Word: mayor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Chicagoans are still on edge. Their mayor, Richard M. Daley, has led a dazzling economic and cultural renaissance during his nearly 20-year rule. Yet, for all Daley's success, his police department remains a blemish on his legacy. Weis was named to the job in November, following the resignation of the last superintendent, Philip Cline, in April 2007, amid a series of department scandals. They included an apparently drunken off-duty officer who was videotaped beating a female bartender. In September, federal authorities charged a member of the department's elite special operations unit with planning a colleague...
...since a news helicopter caught more than a dozen white officers kicking and beating three black men who were arrested as suspects in a shooting on a city street. "This was just a very unusual situation and I think the public reacted to it as an unusual situation," says Mayor Michael Nutter, who was swift to denounce the beatings after the tape showed on local television. "It doesn't represent anywhere near the norm in Philadelphia... We acted very directly, very swiftly, we told the truth and we'll let the investigation play out and let the chips fall where...
What makes this incident in Philadelphia different? Mondesire said it is a combination of weariness and hope in the minority community - weariness because they have seen Philadelphia police go unpunished in other high-profile cases dating back to the 1960s, but hope because the new mayor and his new police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, a veteran of turnaround projects at troubled departments, seem to be responding aggressively to the beating. "They jumped on it right away, they didn't hesitate," Mondesire says. "They immediately stepped into the investigation, they immediately took them off street duty, which is different" from the official...
...year before in a city of less than a million and a half residents. In some parts of the city, gunfire is a common sound and it's hardly unheard-of for innocent bystanders to be injured or killed. Nutter, who is black, was elected mayor last year in part on his promise to reduce the killings in a city weary of constant gunplay. "The rise in homicides makes it really clear that [the police] are operating under a level of stress," says longtime Philadelphia Daily News columnist Elmer Smith. "That doesn't necessarily cause the community to give them...
...Barcelona-bound boatloads of very expensive water are a means to ease that tension a bit. "It's a provisional solution," admits Barcelona mayor Jordi Hereu. "But it makes me calmer about our chances for avoiding an emergency." Maybe so. But it also points out how much more money and political energy will have to be expended to manage the distribution of an increasingly scarce resource. And the difficulties keeping the population hydrated in a politically tranquil Mediterranean democracy like Spain augur poorly for the drier and more desperate regions of the world...