Mail Call for Criminals (UPDATE)

Ranking among the silliest and nonsensical ideas ever to come down the pike, we are moving from "social workers" to "mail men and women:"

• Working from a list of people deemed most likely to become shooters or victims, a Chicago Police commander is expected to start knocking on their doors Friday and deliver letters warning them not to commit any violent crimes.
  
  The “custom notifications” are a pilot program in the Austin District on the West Side. Austin District Cmdr. Barbara West plans to deliver letters to 20 people on a so-called “heat list,” officials said.
  
  The heat list stems from work by Andrew Papachristos, a Yale University professor who studied murders between 2005 and 2010 on the West Side. He found 70 percent of the killings were in a social network of 1,600 people out of a total population of 80,000.
  
  The citywide social network of violence includes more than 16,000 people, police Supt. Garry McCarthy said. The department narrowed that list to more than 400 “hot people” most likely to commit shootings or become victims — or 20 people per police district.
  

So the Yale professor thinks that crime is like Facebook with guns. Brilliant. And the person most qualified to be the mail delivery person for this new "strategy" is Barb West, a woman who ran an illegal First Amendment investigation of the blog.

And what do these letters contain?

• The letters will warn those on the list that they will face the most serious charges possible if they’re arrested for a violent crime.
  
  “The custom notifications are the next step in the evolution of putting those guys on notice that they have the highest propensity for homicide,” McCarthy said. “We’re saying, ‘We know who you are, we know what you do and your chance of dying in a homicide is much greater than John Q. Citizen.’ ”

You know what Gar? We're pretty sure that these pieces of shit already know what they are, what they are subject to and what might happen when they go hunting for trouble. We also think they don't really care. They embrace it. Or maybe you haven't seen the body count over the weekends. Or weekdays when 8 people get shot on a Wednesday.

UPDATE: If we're reading this correctly, they aren't even spending the money on a stamp. These are to be hand delivered by the "Custom Notification Team." We suppose that's so there is someone to read the letter to the little scamps if they actually answer the door.