Rahm Falling Short (pun intended)

Rahm has never had more than a passing acquaintance with the truth. And even when close to truthful, reality keeps popping up and ruining the illusion. Evidently, Rahm is hiring hundreds of secretaries, not street coppers:

• More than a year into the Chicago Police Department’s biggest hiring surge in decades, 14 of the city’s 22 police districts now have fewer beat cops than they did when the push was announced, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.
  
  The city hired more than 1,400 cadets and placed them in the police academy between October 2016 — when Mayor Rahm Emanuel unveiled his plans to expand the department — and late March.
  
  The new hires have outpaced the 862 retirements from the department during the same period, the records show. This net gain of about 600 sworn police personnel put the city on track to meet the mayor’s promise to add nearly 1,000 officers over two years.

Yay! More police....but:

• But the number of rank-and-file officers assigned to police districts across Chicago has dropped in the 17 months since Emanuel’s announcement, the Sun-Times found.
  
  The number of beat cops assigned to districts citywide was 6,046 as of March 29, a Sun-Times analysis of police department records shows. That was a drop of nearly 200 officers since October 2016, when there were 6,244 beat cops on patrol in districts.

And that's just the Slum Times article. The Tribune gives Rahm a smack, too, over diversity concerns:

• Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration has consistently stressed its intent to diversify the Chicago Police Department during its push to add more than 1,000 cops and change the image of a force beleaguered by controversial shootings of black men by white officers.
  
  The city succeeded at bringing black candidates into the early stages of the hiring process. Thirty-eight percent of applicants were African-Americans the last time the department held a police exam, a City Hall news release noted last October.
  
  But that effort has not resulted in a significant increase in black cops.
  
  In fact, while the department made a net gain of nearly 800 officers between October 2016 and the end of March 2018, the percentage of African-Americans on the force dropped slightly, according to a Tribune analysis of department data.

The usual aldermorons demand reducing hiring standards, ignoring background warning flags, and pretty much marching black applicants to testing sites at gunpoint so that they get hired.

All-in-all, not a good day for Rahm in the media. Good thing it was on a Friday so no one was paying attention.