Hammer Time!

When your only solution is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a bent nail:

• The leader of Chicago’s largest police union is warning CPD brass that renewed reliance on canceling officers’ days off will tank morale ahead of the Democratic National Convention, when the eyes of the world will be watching how they respond to demonstrations and gun violence.

  John Catanzara, president of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, recently lambasted Chief of Patrol Jon Hein for allegedly directing other supervisors to “cancel whoever’s days off you need to.”

  Catanzara insisted that Hein was “on a warpath,” and he urged Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling to step in. “Unless the superintendent reins this nonsense in, morale is about to start fading away really fast … before the huge convention that is going to turn this city upside down on its head,” he said in a YouTube video on June 28.

Hein is quite frankly, a moron, a piss-poor "leader," and just dumb enough to miss that Snelling and Conehead are using him as the whipping boy for any blame coming down the road for staffing issues. 

Look at Larritorious deflecting:

• Before Memorial Day, Snelling told reporters that his administration would “be judicious” about cancelling officers’ regular days off and would give them “advanced notice so that they can plan around those changes.” But in recent weeks, as gun violence has spiked and police resources have been stretched thin by special events, the department has again relied on the controversial practice, aimed at addressing long-standing staffing woes.

  Former police Supt. David Brown faced sharp criticism for canceling days off, and concerns grew as a wave of suicides impacted the department.

  When Snelling addressed the violent Fourth of July weekend on Monday, he told reporters that day-off cancellations had fallen by about 70% this year, but he said canceling time off is sometimes necessary. “It’s not just canceling days off just to cancel days off,” Snelling said. “It’s to make sure that our officers have enough manpower out there to deal with the situation at hand and make sure that they keep down the violence.”

You know how he can claim a 70% reduction in cancellations? 

• The department stopped doing it for the first five months of the year. They let beat cars go unmanned, watches were shortchanged, and they hoped the weather would keep crime down.

And it worked as it does every year....until the weather warms up, as it does every year. Then the staffing issues are exposed for everyone to see. Then they rely on the media to not report it....which they don't.

The solution remains what it always has and what we've writing about for seventeen years and what we've espoused for our entire careers:

• gut HQ for real...make it stick. Every bureau is overstaffed by 75%;
  
• minimize front offices...you don't need a secretary, assistant secretary, ticket clerk, stat person(s), DAC officers and whatever other made-up positions exist merely to hide officers. Civilianize it all;
• get rid of CAPS for pete's sake. It's outlived it's usefulness and is merely a money laundering operation nowadays. The amount of swag, cash and outright thieving that goes on, it's amazing that the media has never done a deep dive into it;
  
• downsize unit administrative staffs, Detective areas and Homan Square especially. You could reduce inside staff by 50% and no one would ever know;
• revamp the Academy. Teaching one hour of every five is ridiculous, and it's worse at the outlying training spots. At one training session last year, we had eleven different instructors in an eight-hour session, four of whom never spoke a word;
• someone grow a set of testicles (looking at you Larritorious and Hein) and tell Conehead he gets twenty cops and two sergeants the way it used to be. The other hundred-and-thirty go back to a District;
  
• man the beat cars, every single one, every single watch, first and foremost. Instead of Tact Teams, go back to 06 cars. Make it a monthly assignment, plain clothes, and they're the Area response team. Make the Chief there responsible for their deployment and for their numbers. Real numbers, not blue cards. Heads and CB numbers.
  

And those Area Teams, that's your old Task Force deployable asset. If you run it correctly, you'll probably have a few hundred officers per Area. Add in a voluntary Special Employment OT initiative and you'll get plenty of greedy cops sucking up the OT, further minimizing the need to cancel days off all summer.

But sadly, no one has the balls or the will power.