This Won't End Well (G8)

The roll call announcements began that the Department is canceling all elective Time Due during May of 2012, along with no full 5th period furloughs and no 5B segments. The city is claiming an "emergency" exists, although how you define an emergency as "something you've known about for over a year" still escapes our comprehension.

We also can't believe the silence emanating from the union side of things. This is the perfect opportunity for the FOP and PBPA to agitate for more hiring, better training, and rail against the faulty logic of "doing more with less." If this article is anywhere near accurate, we're going to see in the neighborhood of 35,000 protestors in town (the anarchist websites are predicting 150,000 but their grandfathers said the same thing in 1968 and they were overreaching then, too):

• Activists are planning massive demonstrations to coincide with the G8 and NATO summits in Chicago scheduled for spring 2012, with crowds of protesters likely to reach “tens of thousands,” organizers said.

  More than 160 members representing about 50 groups from across the U.S. and Canada gathered Sunday at the Chicago-Kent College of Law to discuss strategy and start planning two large-scale protests and a march that during the week-long joint summit, which is set for mid-May.

  The G8 and similar economic forums have for more than a decade drawn thousands of demonstrators. With the world economy in turmoil and NATO leaders set to discuss Afghanistan war policy, the joint summit should draw protesters on behalf of a wide array of causes, activists said.

We've gotten a number of e-mails with supposed "inside information" regarding planning. We won't go into to detail yet as it's all rumors, but suffice it to say twelve-hour days and the D-unit in uniforms are probably at the top of the list. Some of it is just too stupid to be believed though. We have almost no confidence in HQ to come up with anything workable any time soon.