Eddie's Rough Start

He's hitting all the right notes - only the "notes" are the tune that Rahm is playing right out of his "Political Rebirth" playbook:

• Eddie Johnson, the surprise choice of Mayor Rahm Emanuel to lead Chicago police during a tumultuous time, says he knows firsthand how it feels to be disrespected by the police.
  
  Home from college one spring, he was stopped by two Chicago police officers even though he had done nothing wrong.
  
  "I've been subjected to racial profiling, and it didn't feel good," Johnson said Thursday in just his fourth day as interim superintendent. "That's how come I am determined to ensure that we don't do that now. Now I'm in a position where I can stop that kind of behavior, and that's one of my end goals."

Could we have some actual, you know, context? We mean, we can tell a story, too. A real tearjerker. We talking Academy Award level stuff.

And so this means Eddie is the guy to stop racial profiling? The profiling that then-community-activist Obama's "Traffic Stop Statistical Study" (originally written for two years) has failed to document over the past decade? Not one single instance of racial profiling located despite exhaustive searches by numerous local and state agencies? That supposed "racial profiling"?

• "I have to emphasize that because these gun offenders are becoming so young, I'm going to ask the parents in the black communities to step up and be parents," Johnson said. "You have to be mothers, you have to be fathers. You have to know what your children are doing because if you don't raise them, the streets will."

Nothing that hasn't been said by dozens of people, just about all of whom are then labeled as racists. Funny how that works.

• In his recent post as deputy chief of patrol, Johnson helped try to ensure that officers properly used the video and audio on police car dashboard cameras, but he admitted that officers hadn't been disciplined properly for faulty cameras.

Um, okay, how do you expect to discipline officers for faulty cameras? The city buys the cheapest shit they can find, installs it with some fly-by-night out-of-state outfit that disappears after screwing up and voiding the warranties on the entire fleet, spends exactly zero dollars on maintaining the equipment, then decides it's the officers' fault when the cameras fail? We'll give Eddie the benefit of the doubt here and assume this was shoddy editing by the media (as usual), but seriously? No one is saying don't discipline for sabotaging equipment, but define it correctly.

• Johnson said he has already set out to improve how the department red-flags problem officers. He admitted that the current system has been ineffective, in part because too many supervisors were charged with monitoring officers, he said. Under his plan, a more centralized group of supervisors would track officers across the department.

Too many supervisors? Too many supervisors monitoring what exactly? In what world?

The DOJ is saying about the ratio of supervisors-to-officers is the worst of any Department they've ever seen. They're talking about one hundred more lieutenants and hundreds more sergeants just to address those shortages. And that's just in Patrol.

We've certainly never seen any shortages at HQ. Why, 35th Street is so shorthanded that the brass has been bringing back lieutenants who were just sergeants down there like 30 days ago.

One or two glimmers of real thinking though:

• Johnson said he was not concerned by the falloff in investigatory stops compared with the old system of contact cards.
  
  "Some of those stops with those contact cards we probably shouldn't have been doing, to be quite frank," he said. "So part of this is to ensure that we're stopping the right people at the right times for the right reasons."
  
  He wouldn't rule out resurrecting the citywide strike forces — disbanded by McCarthy over concerns their aggressive style could further divide the police and community.

Everything old is new again we guess. But to start a citywide unit, Rahm is going to have to hire some of the 2,000 spots that went unfilled.

The real reason citywide units got disbanded was to make up for the upcoming and deliberately planned manpower shortages in the Districts. Further cover was provided by closing three districts, but that failed as blogs like Crime in Boystown and others pointed out the lack of police coverage and resultant crime spikes.

CompStat was implemented specifically to cover up crime, especially property crime. Two professors in New York, one of them a former NYPD captain (who helped develop CompStat) have written and lectured extensively on this.

And guess what the minority community is demanding as of late? Aggressive policing to take the guns off the street and reclaim neighborhoods. The problem is that the ACLU stepped into the void and handcuffed the police from doing anything proactive without extensive documentation AND under the threat of massive punitive damages, even in the case of good faith errors. Cops aren't dumb and they get paid the same no matter who does or doesn't go to jail (quotas are illegal, too.)

In this era of Risk vs Reward style policing, the actuarial tables favor one side excessively. Guess which one?