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| Image: donnieschinalatina21 |
A couple of weeks ago, we reported exclusively that two young men who were beaten and stabbed with broken bottles by a mob near the Belmont Red Line tracks were attacked as they waited more than 10 minutes for police to respond to their 911 call for help with two detained cell phone robbers. Our story revealed that no police officers were ever on their way to help because the 19th District had run out of police officers.
Believe it or not, the entire district quite literally has no police officers available to handle emergency calls on a fairly regular basis. The police department refers to times when no cops are available as RAPs, which stands for Radio Assignments Pending. You can read more about RAPs and their contribution to crime being “down” in our June 23 post.
Weekend overnights are particularly bad times to be in need of the police. Unfortunately, since Wrigleyville and Boystown are nightlife districts, weekend nights are pretty popular times for street criminals to be on the job.
CWB has culled our records from the past two weeks to see how many times we noted that the 19th district entered RAP status. Here are the times that the entire 19th district had no cops available to answer emergency calls:
- Sunday, 23 June 2013 2:42AM to 3:03AM
- Sunday, 23 June 2013 from 4:50AM to at least 5:20AM
- Sunday, 7 July 2013 from 5:25AM to 6:05AM (approximate end)
- Monday, 8 July 2013 from 5:17AM to 5:55AM
It’s entirely possible that other RAPs were declared, but we simply were not made aware of them.
Perhaps you’d like to ask our alderman what he’s doing about this problem? ward44@cityofchicago.org
