BEST PRACTICES AND BODY BAGS

In one scene, gang members gently shepherd a cluster of perhaps 20
customers across a Chicago street. Drug peddlers await them, wares at
the ready. No leisurely shopping allowed. Cops are on the prowl, so
the dope will be exposed for only seconds. You buy, you're gone.

Another scene shows a drug giveaway at Washington Boulevard and Keeler
Avenue. Businesses can't expand without new customers. How better to
hook them than with free samples?

A third scene shows junkies and hookers hired to work as lookouts. If
the cops bust this open-air market, maybe they'll get so tied up
arresting all these expendable day laborers that the gang members
entrusted with guns, drug packets and wads of cash can make an escape.

Individually, these scenes from Chicago police surveillance tapes are
instructive. Spliced together, they're infuriating. This is what many
Chicagoans see every day when they look out their windows. The
shrewdest law-abiders, of course, don't look, for fear of catching
stray bullets. Gangbangers cause half, perhaps two-thirds of the
homicides in Chicago.

Drug gangs are the prime reason why Chicago's murder rate last
year--20.7 homicides per 100,000 residents--was double what it was at
the height of the Roaring '20s, when Al Capone's enforcers turned the
streets to crimson. Any illicit seller--of alcohol or of drugs--wants
to discourage competitors. If that means killing them, so what?

The film clips are galling in the retelling, more so when projected on
a screen so big that the gangbangers appear, yes, larger than life.

Curbing those gangbangers and their street carnage has been Philip
Cline's top priority since he became police superintendent in 2003.
Homicides declined last year by 8 percent. This year's homicide pace
is 25 percent below last year. That success is a reason to push
harder, not an excuse to slack off.

So, on a crisp autumn Saturday, Cline pulled together 260 officers and
prosecutors from city, county, state and federal law enforcement to talk
about further reducing the number of body bags. Those film clips? Jolts of
adrenaline. Reminders that gangbangers still terrorize many streets.
Cline's agenda? To swap "best practices"--fresh tactics the agencies on
hand are using against Chicago's hometown terrorists. Examples:

- - Gangbangers have vast drug profits but need to launder that money.
Some are creating real estate empires, exploiting lax document
verification in the mortgage industry to commit huge frauds against
lenders. In one scam, a gang "rents" the good credit of a person with
no criminal record for, say, $10,000. That person becomes a straw
buyer of buildings. He or she uses gang money, plus phony income
records and other paperwork computer-generated by the gang, to secure
mortgages from careless (or complicit) lenders. Each month, the gang
hands the straw purchaser drug proceeds to cover mortgage payments. As
the buildings are rented or sold, those proceeds fund purchases of
more buildings--or of firearms and drugs. Police and Internal Revenue
Service agents are exploiting new ways of tracking and cracking these
elaborate schemes. One case now under investigation here involves $84
million in frauds. (Remember, Capone went to prison for tax evasion,
not murder.)

- - Intentional shootings here are down 40 percent this year--after a 23
percent drop last year--and gun seizures are up. One reason among
several: an on-call police squad that specializes in locating hidden
compartments for guns and drugs in suspicious vehicles. Crafty auto
shops charge up to $7,000 to build an imaginative stash spot in a
dashboard, door, floor or ceiling. Each compartment is designed to
open only when a driver sends a secret series of electronic prompts.
Sgt. John Hamilton's favorite sequence to date (no two are wired
alike): Close the doors. Turn on the left map light. Pull out the
cupholder. Buckle the driver's seat belt. Turn on the cruise control.
Then hit the power window switch to trip that motor. Boing! The hidden
compartment pops open--and there's the gun.

- - Questioning gang members arrested for recent crimes about unsolved
cases involving their gangs is an ancient ritual. But interrogators
have had recent successes by zeroing in on old gangbangers--those over
30. Sure, a few owe great wealth to Chicago gangs and won't talk.
Others, though, have little but wasted lives and deep resentments for
their years of misplaced loyalty. As interrogators have driven home
that realization, some of the latter group have been displaying sharp
memories and glib tongues.

- - Building on a tactic Cline learned from Los Angeles police, Chicago
cops have been conducting "seat belt safety missions" in some of this
city's most violent neighborhoods--often near friction points where
rival gangs' territories abut. Officers set up traffic stops to
confirm that each driver is obeying seat belt laws. Most citizens get
a "Thanks and good-day." But drivers who try to evade the checkpoints
get pulled aside by "takedown cars." One episode: A driver who tried
to skirt a seatbelt stop at 104th Street and Wentworth Avenue turned
out to be wanted for a double murder in Kansas City, Mo. His car held
a stash of cocaine--and a gun linked to those killings. That's one
more gun gone from Chicago.

- - Federal prosecutors here appear to be convincing street cops and
federal agents that they're not interested in building big numbers of
small cases--a common ploy for impressing the Justice Department
bosses back in Washington. Instead, by initiating two huge criminal
cases this year against some 150 defendants allegedly tied to two of
Chicago's most vicious gang factions--the Mafia Insane Vice Lords and
the Black Disciples--federal prosecutors have telegraphed their
commitment to the big cases that can make this a truly safer city.
Each mega-case is an opportunity to take experienced killers off the
streets and thus prevent future bloodshed.

These five initiatives are works in progress. But they're driving down
the numbers by dovetailing with three other strategies that have
received more public attention: Rapidly flooding police officers into
zones where violence has occurred evidently is diminishing retaliation
among gangs. Community-based efforts such as CeaseFire are stirring
anti-violence activism on blocks long strafed by gang gunfire. And the
local-state-federal Project Safe Neighborhoods, headed up by the U.S.
attorney's office here, is parlaying stiff federal gun laws into more
hard time in far-off federal penitentiaries for shooters who once
served shorter sentences in Illinois state prisons. In the
violence-prone police districts where PSN is up and running, murders
this year are down 35 percent.

"The homicide decline in Chicago's impoverished neighborhoods." That
phrase has been a long time coming. Remember, it's a reason to push
harder, not an excuse to slack off.