Best Explanation So Far

CWB doesn't only report crime. They did something that no other media outlet even considered as far as we can tell:

• It’s the question everyone is asking: Was Judge John Lyke required to release suspected cop killer Alphonso Talley under the SAFE-T Act?

  Talley, a seven-time convicted felon with armed carjacking and armed robbery cases pending before Lyke, later escaped from his ankle monitor and, prosecutors say, brutally robbed a store cashier Saturday morning and then shot two CPD officers, killing one.

  To understand whether Lyke had any real choice in the matter, it helps to walk through exactly how Illinois’ pretrial detention law works.

And then, by God, they walk through it, step by step. Here is the real meat of the article:

• Then, and this is where Lyke crossed the Rubicon, the judge made his finding: “This court cannot find that the state has met its burden by clear and convincing evidence that there is no condition or combinations of conditions that this court can impose to protect any person or persons in the community when weighing everything with a fresh set of eyes and understanding.”

  At that point, the SAFE-T Act required Lyke to release Talley on the least restrictive conditions Lyke believed were necessary to keep the public safe. He had no choice in the matter. A judge cannot decide that electronic monitoring is sufficient and then keep someone locked up anyway. The law does not allow it.

  The answer, then, is yes. Once Lyke determined that conditions existed that could protect the public while Talley awaited trial outside jail, the SAFE-T Act required him to release Talley on those conditions.

Simple put, Lyke's determination that....

• a multiply convicted violent felon, 
• with additional pending violent felony cases 
• committed while already on Electronic Monitoring

....wasn't enough proof that Talley was a danger to the community. So the only way forward was to release Talley on yet another useless Electronic Monitoring anklet because Lyke closed off every other avenue to himself. That "under-developed brain" bullshit was Lyke just closing another off-ramp that would have kept a violent repeat felon in custody.

Fata$$ was actually technically correct - this one is on the judge, a useless DEI hire who misapplied the craptacular law that Fata$$ signed into existence. Plenty of democrats to blame for this one.

An SCC salute to the crew over at CWB, just about the only journalists worthy of the name any more. 

Parking

When we posted about the parking conditions over at the wake and funeral for Officer Bartholomew yesterday, we didn't expect so much whining about it. We were just warning people to plan ahead. 

The family gets to choose the location of services and Special Events does what they can to make it work as well as they can. They've done great work in the past under similar circumstances.

Some commentators suggested car pooling and Uber rides. Someone else said the Park District is going to make lakefront parking available. 

How about this - the Department had dozens of those 15 passenger vans they used for events and deployments in the past. Have those cleaned up and station three or four at the following locations:

• 019 - huge parking lot
• 020 - multistory parking garage
• 024 - Streets and San Ward yard

Then run a shuttle service to and from St. Andrew's. 

There are ways around the parking issue and that shouldn't be something that deters members from attending to show the family support during this trying time.

 

 

Hey, Look!

Actual investigative journalism!

• Two months after a Chicago Sun-Times Watchdogs investigation revealed that Mayor Brandon Johnson’s city budget director Annette Guzman had taken illegal property tax breaks for five years, she’s paying back the rest of what she should have paid.

  The Sun-Times reported in May that Guzman had taken property tax breaks she wasn’t entitled to for the past five years, saving her $3,432 in taxes on a South Loop condo she leases to tenants.

  Annette Guzman got the approval she needed to claim those tax breaks from Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi, her former boss.

  After being asked why he’d approved those tax breaks, Kaegi decided Guzman should pay up for only a portion of what she’d failed to pay: $2,071.29, covering only the past three years, out of the five years for which she’d gotten the illegal tax breaks.

  Following the Sun-Times report, records show, Guzman made good on the rest of the property taxes that she should have been paying, the remaining two years. She sent Kaegi two checks on April 3 to cover the additional $1,360.80 she should have paid for 2020 and 2021.

Remember, this is Conehead's BUDGET DIRECTOR. The person in charge of determining how much money Conehead needs to run the city and how to gather that money from taxpayers - all while cheating taxpayers out of her portion of the tax burden. 

This is how you can tell that Conehead probably doesn't have the backing of the Machine. At least not to the extent that they'd bury this story under normal circumstances.

Funeral Arrangements

Services for Officer John Bartholomew:

• Funeral services for Chicago police officer John Bartholomew, who was fatally shot at Swedish Hospital last Saturday, will be held next week in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood.

  Visitation will be 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. May 7 at St. Andrew’s Greek Orthodox Church, 5649 N. Sheridan Rd., according to an obituary posted Thursday. Funeral services will be held there at 10 a.m. on May 8.

