- Michael Schmidt/Sun-Times
- Jesus Garcia speaks outside the DuSable Museum before a recent debate. He pledges to hire a thousand more police officers if he’s elected mayor.
A politician campaigns in poetry and governs in prose, Rahm Emanuel’s buddy David Axelrod likes to say. That maxim, coined by the late New York governor Mario Cuomo, is astute, but the “poetry” of a campaign is rarely the challenging type. It tends to be shallow and ingratiating—it’s designed to be music to the ears of voters. A candidate’s campaign “poetry” rarely will include a stanza on raising taxes, for instance.
“Violent crime is a staggering problem throughout the entire city,” he says on his website. (That’s not correct. It’s a staggering problem in certain neighborhoods, and it appears to be declining citywide.) “I will keep the promise Mayor Emanuel broke—the promise to put 1,000 new police officers on the street. Without those officers, we will never be able to end the heartbreaking violence that has taken the lives of so many of our children.”
I asked Garcia’s press secretary on Tuesday how much of the $111 million would be counterbalanced by reductions in overtime; and what the net gain in police staffing levels would be; and how much of a reduction in violent crime Garcia foresees from this approach. No response yet to these questions.
