What Did They Expect? (Long Post)

First up, Fran owes the Chaplains $50.

Second, get a load of the bullshit in this article:

• Chicago Police officers made 85,493 arrests in 2016, a 24 percent drop from the year before and roughly half the number of arrests they made the year before Mayor Rahm Emanuel took office.
  
  The steady and precipitous decline in arrests coincided with the mayor’s decision to rely on overtime — to the tune of $143 million last year, and even more during in the first quarter of this year — to mask a severe manpower shortage before abruptly reversing course and embarking on a two-year hiring blitz.

Just so you know (and so Fran can steal another un-credited story from the blog), our spies in Finance tell us that the City has already spent $140 million on police overtime this year....with a full quarter to go. Remember where you heard it first.

• The decline also underscored how important it is for Emanuel to bolster police morale and coax police officers out of their defensive crouch.

"defensive crouch" isn't what Rahm called it before - he called it "fetal." National Police Organizations call it "self preservation." The criminals think it's Christmas. We call it common sense. Graham said this and he isn't wrong:

• Fraternal Order of Police President Kevin Graham said the “steady and striking” decline in police arrests cannot be explained away by the fear police officers have of being captured on the next YouTube video.
  
  “One problem is that our members are being excessively punished for minor or insignificant infractions. More importantly, there is a growing body of evidence that our officers are unfairly vilified, even when they conduct themselves ethically and according to the law and city policy,” Graham wrote in an emailed statement.
  
  “The vilification of the police has been raised to a kind of hysteria, bolstered by the media, which, to this day, refuses to acknowledge the evidence of corruption in the anti-police movement,” he wrote. “Instead, the media prefer to rely on tired and false clichés about ‘a code of silence’ among our members, rather than reasonably following and weighing the evidence.”

And here comes aldercreature Beale, vilifying as he goes:

• Ald. Anthony Beale (9th), former longtime chairman of the City Council’s Police Committee, accused Chicago Police officers of abandoning pro-active policing.
  
  “I can ride around and show you things police tolerate in our community that they don’t tolerate in other communities. They just drive right past. Quality of life issues are not being enforced in communities of color,” Beale said.
  
  “Guys hanging out on the corner shooting crap. A group of guys on the corner drinking. People having parties that get out of hand,” he said. “A lot of your drive-by shootings are people hanging out on corners. That’s an opportunity. If we police quality of life issues, we take away the opportunity.”

Hey Beale - fuck you. We used to do all that - stop the drinker, interrupt the pisser, grab the gamblers, pick out the car with the loud music and marijuana smoke pouring out the windows. But we were told we were singling out people based on skin color instead of their obviously illegal and anti-social behavior. We were told we were being "culturally unaware," as if breaking the law was some sort of achievement. We had to hear the endless refrain of so-called "leaders" who embraced the "Police is always wrong" and "He didn't have no gun" mentality and watch multi-million dollar lawsuits paid without a single objection being raised in an actual Court of Law. Weed was legalized along with everything else Foxxx declined to prosecute. Shooters got low bail, no bail or electronic monitoring and were out on the street within days. Gov. Quinn and the IDOC released thousands before they had even served half of already low sentences.

In essence, the Police were told that all of their efforts take action, to put life-and-limb at risk to enforce the law meant nothing, and if you were found wanting days, weeks, years later by assorted armchair quarterbacks, the you would lose your job, your money and possibly your freedom. In that case, the risk/reward paradigm shifted entirely in one direction and we ask again - what did they expect?

The ACLU has their own uniquely wrong take:

• ACLU spokesman Ed Yohnka maintained on Monday that the drop in police arrests could be a simple reflection of “giving a lower priority to making arrests for small amounts of marijuana.”
  
  “It is not how many arrests are being made, it is that the right arrests are being made for the right reasons are being made,” Yohnka wrote in an email. “As for the argument of a Ferguson effect, we reject that notion [as has the former Attorney General Eric Holder and former President Barack Obama.] Good policing — keeping communities free of gun fire and open air drug markets — and community policing are not inconsistent.”

This as shootings spiked at over 4,400 and nearly 800 dead. Great reasoning there ACLU! 700+ black and brown families thank you for your support. And this asshole still didn't get it:

• On Monday, Yohnka noted that the Sun-Times has reported extensively on “what happens when police operate in an uncontrolled fashion: we end up with arrests where the charges are not sustained. We need smart policing that serves the entire community, not simply larger numbers on a spreadsheet.”

No, this is what happens when you elect soft-on-crime democrats who embrace the criminal and absolve them of any responsibility for their actions, then further corrupt an already-corrupt court system with low bail, low sentences, and no Federal gun prosecutions for eight years.