More Nails in the Coffin

Policing is dead...again:

• Aldermen submitted an ordinance Wednesday intended to end what they said is racial profiling by the Chicago Police Department.
  
  Calling it a "crucial ordinance," lead sponsor Ald. Joe Moreno (1st) urged support for what would become the Stop, Transparency, Oversight and Protection Act. The measure would call on the police department to keep records of all "stop and frisk" incidents along with the race of the person stopped, and would also require police to give receipts to anyone stopped and not arrested.
  
  Aldermen insisted it was not intended to burden police officers, but instead would gather data to ensure police do not engage in "racial profiling," according to Ald. Roberto Maldonado (26th).

First of all Joe, there is no "stop-and-frisk" policy or directive of any kind in Chicago. Never has been. We perform street stops, and they are actually rather tightly regulated by the law of the land. "Articulable Suspicion" or what we used to call "a hunch" leads us to further weigh the facts at hand to see if an actual street stops is in order, warranted or required.

Then, we already keep records of the stops called "Contact Cards." The Contact Cards are supposed to be destroyed (or wiped from the computers" after 6 months, but as a result of numerous lawsuits filed by lawyers looking to get rich off the city taxpayers, these records are under court order not to be destroyed, meaning years and years of data is backed up.

Just two questions Joe:

1. what kind of ward to you represent? Is it one of the "super-majority" Hispanic wards? The one with solid lower and middle class families living cheek-to-jowl, not unlike the Micks, Wops, Polacks, and Bohunks did in years past before moving on to the outer city limits and suburbs?
2. what type of citizen would you expect the cops to stop in the neighborhood you represent? Because last time we checked, this city was one of the most racially segregated cities in existence. The media probably runs two or three stories a year on how far Chicago has to go before "true equality" is achieved. So white, black and brown coppers are mostly stopping Hispanics in your neighborhood, right? How is that profiling when they make up 90% or more of the population?

And another thing Joe - have you heard of the TSSS? The Traffic Stop Safety Study is the only piece of legislation to come out of Springfield bearing the name of a little known pinhead named Obama. It was supposed to run for two years and tracked every stop made by police. You know what it revealed at the cost of millions of dollars and tens of millions of man hours?

• Chicago Police don't racially profile. In fact, we don't think there is a Department in Illinois that can be credibly shown by any study to have racially profiled in the past 25 years.

This so incensed the legislature that they authorized the study to go on for an open-ended number of years - - it's still going on right now, something like eight or nine years. And for the life of us, we can't recall a single charge or allegation of racial profiling ever being brought before a court or a committee anywhere in Illinois.

So you know what Joe - you're correct in one thing. This won't be burdensome on us personally and many many other coppers either....because we just won't stop a damn thing. Too much of this job is useless paperwork already. The environmental cost in dead trees probably makes Al Gore blush. So we're going to do our part and not generate any paper that might endanger Mother Earth and we are going to encourage everyone else to do the same.