Police Superintendent Jody Weis’s August 11 meeting with alleged gang leaders continues to stoke debate over how to reduce violence in Chicago—but not in the City Council committee responsible for oversight of the police department.
The Committee on Police and Fire met Thursday afternoon to consider two agenda items, neither of which had anything to do with policing or crime. The four aldermen in attendance passed the items without a word of debate. The meeting lasted a total of three minutes.
Committee chairman Anthony Beale, alderman of the Ninth Ward on the far South Side, said he initially wanted the meeting to include a discussion about “police strategy going forward,” but he decided to delay it for “about a week” because he and police officials have not yet found time to hold private briefings with other aldermen.
The committee quickly approved the two remaining items: Mayor Richard M. Daley’s appointment of his budget director, Eugene Munin, to chair the board overseeing the city’s emergency telephone system; and an ordinance that drops fingerprinting as a requirement for obtaining press credentials from the police department. No alderman but Beale spoke during the meeting except to vote “aye.”
Under City Council rules of order, the police and fire committee “shall have jurisdiction over all matters relating to the Police Department and the Fire Department.” But over the last few years the committee has rarely examined department operations or their implications for fighting crime. The Chicago News Cooperative reported last week that between 2006 and 2009 just 1 percent of the agenda items before the committee had anything to do with crime or violence, according to an analysis by the Chicago Justice Project. By contrast, 40 percent concerned the donation of used equipment to other municipalities and countries.
Beale was picked to chair the committee in April after his predecessor, Alderman Isaac Carothers, pleaded guilty to federal bribery and tax evasion charges. Beale said again today that he intends to work with the police and fire departments to handle routine matters outside the committee so it can perform a greater oversight role.
“If there are substantive issues that need to be brought up, we’re going to bring them up,” he said.
In April, 20 aldermen signed a resolution drafted by Ald. Robert Fioretti (2nd Ward) that calls for hearings into police deployment strategies. The department is currently hundreds of officers short of the staffing level approved by the council in the 2010 city budget, and Fioretti has argued that Daley needs to find the money to hire 1,000 more officers as soon as possible.
But Beale has never allowed a hearing on the measure. He noted today that he has long called for a discussion about police staffing and deployment, including the possibility of re-aligning the city’s police beats so that higher-crime areas have more officers. But he said he’s in no rush to help Fioretti “score political points.” Fioretti has said he’s mulling a run for mayor in the February election.
“We will have a meeting on that when we can bring some solutions to the table instead of just saying what we ‘need’ to do,” Beale said. “It’s the political season, and that’s why I’m not enabling people with a political agenda.”
In an interview last week, Fioretti accused Beale of acting on behalf of Mayor Daley’s political interests. “If an alternative candidate says something, they send out an alderman to say you’re grandstanding,” Fioretti said.
This morning a group of men describing themselves as former gang members held a press conference to rip Weis for unfairly threatening to hold them accountable for gang-related violence. In recent days Fioretti, Ald. Joe Moore (49th), and Governor Pat Quinn have criticized the superintendent for meeting with some alleged West Side gang leaders. On Tuesday Daley defended the meeting and said Weis had his full support.
Though the issue didn’t come up in the official proceedings of the police and fire committee, Beale was happy to tell reporters, before and after the meeting, that he was behind Weis and so were the majority of his colleagues.
“The ones in touch with their communities are,” he said. “The ones with political agendas, the ones making political hay out of this—they’re not.”