Shooting (IMPORTANT UPDATE!)(x2)

Rare midday post seeing as how this is the first fatal police shooting under the new IPRA regime:

• Police said they shot and killed a man who fired at officers responding to several calls of a man with a gun and a home invasion in the 7300 block of South Paulina Street around 4:40 a.m.
  
  "Responding officers were met by an armed offender and shots were exchanged," the Police Department said in a statement. "The offender was fatally wounded and a weapon was recovered. There were no injuries to officers."
  
  The man was pronounced dead inside the home, according to Larry Merritt, a spokesman for the Independent Police Review Authority, which investigates all police shootings. The man's identity has not been released.

And a big thank you to the Tribune for quoting this moron on scene:

• Carol Gyimatey woke up to gunshots early Sunday morning and police officers knocking on her door.
  
  Gyimatey, 48, walked to the front door of her home in the West Englewood neighborhood and saw through the window officers with their guns drawn.
  
  “I looked out and I said, ‘Put your guns down, I have children inside,’ ” she said. "They said, ‘There is a man with a gun next door, so you have to leave.’ ”
  
  Gyimatey said she grabbed her sons, 17 and 12, and her 5-year-old granddaughter who was staying the night and rushed out the front door.

Really? "Put your guns down"? Who the hell is this idiot telling us how to do our job? OIh yeah, she's part of the "community" who knows so much about police work but says later in the article that crime is "a way of life" in her neighborhood. And this brilliant example of motherhood manages to have 17 and 12 year old sons along with a 5 year old granddaughter.

How about we say, "Fine. By the way, there's a guy with a gun shooting through windows and walls. Can we get your name for the police report when he manages to shoot you? Thanks, see you later."

And the attitude doesn't stop even when she finds out what's going on:

• As Gyimatey talked, a police officer walked over to her.
  
  “Can you come with me?” he asked.
  
  “Why? I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said.
  
  “I know. Some people wanna talk to you,” the officer said, and led her to a group of officers standing near her home.

Honest to god, Englewood should be Ignorant-wood. How about you try being helpful so you can, you know, fix your neighborhood and try to make a better life for your multi-generational disaster in the making.

No officers injured physically so a good start. We'll see what bullshit IPRA comes up with in short order. Best wishes to the Officers and an excellent job from our standpoint.

UPDATE: The Tribune removed all of the quotes from Carol Gyimatey without notice of correction or edit. You think they're trying to conceal an agenda?

UPDATE: Now the Tribune has put back the original article with all the Gyimatey ignorance on full display. Does anyone over at the Tribune actually have a hand on the wheel? Or is the whole thing being run by high school "journo" students?

No Immunity?

Anyone else get the feeling that with this CIT training and OEMC getting tossed under the Rahm Bus that we (the CPD) are going to be sent to every single call that comes into 9-1-1 very shortly?

Fire has the option to refuse, but we don't - unless a supervisor steps up and codes the job. That makes this article even more disturbing:

• The Illinois Supreme Court ruled 4-3 to discard a rule that protects fire, police and ambulance services accused of failing to provide a level of response from lawsuits.
  
  Cook County Record reported that justices Thomas Kilbride, Anne Burke, Charles Freeman and Mary Jane Thesis came together to abolish the public duty rule. Chief Justice Rita Garman, Robert Thomas and Lloyd Karmeier joined in a dissent to the majority position.
  
  "We conclude that the underlying purposes of the public duty rule are better served by application of conventional tort principles and the immunity protection afforded by statutes than by a rule that precludes a finding of a duty on the basis of the defendant’s status as a public entity," Kilbride wrote in the lead opinion. "Accordingly, we hereby abolish the public duty rule and its special duty exception. Therefore, in cases where the legislature has not provided immunity for certain governmental activities, traditional tort principles apply."

This appears to be a big deal - based entirely on the "perception" of protection "owed" to individuals by the police and fire services. You know who might have a decent shot at a giant class-action type lawsuit? Low crime areas stripped of police protection who then suffer a rise in crime. Kind of like the stuff the "CrimeInWrigleyville" blog keeps track of.

One Day Left

And the count stands at fifty-two

...and rising:

• A 34-year-old man was fatally shot late Saturday in the Humboldt Park neighborhood on the West Side, according to Chicago Police.

Chicago is well on its way to 600.

He Made it Out Alive?

Back in the day, this goof would have been making his next appearance on a coroner's tray:

• A convicted Roscoe Village sex offender faces charges of entering a school zone and indecent exposure after prosecutors say he walked into a West Side high school wearing only his socks.
  
  Joseph Marchetti, a 39-year-old independent massage therapist, on Thursday afternoon walked into the foyer of Crane Medical Preparatory High School, 2245 W. Jackson Blvd., naked, wearing only his socks, prosecutors said. Multiple parents and students were present inside the school, and Chicago Public Schools surveillance video captured the incident.
  
  Marchetti, of the 2300 block of West Belmont Avenue, was arrested at the scene. He is a registered sex offender and was convicted of aggravated criminal sexual abuse in Champaign County in 2005, prosecutors said.

Check out this guy's booking photo.

This is the Crane High School across the street from where Rockwell Gardens used to be, correct? The neighborhood must be moving up finally.

Squad Policing Dead?

Who would have figured this disaster wouldn't outlast McCarthy?

• SCC-Maybe you can help with getting information since our unit reps, watch reps, and fop has no answer. This is new information regarding the squad scheduling.
  
  This week the 12 district was informed that the squad scheduling was going to be terminated in the 3rd period.
  
  Everyone has to re- pick day off groups and have to now find a 3rd person for each car. What is upsetting is they wait until the year begins to tell us that its ending. No one for 2 years ever bothered to even ask us our opinion on this. I am not a fan of squad scheduling at all. But like most of us we have family and other obligations in our current day off groups. Its very simple to just up and say everyone has to re-pick day off groups. Instead of waiting until the end of 2016 to fix this issue and have new d.o.g for 2017 they chose to do this now. At least this commander was able to get this stopped, but why now? Any help?

This is a shitty thing to do after everyone has already picked furloughs, figured out holiday schedules and generally scheduled life, knowing what their day off group was going to be for the year. Personally, we schedule all sorts of doctor and dentist appointments months ahead of time because we know when we're going to be available during the week, even as far off as September.

Now we've also just heard that the Impact Zone foot patrols (another relic of the McCarthy era) have been discontinued and all the kids are being shifted to districts with less than (or exactly) two days notice. We aren't positive, but don't they have a certain number of Contract protections after one year? Including the one about proper advance notice prior to switching days off?

And someone just commented that the Department is going back to Street Deputies, instead of OCIC's?

Golly, they can't erase the McCarthy legacy fast enough, can they? Next thing you know, we'll have Watch Commanders again.

Turnabout

Interesting development:

• The police officer who shot and killed teenager Quintonio LeGrier on the day after Christmas will sue LeGrier’s estate.
  
  Officer [...] answered a domestic disturbance call in West Garfield Park and wound up shooting LeGrier and a neighbor, he says, because LeGrier attacked him.
  
  [...] attorney Joel Brodsky confirmed for WGN-TV this morning that he’ll file a civil suit against LeGrier’s estate in a couple of weeks, citing emotional distress and assault.

Police have sued assailants in past cases and won substantial judgements. Perhaps this would dissuade the city from making hasty settlement officers that only encourage and exacerbate the "ghetto lottery" culture. Well played Officer.

CIT For Everyone!