We have only attended one event at that location and parking was a challenge, so allow yourself plenty of time. Check the AdMin Fax messages for St Jude's information.

Illinois Number One!

We hadn't heard of this survey before:

• Americans have spoken out about which states they love to hate. 

  A ranking has named Illinois the most disliked state in the nation, with 25 percent of its own residents saying it is the worst place to live.

  New Jersey landed in the number two spot, reinforcing its long-standing reputation as a frequent target of jokes across the country.

  New York followed closely behind, with a significant portion of residents admitting they believe their own state ranks among the worst. 

  The World Population Review analyzed three key factors to determine which states inspire the strongest negative feelings: how many residents said their own state was the worst place to live, whether population numbers were shrinking and how frequently other states named them as their most disliked neighbor.

This isn't a US media source, but a United Kingdom paper. 

But the population decrease is a dead-on indicator.

Stealing Hydrant Parts

We had this article on standby for late last week, but events kind of drove it off the radar:

• DETROIT (WXYZ) — Thieves have destroyed nearly 75 fire hydrants on the west side of Detroit in the last 48 hours, stealing parts and putting lives at risk.

  Crews with the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department are racing to repair the broken hydrants along Southfield Road and across the west side after thieves tore through dozens in about two days.

  "We think the number is about 75 so far," DWSD Deputy Director Sam Smalley said.

  The thieves are targeting metal nozzles and stems on top of the hydrants, which are worth about $600.

Just when people are saying Detroit has turned a corner, you get something like this, endangering the entire community for a few bucks worth of metal (that $600 price tag is the retail price for the machined part and labor to install - scrap brass goes for under $3 per pound). But it's Detroit, where they used to burn down a couple hundred abandoned buildings pre-Halloween every year....until they ran out of buildings.

Chicago might end up there yet.

RIP Deputy Coyle

Crittenden County (Kentucky) Deputy Rick Coyle, former CPD, died this morning weeks after being shot:

• Crittenden County Sheriff’s Office officials say one of their deputies has died following an officer involved shooting that happened earlier this month.

  According to a press release, Deputy Rick Coyle passed away Thursday morning after he was shot in the line of duty on April 2.

  As we’ve previously reported, officers from the Crittenden County Sheriff’s Office, along with staff from the Kentucky Department of Community Based Services, responded to the 2800 block of KY 365, to serve emergency guardianship paperwork.

We met Rick on a couple of occasions, shooting scenes and such. He was friendly, funny and professional, and he obviously left this impression on his Kentucky department after retiring from CPD. Their loss is fresher than ours. 

Prayers to his family, friends and co-workers both there and here. Godspeed Sir.

Small Progress

At this point, we'll take any good news we can get:

• A gravely wounded Chicago police officer, shot in the face during the same hospital ambush that killed his partner John Bartholomew, is showing signs of improvement, the police union president told the Sun-Times Wednesday.

  Chicago Fraternal Order of Police President John Catanzara said earlier this week it was “going to take a miracle” for the surviving officer to recover from his injuries. “It’s very bad. It’s extremely critical. It’s not good,” he said at the time.

  But the outlook has improved since then, to the point where there’s at least a glimmer of hope for the wounded officer.

  “There has been some positive physical reactions from the officer in the hospital. I don’t want to say alertness, but I was informed that he was breathing on his own for a little while yesterday. That’s a positive sign,” Catanzara said. “He did seem to have some reaction to conversation around him yesterday. So those are all [reasons to] keep praying and hope for the best, positive signs that he comes out of this on the other side, positively.”

It's still going to take a series of miracles, but every miraculous journey starts with a single step.

Godspeed Officer. 

Other Fundraisers

The GoFundMe page has been verified as legit by numerous sources.

The 100 Club and Police Memorial Funds are doing their usual good work.

There is an additional fundraiser at Reilly's Daughter - if someone has the date, time and address, let us know and we'll post the info. 

SAFE-T Revision Possibility?

It's becoming apparent to anyone with two brain cells that the SAFE-T Act is a slow motion failure that is rapidly gaining speed. 

It's also obvious that assorted politicians are uncomfortably aware of this fact, but they're too scared of the Black Caucus to make too many waves, but they are making faint gestures and suggestions that there might be room for some alterations:

• Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson commented on the Safe-T Act on Wednesday. This Illinois statute has garnered scrutiny following the shooting death of a Chicago police officer and the critical injury of another. 

  Those critical of the no-cash bail law argue it allows repeat offenders to remain on the streets, prompting a call for legislative amendments. 

  Pritzker has stated that he is open to reviewing new proposals for the Safe-T Act. Still, on Wednesday, at an unrelated event at Olive-Harvey College, he defended the foundation of the no-cash bail law. 

