Chicago City Wire

The spring sun warming Chicago's sidewalks and urging Windy City residents to emerge after a winter full of public health crises and civil unrest does little to hide the foreboding sense that unhinged violence is on the horizon, according to a blogger. 

According to Chicago Contrarian, the Windy City didn't make it past the first week of spring without seeing at least 44 people shot and 14 dead. And the leaders who are supposed to be at the helm of the anti-violence efforts, the Contrarian says, are geared up to prove another season of inadequacy. 

The blog says that Superintendent David Brown and First Deputy Superintendent Eric Carter of the Chicago Police Department are woefully out of focus in regard to Chicago's needs with their introduction of Reformstat and Compstat-Plus. 

The two leaders are further off-balance by encouraging the "community engagement equals enforcement" initiatives, which objectively seek to negate the violence and crime plaguing the city by highlighting good deeds done by police. 

"While a burglar is stopped on one corner, officers should be doing something such as rescuing a cat from atop a tree on the next corner, thereby bringing a kind of yin and yang balance to Chicago," the blog wrote. "If the CPD does its job and arrests the man who carried out a carjacking, they’ll immediately equal this enforcement action by pumping gas or performing yard work for the elderly. This way, their thinking goes, the negative that somehow was created by enforcing the law has been corrected."

These feel-good instances, reportedly deemed by Brown and Carter as positive community interactions or PCIs, are meaningless according to the Contrarian. 

"For those interested, take a moment and listen to a CPD scanner channel some afternoon and try to count how many times a PCI is broadcasted over the air," the blog said. "The most meaningless metric in policing seems to be the most common broadcast day and night across Chicago."