Don't Do It Tonight

Hello again boys and girls. SCC dragged us out of our peaceful retirement once again to greet the new year and give everyone a heads up.

You know tonight is amateur night, right? The drunks at the parties, everyone getting blasted because it's the New Year. You'll see it all if you're out partying. You'll see it all if you're working. You also get to see and hear the gunfire.

Oh, the memories of gunfire. You would have thought it was a Military Channel special on D-Day some years. The pistols, the rifles, the semi-automatic weapon fire, even a few fully automatic guns, all ripping off thousands of rounds all at the stroke of midnight.

We remember those days and are amazed that we came through it unscathed sometimes. Hiding in alleys, on known blocks of dope dealers and other assholes, waiting in gangways for someone to come out on the back porch and fire a few celebratory rounds into the air. And then rushing out for the first gun of the year, maybe two and three guns. On one memorable occasion, five.

As we aged, we learned the quiet happiness of finding a railroad viaduct or tunnel or parking lot and listen to the gunfire crackle, the radio pop with foot chases of coppers far younger than we became, getting that gun on New Years. We missed it. We always tried to be the police and succeeded more than not, and missing it was an odd feeling, but by that point, we were far more concerned with nursing our already torn up knees and looking forward to retirement. Just the natural progression of things.

So it pains us to have to write this in a way, but if we didn't, we feel far worse if no one told you whippersnappers what it is from the outside looking in after many decades of policing.

Don't chase the guns tonight. Don't do it. Find a safe spot, preferably with another car or two and just listen to the radio and the fireworks and the gunfire that you'll be able to pick out of the night air like only coppers (and soldiers) can do. Not tonight.

This will go against the most basic instincts that most of you have. To run toward gunfire, to save some innocent member of society, to make the world, in some small way, safer from itself. It sounds hokey, but it's true. And it's also true that you shouldn't chase the guns tonight. You may end up in a situation that you will regret the rest of your life, hopefully from a cozy retirement community, but possibly from a cold, concrete box - a prison...or a grave.

You are living in a time and a place where everything about you, from your knit hat/crown/Rocky the Squirrel cap right down to your hopefully shined (but more likely scuffed up) shoes, is despised in certain communities. And while there may be decent people around who, if not liking you, tolerate your presence and recognize the need for you, they are sadly in the minority.

If you confront a man with a gun tonight and it goes south, you will be adjudged in the wrong no matter the circumstances. They will say, "The gun was empty!" They will say, "He was headed back into the house." They will say you planted the gun or, most annoying of all, "Everyone else was doing it." And you will be wrong. Oh, you might be ethically, legally, morally all right. But you will be wrong and it will affect your entire career from this point forward.

Don't be stupid. Be safe. Be thinking about your future. Be fetal.

He Was ARMED You ASSHOLES

Jeezus H. F#$%ing Christ:

• Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Interim Chicago Police Supt. John Escalante are expected to announce a five-step “de-escalation” approach to handling potential conflicts and standoffs, including making sure every “operational” on-duty officer is equipped with a Taser.
  
  By June 1, 2016, every on-duty officer responding to service calls will be equipped with a Taser and trained in using it, according to an emailed statement from Chicago Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi.
  
  Without specifically mentioning the fatal shootings of Quintonio LeGrier and Bettie Jones by a Chicago Police officer in West Garfield Park last weekend, Emanuel said the move was a long time coming.
  
  “While recent events have brought this issue to the forefront for us all, for far too long Chicago – like cities around the country — has faced far too many incidents where officers shot and killed unarmed people,” Emanuel said in a statement. “We need a new reality.”

LeGrier had a BAT. His own "parents" say so. EVERYONE says so. That qualifies as ARMED.

Jones was an accident. Everyone says so. Apologize and pay the lady's family.

McDonald, believe it or not, was ARMED. With a knife. EVERYONE says so. The debate isn't whether or not he was armed or what his PCP-addled mental state was....he was ARMED.

An armed sane person can kill you. An armed mental can kill you. It doesn't matter. Lethal force is to be met with lethal force - that's the law. That's the training. That is nation-wide. It's even written into the Geneva Conventions for chrissake.

An now we have this shit to deal with:

• With new training, officers will be encouraged to ask themselves questions such as: “What is the full range of options for how to respond?” “Do I need to take action immediately or can I slow the situation down and buy more time?” and “Am I the best person to deal with this or should I request assistance from Specialized Units such as a Crisis Intervention Team?”

We don't know about you, but we see response times skyrocketing. "Immediate action" versus "slow down the situation"? We've always heard that "slow and steady wins the race," so we're going to be taking an awful lot of time to think these situations through. Expect calls for a Supervisor to go through the roof.

"Am I the best person to deal with this?" Nope, not by a long shot, not with the inadequate training and non-existent medical degree in Mental Health. Again, maybe if we had doctors or nurses or mental health experts riding along with us?

"Crisis Intervention Team"? You mean the crisis training that Rahm cut out of the budget a year or two ago? Training with exactly ZERO follow-up. Training that is out-of-date and continues to get farther and farther out-of-date with every passing month as medical science and literature moves forward? That training? Yeah, and subject ourselves to further interrogation in Federal Court as a so-called "40-hour expert"? No thanks.

Hey, you know who might be good at all of this? Recognizing mental health breakdowns? Seeking medical treatment for loved ones? Making sure appointments aren't missed, medicine is taken, a support network is established and is utilized in times of crisis?

How about a fucking family?

Stop with the Lawyer Bullshit

As you might imagine, the number of trolls has increased exponentially here since the last shooting incident. We've been inundated with harassing nonsense, none of which we process, mostly because it's simply ignorant rantings of unhinged loons - the kind of stuff that infests the Tribune and other media comment sections without regard to facts, actual law or a sane reading of the facts.

Here is a typical one, based on nothing but "feelings" evidently:

• Scc, it all comes down to how many shots the officer needed to subdue this young man. The actions here were excessive. It seems indisputable to me. And yet you try to defend this as a good shoot. No.

Well Asshat - do you mind if we call you Asshat? - the number of shots has exactly ZERO bearing on anything. It takes as many shots as it takes, plain and simple. Police are taught to shoot to eliminate the threat, and if the threat is still advancing/moving/threatening, then more shots are needed. This isn't Hollywood, where a single shot from a .38 snubbie immediately incapacitates a crazed assailant with a bat. You know how often that happens in real life? Here's a clue - think of a percentage of less than 1.

Then there's the science. Dozens, maybe many dozens of studies show that people under attack in high stress situations aren't bothering counting shots. Even reporters who used to go through the "Shoot, No Shoot" scenarios never kept track of their shots and were constantly amazed that they fired as many times as they did when instructors ran the tapes back. On a good day, we can empty a 15-round magazine in well under 5 seconds. We've seen people do it in under 3.

Then there's the fact that no one, not a single media source or Department source knows exactly how many shots were fired as of yet, nor how many hit the assailant. The only number we've seen is "at least 2." So Asshat, you want to explain how two hits is "excessive" by any stretch of the imagination, seeing as how most police shootings involve many many more shots than that? That kind of makes your "indisputable" look indisputably asinine.

So this is the ignorance we've been weeding out here, not only because it's wrong-headed, uninformed and indisputably dumb, but we don't want to have to moderate an extra 100 comments from others telling this idiot to "go fuck yourself" or painfully explaining what we can in a main post, all while ridiculing the idiocy of someone who's never done our job trying to tell us how to do our job, based on nothing but a "feeling" the police were "excessive" in putting down an assailant.

Shut Up Steinberg

You want to read the most amazing piece of journalistic malpractice ever written?

We're sure you can use a Google search, but read the Wife-Beater's column from 29 December.

He actually pens an entire piece without ONCE stating the words "baseball bat," nor the name "LeGrier," nor "assailant." Just an out-and-out smear job.

And this guy makes a living at it somehow, amazingly. In the old days, people like this used to live under bridges, ranting about aliens anal probing them and such...which might explain a lot of what he writes.

Hey Neil, we heard the missus burned your eggs....shouldn't you "explain" to her how that shouldn't happen? Maybe while you slam another wine cooler, big man.