Porkulous also threw the judge under the bus, making us wonder about the 2028 judicial races:

• “You saw that the judge wants to blame everybody else, but it was right before the judge. The judge who could’ve made the decision didn’t make the decision,” Pritzker said.

That isn't what judges have been told, nor what judges have read into the judicial record from the bench on a number of occasions.

Here's what the behind-the-scenes people are talking about though:

• Trump DOUBLED his share of the black vote in 2024, from 8% to 15%. This was predicted and is why democrats imported 20 million illegals - they couldn't count on the monolithic black vote (92-95%) to carry them over the finish line any more, especially if those voters were actually making more money, opening more businesses, improving their economic lives and wanting to keep their newfound wealth. So they imported a Third World voting bloc and now are fighting like Hell to keep them here in the hopes of a future amnesty.

This is why a directed PR campaign by the Bailey people, supported by Law Enforcement, directed at the people who are bearing the brunt of repeat felons being released into their communities poses a real threat to (at the very least) their super-majority. 

There's even an off-chance at the governor's seat, though how effective he'd be with dem majorities in both houses would be minimal. It would certainly wreck Fata$$'s national ambitions though.

Crime is Up

Remember all those times, all those years, we said "Don't read too deeply into daily or weekly trends. Trends develop over months....years even."

Turns out, we were correct and crime is actually up:

• Chicago crime is no longer just rising — it is accelerating.

  What began as an early-year drop has now fully reversed, with violence pushing further above last year’s levels.

  The latest data shows the increase is not slowing down — it’s intensifying across multiple categories.
  This is no longer a rebound — it’s an established upward trend.

SubX News has links and charts up from the CPD data portal - SIXTEEN weeks worth, all posted, all linked and all from CPD's own statistics which not only show 2026 numbers increasing, but accelerating.

This data is available to all "investigative" reporters and the public, but it takes time and actual effort to plow through it all. It even takes basic MATH skills - something the CPS and CTU are incapable of teaching any more because they're too busy indoctrinating students into supporting communism.

All the signs of a bad summer are rapidly coming to the fore.

GoFundMe Link

We were sent this by a number of people.

• GoFundMe Link 

We have no reason to suspect anything untrustworthy about the fundraising effort, but we also have our usual concerns knowing that there are people that use these events to swindle and scam those who just want to help.

DO YOUR DUE DILIGENCE BEFORE DONATING.

Perhaps the FOP could verify the legitimacy of the fundraising efforts? 

In fact, knowing that GoFundMe routinely takes a percentage of the money that ought to be going to the fallen Officer's family, maybe there ought to be an Official Committee delegated with directing or utilizing alternatives that make sure 100% of the donations end up where they'll do the most good?

Just a thought. 

Judge Says, "Not My Fault"

Damage control over at the Criminal Courts:

• The Cook County judge who released a repeat violent felon with four pending felony cases on electronic monitoring last December, the same felon prosecutors now say escaped that monitoring and shot two Chicago police officers, killing one over the weekend, acknowledged during the hearing that the defendant likely would have faced “a minimum $1 million bail” under the state’s old cash bail system.

  But Judge John Lyke said that era was over.
  
  “Our esteem[ed] Legislature says, no, we’re not going to do that anymore,” Lyke said in reference to Pretrial Fairness Act provisions of the SAFE-T Act. “We’re going to make judges take a critical look at it.”

  And moments later, after explaining that he believed Alphonso Talley’s life of armed robberies and carjackings might have been the result of an underdeveloped brain that had since matured — even though Talley had allegedly committed an armed carjacking and an armed robbery with the same brain just eight months earlier — Lyke decided to let him go home on an ankle monitor.

  Lyke noted, however, it was “over the state’s rigorous objection.”

So after claiming the Legislature forced him to take a look at the criminal record and then OUT OF THE FUCKING BLUE makes a medical determination that maybe this shitbird's brain is "underdeveloped" due to his extensive armed habitual criminal habits, he lets him go on a electronic monitoring system that has been proven TIME AND TIME AGAIN to fail to keep criminals in check.

You know what we remember worked pretty well at keeping criminals in check?

• concrete walls
• iron bars
• twelve feet of barbwire topped fencing 

But democrats don't want that. 

Series of Failures

This really REALLY needs to become a political issue this fall:

• When accused cop killer Alphonso Talley vanished from Cook County’s electronic monitoring system for more than 17 hours last month, then disappeared entirely after letting his ankle bracelet battery run dead, a series of safeguards were supposed to kick in.

