Slight Exaggeration?

This seems a bit far fetched:

• On a summer day last year, David Coleman Headley, like many fathers, took his children to a Chicago park.

  There, Headley ran his children through military drills, including maneuvers such as rolling into a shooting position.

  The observations — by an officer who had received counterterrorism training — became part of the case that was built against Headley, who four months later was charged in the 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai and with planning attacks in Denmark, according to law enforcement officials.

We went through TARA training, TO-SPOT, and attended a few Speaker Series extravaganzas downtown, and for the life of us, we can't remember anything telling us how to spot kids doing military drills and maneuvers.

Then we read a bit further down:

• New investigative teams have been created to generate tips about potential threats and also investigate them. Chicago has an officer permanently assigned to Washington for counterterrorism, and thousands of others are trained to spot terrorists, getting briefings on organizations like Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Would that officer assigned to Washington be the one with the well known clouted father?

• Chicago cops are working with other law enforcement agencies as part of a local FBI task force, and took a key role in the recent arrest of a man suspected of a bomb plot in Wrigleyville.

The one where the FBI supplied an inert device to a whack job? Yeah, they're going to let CPD near that investigation.

• Even in a more sweeping international conspiracy such as Headley's, Chicago police took a leadership role in an investigation that led to his guilty plea last March.

We're pretty sure that entire investigation was run by India's intelligence services using, shall we say, "extraordinary" interrogation methods.

• "That was a prime example of how the Chicago Police Department has become an integral force against terrorism,'' said Patrick Daly, the chief of the department's counterterrorism and intelligence section. "We worked on this investigation 24/7.''

  The FBI-run Joint Terrorism Task Force, which handles terrorism-related investigations in Chicago, has expanded significantly since Sept. 11, 2001.

  Daly was an FBI agent when he joined the task force shortly after it formed in 1981. He was hired by Chicago police Superintendent Jody Weis and created the department's counterterrorism and intelligence unit.

Ah, Daly. This explains everything. Move along folks. Nothing to see here. Everything is just fine. You're safer than you've ever been.

How About "No?"

There's a recession going on, right?

• Cubs chairman Tom Ricketts asked the state of Illinois for $200 million dollars Thursday to help renovate Wrigley Field and Friday he joined the Mully & Hanley Show on 670 The Score to further explain his proposal.

  One problem: Ricketts hasn’t explained the plan to the governor, who said he’s not too pleased about that.

  “They haven’t proposed it to me,” Gov. Pat Quinn told Newsradio 780′s Craig Dellimore, during a taping of “At Issue. “I read about in the paper like everyone else.”

  The bottom line: Ricketts wants to start renovations on Wrigley Field immediately and he wants to take the money Cubs fans are already spending and reinvest it into saving the ballpark.

Have the Cubs stopped filling seats in Wrigley? We didn't think so. Floating municipal bonds in this sort of atmosphere doesn't seem like a good idea, at least from our standpoint.

The "Cop of Tomorrow"

Get a load of what "Human Resources" thinks we're all about. Evidently, we've been a bunch of in-bred ignorant white cops for years now and no one told us:

• "We're looking to have a diverse police force, and that includes culturally ... racially, ethnically, lifestyle, all of that," said Tracey Ladner, the Chicago police's director of human resources, whose office is tasked with heading up recruiting efforts.
  
  Ladner's team not only wants to change the perception of what a police officer does, they also want to mold the image of what a Chicago cop looks like.
  
  Gone would be the stereotype of the rough-and-tumble white cop with basic education and strained interactions with minorities, replaced with a more tech-savvy, multilingual person of any race, religion or sexual orientation.
  
  "We want people who are able to reach out to the community that they serve and come up with solutions," Ladner said. "And the solution isn't always arresting people."

So all that stuff we've been hearing for twenty years now about how Chicago cops are the best educated police force in city history, that Chicago ethnic and minority groups are well represented in the ranks of the Department, about how computers are changing the way we do police work, and all that "diversity training" we had to sit through....it was all bullshit? We're just a step away from Theophilus Conner, fire hoses and attack dogs?

You know what they want the "Cop of Tomorrow" to be? A touchy-feelie report taker with a side of event-number-generator thrown in for good measure. Don't believe us?