Worse and Worse....for Dad

We aren't sure if the Tribune is publishing this stuff on purpose, but all they've been doing for two days is making the cops look reasonable:

• Antonio LeGrier became fearful and went into his bedroom, locking the door. At some point, the teen came to his door and banged on it, using the baseball bat. The father then called police, telling authorities he feared his son may try to hurt him, the law enforcement source said.
  
  [...] The father then called his downstairs neighbor, Bettie Jones, the first source said, and told her to keep her door locked and watch out for police, and let them in when they arrived. The father told authorities he didn't come back out, staying in his room because he was scared, and let Jones watch for police.

So dear old dad locks himself in the room and call the cops because he's in fear. Then he calls the neighbor lady and has her watch for the cops to let them in because he's too terrified to confront his son who has been beating on the door with a bat - the same bat he would then swing at responding officers. Dad's story is also changing about the "mental distress" he never told anyone about, except when he did sometime that isn't on any call taking tapes, and when the police barged into the house, except when all the blood is in the vestibule according to previous media reports.

Keep it up Tribune - you might actually be a real newspaper someday.

Knit Hats Are Back

The rollback of the silliest McCompStat decision.

The knit winter hat is back.

A sensible tattoo policy to follow?

Poor Rahm

Cutting his vacation short:

• Mayor Rahm Emanuel has decided to cut short his family vacation to Cuba after a 19-year-old man and a 55-year-old woman were shot and killed by police after officers responded to a domestic disturbance on the West Side on Saturday.
  
  “While Mayor Emanuel has been in constant contact with his staff and Interim Superintendent Escalante, he is cutting his family trip short so that he can continue the ongoing work of restoring accountability and trust in the Chicago Police Department. He will arrive back in Chicago on Tuesday afternoon,” Emanuel spokeswoman Kelley Quinn said Monday.
  
  The mayor has been in Cuba with his family for their annual holiday vacation.

As someone pointed out, it's kind of ironic that Rahm always vacations outside of the US, denying employment opportunities to American workers. But then, Rahm has always been one to preach one line while doing something completely the other direction.

Careful Nickeas....

....you're going to be on any number of shit-lists if you keep reporting truth:

• In the wake of the fatal shooting of two people by a Chicago police officer over the weekend, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has called on the department to re-examine its response to situations involving mental health crises.
  
  But the police radio traffic and 911 dispatch information available so far from the weekend shooting make no mention that the young man with a bat who prompted the call was in mental distress, and it's not clear whether any 911 caller, including the man's father, mentioned a history of mental illness.

So, as we stated, and numerous news outlets initially reported, Dad called saying he was in fear for his safety and his kid had a bat. Not a single word about any mental issue, distress, etc. Dad even directed neighbors to avoid his son, he was that dangerous.

So the coppers respond to a situation and were confronted by a bat-wielding subject. Knowing a bat to be a deadly weapon, the officers remember their training.....

Yup, hasn't changed since yesterday. Deadly Force was met with Deadly Force. That hasn't stopped the nonsense though:

• "We must also make real changes within our police department today, and it is clear changes are needed to how officers respond to mental health crises," Emanuel said in his statement Sunday. He also directed interim police Superintendent John Escalante to meet with the new head of the Independent Police Review Authority "to review the Crisis Intervention Team training, around how officers respond to mental health crisis calls."

IPRA? Those mopes have even less training in the mentally ill than we do. How about this change - don't call the police for mentals any more?

• It isn't a criminal matter - it's a medical emergency

Let's face it - psychiatrists and psychotherapists get YEARS of training and even they can't predict how mentally ill people will react in a given situation. Yet people expect police, who are given at most, a 40-hour block of training, either in the Academy or In-Service, to arrive at an unknown situation, take control of it (don't hurt him!), safely wrap the mentally ill person in bubble wrap (not too tight with the cuffs!), transport them to the hospital in a padded wagon fueled by unicorn farts and smelling of bubble bath....

Are you fucking nuts? What if he has a bat and is swinging it......oh wait.

Angel? Not So Much

As usual, the truth starts to seep out, despite the media's best efforts to keep it under wraps:

• A Northern Illinois University student killed by Chicago police Saturday morning was home on winter break, and also out on bail for a number of charges he was facing in DeKalb County after confrontations with campus police, court records show.
  
  Records from NIU police and DeKalb County courts show that LeGrier had at least four run-ins with law enforcement in the area, including three arrests that included charges of resisting campus police.
  
  On March 1, LeGrier was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of resisting NIU police. He was arrested again May 6 and charged with aggravated battery in a public place and aggravated battery against a government employee after being arrested near his dormitory by campus police.
  
  A predawn arrest at another dormitory on Sept. 2 resulted in charges of assault, disorderly conduct and resisting a police officer, records show.

Golly, it's almost like he had an inclination to attack officers or something. No word if any of those charges included a bat yet, but would anyone be surprised?

Not Privileged Conversation

So while the Department was busy pulling all the hard drives for every single vehicle that was on scene of the Poice shooting on Erie the other night, they weren't just pulling video/audio to defend a lawsuit - they were pulling audio to actively screw the officer(s) - from the comments:

• They pulled the police cars that the officers were sitting in while talking to their fop reps to see if the camera mics picked up the conversations. That's not a protected conversation. The fop needs to start sending an attorney out on every shooting since charging the officer is the new norm.

This commentator hits the nail exactly on the head - the FOP better start sending out lawyers to shooting scenes. A Union Rep conversation is not privileged in any way at all, and if the city wants the audio out of your squad, it will be 100% admissible against you and your interests.

This makes our suggested Disclaimer re-vamp all the more important and necessary. We as a group have to start thinking more about job preservation and remaining free from a political drive to deny you your Rights and potentially, your Freedom.

Rahm's Minions Attacked

But, but, but.....:

• One of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s deputy chiefs of staff was attacked Sunday evening while attending a vigil for Bettie Jones and Quintonio LeGrier, who were fatally shot by Chicago Police in West Garfield Park on Saturday.
  
  According to a source, Vance Henry was attending the vigil about 5:50 p.m. at the site of the shooting in the 4700 block of West Erie when he was attacked.
  
  The police department’s Office of News Affairs confirmed that a 50-year-old man was at the vigil when “he was approached by an unknown person who began to make verbal threats which escalated to a physical altercation.”

Don't these people (or folks) realize the mayor had his people there to see where the bus should be driven? And no arrests? Of a known offender?

Ervin, Shut the Fuck Up

The Round Mound of Sound is trumpeting out his asshole again:

• "Police officers have batons, police officers have Tasers, police officers have (pepper) spray," Ervin said. "But I don't know how a bat instantly equals a bullet."

Really? Let's see.....

Nope, says right there, deadly force to be met with deadly force. Sorry dumbass, but a bat is deadly force - would you like a list of persons killed by blunt instruments? It outnumbers the number of people killed by so-called "assault weapons" by hundreds.

Furthermore you ignorant tub of shit, same challenge to you that we offered to Mope-rah:

• We will supply you with a vest, radio, and hat (can't forget the hat!). We will provide you with a duty rig with handcuffs, OC spray, Taser, baton (wood or metal) and a fully loaded 9mm weapon of your choice in a retention holster...a full 20 pounds of equipment, give or take a few.
  
  We will give you the Illinois Compiled Statutes regarding Deadly Force situations along with the CPD Use of Force order and the Use of Force model. We'll supply you an Academy instructor to sound out the longer words and a qualified lawyer to explain the legal mumbo-jumbo.
  
  Then, on a dark road or alley of our choosing, we will await your arrival with a metal baseball bat. To win, you have to successfully disarm and handcuff us using the tools at your disposal within 30 seconds or you lose. You cannot violate the law or the CPD policy or you lose. You cannot use excessive force or put the cuffs on too tightly or we will complain and you lose. We will even sign a waiver that if you get a bullet into us, we won't complain...but you still lose.
  
  Oh, and if we beat you to death with the bat, you lose, too. Those are just the risks you take.

And your father was a police commander? We don't recall hearing too many bad things about ol' Claudell, but by siring you, he did the world and Chicago a disservice.

Narrative Changes

Evidently, they're giving out medical degrees in Crackerjack boxes again - this amazing admission quoted directly from the Fox Chicago site (look for it to be deleted shortly):

• Cook said her soon was a sophomore studying engineering at Northern Illinois University and had been suffering from some type of mental illness since September. He had been taking medication, but she said his classmates had told her he was better without it.
  