  A judge was supposed to be notified within 24 hours. A warrant, once issued, was supposed to be fast-tracked for service. A seven-time convicted felon already on pretrial release for armed carjacking and armed robbery was on the loose, and authorities were supposed to round him up.
  
  That didn’t happen.

  Those safeguards were the centerpiece of a high-profile push by Chief Judge Charles Beach, who made overhauling the county’s troubled electronic monitoring programs the very first move he announced publicly after taking office on December 1. People had been steaming about electronic monitoring for days since Lawrence Reed allegedly set a woman on fire aboard a Blue Line train in the Loop after repeatedly violating his monitoring terms on a felony battery case.

How's that case going by the way?

If the FOP isn't too busy, they ought to grab a few Board members and have them contact the CWB blog editors and start compiling a list of Electronic Monitoring failures....

• by date
• by charge
• and by judge

....and start hammering the ever loving SHIT out of judges, legislators and Porkulous. In fact, maybe contact the other guy running for governor (Bailey) and his people start drafting campaign commercials or billboards or bus posters. Target minority neighborhoods that are suffering the lion's share of these recidivist criminals. Point out that democrats are not making their neighborhoods safer and are actually endangering their families. A reader suggests getting various Police Chief Associations to endorse a recall/revision/repeal of the entire SAFE-T Act.

Dukakis the crap out of them. 

Investigation Continues

Gun traced to a straw buyer:

• A suburban woman is facing federal charges for allegedly lying on paperwork when she purchased the gun used over the weekend to kill Chicago Police Officer John Bartholomew and critically wound his partner at Swedish Hospital.

  Olivia Burgos bought the Glock 29, a 10-millimeter pistol, at Range USA in Merrillville, Indiana, on May 27, 2024, according to a federal complaint filed in Indiana on Monday. When she completed the standard purchase paperwork, she confirmed she was the “actual transferee/buyer” of the weapon and that she was not unlawfully using any drugs, according to an ATF agent’s affidavit.

  Both of those statements were lies, she allegedly admitted when ATF agents visited her after this weekend’s shooting.

  In fact, Burgos was addicted to fentanyl when she bought the firearm and had used the drug that same day, according to the filing. She also received money to buy the gun from her then-boyfriend, a convicted felon who was legally prohibited from purchasing or possessing firearms. For good measure, Burgos listed a La Porte, Indiana, address on the form when she was actually living in Highland, Indiana, with the convicted felon, the ATF agent wrote.

The ATF tracked her down pretty quick, but nothing yet on how the gun transitioned from her to Yolanda Talley's nephew.

And now we're getting word that the Detectives that tracked down Yolanda Talley's other shooter nephew was removed from the Area shooting team and the States Attorney's Office is getting pressure to drop the charges. 

Let's see if the media picks up on that one. 

Twenty Years for Window Tints

Quick!!! Outlaw "pretextual" traffic stops!

• A routine traffic stop for tinted windows turned into much more after Chicago police allegedly found a small arsenal hidden inside a pink chest in the back of a man’s car.

  Cops pulled over 31-year-old Deondre Walker around noon on April 14 in the 5600 block of West Division Street after officers noticed his 2017 Chevy Malibu had heavy window tints. As officers approached the vehicle, they allegedly spotted an open bag of cannabis sitting in the driver’s door panel, which led them to conduct a narcotics search of the vehicle, a CPD report said.

Gasp!  An open bag of weed over a tinted window stop! The horror!

• Inside a pink chest in the cargo area, police say they discovered four loaded firearms: a sawed-off Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun, a Taurus .44 Magnum revolver, a Glock 21 pistol fitted with a 31-round extended magazine and a full-auto switch that police say made it capable of firing like a machine gun, and an Anderson AM-15 AR-15 rifle loaded with a 30-round magazine and equipped with a brass catcher designed to collect expended shell casings. Investigators say the rifle’s serial number had been defaced.

Gee:

• sawed off shotgun - Fed charge
• Glock switch - Fed charge?
• defaced serial number - Fed charge

Oh, and his FOID card was revoked....for being a convicted gun felon. 

Because of this "pretextual" stop, a repeat felon is looking at twenty or more years Federal time for having tinted windows is what democrats will tell you.

Or maybe it was just good police work? 

Madigan Appeal Denied

Looks like he's going to serve the majority of his sentence:

• Chicago’s federal appeals court on Monday pointed to a hidden scheme to “exchange enormous political influence within the Illinois General Assembly for over $3 million of benefits” as it upheld the historic conviction of former Illinois House Speaker Michael J. Madigan.