Here we go:

• Five years after closing six of the city’s 12 mental health clinics, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is stepping up crisis intervention training for Chicago Police officers and 911 operators to improve the city’s response to emergencies involving people suffering from mental illness.
  
  The police shootings of Laquan McDonald in October 2014 and Quintonio LeGrier and Bettie Jones in December 2015 are only the most recent examples of incidents where deadly consequences might have been avoided if police officers and 911 operators had been better trained, said Alexa James, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness Chicago.

Maybe Alexa James should familiarize herself with state law and Use of Force directives. A mental with a bat or a knife is just as deadly as a sane person with a bat or a knife - maybe more so since they won't listen to reason, logic, verbal direction, etc. Many even - get this - want to die and figure since they lack the fortitude to do it themselves, they'll get the cops to do it for them.

Maybe someone ought to ask why the membership of the National Alliance on Mental Illness doesn't have a few thousand of its members signing up for the police exam to show us all how it's done.

IPRA Protocol

Here's the letter outlining how Officer involved shootings will be handled now:

Interesting that IPRA will notify Felony Review as soon as possible, even before they leave the office and arrive on scene. That tells us quite a lot. It ought to tell each and every reader quite a lot, too.

No Charges?

Is this another justified Concealed Carrier shooting a ne'er-do-well?

• No charges are expected to be filed in the killing of a man during an exchange of gunfire after a dispute at a party blocks from Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s house, police said Thursday.
  
  Pablo Ulloa, 25, was shot and killed about 7:30 p.m. Jan. 8 following an incident at an apartment building in the 1900 block of West Belle Plaine Avenue, authorities said at the time. Ulloa was killed after he pulled out a gun and began shooting, police said.
  
  No charges are expected to be filed in connection with the killing because the man who shot Ulloa acted in self-defense, a police spokesman said Thursday.
  
  The 25-year-old and a 23-year-old man were attending a party in an apartment when they began to argue, police said in the hours after the shooting.
  
  The older man pulled out a gun and began shooting, hitting the 23-year-old man in the neck, police said. The shooter also hit another 25-year-old man in the abdomen. That man returned fire, fatally shooting Ulloa in the chest.
  The two surviving men were taken to Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, initially in critical condition.

Hm. Not a single mention of any FOID card, nothing about a Concealed Carry License. Just labeling this a justified shooting and moving on? Heck, they don't even name the shooter. But let a copper get involved in a justified shooting and his name is all over the media, endangering his spouse, kids, extended family.

Steal a Million....

...out in three years:

• Off Topic: Speaking of political criminals. Look who just got out of the joint after ONLY 3 and a half years.
  
  This e-mail is to inform you that the offender John Pallohusky has been released from the Illinois Department of Corrections and paroled or placed on mandatory supervised release status. Therefore, this offender is no longer in the custody of the Illinois Department of Corrections as of 1/26/2016.
  
  For more information, please contact the Victim Services Unit of the Illinois Department of Corrections, between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. Central Time, Monday through Friday. The toll-free telephone number is 877-776-0755.
  
  This notification is sponsored by the Illinois VINE Service. It is our hope that this information has been helpful to you.
  
  Thank you,
  The VINE Service
  
  Illinois is a fuckin' joke.

Amazing. He bankrupted the PBPA, they barely got any money back except via a few properties the courts were able to seize, he gets 12 years and he's out in under four. How much of the stolen million-plus does he still have hidden? Crime really does pay sometimes.

Chicago Misses List

And there was great rejoicing at City Hall:

• Despite the ongoing violence plaguing the city, a new report did not name Chicago as one of its most violent cities in the world.
  
  The rankings were published by the Mexico Citizens Council for Public Security, and Caracas was named the most violent city in the world for 2015. The Venezuelan country saw nearly 4,000 homicides with more than 300,000 inhabitants, according to the report. That breaks down to 119.87 homicides per 100,000 people.

But guess who did make the list?

• Four cities in the U.S. were named on the list, St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, and New Orleans, respectively, according to the report.

Golly, the cities of riots, riots, Rust Belt collapse and hurricane central. Also, all run by democrats for the past fifty, sixty or more years.

Peak Stupidity

We've reached it:

Though we wouldn't lay odds on someone finding a new low shortly - this is still Chicago.

Stay Fetal.

Save the Date!

This is actually amusing as hell - some "revrunds" want to schedule a date for ...no murders:

• So rare are days without murder in Chicago that when one occurred in 2012, the news made national headlines. Now, a coalition of Chicago-area ministers, educators and parishioners wants to repeat that day.
  
  The Thou Shalt Not Murder coalition is calling for a murder moratorium in Chicago on Easter Sunday, March 27 as part of an effort to curb gun violence.
  
  Expressing outrage over the 488 homicides and 2,986 shootings in Chicago last year, the group assembled for a three-hour meeting Jan. 16 in the basement of St. Barnabas Catholic Church in Chicago's South Side Beverly neighborhood. Organizers of the "Thou Shalt Not Murder" campaign included ministers from Morgan Park and Mount Greenwood neighborhoods.

Remember, these are the same people (or folks) who can't be bothered for pretty much 460 of the other murders that occur during the year. Just a little selective outrage when Grandma driving her gangbanging grandson catches a round or maybe when a 9-year-old gets executed or at selected police shootings. Now they want to schedule a "no-murder day."

We will arbitrarily set the over/under for Easter Sunday at 5 wounded, 2 dead. Place your bets at the window. The line may be adjusted for the weather as 27 March approaches.

This Again?

When all else fails, fall back on a failed strategy:

• Interim Chicago Police Supt. John Escalante said the department has employed multiple strategies to quell a significant spike in violent crime at the start of the New Year – including the shootings of 16 people over an 11-hour period on Monday, including five homicides.
  
  Escalante said he has put his command staff on notice that he wants to hear any and all ideas for quelling the gun violence that has increased on the streets, but he said it’s the easy availability of guns that is fueling the spike in shootings.

And what trick are we pulling out of the bag?

• Escalante said the department has increased the number of so-called “violence reduction strategy call-ins,” a strategy the department has used for six years to directly engage gang members.
  
  “That’s bringing the gang members in, putting them on notice about stopping the violence, but also giving them the opportunity to take advantage of social services that are there to provide them some alternatives,” he said.

Yay! A stern talking to! That'll show 'em! And after the stern talking, why....we'll put a note in their permanent record! And if that doesn't teach them, then by golly, Double Secret Probation!

Even SeeBS isn't buying this:

• However, with 41 murders through Jan. 25, according to the Police Department, Chicago would be on pace for 600 murders this year, the first time the city has had that many homicides since 2003.

We're going to go out on a limb here and say Mr. Six isn't even in the final three for Superintendent.

Deadline Moved Again

We guess no one wants the job?

• The deadline to apply for the Chicago Police Department is right around the corner, yet the very people the police are trying to attract are not exactly lining up for the jobs.
  
  The push for new recruits, especially black and Hispanic, comes on the heels of controversial police shootings, the department’s promise to increase diversity and a need to replace retiring officers. Yet many of the nearly hundred chairs were empty.

This is at least the second "extension." In November, the deadline was extended a month to January 16. Now it's an additional 14 days. Rahm should just think about reverting to the old days when you showed up at the aldercreatures' ward office with an envelope, and they gave you a badge and a starting date later that month.

Missing Text

The Tribune is suing Rahm over text and e-mail messages that should be part of the public record. Rahm has been fighting it for a while now, but there's an article in the Trib Tuesday, and it's interesting:

• For the first time, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has released text messages that show him conducting official business on a city-issued cellphone, a move that comes as he faces sharp scrutiny on what information he makes public after fighting for months to keep the Laquan McDonald police shooting video under wraps.
  
