Emanuel Touts Teen Mentoring, A Major Prong Of His Anti-Crime Strategy
(CBS) – Who's going to pay for it, and will the money be spent in the right places?
Those are the questions lingering, after Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel revealed his new plan to fight crime.
CBS 2 Political Reporter Derrick Blakley has the reaction.
On Friday, Emanuel was at Morgan Park High School, at one of the teen mentoring programs he's backing.
The mayor says spending $36 million in taxpayer and corporate dollars into programs like Becoming A Man, or BAM, can cut the level of street violence.
"You guys didn't give up on yourselves, and the city shouldn't give up on you," Emanuel said as he met with participants.
He's also hiring almost 1,000 new cops. The initial cost is at least $130 million next year.
What's missing, say critics, is a jobs plan for devastated neighborhoods.
"We really have communities that are starved for economic development," Rev. Marshall Hatch of New Mount Pilgrim Baptist Church. "You can't talk about parenting without giving parents the kind of economic tools to build families."
That is something even downtown advocates say is needed.
"For too long, there were great disparities on the level of investment, and at best it was sporadic in some of these neighborhoods," the Civic Federation's Laurence Msall says.
Emanuel says you have to start somewhere.
"Everybody needs a little help to figure out how to get right and go straight," Emanuel says.
He says 8th-, 9th- and 10th-graders participating in BAM are half as likely to be arrested for violent crime and 20 percent more likely to graduate high school on time.