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The Chicago Tribune reports that the past 14 months have been the Windy City's most violent in two decades, with more than 4,300 people shot and over 760 killed.

Nurses at city hospitals are suffering from compassion fatigue, and everyone from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on down promises to stop the carnage.

Talk is cheap. Will cops and city government get their act together to fight crime? Unfortunately, they have no reason to.

That's because the public fails to hold public leaders accountable for performance. As Patrick Wolf and I show in "Cops, Teachers, and the Art of the Impossible," there is no statistical relationship between a city's homicide rate and whether the mayor keeps or fires the police commissioner. Indeed as one police expert told us it, no prior researcher even bothered to study this since "there is absolutely no correlation with the homicide rates and police commissioner tenure. Everybody knows that."

Top cops get fired for scandals or because mayors dislike them, not when their officers fail to protect the public they are sworn to protect and serve.

Nor do police leaders get fired for police brutality. My co-author Ian Kingsbury finds no relationship between the number of citizens killed by law enforcement officers and the size of Black Lives Matter protests.

That's tragic, because cops can do better. Recently retired New York Police Department Commissioner William Bratton proved it. Bratton led NYPD under current Mayor de Blasio and back in the 1990s under then Mayor Giuliani.

Bratton gained fame for "broken windows" enforcement of minor offenses, and for using real time crime data to mass cops at trouble spots. Yet other cities tried those with little luck. Three largely unrecognized factors led to NYPD's success.

First, even before Bratton NYPD had talent since it recruited nationally rather than just locally, hiring the best. Second, Bratton highlighted precinct leaders who cut crime, making NYPD a learning organization. Third, leaders who didn't learn were shown the door. Bratton replaced two-thirds of precinct commanders with better leaders. Few police commissioners have such power over personnel, and none use it to fight crime rather than reward cronies.

Bratton's reforms brought years of double digit homicide declines. From 1993 to 2014, New York's homicide rate fell from 27 per 100,000 people to 4 per 100,000, about 50 percent below the national average. By 2014 New York had the fewest killings since anyone began counting a half century earlier. In 2015 The Economist ranked New York the 10th safest major city globally. From 1994 to 2014, about 1,300 fewer New Yorkers were murdered annually compared to 1993.

Police shooting of civilians also plummeted. NYPD's 35,000 officers kill about a dozen people annually, nearly 90 percent fewer than in 1970 and 75 percent below the national norm.

Reforming NYPD likely saved over 25,000 lives, disproportionately black lives something Black Lives Matter activists were too busy calling for Bratton's ouster to notice.

Activist politics combine with city hall politics to explain why no one copies NYPD. Mayor Giuliani fired Bratton as soon as the popular top cop became a political threat. Within NYPD, Bratton's change agent personality won few friends. Only a commissioner who didn't mind making cops and mayors mad would copy Bratton.

That means that police and city leaders in Chicago and elsewhere will talk nice and keep their jobs, while doing nothing to make black lives matter. That depresses those of us who want to heal racial divides, and make American cops the best in the world.

Robert Maranto (rmaranto@uark.edu) is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.

If you would like to write an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, please read ourguidelines on submissions.

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The trouble with police, and Black Lives Matter - Washington Examiner

As various movements have sprung up like flash mobs to protest against Donald Trump's election to the White House, a question gradually occurred to me: Where's Black Lives Matter?

Ever since the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was born after a jury acquitted neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012, the loosely formed movement has turned up repeatedly to protest fatal shootings of unarmed black men and other racial disparities in the U.S. criminal justice system.

But since President Trump's election, we have seen new eruptions of racially suspicious police incidents, but not of major protests.

Last week, for example, we saw a suburban Dallas police officer charged with murder for allegedly firing his rifle into a car full of black teens, killing a 15-year-old boy.

Last month we saw the stunning video of a group of black boys, ranging in age from 12 to 14, being detained by police officers, with at least one officer aiming his gun at the boys.

Yet, as much as these disturbing stories made national news, they did not spark the major protests we have seen elsewhere. Why?

A Washington Post reporting team came up with one answer after interviewing what they described as "more than half a dozen leaders" in the Black Lives Matter movement.

The movement has entered a new phase, the team was told. It is focused more on policy than on protest, all in response to President Trump.

"There are less demonstrations," said Alicia Garza, one of three women credited with coining the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag. "People are channeling their energy into organizing locally, recognizing that in Trump's America, our communities are under direct attack."

Indeed, that makes a lot of sense at a time when Trump's election seems to have changed everything about how we Americans view the world.

