John Kass has the Supt. Weis questioning as politics as usual in Chi, W. having shaken up things that were just fine as far as aldermen are concerned — why did he have to go and do that? they wonder as K. sees it, probably with unerring accuracy.

Just a few years ago, even the Chicago mob had a big say in who worked where in the top echelons of the department.

William Hanhardt, the heroic chief of detectives, was once the guy to see in the department about promotions and transfers and so on, even though he wasn’t technically the superintendent, and the Hanhardt culture shaped the detective division. When he was later convicted of running an Outfit-backed jewelry-heist ring, using top cops to glean information about his targets from police computers, the aldermen neglected something.

They neglected to hold a hearing to get to the bottom of things. They didn’t ask any questions. Not one. Not even the mayor would condemn him, which is the Chicago Way.

In addition, an op-ed from an ex-FBI black guy living in Texas who grew up in Chi and got shot for his trouble by a ‘hood resident whom he tackled while fleeing with a snatched purse, says about the aldermanic grilling:

Chicago’s public officials are looking through the wrong end of the telescope when they indulge in second-guessing Supt. Weis’ shuffling of his command structure. And it’s not handguns that need to be controlled, it’s the hands holding the guns.

But the formidable Heather Mac Donald in WashPost has substance to beat all in the matter, pushing for the sort of police procedures that saved New York from itself in the 90s — “the single most effective urban policy of the last decade: accountable, data-driven policing.”

[I]n New York City in the 1990s, Police Commissioner William Bratton and a group of hard-charging reformers embraced the iconoclastic idea that policing could in fact radically lower crime.

Iconoclastic in view of “[t]he received wisdom of the Great Society . . . that crime could be lowered only by eliminating its “root causes”: poverty and racism.”

The N.Y.P.D. pioneered an array of techniques to provide precinct commanders with the most up-to-date information on crime patterns and to constantly evaluate which crime-fighting strategies actually worked. Most important, commanders were held ruthlessly accountable for crime in their jurisdictions.

Sans aldermanic or city council member input, it goes without saying.

The results were startling: From 1993 to 1997, major felonies in New York City dropped 41 percent and homicides 60 percent — a record unmatched anywhere else at the time.

New York “roared back to life”:

Not only the central business districts of Manhattan experienced this rebirth; businesses poured into predominantly minority areas in Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx. The residents of these once-troubled neighborhoods experienced freedom of movement and economic opportunities that had been deemed permanently lost.

Yes.  Next time you hear about City Hall neglecting neighborhoods, do not think job training or subsidies.  Think law and order.  And if it’s not too heretical for you, look towards New York in the 90s.