Could New Twist On Recycled Strike Force Strategy Slow Shootings?

CHICAGO — Police Supt. David Brown say he plans to revive a kinder, gentler version of the "Jump Out Boys" — a military-style response unit infamously known for cracking skulls, making illegal searches and robbing drug dealers.

Or at least that's how it came across in the Tribune. Brown didn't offer many specifics. Follow-up questions with folks at police headquarters were fruitless.

Brown's vague plan for a citywide mobile strike force sounded like other recycled refrains the top cop has spouted recently, including former police Supt. Garry McCarthy's "gang, guns and drugs" catchphrase, and a call for cops to start "clearing these drug corners" that rekindled memories of "stop-and-frisk."

If the citywide task force idea sounds to you like the act of top cop desperate to offer some kind of solution to the spike in the city's shooting epidemic, you're not alone.

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The police department's toughest critics bashed the recycled violence-reduction tactic.

Criminologists called the roving mobile strike force revival a dumb idea knowing the corrupt history of similar violent-crime reduction task forces last eliminated in 2011. The ACLU agreed, particularly when the police department continually fails to keep up with requirements of the court-ordered consent decree that aims to root out abuse, misconduct and corruption from a department with a long history of all three.

But what if it could work?

What's different about the recycled citywide task force plan — that sources say has been floating around police headquarters and City Hall for a couple of years and landed in Brown's lap with Mayor Lori Lightfoot's blessing — is that it includes a mindful departure from heavy-handed policing.

More than a decade ago, officers on similar roving task forces were deployed as invading force with orders to "attack." People standing on corners and walking past corner stores got swarmed by aggressive officers quick to shove folks up against walls, or worse. Some bosses ran those units with unchecked authority like characters in a Dick Wolf crime drama.

The reimagining of a citywide violence reduction squad with a gentle touch would give police brass a much-needed unit of highly trained officers to more effectively respond when shootings spike. Better than, say flooding the streets with 1,200 extra cops, which didn't work July 4th holiday weekend when 100 people got shot, 15 fatally.

But more importantly the revamped task force strategy, sources say, will task violence-reduction officers with being neighborhood helpers. Deployments wouldn't come as a surprise community leaders and concerned neighbors. Officers would spend time in violent neighborhoods after police tape gets taken down from shooting scenes. Rather than only focusing on catching trigger men or mining cooperating witnesses, officers would ask folks, "How can we help?"

It actually sounds like a redeeming twist on an otherwise horrible strategy.

But the only way it will work is if Brown uses this unit to teach rank-and-file officers to see themselves as a new breed of anti-crime advocates instead of a crime fighting force, particularly in poor, neglected neighborhoods plagued by violence.

Frankly, statistics show, the Chicago police department has been a dismal failure when it comes to locking up bad guys. About 90-percent of people who shoot-and-wound someone never get arrested. The city's murder clearance rate has been as low as 15 percent.

Repeated promises to gain the public's trust by curbing police misconduct with additional supervision, accountability and transparency continues to be a joke.

City Hall's refusal to release an inspector general's investigative report related to the boozy night that got former top cop Eddie Johnson fired is just the latest example of a systematic unwillingness to show the public how cops trust the Thin Blue Line code of silence to cover for each other.

Those issues are at the heart of Chicago's shooting problem. They are the reason so many people don't trust local law enforcement. And police department's failure to keep up with the court-supervised consent decree shows those problems aren't going away any time soon.

But if Brown can use his new unit to retrain officers as citywide helpers instead of heroes, well, the top cop actually might be on to something.

Otherwise, he's just desperately picking through the crime strategy recycling bin.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series, "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN, and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots.
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