F#$% You Rahm

Once again, SCC drags us out of retirement to say the things that they aren't allowed to say. Namely, to assess your actions calmly, thoroughly, methodically and completely in the amount of time it takes to come to a proper and legal decision that won't endanger your life, the lives of other officers, or your career.

In other words, slow down. In some cases, stop.

Rahm completely threw the Department under the bus, the Department we gave decades of our lives to, the Department that, while it didn't make us rich, provided us a decent standard of living and allowed us to send kids to school and college and finally, out-of-state, where we currently are spending our golden years.

His speech was pure unadulterated crap. This statement just fucking dumb:

• Emanuel said he was with a group of young men last weekend, describing them as all having "a history with the criminal-justice system," but "trying to get on the right path, do the right thing."
  
  "One young man asked me a simple question that gets to the core of what we're talking about. He said, 'Do you think the police would ever treat you the way they treat me?'
  
  "And the answer is no," Emanuel said. "And that is wrong. And that has to change in this city. That has to come to an end now. No citizen is a second-class citizen in the city of Chicago."

Do you even know why the answer was "no" Rahm? Do you have a clue? Perhaps it's because you aren't driving a ghetto-hoopty ride with one headlight, invalid plates and music jacked up do window rattling volume at all hours? Maybe you aren't howling gibberish, shoving shoppers, snatching iPhones on Michigan Avenue? Maybe you aren't hanging out on the corner at all hours, holding an entire neighborhood hostage with your drug sales, threatening, beating, burning the houses of those who complain? Or maybe, just maybe, you aren't firing weapons at someone who "dissed" you over a rap song, killing the rival dealer or executing 9-year-old kids for who their relative are to the tune of 450 murders and 2,800 wounded.

Or this horseshit?

• He addressed how the Independent Police Review Authority had been created in 2007 only to "ask why, out of the hundreds of police shootings in the last eight years, only a handful of them have led to any charges?"

Has Rahm seen the recent Washington Post study that found 95% of police involved shootings nationwide are fully legal and justified? There is no "epidemic," by any stretch of the imagination. But that isn't stopping the witch hunt.

Or this?

• Emanuel again came close to addressing racial profiling a few minutes later, when he said police officers and community members alike should learn how to "see past their roles, to their souls" when interacting on the streets.
  
  "The officer can see dreadlocks and tattoos," he said, "or a student and an artist."

A lot has changed since we went through the Academy, especially if Officers are taught how to see souls. We are a reactionary job - how the encounter goes is determined by the subject's behavior, 99.9 times out of 100, plain and simple. And the last time we saw an "artist" on video, he was punching a Chicago Police Officer in the head and getting charges dropped by the State.

We don't know how many way to say it, but you have been abandoned by the City. Rahm and the Machine will sacrifice you on the altar of political correctness and not lose a wink of sleep over it. Where does that leave you? Your family? Your kids? Back living with your in-laws while everything you worked for is destroyed for a political game? And when you get out from under, you're doing what? Something that doesn't have a stringent background check we suppose.

The criminal element has won. Self initiated police work is a fool's errand. Every citizen contact you make is immediately suspected of racist undertones. Every observation you make, the ones that make the back of your neck prickle, is subject to review by local, state, federal, IPRA, politician, reverend, lawyer oversight. Every piece of paper you are required to fill out is there to hang you, regardless of what the bosses are tell you.

As SCC has stated in the past, who are you going to believe? Some boss who tells you to go out and get the numbers so they look good? Some old retired fart like us who survived nearly three decades in a rough and tumble era of policing? Or your own damn eyes?

Wake up.