  A three-judge panel summarily dismissed arguments from the once-powerful Democrat’s lawyers in a 29-page opinion less than three weeks after hearing oral arguments. The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling could soon lead to a bid by Madigan to the U.S. Supreme Court.

  “Michael Madigan spent nearly a decade leveraging his power as one of the highest-ranking public officials in Illinois in exchange for over $3 million of financial benefits for his close political allies,” Judge Michael Scudder wrote. “…Madigan insists that this was run-of-the-mill politics. But a jury of twelve Illinois residents saw the evidence differently. So do we.”

The lawyers may ask for a full 7th Circuit hearing before appealing to the US Supreme Court, but the avenues appear to be rapidly closing and Mikey may do quite a bit of the seven-and-one-half years in the meantime.

You can still write to Mike at the prison camp (it has no fencing):

• 446 Greenbag Road, Route 857 Morgantown, WV 26501

Here's a link to the "How To Send Stuff" page for money, packages and commissary donations.

Vallas Puts Two and Two Together

Something that Marty Preib had been writing about for ten or fifteen years ago and what we had amplified for nearly as long:

• Chicago’s media outlets are amplifying a dangerous narrative that paints the Chicago Police Department (CPD) as racist and unreformable, eroding public trust and hamstringing officers who protect our streets. This isn’t journalism—its activism disguised as reporting. Criminals are increasingly treated as victims and cops as villains by so called police reformers and advocates and criminal trial lawyers with media cheerleading the distortion. Facts be damned: the story line is that CPD is biased against Black residents, and allergic to change. It’s time to set the record straight.

It was a racket - it was always a racket:

• In nearly every major settlement for wrongful conviction or police misconduct, failure to implement the Consent Decree is cited as justification for multimillion-dollar payouts. Rarely do reporter’s question whether individuals receiving these settlements were actually innocent or why the settlements are so large. Since 2000, Chicago has paid out over $700 million in police misconduct lawsuits, not because claimants were proven innocent but due to alleged police misconduct.

  The media ignored Kim Foxx’s brokering of deals with a secretive “Lawyers Committee” composed of private attorneys specializing in lawsuits against the police. These lawyers, sometimes hired as “Special Assistant State’s Attorneys,” worked to overturn murder convictions, often not because of new exculpatory evidence but due to allegations of police misconduct. Foxx’s “Conviction Integrity Unit” issued “Certificates of Innocence” even when there was no evidence to support actual innocence, paving the way for successful lawsuits against the city.

  After eight years of Foxx having her thumb on the scales of justice, Chicago has seen half the nation’s overturned convictions and wrongful conviction lawsuits filed. By the time she left office in December 2024, Foxx left as many as 275 wrongful conviction cases for which lawsuits have been or will be filed, seeking millions more in damages. These new suits could cost the city $ 1 billion. No one in the media ever seems to question whether these individuals were innocent of the crimes.

Everything Vallas wrote is 100% true, 100% accurate....and 100% years too late. Like we said, Preib led the way on a lot of this and did far more legwork than any "reporter" even attempted to do because investigative reporting is dead and "journalism" is a corrupt enterprise these days.

You can read it all at the link up top and wonder what might have been before the death-spiral took hold of Chicago and bankrupted it - financially and morally.

Worse and Worse

If a bartender overserves someone who is obviously intoxicated, they're held liable for any criminal acts committed by the drunk. 

So why aren't judges and politicians held liable for repeating criminals they free?

• A man suspected of shooting two Chicago police officers inside a hospital room Saturday morning had been a fugitive for weeks, had two violent felony cases pending against him, had escaped from electronic monitoring, and was listed as an absconder by the Illinois Department of Corrections, according to court records and multiple government sources.

  The officers were standing guard over the man at Swedish Hospital, 5140 North California Avenue, when he gained access to a gun and shot them around 10:50 a.m., CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling said.

  One of the officers died. The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office identified him as John Bartholomew, 38, a 10-year veteran of the department. The other officer, a 57-year-old with 21 years on the force, remained in critical condition at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center.

  The suspect has not been charged with the shootings, and CWB Chicago, which has mentioned him in three stories since 2017, is not identifying him by name for that reason. But sources at multiple levels of government confirmed he is the individual in custody.

Fuck it. His name is Alphonso Talley, and he might be yet another criminal relative of alleged PPP fraudster Yoyo Talley. Google his name and the CWB articles with him listed as the offender are front and center. Yoyo is infamous for having her niece use her car to drop off heroin on the west side, and if we recall had another nephew shoot and wound someone in 015?

But isn't this criminal data available to....oh, we don't know....FUCKING JUDGES who continually release him on an "electronic monitoring" system that fails, time-and-TIME AGAIN, and in this instance, costing an Officer his life and his partner any semblance of a normal existence IF he recovers?