  Emanuel disclosed the text messages in response to an open records request, a decision made as the Chicago Tribune is suing the mayor on the grounds he violated state law by refusing to release emails and text messages sent and received on his personal accounts that pertain to public business.
  
  The mayor's text messages to senior city officials cover a six-day period in late December when a Chicago police officer shot and killed two people on the West Side, including an unarmed mother of five. Emanuel's direct and often shorthand messages show the mayor was concerned about how the story was playing in the media and what policies City Hall should roll out in response.

Most interesting is the redacted text in one exchange - anyone want to speculate?

That first redaction. All we're seeing is Rahm asking the race of the officers involved. Of course, we'll never prove it without the original un-redacted documents, but we'd be willing to bet many thousands of toothpicks on Rahm's direction of thought. So would anyone who is completely honest with the way things play out in Chicago, particularly on the west and south sides.

It's sad, but reality. It's also a sad reality that Rahm immediately used this crisis in an effort to stave off his political demise rather than exert actual leadership and effect some change. But that isn't the animal that Rahm is.

Nice Chase

No one hurt, bad guys in custody, the kind of thing that almost never gets publicity - unless there's a new helicopter around:

• Eyewitness News has exclusive video of a police chase on Chicago's West Side.
  
  Chopper 7 HD was hovering overhead Tuesday afternoon as a suspect sped through city streets, then made a run for it.
  
  Police said it started with an armed robbery on West 23rd St. Officers spotted the suspects' vehicle and started chasing them. Chopper7HD caught up with the pursuit near Roosevelt and Homan.
  
  After dodging vehicles on the street, the suspects turned, then ditched their car in a parking lot on Grenshaw.

Good footage from the chopper. Isn't it amusing that the news stations can have helicopters up most days, but hoping for PH-1 is like wishing for a pony?

Start Snitching

Good news on one front:

• In a sweeping victory for federal authorities, a jury wasted little time Tuesday before convicting John Bills on all 20 counts, finding that the former Chicago city official took up to $2 million in bribes and gifts in return for steering tens of millions of dollars in red light camera contracts to an Arizona company.
  
  With his conviction on mail and wire fraud, bribery, extortion, conspiracy and tax fraud charges, Bills faces at least 10 years in prison, and possibly more than 20 years, his attorney said.

Start spilling the beans there Bills. Unraveling Chicago corruption might take years, but you've got 10-to-20 facing you. You almost certainly kicked money up the food chain. Even the jurors wondered:

• While many jurors leaving the courthouse Tuesday declined to comment about their deliberations, one juror said that while the evidence against Bills was plentiful, the trial raised as many questions as it answered.
  
  "Where else does it lead, you have to wonder," said Michael Woerner, 63, a former Hinsdale village president. "There's got to be somebody above him. Why didn't he cut a deal? That was the big question."
  
  Woerner, who lives in Burr Ridge, said those questions and others bubbled to the surface at times during deliberations.
  
  "But every time somebody started to talk about it, somebody else would say, 'We have a lot of work to do, let's get to it,'" he said.

Let's get to it indeed.

RIP Sgt Fish

Many old timers will tell you that "Barney Miller" was the closest Hollywood ever got to portraying a police department. Coming from a number of police families, we tend to agree.

Open post to discuss and compare Barney Miller to any other shows. Keesing Bandit will probably vote for "Cop Rock."

Shooting Break!

We hadn't noticed the lull. Did anyone else miss it?

• Sixteen people were shot in an 11-hour period Monday, including two along a Safe Passage route in the West Englewood neighborhood, according to authorities.
  
  The shootings - from Cragin on the Northwest Side to Roseland on the Far South Side - left five dead. Those shot ranged in age from 16 to 56. Several survivors were left in critical condition.
  
  The burst of shootings came after no one was reported shot in the city through most of the day Sunday into early Monday.

You think we would have noticed 33 hours without a shooting victim, but the misses are just as loud and we were responding to shots fired calls everywhere the last two days.

$350 an Hour?

Where does Rahm keep finding the money?

• Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Monday defended paying $350 an hour to recently retired Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey to advise city leaders on policing issues, even though the East Coast city had a higher homicide rate than Chicago last year.
  
  Emanuel said Ramsey, Washington, D.C.'s former top cop and a Chicago Police Department deputy superintendent from Englewood, will not be considered for the vacant superintendent post here.
  
  "Ramsey's been clear that after D.C. and Philly, not only he doesn't want the job, and you don't ask someone who doesn't want the job, this is too big and important a job," Emanuel said. "And so, he's clear, and we have a committee searching for the right person."

Rahm is responding to rumors and speculation on the blog now. But he still hasn't contacted us for the vacant Superintendent spot. We won't cost $350 per hour, and we've offered to save the city at least $18 million. Maybe more.

OEMC Error

Curiouser and curiouser:

• Minutes before police fatally shot 19-year-old Quintonio LeGrier, he called 911 multiple times — and begged to have officers sent to his father’s home — but they were not initially dispatched, according to emergency recordings released on Monday.
  
  An officer shot LeGrier six times in December after the teenager advanced on officers with a baseball bat, according to police. The officer also accidentally shot neighbor Bettie Jones once in the chest, killing her, too.
  
  The Independent Police Review Authority, which is investigating the shootings, made LeGrier’s three 911 calls public on Monday, as well as one from his father, Antonio.

So are they clearing the officer now? It certainly isn't the Department's fault that OEMC dropped the ball and antagonized a mentally ill individual leading to his unwise decision to swing a baseball bat at responding officers. There's plenty of room under the bus for Rahm to toss everyone under it.

"This ain’t Englewood!"

No Momma, it certainly isn't:

• Inside the hotel’s lobby, police officers blocked off the area leading to the south tower of the building with yellow crime tape, tying one end to a hand-sanitizing stand near the front door.
  
  Shattered glass peppered the floor near a set of elevators inside the crime scene. Several potted plants lay on their sides. Some chairs were tipped over. A bottle of Patron and a bottle of vodka lay empty.
  
  Taylor's body lay in view of the windows on the south side of the hotel.
  
  Police found at least a half-dozen shell casings and one live round at the scene.
  
  About an hour after Taylor was shot, his mother showed up at the hotel, saw her son’s body through the window and walked inside the lobby, pleading with the officers to let her see him.
  
  “Please, let me see my son,” the woman yelled as she stood near the yellow crime tape. “How did this happen? Here? This ain’t Englewood!”

But somehow, some way, your son managed to bring Englewood to McCormick Place, a place for visitors. A place that can be correctly called an economic engine of Chicago, providing thousands of jobs to those who work there and the support services required to operate it, from the contractors, to the food service personnel, the janitors, laborers, truck drivers, taxi cabs, etc. Thanks so much, from the taxpaying public.

And is anyone wondering why we aren't seeing this snuff film footage from the lobby cameras? It should be all over the news, right?

• This incident's video needs to be released. It's a straight up execution with the victim on the ground. Clear as a movie too, the hotel has a premium security surveillance system.

So why aren't the news channels running this one 24/7? Is there something about it more disturbing that the clips they ran for weeks straight just a little while ago? We can't imagine what that would be.

There it is Again!

The front door of the Hyatt where an individual was executed in the lobby this past weekend:

Can you see it? Maybe if we zoom in a little bit?

Maybe if we circle it? And point big green arrows at it?