But I think the energy and enthusiasm for Black Lives Matter street protests peaked sooner than that. I think it happened last July when five police officers in Dallas were killed by an African-American sniper at a Black Lives Matter protest. Ten days later, three more police were killed by an African-American man in Baton Rouge, La., following street protests over the shooting of another black man.

No, I don't believe it is fair to blame peaceful protesters for the shootings of the officers any more than I think it would be fair to blame Republicans for every deranged right-wing shooter who also happened to vote for the GOP. Still, it's a little harder to criticize President Trump for his various inflammatory remarks, if you dodge accountability for any anti-police tone in your own protests.

Loosely organized flash mob movements with weak leaders and vague agendas have become a trend in the Twitter age. But these leaders tend to lack control over their members, their message and their momentum.

Lack of organizational discipline leads to embarrassments like the foolish protesters in St. Paul who chanted, "Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon," while marching behind police officers at the Minnesota state fairgrounds two years ago. Conservative commentators still replay that video today.

Everybody seems to have an opinion about what Black Lives Matter should do with itself. Here's mine. I think it's time for the movement to move up from protests to planning, policies and programs. Protests have a lot of romantic appeal but they're no substitute for an agenda, firm goals and a plan to get there.

Conservative media have pinned all manner of racist beliefs on Black Lives Matter, yet the movement has not put much of a priority on appointing official spokespeople to push back.

On the contrary, members of today's young, self-styled "woke" (politically conscious) generation, I have found to my chagrin, too often think it is beneath them to arm themselves with knowledge and employ the simple art of persuasion to win people to their side. "It's not my job to educate you" I have been told by some righteous activists in a form of intellectual snobbery that is bound to lead to failure.

Indeed, a lot of people find it easier to call for dialogue than to actually engage in one. That's changing. Some Black Lives Matter activists have organized a formal agenda and leadership development programs, just for starters. Leaders matter. Whether things go right or wrong, somebody has to be where the buck stops.

Clarence Page, a member of the Tribune Editorial Board, blogs at http://www.chicagotribune.com/pagespage.

cpage@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @cptime

Excerpt from:
Can #BlackLivesMatter move up in the age of Trump? - Chicago ... - Chicago Tribune

These women are in jail not because theyve been convicted of a crime but because they cant pay to get back to their lives as they await trial.

Shonta Montgomery hugs her son Levell Jones at California Institute for Women in Chino, California. (Reuters / Lucy Nicholson)

This week, black women in more than a dozen jails across the country will receive a Mothers Day gift from the Black Lives Matter movement: their freedom. These women are among the 62 percent of people in jail who are there not because theyve been convicted of a crime but because they cant pay to get back to their lives as they await trial. Organizers with Southerners on New Ground (SONG), the Movement for Black Lives, ColorOfChange, and other groups have reached their goal of raising more than $250,000 for what theyre calling National Mamas Bail Out Day, and are continuing to raise more. These groups will pay for the release of women whose pretrial detention illustrates much of whats wrong with the criminal justice system. Many of the women who will be freed are in jail for low-level offenses such as loitering or small-scale drug possession. Nationwide, nearly a third of all women in jail have serious mental health issues, and the racial disparity is clear: Black women make up 44 percent of women in jails.

The idea for the Mothers Day bailout, which will free at least 30 women in Atlanta, Houston, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and other cities nationwide, came out of a January gathering of representatives from 25 black-led organizations that wanted to collaborate on bail reform. The groups wondered how they might begin to put into action the vision outlined in the Movement for Black Lives policy platform released last summer. Mary Hooks, co-director of the Atlanta-based LGBTQ organizing project SONG, offered an idea shed been developing with other activists who had noticed the disparate impact that money bail and jail-related fines and fees has on LGBTQ communities. Hookss campaign ideawhat she describes as using our collective resources to buy each others freedomwas welcomed by the larger group. And because event organizers emphasize the ways race, class, and gender identity all play a role in criminalization, they have an expansive understanding of who qualifies as a mother. When we talk about black mamas, we know that mothering happens in a variety of ways, Hooks said. Whether its the mothers in the clubs who teach the young kids how to vogue, or the church mothers who took care of me. Women who are birth mothers and chosen mothers are eligible to be bailed out.

Mothers Day, with its idealized notions of family and womanhood, is the right moment to force an examination of women in jails, said Arissa Hall, a national Mamas Bail Out Day organizer and project manager at the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund. All mothers are not celebrated, she said, adding that this is especially true of women who struggle with poverty, addiction, and mental-health issuesin other words, the women who fill our jails. Black moms especially have not been granted that title of motherhood, she added, going on to describe how slavery shredded kinship bonds. Black women, too, she noted, have historically taken on caretaker roles that have put them in charge of other peoples children and away from their own.