Start voting people. And start encouraging others to start voting. And make sure they don't vote for incumbents, don't vote to retain judges and certainly don't vote for criminal loving democrats....like Conehead and Fata$$.

Lost in the Shuffle

This one got overlooked after the Swedish Hospital shooting:

• Two officers were among four people hospitalized after a downtown crash early Saturday morning, Chicago police said.

  Police said the crash happened near South Wabash Avenue and East Ida B. Wells Drive in the Loop just after 4:45 a.m.

  Investigators believe the driver of a black Jeep SUV failed to obey a traffic signal on westbound Ida B. Wells Drive and crashed into the officers' marked squad car, which was heading southbound on Wabash Avenue.

Best wishes to the Officers for a speedy recovery and we are certainly thankful your reported injuries were not more serious.

Can We Get This Here?

Good news at the national level:

• The Justice Department will adopt firing squads as a permitted method of execution as the Trump administration moves to ramp up and expedite capital punishment cases, officials said Friday.

  The Justice Department is also reauthorizing the use of single-drug lethal injections with pentobarbital that were used to carry out 13 executions during the first Trump administration — more than under any president in modern history. The Biden administration had removed pentobarbital from the federal protocol over concerns about the potential for unnecessary pain and suffering.

Um...who cares if a federally convicted felon experiences a moment or two of pain on their way out the door? Do you have any idea what pain they must have inflicted on members of the public to even merit a Federal Death Penalty?

Besides, who are they going to complain to? Satan? 

Do you know how long THAT line is to see the Dark Prince himself?

Terror Drones?

So were these stolen for domestic terrorism or for some foreign entanglement?

• Someone stole 15 giant agricultural drones in New Jersey — and experts fear a “nightmare scenario” if they end up in the hands of terrorists.

  The fleet of Ceres Air C31 drones, which are about the size of an ATV, were ripped off March 24 by a bogus delivery driver who duped shipping and logistics company CAC International in Harrison, according to The High Side substack.

  A phony bill of lading was presented at the pick-up location for the drones which was bolstered by a fake confirmation email that CAC International took to be legitimate, the report stated.

  The four-armed flyers can carry and spray up to 40 gallons of liquid chemicals, such as fertilizers and pesticides, and unleash the payload over a 15-acre span in just seven minutes. 

The mind boggles at the possibilities here. And if you spend a serious amount of time at it, you'll drive yourself nuts.

Stock up on shotgun ammo at the very least - you can bet the Department won't even have an e-learning module about this.

RIP Officer Bartholomew

Identify officially released:

• The Chicago police officer fatally shot Saturday at a Lincoln Square hospital was identified as John Bartholomew, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office.

  Bartholomew, 38, was shot alongside another officer at Endeavor Health Swedish Hospital, 5140 N. California Ave., by a robbery suspect who had been arrested earlier that morning, police have said.

  No update was provided Sunday on the second officer, who has not been named. He was “fighting for his life” in critical condition, police Superintendent Larry Snelling said Saturday at a news conference outside Illinois Masonic Medical Center, where both officers were taken after the shooting.

More details to follow over the next few days.

One Post Only Tonight

We don't know where to begin with all this.

One deceased Officer, one still listed as critically wounded in the press, but our comments and text messages have all sorts of other info, none verified 100%.

Larritorious saying a third gun was recovered from the scene at Swedish, which implies a breakdown of Custodial Searches on more than one occasion. Guns hidden in fat folds should always be remembered as a possibility....remember Sox Park.

Someone says Swedish "wands" prisoners in custody, but that didn't discover the weapon in question. 

A name has appeared in our comment section, and if you google it, there are many other crimes committed by this individual, most involving guns, mostly in lakefront Districts, all or which should have been multi-year sentences. If the name is correct:

• here he is with a gun again, caught after committing another violent robbery Saturday, shooting two Police Officers;
• he may have been out on Electronic Monitoring, still skipped Court, so yet another SAFE-T Act failure;
• he might be related to a certain exempt who was forced out a while back;
• this might be either the same nephew (or an additional nephew) with a habit of shooting people

More info will probably trickle out today, verifying or debunking some of the above info. Like we said, we have no idea where to even begin with this clusterfuck.

Officer(s) Shot at Swedish Hospital

Rapidly evolving situation.

Prisoner detail gone bad. 

017 wagon crew. 

Prisoner got one of their guns, shot both Officers and escaped,

Possibly in custody after a SWAT response in the neighborhood. 

Coverage here and here.

Prayers. 