You know what? We think these signs must be attracting guns! That's the only explanation:

Quick! Take down the signs! They're shooting where the SIGNS are at!!!

A Tiny Gesture

This is over by one of the pumps:

We won't say where in case someone without the appreciation for the police decided to take matters into their own hands, but thanks to the unnamed workers who put this up. We've gotten more than a few photos of this particular sign and it makes our day.

Hotel Killing

Gee, it's a good thing this didn't happen at a hotel that caters to one of the larger economic engines of the city:

• A 25-year-old man was shot to death inside a Hyatt Regency hotel at McCormick Place in the South Loop neighborhood early Saturday, police said.
  
  Courtney Taylor, of the 1600 block of South Paulina Street, was in a group of several men during a birthday party in the hotel lobby when a male attacker pulled out a gun and fired shots, police said.
  
  Taylor suffered multiple gunshot wounds, according to the Cook County medical examiner's office. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
  
  No one was in custody as of early Saturday.

Oh wait...that is one of the hotels. We can only imagine the phone calls going back-and-forth after this went down.

So Where Should They Go?

Another brilliant bit of media butchery from the Sun Times:

• Over the past 10 years, more than two dozen officers with multiple citizen complaints have been assigned to train recruits at the Chicago Police Department Education and Training Academy, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.
  
  Out of a total of 460 officers assigned to the academy between 2005 and 2015 — most for just a few days or weeks — 40 percent of them had at least one citizen abuse complaint, often before they were assigned to the academy, the Sun-Times found.
  
  One of them supervised a team of cops who went to prison for ripping off drug dealers, two served in the notorious Special Operations Section, and some were hit with complaints from citizens while they were teaching at the academy.

First of all, nearly every one of these complaints was subsequently found to be "Not Sustained" meaning no disciplinary action was forthcoming, same as something like 90% of all complaints against the police, a percentage that hasn't varied much over the years.

Second, were they really "instructing" or were they assigned to the Academy desk answering phones as most persons under investigation are until they're cleared or discharged? We're betting they were part of the rubber-gun squad, answering phones.

Third, what does the Sun Times desire that these people do? Sit at home and collect a check? There's a process that must be followed. Might as well get some function out of them, even if it's answering a phone (which we imagine, was one of the reasons they might have gotten additional complaints from citizens - being pissed off since they're on lock-down.)

In any event, another shallowly researched smear job for no apparent purpose.....while the bodies of their readers keep stacking up.

UPDATE: Some people have commented on what we missed - a sizable number of the people assigned to the Academy are re-treads, that is coming back from military Leaves of Absence, and it might be mere happenstance that they have a CR record that has nothing to do with anything. Did the Sun Times differential between Unit 124 (Academy Staff) and 045 (District Reinstatement)? Not in the article they didn't.

Ramsey's Back!

As a "consultant" though:

• Charles Ramsey — who headed the Washington and Philadelphia police departments during U.S. Justice Department investigations of those agencies — has been invited by Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration to return to Chicago to consult on reforming the Chicago Police Department.
  
  Ramsey, a former deputy police superintendent in Chicago, said the city should embrace the recently launched Justice Department investigation of the Chicago Police Department’s “patterns and practices.”
  
  Ramsey said federal investigators worked cooperatively with the Washington and Philadephia departments while he ran them and that the result was better training for officers and a drop in police-involved shootings in each of those cities.

Any students of history here? Anyone? Does this ring a bell?

It does for us. And it should for anyone who has read the book "Boss" by Mike Royko. Following the Summerdale scandal in 1960, the elder Daley was under a not-too-dissimilar situation that Rahm is now facing. Daley put together a "blue-ribbon panel" to address police reforms and demanded that the most knowledgeable professional in police procedures be appointed to head the committee. O.W. Wilson came in from California to chair the panel and conduct a nationwide search for the next superintendent.

At the end of numerous interviews, Daley engineered his hand-picked guy on the panel to come up with the "suggestion" that since the most knowledgeable professional in police procedures was already here running the search, wouldn't it make sense to appoint O.W. Wilson as the next superintendent? The committee agreed and drafted their chairman to to spot and he was duly appointed and served seven years.

Now there is another panel. And the guy most people would say is among the most qualified is right there in the middle of it. And it's no secret that he would have taken the spot once or twice before if it had been offered. Wouldn't it be interesting.....

Two Hundred (and some more)

Isn't it about time for someone downtown to claim, "Crime is Down"? We're sure that's what is supposed to happen - it's right here in the script we've been following for four years now:

• Three men were killed and seven other people were wounded in Chicago on Thursday through early Friday as the number of shooting victims in the city passed 200 three weeks into the new year.
  
  The tally so far is already higher than the totals for the entire month of January over each of the the last four years.
  
  As of Friday, at least 202 people had been shot in the city this year, 34 of them fatally, according to data kept by the Chicago Tribune.
  
  In January of 2015, 144 people were shot, 28 of them fatally, according to police statistics.
  In January of 2014, 106 were shot, 20 fatally.
  In January 2013, 190 were shot, 40 fatally.
  And in January 2012, 167 were shot, 38 fatally.

And there's still a full week to go, along with some moderate temperatures.

Is 300 a possibility??

CPD's Lawyer is Who?

This report came out a little over two weeks ago, but we just managed to locate the article we were looking for:

• Facing calls for his resignation amid allegations of a police killing cover-up, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has relied on his former Clinton administration colleagues for support and guidance. Now his administration is set to deliver taxpayer cash to one of those allies to defend the Chicago Police Department in a federal civil rights probe.
  
  According to Crain’s Chicago Business, Emanuel’s administration has hired Wilmer Hale’s Jamie Gorelick, who was a Clinton Justice Department official at the time Emanuel served as a Clinton White House aide. The magazine notes that “the Washington, D.C., firm has 14 offices but no presence in Chicago” and that hourly “billing rates for lawyers working on the case will range from $290 to $1,200” — money that will come from Chicago taxpayers. In announcing the deal, Emanuel's top legal official said the city chose Gorelick and her politically connected firm to represent it in the federal probe because they bring "the credibility of being somebody that the folks on the other side know."

We remembered the name "Jamie Gorelick" from a series of scandals, most notably during the Clinton years for building the so-called "wall" that forbade US intelligence services from sharing information with domestic law enforcement (the FBI) prior to 9/11.

Her firm also began to defend Duke University from the lawsuit that came about after Duke railroaded the entire lacrosse team for a non-existent sex crime. When Duke lost the motion to dismiss, her law firm bailed, most likely sensing that this was a loser case for the university that they didn't want to be associated with.

Oh yeah, and there's this:

• Emanuel was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 2000 to a $320,000 job on the board of federal mortgage giant Freddie Mac. His lucrative stint there overlapped with Gorelick’s time at Freddie Mac’s sister agency Fannie Mae, where she made $25 million as a top executive from 1997 to 2003. Neither Gorelick or Emanuel had financial experience before getting those jobs, and their government-backed corporations were slammed by many experts as factors in the housing meltdown that fueled the financial crisis.

$25 million in an industry she had zero experience in that was about to meltdown. No wonder Rahm hired her.

Do we even have an investigative media in this town?

True? Or BS?

Anyone know? Or have examples of this occurring?

• Ipra, plaintiffs lawyers are now asking and getting warrants for your personal phone records and text messages if you are involved in a police shooting, or at a scene. Be extremely carefully when you text message each other. Delete messages and photos that may seem inappropriate immediately. Keep in mind that most deleted material can be recovered. Time to be smart, really smart.

