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The Chicago Police Department released data Monday confirming that crime citywide has increased from a year ago, including homicides, which are up 18 percent. Unless I missed it, no aldermen were outraged enough to call for hearings this time. Why would they? It’s August, the quiet time around City Hall. Plus, the spike in crime wasn’t unexpected; the numbers were trending upward at about the same rates last month and the month before that and the month before that. And of course the politics of the moment don’t warrant it: no one’s been shot during a festival downtown in the last few weeks, the governor has generously offered state police backup “near” crime-plagued areas, and the attention of the International Olympic Committee is on another city halfway around the world. What’s the point in publicly dressing down the police chief now?
It seems to me that anyone seeking to understand how police actually responded to safety concerns at the Taste would need to know how many people were arrested. But a police spokesman told me the department doesn’t know offhand, and apparently no public figure has asked it to find out. “After a thorough search, I must inform you that the Department does not maintain an existing public record or program that captures the information you seek,” Freedom of Information officer Matthew Sandoval wrote me. Digging the numbers up, he added, would be too burdensome.