UPDATE: we're being told one Officer has passed and the news about the second is about as bleak as can be.

Pray harder. 

Shots Fired

No hits, no runs, errors to be determined by COPA:

• Three people are in custody after police said an attempted traffic stop leads to an exchange of gunfire with Chicago police in the Brighton Park neighborhood early Saturday morning. 

  Police said 9th District tactical officers attempted to pull over a car, in the in the 4400 block of South Mozart Avenue, with two men and a woman inside around 1:15 a.m.

  Police said the group drove off and fired shots at officers multiple times. CPD said officers continue to pursue the vehicle until it crashed in an alley in the 2900 block of West 47th Street.

  Police said after the crash, the group ran off and one of the people fired shots at officers and an officer fired shots back. 

  CPD said no one was injured in the exchange of gunfire. 

Summer is around the corner. Stay alert and stay safe.

Lieutenant Promotions - and Larry Leaving

First the list:

 

Second, the math:

• thirty-six promotions;
• thirty percent "meri-clout-orious" would be 10.8;
• the city has ALWAYS rounded down....ALWAYS.

And as our e-mailer with a long memory said, Larritorious has NEVER exceeded the "merit" percentages - except this time and he went over. Does the PBPA have a calculator? Because there might be one or two additional promotions to be wrung out of this misstep.

And thirdly, Larry is obviously leaving:

• two of Larry's office sergeants made lieutenant, including his already twice "merit" promoted sergeant driver.
• two of Larry's close friends were also promoted by their respective exempts

That many moves indicates someone is leaving VERY soon. Our older rumors said May, but it could be as late as October depending on what new job Larry has lined up.

Captain Training (corrected)

A couple of interesting choices among these six:

One of these lieutenants has a thirty-day suspension in his history:

• fighting with the police
• conduct unbecoming
• lying (Rule 14?)

But he can be a captain? 

Must be heavier than whale shit. 

UPDATE: title fixed

UPDATE: as people are pointing out, how can someone with a sustained Rule 14 even be put on the list?

• can't sign off on Arrests which was the purpose of a captain
• can't be part of any CR investigative process

Pretty much useless, which seems to be the defining characteristic of the entire rank nowadays. 

But he gets an unearned pension bump for a political appointment. 

Cool Weekend

It's about time to start predicting the summer weekend mayhem.  A sort-of-warm Friday gives way to some fifty degree days, so this one is going to be more a "stab in the dark."

• we're going to guess at three dead, maybe seven maimed

1700 hours Friday until 0000 Monday for a fifty-five hour window. 

Only HeyJackass.com numbers will be accepted as official.

Place your bets. 

Downgrading Weed

No longer a Schedule I drug like heroin:

• President Donald Trump’s acting attorney general on Thursday signed an order reclassifying state-licensed medical marijuana as a less-dangerous drug, a major policy shift long sought by advocates who said cannabis should never have been treated like heroin by the federal government.

  The order signed by Todd Blanche does not legalize marijuana for medical or recreational use under federal law. But it does change the way it’s regulated, shifting licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I — reserved for drugs without medical use and with high potential for abuse — to the less strictly regulated Schedule III. It also gives licensed medical marijuana operators a major tax break and eases some barriers to researching cannabis.

Marijuana enforcement was pretty much a non-starter over the last decade of our careers. You can't walk down the street or drive down the highway without smelling that crap everywhere. It goes no where in court and no one seems to care.

Weren't weed tax revenues supposed to cure all of of Illinois' budget woes? Like the lottery, right?

We imagine more weed gets tossed in the sewers or scattered into the wind than gets inventoried nowadays. 

Nice Downtown Conehead

Is this spillover from the Greyhound Station?

• A man was shot during an altercation on a West Loop sidewalk during Thursday morning’s rush hour, Chicago police said.

  The victim, 42, was in the 300 block of South Canal Street when he got into an argument with another man around 8:24 a.m., according to police and CPD dispatch audio. The second man pulled out a gun during the argument and fired one time, striking the victim in the left leg, police said. He then climbed into a black Chevrolet Malibu and fled the scene.

Not downtown proper, but at 8:24 in the morning - it's not like there aren't a few thousand people headed to work around that time.

Cocaine Coho

A side effect of blowing up drug boats?

• Salmon exposed to cocaine in the water swim longer distances than those that go without, according to a study released this week.

  Cocaine use is on the rise worldwide, with the U.N. reporting an estimated 25 million people used the stimulant in 2023 and the drug being increasingly found in waterways.

  Joint research released Monday by scientists at Australia's Griffith University and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences studied how the drug affected the movements of wild fish in their natural habitats.

"Joint research." 

