My favorite television spot for a Chicago mayoral candidate has got to be one of the spots for Toni Preckwinkle, president of the Cook County Board. I’d embed it but it doesn’t appear to be available on Youtube which looks like an un-media savvy thing to me.
In the spot several earnest-sounding ordinary Chicago types make glowing statements about Board President Preckwinkle and she chimes in with modest support for their praise. One of them chortles “She was a CPS teacher!” and BP Preckwinkle adds “So I believe in more teachers rather than more jails.”
I guess that’s fine if you don’t examine it too closely but isn’t the more apt comparison between teachers and police officers rather than teachers and jails? I mean why do you need police officers to arrest people if you don’t plan on jailing them? If she’s actually running against adding police officers, it would certainly distinguish her campaign—everyone else is running on adding police officers. (Just for the record Chicago already has the highest number of police officers per 100K population of any major U. S. city and I know of no empirical evidence that more police officers reduces the incidence of crime. Indeed, the only pseudo-controlled study of which I’m aware found no correlation.)
So, what do you do if you lay off police officers, hire teachers, and you come home at night to find your apartment ransacked by burglars? Call a teacher? The entire thing is goofy.
