NEWSFLASH! South Side Isn't Safe

Here's a giant problem for Rahm - we're just surprised it didn't happen sooner.  And we call it "Rahm's problem" because he's running the show.  And what do you do when a portion of your voting base (north shore liberals) know that you're full of crap?

• The Brooks College Prep baseball coach said Sunday he will never agree to a game with Payton College Prep again after a group of Payton parents refused to send their kids to the far South Side school for a night non-conference game.
  
  As many as eight Payton parents were worried about the Roseland neighborhood around Brooks when they refused to let the teens play the 7 p.m. game at Brooks, located at 250 E. 111 St., school officials say.
  
  Both schools are elite Chicago Public Schools college preps that accept students based on test scores.
  

Of course, that tired old canard came out almost immediately:

• “The only thing I’d say to parents is, `What are you teaching your kids when you sit down to the dinner table and Johnny says `Why can’t we play at Brooks?’‘’

Gee Coach, how about the fact that the neighborhood is pretty much a war zone? That 85% or more shootings/killings occur on the west and south sides? That pretty much every basketball game is a set of armed camps and patrolled by dozens, sometimes as many as 100 off-duty Chicago cops and Cook County Deputies, not to mention the on-duty cars assigned? And the fact that school buses regularly seem to intercept bullets in that geography?

Maybe the parents are teaching their kids that them being alive and whole is more important than a game. And that parents who care enough about their children aren't going to send them into danger. We recall reading not too many weeks ago about parents on the west/south sides complaining about school closings and saying how dangerous it was going to be for their children to cross gang boundaries. Now that problem has been all cleared up? We don't think so - and Rahm is paying us time-and-one-half later this week because even he doesn't believe it.

You can't have it both ways. Either your neighborhood is a crime infested shithole that Rahm is spending about a million dollars per week on to stop the people there from killing each other or everything is just fine and dandy. If it's crime infested shithole (which we know it is, having spent many years down there), then it ought to be shunned by all decent people until such time as it's safe. If it isn't, then we must be living in a fantasy world.

Two requests - (1) a total of all shootings within a one-mile and five-mile radius of Brooks, and (2) where does Coach Street lay his head at night?  If it isn't Roseland, then he really has no basis for complaining.

UPDATE: The backtracking begins in earnest. Rahm must have been making calls all afternoon for people to come up with excuses.