We had a salmon filet the other night and didn't sleep for two days and lost five pounds. 

Not much happening in town today. 

UPDATE: commentator remembered that Frank Trigg could have used a fish dinner as an excuse when he pissed hot. 

 

Don't Demonize!

Unless someone is an actual....you know....demon:

• A 16-year-old boy on probation for a gun case, with two more firearm arrests in his background, chased down and killed a Brighton Park man on a neighborhood street last autumn, prosecutors said Tuesday.

  Ayden Reynolds is charged as an adult with first-degree murder in the October 6, 2025, killing of 33-year-old Alan Maldonado. Judge James Costello ordered him detained.

Three gun arrests by the age sixteen, and those are only the times he was actually caught with a gun. How many hundreds of times was he packing and got away with it? CWB has most of his juvie record and it's impressive for all the wrong reasons.

Demonic reasons. 

Fighting Crime Works Wonders

"We can't arrest our way out of this situation" has been proven to be a falsity many times over now.

Now another lib-tareded trope bites the dust: 

• San Francisco drastically reduced issues they were having on public transit by making it almost impossible to enter without paying, according to a report from The Atlantic.

  The outlet noted that last August, BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) installed six-foot-tall saloon-style doors made of plexiglass with metal frames that were much harder to get through compared to regular turnstiles that could easily be jumped. This change is expected to increase revenue by $10 million per year as riders are forced to actually pay to ride. 

  But beyond generating more income, it’s also led to a decrease in issues that used to plague the subway. Overall crime on BART plunged 41% in 2025 compared to the previous year, with violent crime down 31% and property crime down 43%.

Instead of CTA workers just ignoring - or worse - waving through the homeless, the mentals or the teen-takeover-participants, denying them entry and making them ::gasp!!:: pay their own way cut crime by 40% in a single year.

Combine that with increased police presence and suddenly, the CTA is a functioning government agency almost overnight. 

Gee, next we'll hear that deporting ILLEGAL ALIENS improves crime numbers, too. Or is that already happening? 

PBA Leads the Way

This should be a national effort:

• New York City’s largest police union is suing the watchdog agency that investigates allegations of officer misconduct, saying the Civilian Complaint Review Board has stigmatized officers by sharing “inflammatory” records related to unsubstantiated allegations of sexual misconduct, bias-based policing and lying.

  The Police Benevolent Association is urging the CCRB to redact officers’ identifying information when it turns over records related to these three categories of misconduct, if the officers were not found guilty of wrongdoing. It’s also asking the agency to implement a process for officers to clear their names before these types of unsubstantiated complaints are disclosed.

Compare that to the policies here where allegations that haven't been proven, haven't been testified to, haven't even gotten a sworn affidavit attached to them are all over the Invisible Institute website, surviving any effort to be removed even decades after the Officer has died.

Remember, this unsustained unproven crap follows you into retirement job applications forever.

No idea if the PBA will win this battle, but it's good to remind everyone that while Police aren't above the Law, they shouldn't be under it either and the onerous burden of unproven allegations shouldn't punish you for a lifetime when you finally get out of this shitshow.

Manufactured Outrage

As reported a few weeks ago, the City Council is attempting to outlaw membership in "extremist groups" by police officers (but not other city departments). They've tried to pass this ordinance a bunch of times but it keeps running into legal objections, not the least of which is no one seems to be able to define what makes a group "extremist." 

So the brainiac aldermorons pretty much relied on organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center to define "extremist," which ended up being anyone leaning just a little bit to the right side of the political spectrum.

Look who just got indicted for funding these "extremist" groups....and then fundraising off of that very "extremism" that they funded:

• The Department of Justice announced Tuesday that a grand jury indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center for making fraudulent payments of millions of dollars to members of the Ku Klux Klan and other neo-Nazi organizations.

  Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a news conference that the 11-count indictment filed in an Alabama federal court alleged the left-wing nonprofit had in the past decade paid at least $3 million to eight members of the far-right groups.

  One leader of the 2017 Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville, Va., received roughly $270,000 over an eight-year period.

The racism that polluted the country for so many years was literally on the verge of being consigned to the dustbin of history as minorities were making great strides in education, business and economic opportunities. Wonder of wonders, some black guy even ran for president and won.

But it's hard to raise funds from people who are doing well. In fact, people who do well gradually start to want to keep their wealth and pass it on to their children....and to do that, they start voting that way. Leftists couldn't have that, so suddenly everything was racist again. When racism couldn't be found often enough, it was manufactured. And when it couldn't be manufactured, it was purchased by organizations like the SPLC.

And now finally, the truth is coming out.