We would have assumed that they would have to show cause of some sort in order to violate privacy such as this. Maybe we were phoning our lawyer, wife, priest or doctor. How would they separate out those types of  calls from the fishing expedition this obviously is?

And speaking of rumors, anyone from the D-Unit want to comment on the one where IPRA is taking the lead on police shootings now? Again, we'd imagine that that would negate large portions of Contractual protections, meaning there better be a lawyer out on every shooting prior to IPRA's arrival.

We're Saved! Dart is Here

First the United Nations, now Tom "nice hair" Dart:

• The Chicago Police Department is teaming up with the Cook County Sheriff's Department to target gang violence on the city's West Side.
  
  "I think it's going to increase our visibility so people can see both sheriff's officers and Chicago police officers working together, targeting areas that are plagued by violence," Chicago Police Dept. Interim Supt. John Escalante said.
  
  The agency's executives announced plans to work together with better efficiency targeting and prioritizing areas with violent crime and illegal guns.

Sure. Brilliant. The did this last year and 011 won the homicide race while 015 placed in the top five or so. Does anyone know if Dart has his people filling out two-page Investigative Stop Reports?

The community is 100% supportive though:

• "There could not be a worse time to add more police to the street," said Rev. Ira Acree, Greater St. John Bible Church.
  
  Pastor Acree said he is deeply troubled by the violence but this latest strategy is the wrong approach.
  
  "I've never seen it liket his before. As a longtime resident of Chicago, I've never seen police-community relations strained to this degree. It's at an all-time low," Acree said.

Oh. We guess that's not as supportive as we thought. How about that....the community leaders don't even want the police around. Who would've thunk it?

Everyone getting the message yet?

Weather Again?

McCompost spent how many years telling everyone how weather wasn't a factor in crime, that shootings didn't go up when the temperature did, and the beaches were closed that one year because it was sooooooo hot, people (and folks) were battling passing-out yards from the largest supply of cool fresh water on the planet.

Thursday, the temps hit 30 degrees and.....

• Eight hours of shootings across Chicago Thursday left a man dead and at least six other people wounded.
  
  The homicide happened about 7:15 p.m. in the West Garfield Park neighborhood.
  
  Two men, ages 21 and 24, were in the 4600 block of West Huron the younger man was shot in both legs and the older suffered multiple wounds, according to Chicago Police.
  
  They were driven separately to Stroger Hospital, where the 24-year-old later died. The 21-year-old’s condition stabilized, police said.

Funny how that happened. We don't know what the issue is.

CTU Folding?

Looks like Rauner's threat to have the State take over and bust the Teachers Union is paying a dividend:

• Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union>, voiced optimism Thursday about the progress of contract negotiations with the school board and acknowledged her members could be in line to "lose certain things."
  
  Lewis said those losses could include the end of the city's practice of picking up the bulk of teachers' required contributions to their pensions. But Lewis said the union would not bend on another key issue, incremental pay increases known as "step and lane" bumps that are doled out based on seniority and experience.

This would mean a 7% "reduction" in teachers' pay and a CPS "savings" of $170 million, still far short of bringing any sort of solvency (or sanity) to the table. Just part of the slow stage play.

Joravsky at The Reader has his usual piercing insight into the entire theater.

We're Saved!

It's the United Nations!

• A group from the United Nations will be in Chicago next week to investigate the current state of the city's race relations.
  
  On Monday, civil rights leaders gathered on the Southside to discuss the UN visit and to urge investigators to examine social and economic disparity within the city, as well as to examine violence against blacks at the hands of police officers.

Let's just review for the United Nations what's what in Chicago:

• 2015 killed by police 9; wounded by police 16
  2014 killed by police 17; wounded by police 28
  2013 killed by police 13; wounded by police 30
  2012 killed by police 8; wounded by police 49
  2011 killed by police 23; wounded by police 37
  2010 killed by police 13; wounded by police 33

That's a pretty downward trend. And the rest of the violence in Chicago, just for 2015:

• Shot and Killed: 443
  Shot and Wounded: 2552
  Total Shot: 2995
  Total Homicides: 502

(All stats courtesy of HeyJackass.com)

Looks like the UN sure has its work cut out for it.

VRI Quotas....Gone?

Seems the feds frown upon what we (and everyone else) called "quotas:"

• No More "VRI Quotas"
  
  It turns out someone on the Chicago Police Department realized that requiring a certain amount of arrests, tickets, contact cards (Now ISRs) are a QUOTA.
  
  YES!! Illegal by federal law.
  
  Since the Feds have come to town, someone's balls shrunk up in them and they have been dropped.
  
  You can now sign up for VRI regardless of activity.

Word from some people is the entire "rating system" database has been seized/recorded/preserved because the feds want to know about why all these numbers were being tracked on an individual basis if there isn't any "quota" purpose.

No Guns for You!

But el Chapo?

• A .50-caliber rifle found at Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s hideout in Mexico was funneled through the gun-smuggling investigation known as Fast and Furious, sources confirmed Tuesday to Fox News.
  
  A .50-caliber is a massive rifle that can stop a car, or as it was intended, take down a helicopter.
  
  After the raid on Jan. 8 in the city of Los Mochis that killed five of his men and wounded one Mexican marine, officials found a number of weapons inside the house Guzman was staying, including the rifle, officials said.
  
  When agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives checked serial numbers of the eight weapons found in his possession, they found one of the two .50-caliber weapons traced back to the ATF program, sources said.

Not seeing much of this covered in the mainstream media for some reason. You'd think that a president's people running guns to Mexican drug lords might be an issue in this age of "ban everything."

Fixes? Hahaha

Everyone knows how to fix the police....just ask em:

• The fallout over the killing of Laquan McDonald and other police-involved shootings has led to a wave of legislation to overhaul how police interact with the public, including measures that would require all Chicago police officers to wear body cameras and police departments throughout Illinois to rely on nonlethal force when dealing with a suspect.

Oh boy, get ready for a list of dumbass ideas from dumbass legislators:

• Other newly introduced bills would make footage from body cameras more available to the public, attempt to limit encounters with police altogether by allowing officers to give nonviolent offenders notices to appear in court instead of making an arrest and require police to maintain liability insurance.

Great - don't arrest anybody. That's a brilliant fucking idea. And liability insurance? What company is going to offer that? We certainly don't plan on buying any. How about aldercreatures buy "bribe insurance" or the mayor buys "crooked contract insurance to protect taxpayers from the shit they pull?

• Democratic Rep. Marcus Evans of Chicago said he sees a greater problem not in individual officers but in what he described as a culture that has police reaching for firearms too quickly. So he filed a bill that would require police departments throughout the state to develop clear plans for the use of nonlethal force on anyone suspected of a crime or resisting arrest.

Really? According to all the stats we've seen and available, police shootings are down, and down significantly. We're already using non-lethal force when available and de-escalation techniques when appropriate. Firearms are already a last resort and we've had to use them far fewer times than in years past, but because of the artificial outrage ginned up by politicians and media with axes to grind, we're going to see the Law of Unintended Consequences come into play very shortly.

• "I don't think (police departments) have these plans in place, because I think instead there's this idea that shooting somebody is acceptable behavior," Evans said. "I don't think they're saying, 'Hey, make sure you don't kill the person you're detaining.' I think instead it's, 'Hey, protect yourself, make sure you get home.'"
  
  Evans said he hoped that requiring nonlethal force strategies would make police shootings a last resort. He also said police should be exploring alternatives to firearms, like Tasers.

