Gardeners far outnumber police in Chicago's downtown

Driving through downtown Chicago on most nights in early June, the largest mob of men you are likely to see isn't there to crack your skull with a 34 inch baseball bat and take your wallet.

The mob I'm talking about does carry shiny, sharp, metal objects — but they are used to cultivate and plant, not to stab and slash.

And that may be the problem. The largest group of men you will see gathered in one place working for the city is putting in flowers — not protecting the public.

On Friday night, I left a restaurant near Michigan Avenue and Oak Street, one of several sections of the city recently preyed upon by small mobs of street thieves. Even though it was an unusually cool and wet night, there were still thousands of tourists and visitors on the streets about 10 p.m. But driving south on Michigan all the way to Wacker Drive, not one Chicago Police officer was visible. Not one was seen walking, in a patrol car or in an unmarked car.

All along Wacker, however, teams of landscape crews with huge carts of flowers were hard at work. There were dozens of men planting annuals in city-owned urns and concrete boxes that line Wacker as it follows the south bank of the Chicago River.

If one of those tourists from Davenport, Iowa walking down the street suddenly needed a geranium, there would have been no problem. A landscaper was right there to help. But if a flash mob appeared from an alleyway, where were the police?

Of course, this doesn't have anything to do with individual Chicago police officers, nearly all of whom are dedicated and hard working. Nor does it have anything to do with begonias and impatiens. The city has never looked better. And the Christian Industrial League that the city pays to install the flowers puts the money to good use-funding programs for men who are down on their luck.

This has nothing to do with any of that.

It has to do with a number that is in the ballpark of $500 million. Give or take $150 million.

That is the supposed size of the budget deficit in Chicago.

If you and your family were deeply in the red and owed thousands on your credit cards, cars, home, and to hospitals, doctors and bill collectors, would you still have the local landscaper come by to put in a terrace of Paris periwinkle and Mexican Heather?

Basically what we have here is a situation where city officials are planting petunias in a hole instead of digging the taxpayers out of it.

At least for the summer of 2011 Chicago needs more police, not more marigolds. And not the 150 cops that Mayor Emanuel announced Sunday would be shifted from lower crime districts to those that have lately seen an increase.

Chicago needs several thousand additional police officers on the streets. Moving cops around from one place to another, like the M & M game on the United Center jumbo-screen, won't help for long. Eventually the muggers and gangbangers will redeploy as well.

It wasn't always this way. Back on June 17, 1966, when Mayor Richard J. Daley and the City Council Committee on Beautification made the Chrysanthemum the “Official Flower of the city of Chicago,” things were simpler. There were no flash mobs on Michigan Avenue. And when things really got out of hand, the mayor called in the National Guard or just gave a shoot-to-kill order.

Since then, and largely with the backing of Mayor Richard M. Daley, Chicago has become a world class-looking city. More than ever in it's history, Chicago now lives up to it's motto “Urbs in Horto,” Latin for City in a Garden.

According to the city's department of transportation, “Chicago has more than 85 miles of landscaped medians on arterial streets throughout the city.” The flowers, most of which last just a few months, cost taxpayers millions of dollars to install and maintain. The landscaping on a few medians is privately financed, including North Michigan Avenue, whose merchants pay for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in floral work.

If attacks by roving gangs cannot be controlled by police, the merchants association should consider reallocating their gardening budget to private security patrols to protect themselves.

Friday night, the juxtaposition of no police in an area where there should have been a cop on every corner and a battalion of uniformed gardeners made one thing clear. Mayor Emanuel and his new police Superintendent Garry McCarthy ought to reread the old economic model of guns or butter.

Or as we are now facing in Chicago, guns or roses.

Chuck Goudie, whose column appears each Monday, is the chief investigative reporter at ABC 7 News in Chicago. The views in this column are his own and not those of WLS-TV. He can be reached by email at chuckgoudie@gmail.com and followed at twitter.com/ChuckGoudie