  "So I told him not to take it," shes said.

A-fucking-mazing. "Just don't take your meds son, you seem so much happier and normal without them. Your 18 and 19 year old friends, with all their worldly experience and medical degrees, say its so." What the fuck?

And the out-and-out ignorance on the part of the media (and it's commentators) about "Why wasn't a Taser used?" Um, we're under ZERO obligation to meet deadly force with non-deadly force, dumbasses. That kind of defeats the purpose of the entire "preservation of life" policy, especially our own. But the media narrative just goes blithely along about those out-of-control police, completely disregarding that we are entitled to the same protections afforded non-police, namely going home in the same condition we left.

We've noticed the fact that the 9-1-1 call included the language of the caller being afraid for his life is suddenly not at the forefront of the story now. Now the narrative is the police responded to a "disturbance." We've also noticed the nation media outlets leaving out the entire "armed with a bat" portion of incident, making it seem that we just up and shoot mentally ill people.

Hey Deano?

Isn't it about time that the FOP update the standard disclaimer that is supposed to accompany To-Froms? Something along the lines of...

• R/O has been made aware that all (A) Use of Force, (B) Tasering, (C) Shooting incidents of this nature are being forwarded to the (A) Cook County States Attorney, (B) the Illinois Attorney General, (C) the Department of Justice (D) Other, for the possible intention of a criminal prosecution. Upon advice of Counsel and to protect the Contractual, Administrative, Criminal and Constitutional Rights of the undersigned, all statements taken/ordered by _________________ should be considered as being made under duress and without the presence of Counsel and benefit of reviewing any (A) video, (B) statements, (C) reports, that have been generated out of his/her presence by person(s) whose priorities may not lie in the best interests of the Accused.

Especially in light of the sudden magical appearance of a 30-day "administrative" job action that no one, not even the FOP, has ever heard of or been consulted on.

Apologize if Warranted

If the facts of the investigation, which is no where near done, bear out that the 55-year-old woman was accidentally killed by a round that passed through or by the assailant with the baseball bat, then the Department and City should apologize profusely to the family and engage in talks of a settlement. It's the only proper thing to do. (And to those about to go off half-cocked, we make no judgement, assess no blame, have no knowledge of the investigation - read what we wrote, not what you think you heard.....are you back already? Go back and read it again.)

That these things happen is no comfort to anyone involved. We strive to do our job well as almost every person does. No one who is sane goes to work hoping to:

• shut down an assembly line,
• destroy a set of office files,
• flood a subterranean set of tunnels that no one remembered existed,
• kill someone.

The thing is, with those first three examples, it can be fixed most of the time. Not so much with the last, but so much of what we roll up on is already out of our control. The location is where we were called to, tactical options are few, response options are limited, and decision time is infinitesimal.

For these reasons, training should be a priority for any police department. But the fact is, Chicago has been getting by on the cheap for years, decades even. Too many cops fire a mere 30 qualifying rounds a year. Training is slapdash or non-existent (we're only now running any sort of drill for a mass casualty event with the Fire Department, and from what we've heard, it runs against any existing SWAT protocol). And was either Charlie Williams, Masters Masters Masters or some other brainiac who declared it wasn't "feasible" to train every copper in the most basic anti-terror tactics. That's what passes for "leadership" nowadays.

Media people wonder about the lack of video and audio from in-car systems? Look no further than the money CPD doesn't spend on equipment, training and maintenance. Garbage in, garbage out and you have to look a lot higher than the blue shirts for that.

Amusing

Is anyone shocked? Anyone who's paying attention we mean:

• Investigators recovered five guns from a party bus early Sunday after shots were fired in the Gold Coast neighborhood.
  
  When officers heard gunfire near the 100 block of West Division Street at 2:30 a.m., people indicated that a party bus heading westbound on Division might have been involved, according to Chicago Police.
  
  Officers stopped the bus and eventually found five guns inside, police said. A 35-year-old man was taken into custody for questioning.
  
  No one was injured in the shooting, police said.

We highly doubt that this one detainee was carrying all 5 guns.

But is anyone really surprised that these "party buses," which are pretty much unregulated rolling thug limos, filled with strippers, whores, gallons of liquor, any type of drug you could want and yes, guns, are involved in anything criminal? Besides the media and the liberals on the Gold Coast.

Well Done Citizens

Determined to match the police shooting for shooting, the south and west sides responded predictably:

• One man has been killed and two teenagers were wounded in shootings on the West and South sides Saturday, police said.
  
  About 7:19 on the 600 block of South Tripp Avenue in the Lawndale neighborhood, a man was shot in the chest and stomach. He was in critical condition at the scene and was later pronounced dead, police said.
  
  At 6:15 p.m., a 16-year-old boy was shot in South Austin, said Chicago Police spokeswoman [...]
  
  He was in the 5200 block of West Adams Street when two people wearing masks approached from an alley and shot him in the left leg, Greer said. He went to West Suburban Medical Center in good condition.
  
  At about 4:30 p.m., an 18-year-old man was shot and critically injured in an attempted robbery in the Oakland neighborhood, police said.

While Chicago will most likely miss 500 homicides by a whisker ad 3,000 shot by another whisker, rest assured, next year will be different - radically different if we read the sign correctly.

Go Bucs!

Give the Bears the 3.5 points.

Another?

Another police shooting, this time south:

• A man was seriously wounded Saturday afternoon in a police-involved shooting on the Far South Side in the city's Washington Heights neighborhood, authorities said.
  
  The shooting happened about 1:30 p.m. in the 1000 block of West 103rd Place, according to Chicago Fire Department Media information. Police fired on someone and hit them, according to Larry Merritt, a spokesman for the Independent Police Review Authority, which investigates police-involved shootings.
  
  One person was taken in serious to critical condition to Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, according to fire officials. The man was in surgery Saturday night, according to a police statement.

Gun recovered, good guys go home, bad guy to jail. But of course, the usual suspects are spouting off their ghetto law degrees to the media, who gleefully print it.

Police Shooting

Two on the west side:

• A man and woman were killed in an early morning police-involved shooting following what police say was a domestic disturbance at a West Garfield Park residence.
  
  In a Chicago Police Department statement issued about 9:50 a.m., officials said, shortly before 4:30 a.m., officers responded to a domestic disturbance in the 4700 block of West Erie Street and were confronted by a "combative subject," which resulted in the discharging of an officer's weapon. Two people were fatally wounded, the statement said.

That's about all we know and all the media knows. The investigation continues.

Anyone know when the last police shooting was, and the number of shootings in between that had nothing at all to do with the police, so that it can be pointed out how extremely rare police shootings are and that this entire narrative the various movements and media outlets perpetuate is false?

UPDATE: The last police shootings we can find in our archives are from early October (a fatal and another where no one was hit) and one in November on the northside (one shot was discharged, no hits). That certainly gives lie to the constant drumbeat of an "out of control" spate of police shootings.

All Elective Time Canceled?

Rumor popping up in the comments about all elective time off is about to be canceled for New Years Eve.

Anyone have the facts since 35th Street is closed until Monday? Is that New York "credible threat" going national?

Peace on Earth and G ::BANG BANG::

Not even slowing down for the holiday:

• Two people are dead and five others have been wounded in separate shootings since Friday morning in Chicago.

The headline has been changed to 6 wounded....and none by the police once again.

Someone Got Charged?

We're actually surprised by this report, seeing as how it's been weeks since anyone else was charged for this same or worse actions:

• A protester was freed on bond Friday after his arrest during a Christmas Eve march along the Magnificent Mile shopping district to protest the fatal police shooting of Laquan McDonald.
  
  The suspect, Eugene Tucker, was charged with battery and failing to obey police. He is accused in court documents of hitting a police commander on the head.
  
  Tucker was one of two demonstrators arrested Thursday on misdemeanor charges. The other was Anderson Chaves, 19, of Berwyn, said ...a Chicago police spokeswoman.

Of course, since Anita's office isn't involved in charging misdemeanors, we're sure it will be dropped at court on the first appearance. Someone update us.

Merry Christmas

From everyone here to everyone out there, a very Merry Christmas to all our readers, commentators, fans and detractors. Be safe, be careful, especially if you're working the holiday away from family.

