New Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s campaign trail idea of taking away Ald. Ed Burke’s security detail to put a few more Chicago police officers on the streets won’t be coming to fruition.
The mayor’s handpicked police superintendent, Garry McCarthy, said today that he can’t pull back Burke’s police bodyguards.
“It's mandated by a court,” McCarthy said. “So I don't have the authority to change a court decision.”
That assessment came after Emanuel suggested during a February mayoral debate that the powerful 14th Ward alderman’s detail should be on the chopping block.
“The City Council has to share in the sacrifice because the residents will be sharing in the sacrifice, which means if Ed Burke has six police officers, that just can’t continue," Emanuel said.
At the time, Burke was backing mayoral candidate Gery Chico, Emanuel’s toughest opponent. After Emanuel won, however, Burke and the mayor-elect reached a détente that allowed him to keep his long-held post as Finance Committee chairman.
A couple of weeks after the debate, prosecutors charged an unemployed Southwest Side man with making a veiled death threat against Burke in a telephone message at his office.
McCarthy, who was speaking at an unrelated event Tuesday, said in light of his efforts to get more cops on the street, “I absolutely understand the question” about Burke’s security detail.
Burke has had a bodyguard detail since at least the early 1980s, when he was a prominent politician involved in the racially tinged Council Wars. When the late Mayor Harold Washington in 1986 tried to cut it from four to two people, Burke went to court and blocked the move.
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