CHICAGO REINS IN MURDER TALLY AGAIN

'05 Count Suggests '04 Was No Anomaly

A quiet November has helped bring Chicago's murder tally back down to
last year's historic lows, a turn that officials attribute to putting
more police on the street in the city's most violent neighborhoods.

Authorities feel confident that by the end of the year, they will be
able to show that last year's total of 448--the smallest number of
murders in the city in almost four decades--was not an anomaly.

In 2003, Chicago led the nation in murders, and police introduced new
strategies to fight the gang violence that was a major part of the
problem. The next year the number of murders dropped by 25 percent.

That drop was so steep that police officials cautioned against high
expectations for 2005.

Indeed, by the end of August, the murder tally was running 15 higher
than at the same time in 2004. Gang strife in Chicago Lawn, Roseland
and a few other areas spiked over the summer before police could
deploy extra officers to those areas and send gang members into hiding.

But this fall, the trend has shifted again. November's murder total
dropped from 32 last year to 26 this year. As of Thursday, there had
been 415 murders in Chicago, compared with 418 by the same date in 2004.

Supt. Philip Cline believes that an opportunity to add more uniformed
police to the weekend patrols in gang-infested neighborhoods over the
last two weeks helped quiet the violence in November.

"When the gangs see that visibility, it makes a difference," Cline said Friday.

The Police Department did not hire more officers, but Cline tapped
money seized from drug dealers to start paying officers overtime so
that they could spend their days off patrolling trouble spots.

Every weekend an additional 50 officers patrol 10 high-violence
sections of the city that Cline calls "hot zones."

Shutting down drug dealers

The department also has increased the number of street-corner
narcotics conspiracy operations this year. By shutting down the
gangs' street drug dealing, and by arresting several gang members at
a time on conspiracy charges, the department believes officers have
further thwarted the street narcotics trade, which often leads to
gang violence.

"We did a total of 34 [operations] last year, and this year we've
already done 48," he said.

Part of the solution is better information.

The Police Department has improved its ability to quell gang violence
since the creation in mid-2003 of the Deployment Operations Center,
which uses rapidly gathered crime statistics to pinpoint gang
conflicts as they unfold in the city.

Working hand-in-hand with the center, special teams of uniformed
officers are assigned to flood the areas for weeks, making it
difficult for gang members to settle conflicts on the street with guns.

The ongoing challenge for Cline has been to find more officers to put
on the street in the targeted areas. He has taken officers assigned
to desk jobs and put them on the street one day a week to bolster the numbers.

"We're going to just keep doing what we're doing," Cline said Friday.