Hiring and Firing

This is how "candidate screening" is supposed to work:

• A former Peoples Gas worker said he applied to become a Chicago cop because he wanted Black people to see someone like them working for the Chicago Police Department and “wanted to help create a safer life” for them.

  But his application was rejected because he’d been arrested 10 times — for reasons including an accusation that he’d punched his girlfriend in the face.

  None of his arrests led to a conviction. He later got them expunged. Still, his appeal to be restored to the department’s eligibility list was denied. He sued the Chicago Police Board, the oversight agency that handles such appeals.

  “I still feel I did not get a fair chance in Chicago,” says the 37-year-old man, who agreed to an interview on the condition he not be named. In May, the Harvey Police Department hired him, state records show.

Someone like this doesn't need to be anywhere near law enforcement....but Harvey we guess.

Now look at someone they're trying to fire:

• A Chicago police officer facing dismissal for fatally shooting an armed man during a foot pursuit is also under fire for paralyzing another man in a shooting months earlier, the Sun-Times has learned.

We remember many cops like this - we'd jokingly refer to them as "$hit magnets" because they always seemed to attract the worst of society. Two or three in particular were involved in multiple shootings - double digits worth, all justified, all legal and all felonious encounters that put very bad people in prison or six-feet under.

They were good cops, probably even great ones, who paid attention to all sort of small details most of us would overlook or miss, and they'd establish good reasonable articulable suspicion (RAS) and expand it into Probable Cause stops. They were really amazingly good at this job. But now, someone like that, they're trying to fire them after one or two incidents.