imported his crooked counting practices to "fix" the numbers.

Riddle us this - how many Death Investigations are ongoing? Are those going to be reclassified at a later date? And did you know that if it is found that deceased individual A was shot to death by individual B, and individual A was also armed at the time of death, a serious effort is being made to develop leads that can allow the death to be classified as justifiable? That individual B was acting in self defense and therefore, the killing is not in fact a homicide and will not be classified as a homicide at all. We know of a few incidents like this that didn't count toward district totals.

We just showed you how to find enough homicides to match the 2011 totals - a mere 20 killings. An enterprising reporter could raise a lot of uncomfortable questions if they scraped the surface a little bit, but then Rahm might not invited them or their editors out for cocktails.