Um, no shit Sherlock. We go home. Period. And firearms already are the last resort - it says so in all the training.

• "Why are we still shooting people with guns? We don't have any way to stop a person who's running away other than discharging a bullet in their back?" Evans said. "It's 2016."

Right, and that's why your community is acting like it's....what year again? Some first century barbarian hordes battling Caesar's legions? Because it certainly isn't 2016.

• Another measure focuses on protecting taxpayers should a police officer be found guilty of wrongdoing.
  
  Rep. Ken Dunkin, D-Chicago, wants officers to be required to carry liability insurance to help pay for costs of any possible legal action. The idea comes as the city has paid $42.5 million in judgments and settlements over police shootings from May 2011 through October.
  
  The bill also would require law enforcement officers to undergo psychiatric evaluation before they are hired and every five years after that. Currently there are no state standards for psychiatric evaluations; it's left up to local agencies.

We'd like to see State legislators submit to competency hearings, knowledge of the laws they read and pass, that thingie called "due process" along with a wide assortment of sanity hearings. Especially when a sizable percentage of those payouts are actually "payoffs" to go away instead of fighting completely winnable cases.
Whatever. We're ranting. Just be prepared for a lot of stupidity from people who don't want to address the real problem.

Isn't This Special?

Something something something matters.....

• Four teens were injured when someone shot up their van in the Bronzeville neighborhood Tuesday afternoon, about 10 blocks south of where another person was shot a few hours earlier.
  
  The most recent shooting happened at 48th Street and King Drive about 3:40 p.m. Two boys, 16 and 17, were shot in the back and taken to Stroger Hospital. A 16-year-old boy suffered a thigh wound and was taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, and a 15-year-old boy suffered cuts from broken glass and was taken to Comer Children's Hospital.
  
  Their conditions were stabilized, and police said none was cooperating with police. Two of the three shot are "known to police" and "probably were" involved in an earlier shooting in the 3700 block of South Michigan Avenue that left a 23-year-old man wounded, according to Eddie Johnson, Chief of Patrol for the Chicago Police Department. All three were Dunbar Vocational Career Academy students, he said.

Go Dunbar!

And the irony of all ironies, shot the day after a holiday on the street named after the reason for the holiday. How very proud the community must be.

Remember, the police are the problem.

Thirteen Death Investigations

You just know they're covering up something:

• Skull fragments found in a Fuller Park industrial building are human and were likely donated to science "long ago," according to the Cook County medical examiner's office.
  
  The bones were found Monday morning as the floor was being dug up at the building in the 200 block of West Root Street, officials said.
  
  "The 13 fragments of human skulls included cranial caps, bases of skulls that had been sectioned and mandibles," the office said in a statement. "The bones had been previously sawed in a manner consistent with dissection for teaching purposes and/or autopsy. One non-human bone was also examined."

Suuuuure they were. Rahm doesn't need the homicide rate going any further up that it already has. This is exactly the story we'd come up with, too, if we were Garry McCompStat.

Where Did It All Go?

You mean no one was keeping track?

• Two years after Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed a record 50 schools over low enrollment, officials say they don’t know where many of the computers, desks, books and other items from those buildings ended up.
  
  After being pressed for more than six months on what happened to the classroom equipment, Chicago Public Schools officials now say they don’t have an answer.
  
  They blame bad record-keeping under Barbara Byrd-Bennett, Emanuel’s disgraced former schools chief, who awaits sentencing after pleading guilty in October to steering millions of dollars in CPS contracts to her former employer in exchange for what prosecutors said were promises of kickbacks.

Hahahaha.....blame the woman already going to prison. Rahm can't take another scandal hit it seems, so have Triple-B take the weight, as if she was responsible for the day-to-day security of fifty shuttered buildings.

We remember dozens of comments about scrappers and metal thieves gutting entire school buildings, some of which ended up so damaged that the cheapest thing right now is to bulldoze them and start over. But that was probably part of the plan anyway to enrich some connected companies.

A Chicago Gun Store?

A nice proposal, but we're betting it's doomed:

• A Chicago man is pitching plans to open the city's only gun store and gun range.
  
  Irving Park resident Christopher O'Connor plans to open Firearms Defense Training Center, a full service gun range and gun shop in a warehouse at 613 N. Union Ave. in an industrial corridor of River West. The building is located near the Tribune's Freedom Center printing plant, the WaterSaver Faucet Company and the Chicago River.
  
  After decades of fighting legal challenges against Chicago's strict gun restrictions, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the city's handgun ban in 2010. In 2012, a federal appeals court struck down Illinois' concealed carry ban and the City Council passed an ordinance in 2014 overturning the ban.

But he'll still have to get it through the City Council's "Zoning Board of Appeals," and there isn't nearly enough bribe money being passed around to do that.

Here's an amusing admission from the local aldercreature though:

• "So long as residents don't have a problem with it, I don't think it's a big deal," [Ald. Walter Burnett Jr. (27th)] said. "Everyone I run into now has a conceal carry permit. You don't want a bunch of folks to have guns and not know what they're doing with them."

Really? Everyone? In Rahm's "gun-free" Chicago, Home of the Often Ignored "Beretta 92F Banned" Signs? Imagine that.

But again, it's bound to fail based on simple economics:

• If approved, the 25,000-square-foot Firearms Defense Training Center would "look like an Apple Store" and provide a consultative experience to prospective gun buyers, he told DNAinfo Chicago Thursday.
  
  Gun stores "are no longer a dank, dark, smelly spots with shelves and shelves of guns," said O'Connor, 33. "This will be an accessible store. The goal is to find the right gun for you."
  
  The gun shop would feature armored display cases and two classrooms on site.
  
  Under the city's rules, gun shop owners must videotape all gun sales and open their books for inspection by Chicago Police. Gun buyers are limited to buying one gun every 30 days.

Sure, and if we find gun we like, we'll simply get a quote, travel outside of Cook County, and buy it there for $100 bucks less, without worrying about videotaping or 30 day limits. We'll also pick up ammo at $0.05 per round less, thanks to Prickwrinkle's bullet tax. It's not like Chicago/Cook County needs businesses to thrive, right?

UPDATE: And the usual layers of media fact-checking fail once again:

• To date, no gun store has opened in Chicago. The closest gun ranges are located in suburban Zion, Lombard and Riverdale. There is also a gun range in Lyons.

We can think of one under 2 miles away from Chicago, but hey, "journalism" is hard.

Baldricks is Coming

Under two months away!

• We're two months away from the annual St. Baldrick's event, it's time to get signed up if you haven't already. For those who don't know St. Baldrick's is an event where volunteers agree to shave their heads in solidarity with the kids who lose their hair in chemo and other treatments, while seeking pledges from friends and family to raise funds to help find a cure for this terrible disease.
  
  For the last seven years hundreds of members of the Chicago Police Department have gotten together to fight this terrible disease that affects way too many of us. The St. Baldricks Foundation is the largest funder of childhood cancer research grants, second only to the U.S. government. Grants of over 178 Million dollars in childhood cancer research have contributed to hundreds of childhood cancer research products, training the next generation of researchers, and helping institutions treat more children in clinical trials including many right here in Chicago.
  
  This year, after the request of several past attendees, we have moved the event to a Saturday. This will allow more friends and families to come down and parking and traffic will not be an issue. The event will be at the Academy, 1300 W. Jackson on Saturday, March 12th from 0700 – 1700 hours. Please click here Chicago Police St. Baldrick's and go to the site to sign up Just follow the link, Join Us and let your hair go for the next two months, we'll take care of it on the 12th. For any questions, please send an email to brenda.valadez7694@gmail.com. Thanks and hope to see you on March 12th!