• One shining example of this method is Brett Goldstein, 36, a software expert turned police officer who directs the department's predictive analytics program, which has become a centerpiece in Superintendent Jody Weis' crime-fighting strategy.

A "shining example," albeit one without a single instance of successfully predicting a crime to occur or prevent.

Anyone have the current numbers of applicants? We're just curious.

Silly Season to Begin

Here it comes:

• Former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun and Rep. Danny K. Davis are all ready to make it official: They're running for mayor.

  Emanuel plans to make his announcement Saturday at Coonley Elementary School on the North Side, an anonymous aide said.

  Davis will formally announce Sunday at a Loop area hotel, a spokesman said.

  Braun says she will officially kick off her bid Nov. 20.

And don't forget....

• The Rev. James Meeks on Thursday joined the growing list of politicians planning to officially enter the mayoral race this weekend.

  The state senator from the South Side will formally declare his candidacy at 6 p.m. Sunday at the University of Illinois at Chicago, 725 W. Roosevelt Road, said Bryan Zises, his campaign spokesman.

Three black candidates and the Rahm-inator. Daley's people aren't taking any chances it seems.

Free Deer!

Well, not really free. And no trophy racks - only doe tags. And it sounds like you don't get to keep the kill:

• Will County is looking for volunteer sharpshooters to cull female deer from five of its forest preserves.

  The aim is to reduce the number of deer to between 20 to 30 per square mile. The Will County Forest Preserve District estimates that's anywhere from 332 to 406 deer.

  Using their own rifles, applicants will be required to hit a 1.9-inch circular target at 50 yards five times with only five attempts allowed. Applicants also will have to pass, among other things, a criminal background test and a drug-screening test.

Sounds like a ready-made live fire exercise for SWAT. Be sure you read the comments attached to the original article. The hunters appear to hold their own against the liberal anti-hunter/anti-gun people who'd rather see hundreds of deer starve to death or get hit by cars.

Veteran's Day

To all who have served, are serving or will serve in the future, Thank You for our freedoms.

Mandatory POD Missions?

Whose brain fart is this one?

• Get a load of this. POD Missions to be run 24 hours a day in 011. Various Beat Cars are to be held down in two hour increments to monitor the PODS. Best part? POD room is open to the public to come and sit down with officers!! They can "learn" to use and watch the POD. Second best part? They kicked the Review Office & people out of that room to accommodate this latest brainfart. Sounds like another appeasement of the phony-ass reverends on Henny Penny's part. And talk about ANOTHER waste of manpower, especially with how short we are.
  

Aside from the Civil Rights issues about letting civilians run cameras and peeping in windows that might fall into the visual range of the device, isn't 011 part of one of the busiest two or three radio zones in the city? We read comments every week about how the watches are downing beat cars, sometimes 4 or 5 beat cars on midnights due to manpower shortages. How some brainiac is going to pull a beat car off the street every single day in two-hour increments to watch cameras?

What about the overloaded front offices? Shouldn't they be covering this? Or maybe some of these fake foot posts and ghost cars that pop up everywhere for the recently bounced inside mice?

Don't we have an entire unit of "pod watchers" hidden away somewhere at OEMC? We seem to remember that seeing as how we answer "Drinking on the Corner" calls that they observe at least three times a night. Why are we wasting District resources on this crap.

Here It Be

In all its glory.

No Time Due in 002?

For the entire 13th Period? A completely winnable grievance.

With enough notice, the Department can make accommodations with hire-backs or importing volunteers from other districts/units.

What happens for the Christmas party in the Deuce? Everyone has to buy a ticket, then no one is allowed to show up?

Unit Problems

WTF guys?

• Seven Chicago cops are subjects of a department investigation into whether they conspired to write 24 phony parking tickets to a south suburban man who believes they were helping his estranged wife get revenge, the Sun-Times has learned.

  Mark Geinosky, in a federal lawsuit, said the tickets came in the mail in 2007 and 2008 after he and his wife separated. The tickets were issued by officers in the Targeted Response Unit. Geinosky said his estranged wife is "friendly" with cops.

And this pending disaster?

• Thanks to the 55 team's fuck up at Mc Donalds, the entire MSF unit is again in the negative press. Word is [so-and-so] got stripped and the entire team is getting ready to get launched back to the districts. Over one guy's mistake, we all have to pay? Thanks for nothing LT. S.L.

