Chicago's crime rate goes down: can cops take credit? - Arresting .

So, getting back to my question.There are some crimes on which police can cause a direct impact throughenforcement, such as gang crime, street robberies and quality-of-lifecrimes like vandalism and public intoxication. Property crimes aretrickier, as are crimes against persons. The accuracy is that no one actually knows why crime rates increase and lessen the way they do.

he police administrator who takes credit for dropping crime rates issetting himself up as a scapegoat when rates spike upward.Socialscientists and criminologists have all kinds of theories. Right nowthe reductionist "poverty causes crime" isn't looking too good-propertycrime rates are apparently decreasing even as unemployment andforeclosure devastates entire neighborhoods.Tthe majority ofday-to-day police work is untouched by, and has little shock upon,fluctuations in reported crime rates, especially in the suburbs. Wespend most of our time dealing with people who've ended up with usbecause some other-every other-system or safety net hasbroken. We are the de facto largest supplier of mental health andsubstance abuse intervention. Not merely are we the only governmententity that will do the phone 24 hours a day, we're the only onethat will actually send a voice to your home to speak with youabout your problem.I've written before about Chicago's violence and the decomposition of the family, but it's not merely an urban problem-I've also written around the intractable nature of rural poverty and crime.Again and again I come back to the thought of the dysfunctional family,with its tangled issues of poverty, mental illness, substance abuse andevil, as the main driver of police workload. I recently saw three stories, all involving mothers and their children, that illustrate my point.Meet Sheila Marie Montgomery:

Ms.Montgomery, 40, has a 20 year old son who was recently convicted ofpimping a 15 year old girl. Being a protective mother, she felt thather son was unjustly prosecuted, and confronted the 15 year old girloutside the courtroom. Not quenched with calling the daughter a liar,Montgomery called the daughter a "Hoe" on Montgomery's MySpace page, sayingshe was a "Hoe" before Montgomery's son came along. Then Montgomery posted links to internet prostitution ads featuring sexually explicit photos of the 15 year old girl.Ms. Montgomery is now facing felony charges herself. From the article, we see a little more about her:One of her MySpace pages is titled "Mama" and suggests she's been takingclasses since 2008 at Portland State University, noting the coursename: Child and Family Studies. She's been an outspoken opponentof Measure 11 mandatory minimum sentences, particularly after her sonwas convicted in 2006 of second-degree robbery.Charming.Next is a heartbreaking story from Bloomingdale.

43-year-old Marci Webber murdered her 4-year-old girl by slashing the child's throat. Her cause for doing so? "She said she cherished to prevent her daughter from being an Internet sex slave." Thethird story involves 27-year-old Jamie Riley of Riverside. Rileyrecently had a DCFS case against her dropped, so she decided tocelebrate. Police found her in the 5400 block of South Harlem Avenue,drunk, and keeping her 3-month old son "under her arm like a football."The baby is second in DCFS custody, and mom was supercharged with "misdemeanor child endangerment, disorderly conduct and public intoxication".Onemom who's a boozehound, one who's mentally ill, and a third who's justplain mean. No policing strategy addresses any of these, other thanshowing up afterward to clear up and make arrests.If only therewas a way to spot family situations like this and break them before it'stoo late. I believe that almost happened in this video, when police inHouma, Louisiana intervened in a wedding celebration gone wrong: