“Over the 1991-2002 period, violent crime [in Chicago] has declined by 49 percent, and property crime by 36 percent,” reports the Chicago Community Policing Evaluation Consortium in its January report, “CAPS at Ten.” “Murder was down the least over this period, by 30 percent. As in many cities, the ability of Chicago’s police to solve homicides has waned. While other kinds of homicide have declined, the remaining core of gang and drug-related shootings has proven more difficult to counter.”
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Recycling takes on a whole new meaning. The Peoria Journal Star (April 7) reports that 70 barge loads of mud are being dredged from Peoria Lake in the Illinois River and hauled upriver to the south side’s old U.S. Steel site, which is being turned into a park. John Marlin, a senior scientist with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and a Peoria native, has done research showing that “the sediment deposited recently is almost as clean as that settling into the river before the heavy use of industrial chemicals.”
Stop giving stuff away–it doesn’t help. University of Iowa planning professors Alan Peters and Peter Fisher write on “The Failures of Economic Development Incentives” in the Journal of the American Planning Association (Winter): “It is possible that incentives do induce significant new growth, that the beneficiaries of that growth are mainly those who have greatest difficulty in the labor market, and that both states and local governments benefit fiscally from that growth. But after decades of policy experimentation and literally hundreds of scholarly studies, none of these claims is clearly substantiated. Indeed…there is a good chance that all of these claims are false….Many public officials appear to believe that they can influence the course of their state or local economies through incentives and subsidies to a degree far beyond anything supported by even the most optimistic evidence.”