How about we try to stay out of the media spotlight for a few months in a row instead of this every few weeks?

Was This Predicted?

Once again, demonstrating the stupidity of attempting to predict random behavior:

• Three men were shot outside a Taco Bell near Wrigley Field early Wednesday in a shooting that might have been connected to an earlier fight at a night club, authorities said.

  At 12:30 a.m., a gunman approached two 19-year-old men and a 20-year-old man outside the Taco Bell in the 1100 block of West Addison and opened fire, striking all three of them, police said.

  The gunman fled the scene; no one was in custody as to early Wednesday.

We assume there will be a new Commander of the local district shortly?

Spot the Coincidence

Interesting article about political money shenanigans:

• Two Illinois congressmen have paid their wives hundreds of thousands of dollars out of their campaign funds in the last decade, according to records filed with the Federal Election Commission.
  
  The campaign to re-elect Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. has given wife Sandi Jackson's company at least $315,000 for her work. Rep. Bobby Rush's campaign has paid his wife, Carolyn Rush, more than $240,000 to serve as a consultant.
  
  Two other Chicago-area congressmen, Danny Davis and Luis Gutierrez, have given their wives smaller amounts for doing campaign work. The four lawmakers, all Democrats, were re-elected last week.

The Tribune seems to think this is a shock, as if Shortshanks hiring relatives for the past twenty-five years never happened. They also throw in two Republican names in the middle of the article to kind of "even out" the appearance of corruption - Kirk and Manzullo - but go back and read the democrats names:

• Rush, JJJr., Gutierrez, Davis

Rush ran for mayor a few years back, JJJr was bumped by scandal from running for mayor, Gutierrez left the mayor's race under a cloud and is now connected to Rezko and Davis is the current "consensus" candidate for mayor.

Funny how that all works out.

Four-and-Two for Everyone

FOP says the City prevailed in their decision to implement the Four & Two schedule across the Department, meaning 005, 008, 013 and 020 will be adjusting before the First Police Period next year. Details forthcoming. Check the FOP link in the right hand side for info in their "Current Updates" section.

Street Talk Series

Supposedly, one meeting down and they canceled the next one. As one comment suggested, did they get all the "input" they needed and canceled the rest as unnecessary? Or did they pretty much sit around for the hour with no one saying a word, leading to the awesome conclusion that the leadership of Ernie and Jody have solved all of the Department's problems?

Did anyone attend or know someone who attended? And did they keep their spots after having themselves a little "street talk" with Ernie's people?

Anyone Got a Copy?

This would be hilarious if we managed to snag a copy:

• SCC,
  Please scan a copy of today's AMFN message from Downtown Ernie Brown and put it on your site for everyone to see. You must have seen it. There was even a "revised" order that came out after someone read it and said "Hey Ernie, that's not proper English". It read, "Chief Zavala is be retiring....". Holy shit. I almost fell off the chair when I saw that. "Is be retiring"... You're probably too late though. I'm sure the original has been pulled off the site by now, but someone has to have it out there. Come on we need a good laugh.

Usually, dumb people try to associate themselves with at least one smart person to make them look good. Downtown Ernie Brown seems to go completely the other way though and by doing so, reinforces the image of the Chicago Police Department as being run by unprofessional hacks.

On the other hand, it certainly undercuts J-Fled's image as a person who can choose leaders like he claimed on that blog of his.

12,000,000 and Counting

The blog passed 12 million visitors a few hours ago. Once again, we are moved to thank everyone who comes by to give us a few minutes of your day, even the asshat that spouts nothing but anti-Tea Party drivel, somehow tying us into that political movement.

Hey dumbass, if you didn't notice, the Tea Party won almost 100 races across the country without a single word of support from us. Not one single word. Oh, you didn't notice?

To everyone else who seems able to actually read what we write, thanks again for stopping by.

del Valle Denies Dropping Out

Rahm's people working hard to make deals?

• City Clerk Miguel del Valle held a news conference Monday to deny a published report that he was angling to pull out of the race for mayor.

  In a column in Sunday’s Sun-Times, Michael Sneed wrote that del Valle “is negotiating for a top position with the Chicago Public Schools in exchange for his exit from the mayoral race.”

