Those realignment blues

Hoo boy, am I dumb.  When Mary Mitchell called for more cops in black gangsters’ neighborhoods — “on the South Side where most of the shootings have occurred” — I simply asked, rhetorically, To do what?  Can they get aggressive, or is that what causes riots (smaller things have caused riots), as Mitchell said, agreeing with Daley?

“[T]he mayor is right about one thing,” she wrote. 

Community activists would have gone berserk had Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis ordered police to stop every white T-shirt, cap-cocked-to-the-side, medallion swinging, pants-sagging black and brown youth in and around the Taste.

“You have to be cautious. You can’t just send a hundred policemen and — say if it’s Gang X African-Americans — and start grabbing every African-American [in the area]. You’d have a full-scale riot,” the mayor said on Tuesday.

Had police harassed even one person who fit the profile of a gang-banger and that person turned out to be a harmless suburban kid in hip-hop gear, well, you can imagine the outcry.

No, what they do was not her point, to go by today’s “Weis wants a new SOS REVIVE DISBANDED UNIT? | Meets with aldermen after Taste violence,” in which the issue is switching cops from white non-gang wards to black (and hispanic) gang wards:

“[Weis is] doing a statistical analysis of crime and crime patterns with an eye toward realigning beats and districts,” said Ald. Robert Fioretti (2nd).

Ald. Freddrenna Lyle (6th) said Weis “agreed there needs to be some kind of re-evaluation because it hasn’t been done in 25 years and everything has changed since then.” But she’s not holding her breath.

“Every superintendent we’ve had has said they’d look at it — and it still hasn’t happened. You’ve got to [be willing to] make some people mad,” Lyle said.

“Some people” indeed.  Lyle meant white people living in non-gang wards, of course.  It’s a matter of moving cops around.  That’s what Mitchell was talking about.

It would have been nice to read her saying that more clearly, but she preferred tip-toeing on the subject.  Even race-based columnists have their sensitivities.