SPARs Up, CR's Down

(yeah we know they're called CL's now, but we were raised on CR's)

When society made the police the enemy, cops backed off. They backed off a lot. We can debate the pros and cons of having a dedicated (or aggressive) police force for years and never come to a consensus. But when the multiple oversight agencies don't have CLs/CRs to investigate and justify their existence, the Department has to resort to nitpicking minor infractions so they can say, "Look! We're holding Officers to account!"

• While proceedings in high-profile police misconduct cases slowed to a trickle in 2024, the number of internal disciplinary actions initiated by Chicago Police Department supervisors nearly doubled from 2023, according to a Tribune analysis.

  Records obtained via the Freedom of Information Act show CPD supervisors, mostly sergeants, filed more than 5,300 Summary Punishment Action Requests — “SPARs” — in 2024, a sharp increase from the 2,700 SPARs initiated in 2023.

  The rise in internal CPD discipline comes as the external disciplinary process — where fewer, but more serious cases, such as those involving deadly force incidents, are handled — remains greatly curtailed as a legal fight carries on between the city and Fraternal Order of Police in the Illinois Appellate Court. No decision is expected anytime soon.

The SPARs are for minor violations, mostly administrative:

• tardiness, court deviations, uniform violations, grooming standards, failure to clear a job or lunch promptly, congregating, reading or smoking in public, radio procedure violations, minor fender benders.....minor crap

The BIG ones (CLs/CRs) are things that may end up as suspension time or criminal charges:

• Use of Force violations, money beefs, thefts, deliberate violations of orders, etc.

Remember when everyone complained that 95% or more of these violations ended up "unfounded"? That's because they were made up by criminals in an effort to intimidate Officers into not doing their job. The Department was never that corrupt, but the lib-turds and media amplified everything, bought into the grievance-mongering, and hamstrung the Department.

And cops (eventually) got the message, backing off from having anything to do with the public that had been conditioned to hate them. The job became solely a paycheck instead of a calling to serve and nowadays, Chicagoans reap the whirlwind. Good people as well as bad ones, everyone who bought into the hype or stayed silent in the face of the hype.

Get a load of this paragraph:

• “The new policy — combined with new efforts for progressive discipline — should better ensure that interactions with police are appropriately recorded,” the independent monitoring team wrote in its ninth report on CPD compliance, published in May 2024. “This will greatly improve any subsequent reviews or investigations by detectives, supervisors, TRED (CPD’s Tactical Review and Evaluation Division), the Bureau of Internal Affairs, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, the Inspector General, the IMT, and the public.”

That's what....five oversight agencies (and doesn't include that one that Crimesha started solely to look over old cases.) No wonder almost no one is doing police work, unless they're selling their souls to get off of midnights.

When there aren't pretend investigations going on over lying criminal accusations, they only thing left to do is nitpick. And while some of the nitpicking is necessary, much of it isn't and just serves to drive morale further into the ground.