  Del Valle suggested that an opponent had deliberately fed Sneed a false tip.

  “Under no circumstances will I leave the race for mayor,” he said. “The rumor that is circulating is a political trick that is being used to negatively affect our campaign, and I will not permit such a rumor to circulate … I want to assure the public that we are in the race until the end, and that we are going to win this race.”

Since they've effectively split the black candidates, time to work on the Hispanic coalitions. What are they offering Chico?

Well, Would You Look At That?

J-Fled taking credit for one of the simplest of ideas that EVERY SINGLE COP has been advocating for as long as we can remember. Hell, we've been advocating it for over 5-and-a-half years here. It even came up at J-Fled's "town hall" meetings where they looked for malcontents to dump:

• Chicago's year-old strategy of going to trial with lawsuits against police officers instead of settling cases is paying off, city officials say.

  Last fall, police Supt. Jody Weis notified Chief U.S. Judge James F. Holderman of the change in legal strategy.

• A year later, the results are "astonishing," according to a report the Law Department prepared for this year's City Council budget hearings. Lawsuits filed against cops -- and settlements of lawsuits -- have both fallen dramatically, the report said.

If you pay people for bad behavior, you will get more of it. Witness welfare fraud, years of "unemployment" handouts, LINK, and Social Security for generations of layabouts who have been on the dole for years, . Why do you think entire families of grifters moved to Wisconsin from all over the midwest in the 1980's? If you reduce the incentives for misbehavior, you get less of it. Gingrich proved this during the Clinton years.

So don't listen to the plaintiff lawyers in the article who denigrate the system of fighting suits. They're plaintiffs' lawyers for a reason.

And someone tell J-Fled to stop taking credit for something simple street cops have been saying since 5 superintendents ago.

An Interesting Question

First up, from the comments:

• You cannot have a watch run efficiently by 2 Lieutenants arguing over who has to be inside and who has to be outside. You must have a Captain who is the unquestioned leader, responsible for all major decisions for the watch.
  One Captain per radio zone is a HUGE safety issue. Who is going to be responsible for the first prisoner who hangs himself in the lockup? The Zone Captain, who wasn't in the building? The Lieutenant, who was out in the street? The Desk Sgt, who is left holding the bag?
  The cost of the resulting lawsuits will more than outweigh the cost of properly staffing the department....Sorry, I forgot, the city doesn't care about that right now.

"Sharky" raises some good points. For years, the Department has been preaching responsibility, culpability, who's to blame. Now the Department is setting up a chain of command where the ultimate responsibility lies with someone not even in the building they're supposed to be in charge of.

This thing is looking more and more like a disaster of epic proportions.

Remember the promotional exams? The city gives out millions to develop and run tests for all sorts of promotions. Thanks to an avid reader, we have this copy of what the city was looking for in their lieutenant candidates:

There's plenty of material there for all sorts of Lieutenant (and Captain) grievances that will end up costing more than whatever the original "savings" was supposed to be.

The reason we bring this all up is to spotlight that the city seems incapable of following any sort of contract that they negotiate with their workers. They always negotiate in bad faith. And the second they think they can get away with something, especially against the FOP, they'll do it. Hell, they've done it constantly in the past and paid out tens of thousands in cash, OT, time on the books, etc.

And with all the "merit" people floating around never having read a contract, we'd imagine that it going to get far worse before it gets any better.

These are Stories?

We guess the economy must be fixed and the Republicans didn't win any seats in the House according to the Sun Times. They're wasting ink and paper on stories like these:

• A female Roosevelt University was robbed of her iPhone downtown early Monday.

  At 12:30 a.m., a female Roosevelt University student was robbed of her iPhone in the 600 block of South Michigan Avenue, according to Central District police.

Really? An iPhone? Any helpful descriptions of the offenders? Nope, not a clue aside from "two males."

Or this one:

• A Chicago Police officer fatally shot a pitbull after it apparently attacked him Monday afternoon in the Far South Side Pullman neighborhood.

  The officer was conducting an investigation near West 118th Street and South Princeton Avenue about 1:30 p.m. when a pitbull escaped a yard and bit him in the ankle, police said.

We hope the officer has a speedy recovery, but is this really news? The CPD probably kills a dog every week or two, but we seldom recall any headlines over it.