Black moms especially have not been granted that title of motherhood. Arissa Hall

History guided event organizers in other ways as they pieced together their strategy. They studied the incremental steps toward abolition that enslaved people made in centuries past. From putting ourselves in cardboard boxes and mailing ourselves to freedom, to using the Underground Railroad, black people didnt wait for an Emancipation Proclamation or the end of the Civil War to act on their own behalf, Hooks told me. Instead, they sometimes bought their own and each others freedom, and in doing so left a blueprint for how to directly challenge mass criminalization today, even as policy battles are in progress. Marbre Stahly-Butts helps lead the Movement for Black Lives policy table and is partnership director at Law for Black Lives. She and others who advocate for criminal-justice reform and prison abolition are engaged in the long fight of pressuring district attorneys, judges and local and state officials to change their policies and practices. We have to be doing that, she told me. But we also can be collecting our resources to make a direct impact on the material conditions of our people who are in cages right now.

Donate to National Mamas Bail Out Day

This is the work bail funds across the country engage in every day, which is why Halls expertise has been critical. Shes been researching the specifics of how bail operates in the cities and counties where this weeks actions will take place, building relationships with sympathetic public defenders and otherwise demystifying the process for organizers. Its a myth that folks dont come back to court when released on their own recognizance, she told me, explaining that upwards of 95 percent of people helped by bail funds return to court for their scheduled appearances. People will come back to court regardless of whether or not bail is set. In her experience, what it takes to get people to their court dates is phone-call reminders and bus or train fare.

Providing the social services people need can help, too, which is why in Atlanta there will be a homecoming celebration on Mothers Day where the women bailed out of Fulton County and Atlanta city jails can gather for a barbecue and more information about subsequent campaigns to end cash bail, Hooks said. In addition to learning about the national effort theyre a part of, the women will be able to have photos with their families taken and get access to resources for housing, jobs, health services, and rides back to court.

Recently, the stories of Kalief Browder in New York City and Sandra Bland in Texass Waller Countypeople who were jailed and then met related tragic deathshave brought public attention to how torturous the experience of jail can be. Desperation to get out of that environment can force people to do whatever it takes to go home, including taking plea deals even when theyre innocent, organizers said. Bail corrupts the concept of justice, in that people who cant pay to get out of jail will eventually resolve their cases through a plea, said Hall. We dont force our court system to do what its actually supposed to do, which is give people a fair trial.

See more here:
This Mother's Day, Black Lives Matter Activists Will Give More Than ... - The Nation.

Anthony Souffle, Star Tribune DeRay Mckesson, one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, spoke at the Charities Review Council forum on equity and inclusion in northeast Minneapolis on Tuesday.

DeRay Mckesson, a former Minneapolis schools official who left his job to become one of the most high-profile figures of the national Black Lives Matter movement, told local nonprofit leaders Tuesday that Minnesota Nice can stand in the way of equity.

As a human resources director for Minneapolis schools, Mckesson said he noticed that people in the Twin Cities liked to talk about equity ensuring that kids regardless of color can achieve at the same high level but sidestepped the honest, sometimes hard-to-hear conversations and criticisms that can result in change.

Minnesota Nice does damage to kids, he said. While observing in classrooms, he found that some felt attacked and were defensive when people just gave feedback.

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BLM leader DeRay Mckesson: 'Minnesota Nice' hurts equity efforts - Minneapolis Star Tribune

Criminal Justice

Posted May 10, 2017 12:34 pm CDT

By Debra Cassens Weiss

Shutterstock

Several groups have been raising money to bail black women out of jail so they can spend Mothers Day with their families.

The idea for National Mamas Bail Out Day originated with the Atlanta-based, LGBTQ nonprofit Southerners On New Ground, report The Nation, Phoenix New Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Women in pretrial detention are being bailed out of jail in 16 cities across the country in advance of Mothers Day on Sunday.

Other groups participating include Black Lives Matter, the Movement for Black Lives, ColorOfChange, Healing Hearts of Families USA Ministries, the National Domestic Workers Alliance and SisterSong.

The idea springs from freed slaves raising money to buy their relatives freedom before the Civil War ended.

Southerners on New Ground co-director Mary Hooks spoke at a fundraiser on Thursday, according to the Journal-Constitution. Many of the women being stuffed into cages right now are in for minor, low-level offenses, she said. Its time for us to divest from police, jails and courts and invest in our communities.

Black women are imprisoned at higher rates. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, 30 percent of all incarcerated women in the United States are black, although they make up only 13 percent of the female population.

The groups are also considering a bailout day for Fathers Day.

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Black Lives Matter and other groups raise money to bail women out of jail before Mother's Day - ABA Journal