As usual, comments may be delayed to to previous obligations today. Open post...keep it clean.

Way to Go Jesse White

They've had years to fix this and now, no time at all:

• Illinois has been on borrowed time for a decade when it comes to new federal security rules, but it appears time has run out.
  
  In 2005, Congress enacted a law imposing tougher requirements to prove U.S. residency, but Illinois has yet to comply with new security rules for driver’s licenses and state ID cards.
  
  The REAL ID Act requires state officials to verify birth certificates through the Electronic Verification of Vital Events system in order to meet federal security and anti-terrorism guidelines.
  
  Until now, the federal government has repeatedly granted Illinois extensions, but turned down the state’s latest request. That means, after January 10, an Illinois driver’s license or ID card won’t be good enough to get past security at federal facilities, and by summer it might not be good enough to board a commercial airliner.

Ten years to meet the nationally required norms and all Illinois did for a decade is ask for deferments. Morons, one and all.

Hahaha

Funny story out of Texas:

• An elderly man shot and killed a would-be burglar inside his Oak Cliff home.
  
  Police say the homeowner saw Deyfon Pipkins, 33, trying to climb into the window and fired his weapon at least once at the intruder. The homeowner is legally protected by the Castle Doctrine, which allows a person to defend his or her home against an intruder.
  
  “It means they don’t actually have to retreat once someone comes in their home,” Sergeant Calvin Johnson, Dallas Police Department, said. “You have the option of using deadly force if you believe your life is in danger.”
  
  After police notified relatives of Pipkins’ death, some showed up at the house. They were upset, and questioned the homeowner’s actions. “He could have used a warning,” Lakesha Thompson, Pipkins’ sister-in-law, said. “He could have let him know that he did have a gun on his property and he would use it in self-defense.”
  
  Pipkins had a lengthy criminal record. He served time in prison and was convicted of theft, possession of a Controlled Substance and criminal trespassing.

We love happy endings, but we're sobered by the thought that in Illinois, these leeches would actually have a case.

Sanctions Dropped?

What the hell is this again?

• Attorneys for a Chicago police officer who fatally shot a man last year have withdrawn a request to have the man's mother punished for allegedly threatening harm on the officer and his teenage children earlier this month.
  
  The motion by Officer [...] alleged Dorothy Holmes threatened him and his teenage children in comments she made at a South Side protest a day after Cook County prosecutors declined to bring murder charges in the death of Holmes' son, Ronald Johnson III.
  
  But the city's top attorney stepped in, and the motion was abruptly withdrawn Wednesday.

And what did momma say to provoke said sanctions?

• "What goes around comes around. And he can take it how he wanna take it. If he wanna take it as a threat, it was a threat. And I ain't backing down."

Gee, pretty straightforward. But we'd be willing to be a sizable amount of money that the "city's top attorney" went into this meeting and threatened to stop the city paying for outside counsel so the officer would sign off on this motion withdrawal. We've seen that threat issued before - if full cooperation with outside counsel isn't forthcoming, on the city's terms since they're footing the bill, then you can pay for your own lawyer. This is how the city typically operates.

So let's see...

• copper battered by a poet - charges dismissed
• coppers screamed at thru megaphones from inches away, damaging hearing - no charges
• coppers wrist broken during melee - no arrests
• copper's family threatened - sanctions dropped

Anyone need a weatherman to see which way this wind is blowing?

Rapper Shot

But with an amusing twist:

• Chicago rapper King Louie was shot in the head Wednesday afternoon in the Ashburn neighborhood on the Southwest Side, his management team confirmed.
  
  The rapper — whose real name is Louis Johnson Jr. — was shot while in a vehicle in the 3900 block of West 83rd and Street about 3:30 p.m., according to his management and Chicago Police.

At this juncture it looks like he'll live since he wasn't stuck in any vital organ.

But the truly amusing part:

• King Louie, 27, coined the term “Chiraq” in 2009 and is also credited with the creation of “Drillinois,” a term that plays off the hip-hop genre of “Drill” that he and other Chicago rappers, including Chief Keef, Lil Reese, Lil Durk and G Herbo helped popularize.

So the originator of the term "Chiraq" is almost the victim of Chiraq's violence. Ironic almost.

Run Away!

People are still running away from Illinois as fast as their cars can take them:

• The U.S. Census Bureau report released Dec. 22 is compelling evidence that Illinois needs pro-growth, pro-jobs reforms. The report shows that Illinois recorded its first six-digit loss of residents to other states, with Illinois losing 105,000 more people to other states than it gained from July 2014 to July 2015.
  
  The “border war” losses were so bad that Illinois’ total population shrank by 22,000 people on the year, the worst ever. Similar to last year’s 2013-2014 data, Illinois is the only state in the region to have a shrinking population.

One resident every five minutes. A resident, most likely a tax paying resident with a decent education and more than a few prospects, choosing to exercise those prospects elsewhere. An unsustainable model if ever we saw one. Great job Illinois voters!

"Doesn't Need Rahm"

Well, since you aren't going to win the nomination, of course you don't:

• Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Wednesday took a not-so-subtle jab at Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a supporter of rival Hillary Clinton, in declaring he doesn't want or need the mayor's backing to win the White House.
  
  In a short Chicago visit ostensibly aimed at promoting ways to end what Sanders called "institutional racism" and improve the nation's criminal justice system, the Vermont senator sought to remind the city's Democratic progressive voters about the embattled mayor's backing of Clinton.

Bernie also took his turn driving the bus over police officers, pandering to the crowd and former mayoral hopeful Chuy, but that's to be expected from a socialist pandering to socialists and hosted by socialists.In any event, just a regular day on the national political scene.

"Credible Threat"

Centered around New York, but it could happen anywhere:

• Top NYPD brass including Commissioner William Bratton held an emergency meeting Tuesday to discuss the threat and their response to it, sources said. Few details were released about the nature of the threat.
  
  A federal law enforcement source said the threat is not specific and could take place in several major U.S. cities.
  
  All New York City police officers received a bulletin Tuesday afternoon outlining the department’s tactical plan and warning officers to stay vigilant, according to sources. That internal memo mentioned social media being used as a tactic and that a possible attack could come without warning.

Frankly, we're looking farther ahead to the New Year celebrations.

Threats = Sanctions?

How about "threats = criminal charges"?

• City attorneys have accused the mother of a man killed by a Chicago police officer in October 2014 of threatening harm on the officer and his teenage children at a recent protest of her son's death.
  
  A police dashboard camera video released earlier this month showed Ronald Johnson III running from police as Officer [...] opened fire, fatally striking Johnson in the back. Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez announced Dec. 7 that her office would not bring charges against [the officer] because the grainy video appeared to support the officer's claim that Johnson was armed with a handgun.
  
  A day after that decision, Johnson's mother, Dorothy Holmes, threatened [the officer] and his teenage children at a South Side rally that was covered by several news outlets, according to a recent filing by the city in federal court as part of Holmes' wrongful death lawsuit.

Of course, this is completely acceptable if it fits the current political narrative. Wrong is right, up is down, justified isn't, and assault against an officer's children is "sanction-able."

Sign us up for another 25 years!

Potholes? We Have Potholes?

Not doing enough? Or not doing it right?

• With a sickening thunk one of your front tires lands in a mini-crater, and you perhaps wonder if there’s something more the city can do to prevent potholes. There is, says the city’s Office of Inspector General, and it could save your cash-strapped metropolis $4.6 million each year.
  
  Chicago’s “pavement management program,” which covers about 3,600 miles of residential and arterial roads is “neither efficient nor cost-effective,” according to an OIG report released Tuesday.
  
  Among other things, the city’s Department of Transportation could do a better job of sealing cracks before they develop into tire-swallowing potholes, the inspector general’s office found. And the city does a poor job of collecting data on the condition of city streets, particularly residential ones, which make up the vast majority of the roadways under the city’s jurisdiction.

Or they could research into how the roads up north always seem to be pothole free. It always amazes us that when headed north, the rattle and thunder of our tires seems to suddenly evaporate as soon as we see that "Welcome to Wisconsin" signage. The speedometer climbs a couple extra miles-per-hour as the tires don't have to bounce and we don't have to swerve as much. This has led to some amusing meetings with Wisconsin's finest, but no harm.

We saw a study some years back - the amount of money spent per mile of roadway in Illinois versus that of other Midwestern states in the snow belt. What was shocking? amusing? sad? was how little life expectancy Illinois drivers got out of their roads, leading to the old adage of two seasons - winter and construction. Illinois (and Chicago) build crappy roads to keep construction companies in business, who in turn, keep donations flowing into to politicians, who keep the low-bid crappy roads in existence.

Maintain a road? The Inspector General might as well as the City to maintain an in-car camera. It isn't in the nature of the City to spend money on maintaining what they can simply buy again, again and again.

NY CompStat Follies

If you can't downgrade the crime, downgrade the property:

• There are so many Citi Bikes being stolen that the NYPD and the company that provides the vehicles are trying to figure out how to lower their value so that the thefts would be downgraded from felonies to misdemeanors, sources tell The Post.
  
  The distinction is a significant one for cops because only felonies are included in the NYPD’s CompStat figures, which track seven major crime categories.
  
  “It’s highly unethical and raises questions of fairness,” a law enforcement source said of the push to cut the bikes’ value.
  
  “Citi Bike has a multimillion-dollar contract with the city, so of course they’re going to work with the police department,” the source added, but “this sends a bad message to the everyday police officer who is trying to evaluate criminal charges in a fair manner.”

At some point, we're sure this will be co-opted by Chicago. It's too brilliant to languish only in the Big Apple.

Cop Assailant Also Assaults Women

This is only getting play in the alternative media - nothing mainstream:

• Malcolm London had been marching for four hours, and the Nov. 24 protest for police shooting victim Laquan McDonald was winding down.London was directing activists to Grant Park, where the organization he is a part of, Black Youth Project 100, planned to end its march with a quote from Assata Shakur: "We have nothing to lose but our chains." Some planned to head next to a jail, where they'd call for arrested activists to be released.
  
  Then, someone dropped a smoke bomb. London, 22, said he was across the street from where the smoke bomb was released, but an officer approached him and asked if he was responsible. London said no, but then he was surrounded by — he estimates — six to eight officers. He screamed at the other protesters, telling them he was being arrested. What happened next depends on whom you ask. London maintains the police were the ones roughing him up before he was charged with aggravated battery.
  
  As he sat in jail, with those outside calling for him to be freed, a woman began to type an open letter to the black, queer, feminist group London works with and to all Chicago activists. London has sexually assaulted her, she wrote, and she wanted him to be held accountable.

The entire article is amusing as the lefties try to simultaneously excuse London's behavior without denying the victim's claims (i.e. all accusations of sexual assault must be true, unless they're made against Bill Clinton or popular leftists who spout the appropriate political narrative.) But is anyone surprised that someone who assaults police officers would have a past that included assaulting others? And that he's held up as some sort of poet hero?

Quite the Weekend

For a December we mean:

• Three men were killed and at least 26 people were wounded over the weekend in Chicago as the number of shooting victims in the city passed the 2,900 mark for the year.
  
  Among those killed was 71-year-old Fredell Bryant, who was shot twice in the chest when he answered the door at his Back of the Yards home early Sunday morning, according to police.

And once again, none shot by the police.

Redmoon Goes Under

At least they won't be stealing taxpayer money a million at a time:

• Redmoon, an unusual performance company specializing in public theatrical spectacles and a part of Chicago's cultural fabric for 25 years, is going out of business, effective immediately.
  
  [...] Those risks boiled down to moving into a new warehouse space at 2120 S. Jefferson St., in the Pilsen neighborhood, which required a monthly rent payment in excess of $30,000, and, secondly, ramping up the budget to create the 2014 Great Chicago Fire Festival, a wildly ambitious combination of neighborhood outreach and a spectacle on the banks of the Chicago River that attracted tens of thousands, among them the state's and city's highest-ranking politicians.
  
  That latter choice resulted in a high-profile downtown performance that was widely criticized for its lack of impressive flames. A 2015 edition of the Fire Festival featured a roaring blaze, but the damage in perception was done, and city officials backed away from the future of the event. This year's festival in September, relocated to Northerly Island, also faced some heat from the Burnham Park Yacht Club for raining embers and ash onto the club.

That Rahm has quite the anti-Midas touch what with executives going to jail or getting fired and his handpicked artsy crowd going bankrupt after first failing to start a fire and later, burning the Chicago Yacht Club to the tune of $80,000. Good riddance.

Christmas Chicago Style

Don't show this to the little kids:

Death investigation!

New Contact Card Order

The roll out isn't until 01 January, but the Order was published this weekend for your reading pleasure. It's only 16 pages long and lists a whole bunch of things you will, shall, and must do, along with the requisite definitions, supervisor responsibilities and retention information.

Most ridiculous so far? You will fill out an "Investigatory Stop Report" even when you arrest someone, a clear duplication of effort keeping you off the street on paperwork instead of....you know....fighting crime.

Brilliant.

Don't Read THIS Case Report!

Don't do it!!!

• After pleading guilty to robbing Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s teenage son and apologizing in court, Phillip B. Payne got a break.
  
  Cook County Judge Lori Wolfson sentenced Payne to three years of probation, telling him she thought he “is not a violent person” and is “capable of doing well.” She also ordered him to stay away from gangs and drugs.
  
  But since his sentencing earlier this year, the wiry 18-year-old known as “Peejay” hasn’t managed to do that, according to interviews, court records and his own social-media posts.

Evidently, this guy turned his life around so hard, he spun a full 360, and kept headed down the wrong path. And the case with the mayor's kid is still active because no one can find the accomplice, so don't look at the case report.

No Discretion

The future is here and it's in Baltimore:

• The footage shows a Baltimore police officer walking up to the driver's side window of a car he'd just pulled over downtown. The audio begins a few seconds later.
  
  "I must advise you for my safety and yours, this is recorded," the officer says to the woman behind the wheel. She asks why she was pulled over, and he tells her she was "going straight in a turning lane for about three blocks." "Can I just get the ticket and go please?" she says. "I don't want to be late for work." "OK," the officer responds.
  
  The officer then finds the woman's license is suspended. He asks her if she has someone who can come collect the vehicle so it doesn't have to be towed, but after 15 minutes he tells her that he had to order a tow truck — to which she complains.
  
  "Ma'am, I don't make up the rules," the officer says. "If you have a problem with it you're going to have to talk to your mayor. I have rules that I have to abide by, and now that we have body cameras I have to go line by line and we are not allowed to give discretion to anybody, because that's the way it is now."

You are now an automaton. Of course, we already have a version of that here in Chicago - speed cameras and red light cameras - those don't even care if you weren't driving the car. The car is proof of guilt and the registered owner is going to pay. But just wait until the whining starts about "Can't you give me a break?"

Lack of Audio

The article opens with a description of...well, there's no easy way to put this - plain old fucking stupidity. Cops throwing microphones on the roof of 016? How that can be excused, we have no idea.

But further down the article, there's this:

• IPRA has referred 24 incidents to the Cook County state’s attorney’s office this year for review of possible misconduct by Chicago cops. Twenty-two of those involved police shootings, and the other two involved other allegations of excessive force.
  
  IPRA provided the state’s attorney’s office with dashcam videos in just three of the 24 cases.
  
  And none of the videos had any audio of police officers talking, according to Sally Daly, a spokeswoman for State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez.

These stats are so incomplete as to be meaningless.

• HeyJackass.com only lists 21 police shootings on the year and their disclaimer reads that they might not all be CPD;
• The Sun Times says 22 shooting incidents have been refered to the States Attorney for "possible misconduct," a 105% rate of referral if HeyJackass.com is correct;
• Only 3 of these incidents had dash-cam footage, not surprising as many shootings occur somewhere away from the car, but that isn't explained in the article;
• None of the 3 had audio

While a 100% failure rate of audio might seem unlikely, the Department spokesweasel admits that up to 12% of cameras are down daily for "issues" and the audio failure rate approached 80% for other reasons, including broken equipment, operator error, or what we will politely call sabotage.

We make no excuses for the intentional damage issue - you get caught, you will get hammered. But the cheap equipment the City buys, the slapdash installation, the complete lack of maintenance - these things are in use 24/7/365 with no time outs for upkeep. You buy garbage, it's going to fail, regularly and predictably. The antennae are as cheap or cheaper than a 1990's flip phone antennae. We're wearing them, open and unprotected on a body that already carries a gun, Taser, magazine pouches, OC spray, collapsible baton, handcuff case, maybe two handcuff cases, radio carrier, and a vest stuffed with rubber gloves, FOP book, complaint books, pens, a radio cord that stretches from the belt to our radio strap. We're amazed the antennae survive a tour.

None of this is mentioned in the article, just the 100% failure of audio to exist, despite the myriad of plausible reasons we've just given for there to be none on a regular basis. It's isn't some grand conspiracy - it's a calculated effort to pinch-a-penny at the expense of the street officer to be properly equipped.

Pretty Picture

Using a corpse as a bargaining chip:

• Sixteen million dollars — $1 million for each bullet that Officer Jason Van Dyke fired into Laquan McDonald.
  
  That’s what lawyers representing the mother of the 17-year-old killed in the caught-on-video shooting demanded, according to records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.
  
  A month later, they settled with the city of Chicago for $5 million in a deal giving the lawyers what they thought would be a $2 million cut of that, without even filing a lawsuit, though it ended up being $1.8 million.

So pretty much it was never about "justice," it was about money. A lottery ticket on two legs, jacked up on PCP, abandoned by any semblance of family.

Da Vikes

What? It's not like it hurts anything.

Plus, if Minnesota wins, they make the playoffs.

McCarthy - Patsy?

An interesting theory and an always entertaining read from Jack Dunphy, the "nom de cyber" of an LAPD copper with a biting insight:

• Poor Garry McCarthy. Only a few years ago he was on top of the law-enforcement world. He had risen through the ranks of the New York Police Department to become a deputy commissioner, from which position he was induced to cross the Hudson River and take command of the police department in Newark. During his tenure there, crime fell by 21 percent, with homicides down by 28 percent and shootings down by 46 percent. So impressed by this record was Rahm Emanuel that upon his 2011 election as mayor of Chicago, he invited McCarthy to become superintendent of that city’s police department.
  
  It’s hard to imagine someone in Chicago longing for the good old days in Newark, but I suspect that’s just what McCarthy must be doing, for he is now out of a job, cast off as an expendable in the cause of keeping Emanuel’s name on the door at City Hall. McCarthy may have come to Chicago thinking he was going to show the rubes on the prairie how police work is done in the Big City Back East, but in the end it was the rubes who showed him how politics is done in Chicago.
  
  If he didn’t see it coming, he had no business in the job in the first place. I can’t claim any great expertise in the ways of Chicago politics, but I am very much of a Chicagophile. Ever since my first of many visits to the city some 30 years ago, I’ve wondered how Chicago simultaneously produced some of the greatest people I’ve known and some of the most loathsome politicians the country has ever seen. Stuff for another column someday, perhaps.

He's picked out McCarthy's entire New York style attitude - we pointed out many times as did readers that McCarthy brought with him an unpleasant air that the NYPD and he invented policing and we were lucky to have him here to teach us all about it.

Dunphy touches much that the media is hashing out and a bunch that they aren't. It's a good read and, for an outsider to the Chicago scene (but an avowed "Chicago-phile") very insightful. Give it a read.

Wrong Fifth Floor

Someone knows which way the feds should be looking:

• When the federal watchdogs landed in town to start sniffing around police headquarters, it signaled to many that they’ve got their investigative noses pointed in the wrong direction — upwind from the traditional source of the department's strongest stench: City Hall, that is.
  
  Now, don’t take that as the opinion of a cynical reporter.
  
  Mayor Rahm Emanuel, after all, is the guy who reminded everyone exactly how entrenched his administration — and the City Hall operation of every mayor for more than 40 years, for that matter — is in the day-to-day operation of the Police Department that the feds are investigating.

The Department has been a political football for years, only breaking from the mayor's orbit for a short stretch back when the old mayor Daley appointed O.W. Wilson, and "appointment" that was engineered by....old man Daley and brilliantly told in Mike Royko's novel "BOSS." Since then, the Department has been drawn steadily back into complete mayoral control.

Don't believe us? Remember what happened when J-Fled though he could not answer the phone when Shortshanks called? The mayor helpfully appointed J-Fled's Chief of Staff whose sole function was to answer the phone and tell J-Fled, "The mayor is one line 2 and wants to talk to you." There were no more missed communications after that little tiff.

It's would be nice the the FOP picked up the ball here and started pointing out who really runs the Department, where all the big decisions are made and where all the appointments are coming from. But given the connections that run from LaSalle Street to 35th street to Washington Blvd, that might be too much to hope for.

Poor Guy

Rumor started up that McCompStat was still showing up at work, locking the door to his office, and burning incense along with sensitive files showing the true crime numbers. The Sun Times attempts to dispel these stories:

• Mayor Rahm Emanuel sent his $260,044-a-year Police Supt. Garry McCarthy packing with just one month’s salary — roughly $21,670.
  
  “Garry McCarthy was relieved of his duties on December 1, 2015, and is being paid until the end of this month through vacation days he earned, as required by state law,” Kelley Quinn, Emanuel’s communications director, wrote in an email in response to a Freedom of Information request from the Chicago Sun-Times.
  
  “He will have two remaining vacation days at the end of 2015 and has no severance package.”

The Sun Times further outlines just how bad Garry got punked:

• The $21,670 in exit pay given to McCarthy pales by comparison to the $291,662 golden parachute offered to former Chicago Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard.

So word is he's waiting for a high-profile security job, either with the NFL or the NHL.

Copper Injured

No arrest for whatever reason - at least Anita can't drop them again:

• A Chicago Police officer suffered a broken wrist Friday in a scuffle with protesters.
  
  Police were trying to make way for an ambulance on its way to Northwestern Memorial Hospital when a small group of protesters “engaged police,” according to a CPD statement. One officer was taken to an area hospital with a broken wrist, according to the statement.
  
  The group dispersed immediately and no arrests were made in that incident, police said. The statement did not indicate the precise location of the altercation, and police did not immediately respond to requests for more details.

"Engaged"? Sounds like a battle. And the "protesters" are blocking ambulances to Northwestern? How would those people (or folks) have felt if someone like the former mayor was on his way there?

Main on Fire

Frank digs up another one:

• One of Chicago’s most notorious informants — who provided drug tips to the police while secretly killing and robbing people and doing drug deals — was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for his information with the approval of police supervisors who have since reached the highest levels of the department, records show.
  
  Saul Rodriguez was a top snitch for the Chicago Police Department’s narcotics section between 1996 and 2001. Over that period, he received more than $800,000 from the department for his information.
  
  Interim Chicago Police Supt. John Escalante, former police Supt. Phil Cline and chief Eugene Williams were all supervisors in the narcotics division over that period and approved payments to Rodriguez, records show. During those years, Rodriguez was involved in two killings and other serious crimes like holdups, according to federal prosecutors.

Some people were giving us flak in the comments yesterday about a certain exempt who was uncomfortably close to a scandal where his partner got 18 years in the Federal Pen. They said he was a nice guy and never hurt a copper. We are of the opinion that anyone that close to something that bad probably isn't the best choice for the position they put him in. We don't care if he's the greatest administrator in history and brings lunch for the watches every single day. At some point, it's going to come up in a public forum (like a newspaper) and it's going to make the Department look bad, and by virtue of it's very existence, it's going to make coppers look bad...like signing off on an informant that murders people while he's on your payroll.

Is it fair? No, not at all. It restricts a lot of people from ever making it higher than their own talents will take them. But it's reality. We're all living it now. Is it fair that we're all about to be living under some sort of Federal Consent Decree? Is it fair we got painted with the same brush that others wielded when they took money from tow drivers, dope dealers, drunks, dead people, stole dope or property, botched investigations, molested women, beat bartenders, drove intoxicated, etc, etc? We don't think so.

There's a national conversation taking place and guess who doesn't even have a seat at the table? Us. We do our job, honestly and to the best of our ability. But this isn't the time or place to be putting anyone with a potential skeleton in a position when every single appointment is under a microscope. It seems to be a lesson lost on this Department lately and on Rahm pretty regularly.

"Merit" Requests

The letter came out asking for "merit" recommendations. It seems that the Department is eager to make a quick class off the new Lieutenant list before any lawsuits make it to a hearing and hold up the process.

Of course, seeing who Rahm just put in all sorts of exempt positions, these are the people who will be reviewing "merit" packages and making the call for the next generation of bosses. They realize that if the spots are filled prior to the Feds poking their nose into things, the chances of their people getting demoted are tiny.

Politics continues unabated in the Department.

UPDATE: Someone posted links that we forgot about - FOIA requests that revealed "merit" lists from years gone by. One here. Another here. We don't know why some people don't FOIA entire promotional lists and go through it with a fine toothed comb linking "merit" promotions with exempt picks, with political sponsors, even with assorted lawsuits, just to see how the whole rotten thing comes together.

Spike's Box Office

Anyone hear how Spike's "Chi-Raq" did at the box office?

We heard it only lost $10-to-12,000,000.

On the bright side, the Academy is looking for Best Picture nominees shortly.

See?

Yesterday, we mentioned that all of Rahm's appointments to exempt positions were merely political moves to assuage certain voting blocs, and that anyone with time, an FOIA request and the ability to read might find some interesting backstories.

Frank Main went and found another:

• A newly promoted Chicago Police commander is accused in a lawsuit of helping to frame a man on federal drug charges more than 16 years ago, court records show.
  
  Noel Sanchez, who was named commander of the South Chicago District earlier this week, was working with his partner Glenn Lewellen in 1999 when they arrested Refugio Ruiz.

Lewellen is currently in the midst of an 18-year sentence, so he was unavailable for comment. But Rahm needed a guy to fill a certain need, so there you are. We certainly hope people don't think this is the only shady one. This is just one of the easy ones.

Give it some more kicks Frank - you might bring down the whole rotten structure.

Files That Shouldn't Exist

Once again, ignorance:

• As the U.S. Department of Justice gears up for a civil rights investigation into the Chicago Police Department, the city’s police unions are fighting in court to keep hidden reams of complaint records spanning decades.
  
  Last year, a request made under the Freedom of Information Act for records of complaints against Chicago police officers dating back to 1967 was challenged unsuccessfully by the city. The Illinois Appellate Court ruled the city must honor the request, made by independent local journalist Jamie Kalven.
  
  In the wake of that ruling, Kalven was joined by the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times in his fight for the data, and city officials agreed to release it.
  
  But then the unions stepped in.
  
  In October 2014, the union representing rank-and-file Chicago police officers sued the city to prevent the release of records more than four years old.
  
  The suit by the Fraternal Order of Police, or FOP, argued that officers would face “public humiliation and loss of prestige in their employment” were those older records made public. The Chicago Police Benevolent and Protective Association, or PBPA, which represents higher-ranking officers, filed a separate, similar lawsuit.
  
  Illinois Circuit Court Judge Peter Flynn granted the unions an injunction preventing the release of most of the files. But preliminary findings show the power and importance of this kind of information.

We fail to see what releasing records dating back decades would show. In many cases, these people are retired or deceased. This is just a broad-based initiative by the leftist agenda muckraker Kalven for his so-called "Invisible Institute" to further smear, tarnish and de-ligitimize the Department. These files were supposed to be destroyed by Law after five-to-seven years, especially in the cases of exonerated, unfounded and not sustained files. That's what a Contract is in Illinois - it is effectively a Law.

If only he directed his considerable efforts at the Chicago Machine, Cook County corruption or the Illinois Combine, but you know lefties - see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil...especially against those who enable your agenda.

"Constituent Approval"?

From the comments again:

• The City Council is talking to FOP about taking our next contract to the "constituents" for approval?
  
  FOP's counter move should be to compel every last dues paying member to sign a petition creating a referendum to reduce the number of aldermen to 15. Send it to the electorate for a vote. And campaign actively in press and media why it's a good idea to reduce the number of aldermen, how much they waste and how much money would be saved and how much corruption cut out. It should now be our mission to ruin those ignorant illiterate thieving corrupt pandering jagoffs for their insolence.
  
  Oh, and no more stipend to rent offices. Aldermen can have a cubicle inside a police station working under the same audio, visual and telephone surveilance that we must work under. Put them in the CAPS office. The aldermen and CAPS officers should have a lot to talk about.
  
  This shit has to end.

We would certainly hope that this isn't a serious proposal. The "constituents" already have people in place to read, debate, discuss, suggest and approve/reject every labor contract that is negotiated. They're called "aldercreatures."

The citizens elect them every four years and expect them to do the business of running the city. They get a pretty decent salary for what is supposed to be a part time job, enough to put them well into the top 1%. They also get a slush fund amounting to well over a million dollars so that they can pay themselves "rent" for office space. They can also conduct their regular job in between their part-time job, earning another pretty penny, especially if their regular job intersects with their part-time gig.

We certainly wouldn't want to accuse the aldercreatures of failing to do their job, would we? They wouldn't actually pass budgets, approve contracts, spend money without reading the fine details placed in front of them, would they?

We heartily approve of the attempt to reduce the number of aldercreatures though. Long time readers will remember such an effort here years ago, an effort doomed to fail, yet that gathered around 11,000 signatures in short order. The form is still available somewhere - you can Google "reduce Chicago Aldermen Chicago" and something should pop up. Perhaps someone with more time and drive can resuscitate the effort.

Good Answer

From the comments:

• 15 shot in one day on a Monday in December. By the way... What are the police doing about it? 

We recognize it as a sarcastic question - the type that we would usually ask, but didn't get around to following this weekend's mayhem. Someone decided to give an answer that we certainly appreciated, and ought to be the standard response to all of those who don't get the sarcastic bent of this site:

• People like you, Mr Troll, have told us to stand down. You have told us not to stop cars we think are suspicious because they will run and there will be a chase. You have told us not to engage offenders with knives and guns and win. You have told us that any person who abuses drugs and dies at the time we engage is our fault. You have told us not to CRIMINALLY profile. You have told us we are expendable.
  
  You have told us that we will lose our families money. You have told us we will go to jail. You have vilified us. You have protested against us while we try to protect you and your family. You have wished us dead. You have whipped up an anti-police sentiment that has caused the deaths of police officers. You have empowered the criminals in this city.
  
  So let me ask you, you moron: What are YOU going to do?

Well answered, sir or madam.

This is What They Promote?

FOIA tripping up Rahm's "reform" efforts:

• Top-to-bottom changes at the Chicago Police Department are a direct response to the police-involved killing of Laquan McDonald last year.
  
  Yet at least two CPD veterans who were promoted over the weekend were directly involved in the now-disputed official investigation that initially cleared police officer Jason Van Dyke.

Oops. We suppose after "meri-clout-oriusly" promoting the same people time and time again, when you need to "reform" something, tell, you still need to control the "reformers," right? So your supposed "reformers" are actually insiders, who really aren't capable of reforming jack shit.

And the media has all these reports and is actually making connections - for once. It's almost impressive.

Let's see what they make of this one:

• January 02, 1992 By Steve Johnson.
  
  A security guard at a Near West Side school disciplined four 7th-grade girls caught in the hallways after lunch by forcing them to eat cakes of caustic soap, a federal lawsuit charges.
  
  The students at the Talcott School, 1840 W. Ohio St., were found wandering the halls on Oct. 10 by the guard, an off-duty Chicago police officer, according to the lawsuit filed Tuesday.
  
  The officer brought them to a vice principal`s office where she offered to punish the students herself, said Denise Devitt, the attorney who filed the suit on behalf of three of the girls and their mothers seeking unspecified damages.
  
  When the vice principal approved this, Devitt said, the officer, whom Devitt identified as Maria Pena of the Wood District (ALERT ALERT - A CLUE! A CLUE! MEDIA LOOK HERE!!! - SCC), led the girls to a bathroom. Once there, a second security guard, identified as Marcy Mercado, allegedly barred the door, according to the suit.
  
  Then, Pena, who was wearing her police uniform, allegedly forced the 11-and 12-year-olds to begin eating bars of heavy-duty janitorial soap, causing one of them to vomit, Devitt said.

Anyone remember how much that one cost the city? Or the harassment beef filed against her in 010 for what was pretty much a slam-dunk libel/slander suit concerning a female officer? And paging through the hundreds of comments in the "Changes" post a few days ago, there are more than a few other...shall we say "questionable" histories among the listed promotees. It's almost like these promotions are more to pay off Rahm's critics than to actually "refrom" anything. These people can't be reformers seeing as how they are integral parts of the problems.

