A Plethora of Bad Ideas

Lightfoot outlines exactly how she'll fix Chicago if she wins:

• Mayoral candidate Lori Lightfoot has argued that Chicago’s never-ending cycle of gang violence has triggered a “public health crisis” that requires rebuilding impoverished neighborhoods and restoring shattered trust between citizens and police.
  
  Now, the former Police Board president who co-chaired Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Task Force on Police Accountability is unveiling that “Marshall Plan” to give Chicago neighborhoods the level of safety they desperately need and deserve.
  
  [...] The new office will ensure that public-safety resources are “equitably distributed throughout the city.” It also will oversee a public-safety board with authority over the Police Department, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability and the Police Board.

Really? So we'll get the manpower needed to actually patrol our neighborhood? Because we haven't seen the beat car around these parts in months. When we drive by the District, we see ten and fifteen unmanned squad cars parked in the lot with no police to drive them. When we get to work, we run a Unit Summary of home and are constantly amazed at how many cars are listed as "DOWN" but there never seem to be any bid openings for us to get closer to home.

• With illegal guns pouring into Chicago from Indiana and Wisconsin — and even from as far away as Texas and Mississippi — Lightfoot’s plan also includes creating a department within CPD to target gun traffickers and pressure the U.S. Attorney’s office to increase the “relatively small” number of prosecutions for “serious gun-related crimes like trafficking and selling guns.”

You mean like the 400 stolen guns - stolen by a career Chicago criminal on home monitoring - that just missed making it here by a whisper? Or the gun-runners that Kimmie seems to plea out for months on crimes that should be punished for years (and that punish victims for a lifetime)?

• After hearing from a “startling cross-section” of Chicagoans who view police officers as racist, Lightfoot also made the case for “some kind of racial reconciliation” that would allow Chicagoans who have felt harassed or disrespected by police to publicly air their grievances across the table from police brass. 

You mean like when officers pull up on a scene and are immediately assailed with accusations of racism, not caring, being blamed for the acts of people/folks that want nothing to do with anyone in a blue and white?

• To bridge the divide between citizens and police, she’s proposing a citywide peace and reconciliation process, community-level summits and even allowing community leaders to teach scenario-based classes to police recruits.
  
  Following New York City’s lead, rookies would be required to spend two weeks meeting with community leaders before starting work in their assigned districts.
  
  The Police Department would also: hire a chief diversity officer; eliminate clout promotions and redesign “sergeant selection criteria”; overhaul its gang database; make mental health professionals “co-responders” on calls requiring crisis intervention; and implement an early-intervention system to identify problem officers.
  
  And Chicago Public Schools would be charged with developing a K-through-12 curriculum that teaches students how to resolve conflicts.

Community leaders who hold onto every racial grievance (real and imagined) they can for years? Decades even? Two weeks with such stellar examples of "community leadership" like who? Jesse? Louis? Phleger? Maybe Jamal or Lemon?

You had our interest for a second with eliminating clout promotions, but we suspect an ulterior motive there. That "co-responders" sounds like a way of getting civilians killed by mentals and there's already a curriculum that teaches conflict resolution - it's called a family and usually consists of parents and a supportive family structure.

Once Prickwrinkle starts pulling away in the polls, this one is toast.