Welcome To The Third World, Part 18: Pensions Overwhelm Public Services
By: John Rubino
GoldSeek.com
Sunday, 28 August 2016
Citizens of the developed world are watching Venezuela’s descent into financial and political chaos mostly, it seems, with amused detachment, safe in the assumption that we’ll never end up hunting our cats and dogs for food.
But – since Europe, Japan and the US are making essentially the same mistakes as Venezuela’s past and present governments – we might want to question that certainty. Consider what’s happening in the third biggest US city:
Chicago’s detective force dwindles as murder rate soars
(Reuters) – Every two weeks, Cynthia Lewis contacts the detectives investigating the homicide of her brother on Chicago’s south side almost a year ago.
They have had no success finding who shot Tyjuan Lewis, a 43-year-old father of 15, near his home in the quiet Roseland neighborhood of single-family houses.
The death of Lewis, who delivered the U.S. mail for 20 years, is one of hundreds of slayings in 2015 that have gone unsolved as the number of homicides soared in Chicago, piling pressure on a shrinking detective force.
In a city with as many as 90 shootings a week, homicides this year are on track to hit their highest level since 1997.
Chicago’s murder clearance rate, a measurement of solved and closed cases, is one of the country’s lowest, another sign of problems besetting police in the third biggest city in the United States.
Detectives and policing experts interviewed this week said Chicago struggles to solve murders because of declining numbers of detectives, the high number of cases per detective and because witnesses mistrust the police and fear retaliation from gangs.
The number of detectives on the Chicago police force has dropped to 922 from 1,252 in 2008. One detective who retired two months ago said investigators are overwhelmed. “You get so many cases you could not do an honest investigation on three-quarters of them, he said in an interview. “The guys … are trying to investigate one homicide and they are sent out the next day on a brand new homicide or a double.”
Why should a city as apparently affluent as Chicago have such a nightmarish crime situation? Because it’s not really that affluent. Like most of the rest of the formerly-rich world, Chicago ran out of money years ago and has been more-or-less secretly borrowing to cover the shortfall. Its public sector pensions, for instance, pay retired workers far more than the city can afford – but are legally uncuttable according to a recent court ruling. Here’s that story:
Pension ruling another blow to Chicago taxpayers — and Emanuel
The Rest…HERE
