Will Rahm Emanuel follow through with his promise to implement significant police reform in Chicago despite the utter lack of interest from the Trump administration?

Would an increase in the level of punishment for getting caught a second time with a loaded, un-registered handgun make serious progress against our plague of street violence?

The Chicago Reporter’s Curtis Black joins us this week to analyze these and other issues. Fixing the CPD, he says, is complicated and difficult. But perhaps most important, it’s going to be really expensive. That’s due, at least in part, to the fact that this mayor and his predecessors have consistently short-changed the police.

“It takes resources and Chicago has been in this fiscal crisis for a long time,” he explains. “And if you look at the report and you remember back to Emanuel’s first budget where he called for $109-million in cuts and shut down police stations, and now you have sergeants supervising 20 or 40 patrol officers, and that’s one of the many problems. You have a tiny training department. You have three mental health counselors for the entire force…So, at the same time that Emanuel has decided to hire 1,000 officers there’s a real question of how you’re going to prioritize the limited resources that we have.”

You can find a directory to Curtis Black’s thoughtful commentaries HERE.

And you can listen to the entire show on your smartphone on SoundCloud.

And you can read a full transcript of this show HERE: CN transcript April 6 2017