Quote:
Originally Posted by iheartthed
A cop should definitely understand the neighborhood that he or she patrols. It is fundamental to police work.
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But in a city as large (and hyper-segregated) as Chicago, the residency requirement doesn't really enforce what you want it to.
How is a cop who lives Edison Park and mostly patrols the Garfield Park area more fundamentally in-tune with that community than a hypothetical cop who lives just across city limits in neighboring Park Ridge?
I mean, the former one gets to vote for mayor and an alder-cretin, so there's that I guess, but on socio-economic and demographic measures, Edison Park and Park Ridge are orders of magnitude more similar to each other than either are to Garfield Park (like a different galaxies level of difference).
As I said before, the main point of chicago's city worker residency requirement is about keeping city tax dollars within the city, and by extension, keeping some fringe neighborhoods more stable middle class.
You can kind of look at it as a sort of "economic greenbelt" because the city of Chicago really has no control over how land gets developed out in the collar counties, so the least it can do is prevent people who collect city paychecks from feeding into the disgusting sprawl beast.