Always a worthy cause.

Another Decline

This one from 2014 to 2015:

• Chicago Police officers made dramatically fewer arrests in 2015 than they did in the previous year, according to figures just released by the department.
  
  Total arrests were down 12 percent, but the drop off was even greater for most major crimes, including murder, robbery, burglary and sexual assault.
  
  The Fraternal Order of Police said morale could be a significant factor.

The year-to-year numbers are a better indicator of a broader trend, but this year will be very closely watched. After all, McCompost was bragging about how "crime was down" so it might logically follow that arrests were down, too. But if crime is up and arrests are down - that'll be the proof that Rahm fears. Fetality.

Wasn't the CTA "Gun Free"?

We're pretty sure they were:

• A man was shot Monday evening after an argument began on a CTA bus, officials said.
  
  He was on an eastbound No. 75 74th/75th bus when he got into an altercation with another male, according to CTA spokeswoman Tammy Chase.
  
  The bus pulled over at about 8:45 p.m. and the two males got off, Chase said.
  
  At that point, one of the men was shot, according to police.

But...but...but that means one of the aforementioned gentlemen was :::gasp::: armed on a bus?? How can this be? In Rahm's gun-free Chicago? The buses even have SIGNS on the windows.

Let us just say for the record:

• People on the No. 75 bus! We are very very disappointed in you.

Now don't let it happen again.

Interesting Theory

Blame social media?

• Chicago’s interim police superintendent John Escalante is struggling to explain the wild jump in shootings in the Windy City, and he thinks he has at least part of the explanation: it’s social media’s fault.
  
  At a Wednesday presser, interim Chicago police superintendent Escalante blamed the “spike” in shootings on the fact that many of the city’s gang members are driven by constant agitation on social media sites such as Facebook.
  
  “A lot of it is gang conflicts, but [it’s] also heavily driven by social media,” Escalante said, “It is the new way… of taunting and challenging other gangs, and is the modern way of gang graffiti.”
  
  Escalante isn’t the only local official to blame Facebook. Last May Alderman Joe Moore also blamed the increased number of shootings on the concurrent increase in “taunts and insults” on Facebook.

Couldn't be anything else, right?

• But while this social media claim might satisfy some, others feel that it is the fault of changes in policy inside the Chicago Police Department.
  
  Chicago’s DNAInfo reports that there has been a major drop in the number of investigative stops in the city — and not just a small drop, either.
  
  “In the first 11 days of the year,” DNAinfo writes, “officers filed just 3,916 investigative stop reports compared to 16,698 during the same time period last year, according to police data.”

Oh yeah.....there's that.

Write Off These Commies

This is the current magazine cover of the CTU:

Here's Lesson #1 - don't do drugs, don't carry a knife when you do drugs, don't cut up squad car tires and stab squad car windshields. Or is that another lesson that should have been taught at home?

The FOP ought to be seriously distancing themselves from these jackasses and anything they're involved in.

Credit Union Protest?

Get a load of these idiots:

• About 200 protesters gathered outside the Chicago Patrolmen's Federal Credit Union on Saturday, their breath visible in the cold air as they chanted, their fists pounding with each cry.
  
  They were determined to shut down Saturday morning's business for the credit union, across the street from the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, Chicago's police union. For nearly two hours, Black Youth Project 100 Chicago Chapter members, dressed in black T-shirts with the words "Fund Black Futures" written across them, linked their arms together to form a barricade around the bank's front desk, stopping workers from conducting business.
  
  "The FOP's advocacy of CPD has helped perpetuate cycles of criminalization that especially plagues low-income black communities," BYP 100 member Jennifer Pagán said. "These politicians, that these organizations and institutions, like the FOP, would rather police us, kill us, lock us up, than meet demands of better housing, mental health clinics, fully funded neighborhood public schools and jobs programs with fair wages for all of us."

The FOP's what now? "...advocacy of CPD..."? These commies don't know that the relationship between employer and employee is necessarily adversarial? And the Credit Union is in the business of housing, mental health and schools.....since when exactly? And they want funding for "black futures?" Like what exactly?

Do these people have any idea how many billions of dollars (yes, billions) are available simply if they stay in school, hold a job, buy a home, form a company, express interest in bettering their situations....simply because of the pigmentation of their skin? We fund all of this through taxes, now they want the Credit Union to do it, too?

We aren't understanding this at all.

Hotel Stickup

And not just any hotel - the Congress:

• Police are investigating an armed robbery that took place Saturday morning inside Chicago’s Congress Plaza Hotel.
  
  At approximately 8:30 a.m., two male suspects followed one of the victims to his hotel room in the 500 block of South Michigan Avenue and forced their way inside, according to Chicago police.
  
  Three men, each 20-years old, and two women, age 19 and 23, were robbed at gunpoint, according to investigators. The suspects stole the victims’ cell phones, wallets, purses and cash.
  
  The two suspects then fled the room and the victims alerted hotel security who encountered the suspects in the lobby, according to police. After a brief chase, the two suspects escaped through the front entrance of the hotel.

Amazingly, no descriptions in the NBC story, but this can't be good for the tourist trade.

Friday...then Saturday

The hits just keep on coming - Friday started warm:

• Two teenagers and at least six others were wounded since Friday afternoon in separate shootings on the South, Northwest and West sides, Chicago police said.

Saturday continued:

• Two men were killed and at least 10 other people were wounded in separate shootings Saturday in Chicago, including two men who walked into a South Side police station after having been shot in a car nearby.

And the only person charged all weekend was one of the victims when a gun was found in his possession. All of the other people (and folks) took their legally owned handguns and CCL's and disappeared into the night.

Another Expressway Shooting

So are these neighborhood disputes spilling onto the expressways or gang bangers just figure that there aren't enough police in the hoods, and certainly none on the highway?

• Police are investigating after a man was shot along the westbound Kennedy Expressway in the city's far North Side.
  
  The man was a passenger in a car somewhere between Kostner and the Edens junction around 4:45 a.m. Saturday when the shooting occurred, police said.
  
  Outbound lanes were briefly shut but have since re-opened. The driver drove the victim to Northwestern Hospital.

How many this year? How many with hits and without hits? We can recall at least four or five.

FOP Wins a Big Victory

This is a very big win:

• A labor arbitrator has said the city must destroy Chicago police disciplinary records dating back decades, the latest blow to activists’ attempts to get access to misconduct files from as far back as the late 1960s.
  
  A ruling issued Tuesday in a labor grievance case between the city and the Fraternal Order of Police states the city’s contract with its largest police union requires it to destroy most disciplinary records four years after complaints are filed.
  
  Arbitrator George Roumell Jr. ordered the city to begin negotiations with the FOP on which records were due for destruction — files in pending lawsuits would be exempted — and said he would issue a final order in mid-April.

The usual persons are upset:

• Monday, State Rep. La Shawn Ford, D-Chicago, said he planned to introduce legislation that would require police departments across the state to keep all disciplinary files permanently, a move he said would pre-empt any union contract.

Hey Ford, why not work on trying to pass a budget? And leave local matters to local authorities?

• Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago Law School professor who has joined litigation seeking to make the decades of disciplinary records public, said Friday he was concerned that the ruling leaves just a few months before a court-ordered “bonfire” of data that could be used as the Chicago Police Department makes reforms in the aftermath of the Laquan McDonald shooting and a looming federal investigation of the department.

