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The changes did not produce immediate results. While overall crime dropped, the number of homicides, which had averaged fewer than 460 per year from 2004 through 2011, soared. Emanuel blamed such influences as the warm winter--which supposedly brought gangbangers into the streets--and the enduring problem of absent fathers. Barraged by reporters eager to talk about murder when he wanted to bask after hosting a successful NATO summit, Emanuel seethed.
"You're like birds all jumping from the telephone wire," he scolds when I ask him about gun violence in February, shortly after a 15-year-old named Hadiya Pendleton was killed while standing with friends in a park about a mile from Obama's South Side home. She was one of at least 39 killed in Chicago in January, and her death, which came days after she took part in the Obamas' Inauguration ceremonies, reawakened the world to the city's epidemic of gun violence. Scrambling to stop the killings amid the media glare, the mayor and his police superintendent raided overtime budgets to saturate hot spots with cops.
Now McCarthy's reforms appear to be kicking in. Through May 6, the city experienced 102 murders, compared with 167 in the same period of 2012. "These are the best numbers Chicago has seen since 1959," McCarthy said. Crime overall is down 11% compared with last year and close to 20% since Emanuel took office. McCarthy believes he can do better still. "A regression analysis based on algorithms--sounds funny coming from a cop" has identified the 420 most troublesome men in Chicago, he says, and police are looking into their networks.
That improvement will depend partly on manpower--the police department has already used about two-thirds of its entire 2013 overtime budget to tamp down violent crime. Summer's warm weather, which historically brings a rise in gun violence, won't make it any easier. Shootings over the Memorial Day weekend killed six people and wounded 11, a high toll, but a drop from the more than 50 killed or injured during the 2012 holiday.
These statistics are of little consolation to many residents of South and West Side neighborhoods. When McCarthy reorganized the department to attack "one of the worst, if not the worst, gang problems in the country" and reassigned what he calls the "warm and fuzzy" community-relations officers to street patrols, some residents regarded it as a hostile gesture.
This was clear in an interview with Pamela Wright and Greg Young, the mother and stepfather of Tyrone Lawson. An honors student at Morgan Park High, Lawson, 17, was shot to death outside a basketball game in January. Two grown men have been charged; their motive remains unclear. It may have been simply a case of mistaken identity.
"He never, that I am aware of, had a fight or an argument," his mother says. "He was a big kid," adds his dad, "6-feet-3 and over 300 pounds, so I suppose people could think he was intimidating," but his aunt described him as "the gentle giant." Lawson spent part of each Saturday in an honors class in physics and was deciding between going to college and joining the Navy.