Rahm as a Plaintiff Witness?

A curious misstep by a usually sure-footed politician:

• Could Rahm Emanuel be headed to the witness stand?
  
  Attorneys representing two police officers who said they faced retaliation for trying to reveal corruption, say they will call the mayor to testify about a so-called “code of silence” in the Chicago Police Department.
  
  The mayor’s office said it will oppose any such effort, but lawyers for the two officers say he is key to their case, because he has publicly acknowledged that officers sometimes cover for each other.
  
  “We now have an admission from the highest, within the City of Chicago, that the code of silence exists,” says attorney Christopher Smith.

This would certainly be an interesting deposition or appearance on the stand. Could Rahm have inadvertently (or purposely) thrown the entire Chicago Machine under a bus that is careening out of control? Because if there is, and he has knowledge of, a police "code of silence," then what of the "code of silence" among:

• the aldercreatures? 
• At the various city Departments infiltrated by assorted organized crime figures? 
• Maybe the Outfit connections throughout the Metropolitan and Pier Exposition Authority? 
• Among the denizens of City Hall? 
• The County Board? Certain political families married to certain mob families? 
• A certain ex-mayor hanging around other "connected" individuals? 
• Certain scandals like Hired Truck? Parking meters? RedFlex?
• Rahm's unerring instinct to hire outsiders who are already under investigation elsewhere?

There are a whole bunch of "codes" that need explaining. We welcome them all.

Life With No Parole

Closing the book on the legal proceedings:

• Marcus Floyd was sentenced to life without parole on Tuesday for the murder of off-duty Chicago Police Officer Thomas Wortham IV in 2010.
  
  A long chapter has finally come to an end for the Wortham family, but the pain will always persist. It has almost been six years since the off-duty Chicago police officer was shot and killed in front of his childhood home during a robbery attempt.
  
  With two people already convicted and sentenced to life in prison, Floyd was the final defendant. While he did not fire the gun, Floyd will also be spending the rest of his life behind bars.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Baltimore Non-Verdict

Numerous court observers predicted this outcome:

• A Baltimore jury is deadlocked over the verdict in the first trial of a police officer charged in the death of Freddie Gray
  
  Closing arguments finished in the case Monday afternoon and the jury told the judge today that they were deadlocked and unable to reach a decision. Judge Barry Williams ordered the jury to return to chambers to try and reach a unanimous decision.
  
  "Compromise if you can do so without violence to your own moral judgement," Williams said.

"Compromise"? On Reasonable Doubt? That certainly sounds like an improper recommendations from the bench, prejudicial to the defense, irreversible error and grounds for an appeal.

Award Negated

A judge made sense of the Law? What is this world coming to?

• Two weeks before the release of video in Laquan McDonald's shooting thrust the issue of Chicago police brutality into the national spotlight, Priscilla Price sat in a nearly empty Cook County courtroom as a jury found that a cop had killed her 19-year-old son without justification in 2011.
  
  Price's sense of relief was short-lived, however. In a controversial move, the judge overseeing the case negated the jury's award of $3.5 million in damages and instead found in favor of the city. It turned out that the jury, in answering a written question as part of its verdict, had found that the officer had a reasonable belief that his life was in danger when he opened fire.

We'll see if it stands on appeal, but the logic is inescapable - you can't ruled "unjustified" if the officer was in fear for his life - he is by default, justified. And to find the City liable to the tune of $3.5 million over a justifiable shooting because you feel sorry for the plaintiff is improper.

Cops Win Against Sun Times

So the lawsuit will proceed:

• The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from the Chicago Sun-Times that sought to block a lawsuit from police officers over the newspaper's coverage of a case involving the nephew of Chicago's former mayor.
  
  The justices did not comment Monday in allowing the lawsuit to proceed over whether the newspaper violated the privacy of the officers by publishing identifying information about them from state driver license records. The officers contend that publishing the information violates a federal law intended to protect driver license data.
  
  The article used the information to suggest that the police put together a lineup that made it unlikely that the nephew of former Mayor Richard M. Daley would be selected. Daley nephew Richard Vanecko eventually pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the 2004 death of David Koschman.

Of course, without the queered line-ups run by the political cabal up north, maybe we wouldn't be seeing this massive upheaval of gold stars of recent days. Not the coppers' faults of course - they were used for a political end, but the media overstepped a lot of boundaries

Just What Rahm Didn't Need

Teachers Strike!

• Nearly every one of the thousands of Chicago teachers who cast ballots last week to determine whether they could go on strike voted to do so, blowing past a 75 percent approval mandated by the state.
  
  The Chicago Teachers Union announced Monday that 96.5 percent of those casting ballots last week voted to back the strike. With nearly 92 percent of members voting, that means about 88 percent of all members support a strike should ongoing contract negotiations fail, according to CTU vice president Jesse Sharkey, who described the results as “overwhelming.”
  
  That’s a shade lower than in 2012 when 89.7 percent of all CTU members voted to strike before walking out for seven school days.

Rahm supported that 75% approval number years back and Karen Lewis has humiliated him twice with it. Must be nice to be such a unifying figure of focused hatred. We'll see if Karen re-directs it at Springfield one of these days where all the big decisions will be made.

Pop-Up Issue

We got a complaint yesterday about a series of pop-up ads appearing when a reader tries to access the site.

SCC is ad-free, always has been and as far as we're concerned, always will be. This is a hobby, done off duty, for the enjoyment and entertainment of all. We suggested to the reader he might have a virus of some sort, but then a whole series of people chimed in saying it had just started occurring. The only common thread running through more than half of the complaints was they were using iDevices - iPads, iPhones, etc. or they were using the Safari browser. We use neither, so we couldn't replicate the pop-ups at all.

We're currently checking the settings to make sure eBlogger didn't pull a fast one on us like they did a few years ago where we stopped appearing in Google searches because they changed our settings. But again, it isn't us.

Evans Acquitted

As expected after another dismal performance by Anita's office:

• A Cook County judge on Monday acquitted Chicago police Cmdr. Glenn Evans on charges he shoved his gun down a man’s throat in spite of evidence showing the alleged victim’s DNA on Evans’ gun.

Of course, there was no way to prove this as the lab never even tested the DNA to see if it was tissue, blood or saliva DNA, all of which have distinct profiles.
scan
IPRA takes a beating, too:

• His lawyers made an important part of their defense an attack on the integrity of the much-maligned Independent Police Review Authority, which investigated the allegation of excessive force.
  
  In her closing argument Thursday, Evans' attorney, Laura Morask, called IPRA a "band of inept, corrupt, comically laughable" investigators whose efforts to "bag a commander" were "nothing short of disgusting."

Well put.

Firefighter Killed

Thoughts, prayers and deepest sympathies to the Chicago Fire Department on the loss of their brother.

Changes!!!

On a Sunday night, the biggest changes in Command staff in quite a while - probably 7 years or so.

Lots of political heavyweights being moved around, like deck chairs on the Titanic.

Gang Enforcement Unit is being "disbanded," or re-assigned to the Areas.

A lot of movement from the "Acting" Superintendent...so what's the real story behind all of this?

UPDATE: The Changes!

Promotions to Chief
Eddie Johnson to Chief of Patrol
Gene Roy to Chief of Detectives


Barbara West - Deputy Chief of Patrol (XO)
Melissa Staples - Deputy Chief of Area North
Kevin Ryan - Deputy Chief of Area Central
James Jones - Deputy Chief District 011
Maria Pena - Commander 025 to Deputy Chief of Street Operations

Promotions to Commander

Roger Bay - Commander 016 to Commander (XO) of Area North
Al Nagode - Commander 001 to Commander (XO) of Area Central
Robert Klich - Commander 001
William Looney - Commander 016
Sean Loughran - Commander 020
Noel Sanchez - Commander 004
Anthony Escamilla - Commander 025
Darren Doss - Commander 003
Kevin Navarro - Commander 004 to Commander of Area South Detectives
Thomas Lemmer - Commander of Youth Investigations Division
Cornelia Lott - Commander 020 to Commander of Inspections Division

Dave McNaughton - lateral move to Deputy Chief of BSS