A "bonfire" decades in the making:

• City officials have testified they maintain more than 3,600 boxes of investigative files and several computer databases, holding police disciplinary records dating back to 1967.

Fully 60% (or more) of the Department wasn't even born in 1967. Yet these files exist in violation of numerous contractual agreements, thru assorted political administrations and not a few FOP regimes. We wonder if some sanctions might be assessed against the City at some point.

Thirty Nine Candidates

And of course, the Sun Times has to publish the most important qualification right up front in the headline:

• 39 candidates, most of them black, apply to be next police supt.

The story:

• Thirty-nine candidates, many with big-city policing experience, will vie for the right to replace fired Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy.
  
  The furor over the Laquan McDonald shooting video that triggered a federal civil-rights investigation of the Chicago Police Department appears to have slightly dampened the interest in the $260,004-a-year job.

Whoop-de-do. We'll just say for the record that we don't give two shits what color the Superintendent is. Never have, never will.

We would certainly prefer that he be from the Chicago Police Department, seeing as how the last two outsiders have driven the CPD to this point, but we understand that the "merit" system has left the entire Department bereft of anything resembling competent leadership. We can't think of a single boss that hasn't made one or more promotional ranks via the "meri-clout-orious" process, meaning that somewhere along the way, they owe someone.

We also understand that whomever ends up in the top spot is going to be a puppet of Rahm as he fights for his political life. They are going to be, first and foremost, a tool. Hopefully, Rahm has been practicing with the ventriloquist dummy we sent over last year so that when the superintendent's mouth moves, you don't see Rahm's lips moving along with the script.

We saw this list in the comment section:

• "Chicago Tonight" has learned of a list of candidates from within the CPD, put together by African-American aldermen, clergy members and community leaders. They include:
  
  • Ernest Brown, chief of Cook County Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management
  • Eddie Johnson, chief of patrol
  • Fred Waller, deputy chief
  • Eric Washington, head of Community Policing
  • Eugene Williams, head of the Bureau of Administration

We certainly hope that the media does it's homework for once and disqualifies the first name on that list. It isn't too difficult. His name is all over any number of lawsuits and has appeared prominently in a number of posts here and elsewhere.

The smart money is on Gene Williams right now.

Silly Calls

Here's a couple amusing calls that call takers logged and dispatchers sent out:

Police resources for a 5-year-old?

Paging the tin-foil hat brigade!

Well, the family that gets high together.....

Taser Restrictions

Remember all those Tasers were supposed to get? The ones that will provide certain connected folks a big boost in their bank accounts? Yeah, everyone might want to read the linked article here:

• Police officers lacked clear legal guidance on when they may zap people with Tasers, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals decided on Monday, so it made a new rule to restrict their use.
  
  If a person is not creating "an immediate safety risk," the court said, officers aren't allowed to shock him with a Taser. The pain it causes is an excessive use of force that violates the person's constitutional rights under the 4th Amendment, it said.
  
  The ruling arose from a lawsuit against Pinehurst over the death of a mentally ill man. Pinehurst police used a Taser's pain mode in a failed attempt to make the man let go of a post. He died a few minutes later.
  
  The decision applies in the five states in the 4th Circuit: North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia. The N.C. Justice Academy advised law enforcement agencies to revise their Taser policies to comply.

It's a Fourth Circuit decision, but federal courts have a habit of looking at what each court is doing before deciding which way the wind blows. And the Fourth Circuit encompasses the DC metro area where a lot of congress-critters spend time and decide the rules that lesser mortals must follow.

Predictably, police will probably revert to other methods from years gone by:

• Officers likely will resort to other weapons, like pepper spray and batons, plus hands-on techniques to make people comply with their orders, said Cumberland County Sheriff's Office attorney Ronnie Mitchell.
  
  "I'm afraid it will lead to more injuries to individuals," Mitchell said, both law enforcement officers and the people they are attempting to detain or control.

No kidding. We wonder if Rahm has seen this decision yet...or DeEscalante with his "Force Mitigation" bullshit.

If someone is an "immediate safety risk," we aren't choosing to use a device that has a failure rate approaching the graduation numbers for a Chicago Public High School. We're choosing something that will let us go home at the end of the tour.

This About Covers It

From the comments, a very good summation of what we're facing today:

• ACLU's point of view:
  You stop 10 people in a day. One of them has a gun and you arrest that person and they are charge and prosecuted accordingly..... You do 10 isr's and and arrest report with a gun recovery, taking a dangerous armed criminal off the street.... Nice job officer!!!
  
  ACLU says - yes you took an armed criminal off the street - but at what cost? You violated the rights of 9 people before you eventually found one with a gun. 90% of your stops are in the interest of civil rights violations. Your "hunches" suck and cannot be trusted.
  
  Cops response: actually some of those that I stopped likely were selling drug and had them in their mouth or their crotch, places I can't recover them. My "reasonable articulable suspicion" does not suck, I'm just trying to do the best job I can. And I did get an armed felon off the street, possibly preventing a shooting.
  
  ACLU: No officer, your "hunches" suck. You are a civil rights violator and a racist. Await the lawsuit I am about to file. Please list your assets accordingly.

Exactly.

NBC Coverage

Channel 5 covers the ISR issue:

• Across Chicago, the cop grumbles are almost as loud as the sirens.
  
  The police discontent stems not only from increased scrutiny, including a U.S. Justice Department investigation, but new two page forms, which officers must now fill out after every stop on the street.

Not precisely true, but you can't expect the media to get it always correct, can you? We have to fill out one of these for every single individual whom we take any sort of investigatory action on. That means if you stop three or four gang bangers, each one is a separate and distinct ISR report, each taking between 15 and 25 minutes to complete, each with a receipt given unless they get some other form of paperwork (tickets, arrest). That's a hour or more off the street or off the radio.

• On the Second City Cop blog, one officer declared, “What a complete joke!” Another said he planned to “just drive around and wave at the fine, fine people in the neighborhood,” while a third predicted “I say the 500 homicide mark gets passed by 1 October!”

Um, how do these media types know these are officers? They have some sort of insight or crystal ball or program or something? The fact is, we cannot and never intend to prove anyone who posts a comment is an officer. We know people identify themselves as not cops, suburban cops, out-of-state cops, relatives of cops, a Keesing Bandit, a SpankDaddy, etc. But the comment forum is open to anyone, even media types. That doesn't make them cops by any stretch of the imagination. You'd think the media would get that.....unless there's some agenda at play here.

Then the ACLU gets in on the act, making this statement with a completely straight face:

• "We are pleased that there are going to be fewer stops." 

You got that minority community leaders? The ACLU is ecstatic that they've tied the hands of coppers (see the post directly above this one.) They are bragging about it. So when you come bitching that "the police aren't doing their jobs!" we're just going to point you in the direction of the ACLU and say, "This is what they demanded and got. Take it up with them. Here's your report, have a nice day."

• The forms are an outgrowth of a settlement between the City and the American Civil Liberties Union, which found in a study last year that stop-and-frisk policies were overwhelmingly concentrated in the city’s black neighborhoods.

You know what else was overwhelmingly concentrated in the city's black neighborhoods last year? We'll give you a hint:

• HeyJackass.com

Something like 80% of the homicides. 90% of the aggravated batteries. 80+% of the gun crimes. So it would seem that the community that is under siege might appreciate the effort on the part of the police, even if the ACLU doesn't.

Guess who's going to feel the brunt of the police pullback? HeyJackass is already tracking that, too.