More "Perception" Problems

A simple set of equations:

1. Less police = longer response times
   
   
2. Longer response times = citizens not sticking around for a report
   
   
3. No report = no reported crime
   
   
4. No reported crime = crime "reduction"

But citizens aren't believing it, thereby creating a "perception problem."

The citizens are the ones who have it right though - they (or their friends) are the ones sitting in the hospital bleeding or telling everyone who will listen at work, at home, on their social media site that they got attacked, beaten or robbed.

And the complaint throughout? The police never showed up. The police didn't care. It'll never be solved, so why bother to report it.

"Perception" is the least of our worries. This is a failure in progress of epic proportions.

More Time Due Canceled

Someone said the Department is now considering the weekend to run from Thursday evening all the way through Monday night in order to further restrict Time Due all summer.

If we're at full strength, how is this possible?

And how the hell are we supposed to attend any sort of family events when every other non-cop in the world is off Saturday and Sunday, but we can't get the day? Spare us the "you knew what you signed up for" bullshit. We aren't demanding or expecting every weekend off, but it would be nice to get one when we needed one. After all, that's our time off earned.

Just a Question

How come the parking meter contract with the Dubai company will be honored with minimal questioning, even when they're demanding extra tens of million of dollars they can't prove they earned or lost, but the teachers 4% raise supposedly codified in a lawfully binding contract can be disregarded at will?

No wonder they got 90% support for their strike vote.

Perception Problem?

How about a "truth problem?"

Here's G-TongueTied Tuesday at the Union League Club:

• Amid media reports highlighting Chicago’s rise in homicides and shootings so far this year, police Superintendent Garry McCarthysaid Tuesday he is facing “a perception issue” when it comes to crime.
  
  Speaking to the Union League Club in the Loop, McCarthy pointed to declines in homicides and shootings in recent weeks but said he’s having a hard time getting that message to register with the public.
  
  “Would anybody believe me if I told you that murders in the city were down 17 percent in the last month? Probably not, right?,” McCarthy told about 100 people at the breakfast. “Would anybody believe me if I told you that shootings are down in the last two months, 10 weeks? Would anybody believe if I told you that we had less shootings on Memorial Day this year than we did last year? Probably not.
  
  "We’re having a perception issue. And perhaps it’s my problem. Perhaps it’s my fault. I don’t know how to change this.”

That quote....

• Would anybody believe if I told you that we had less shootings on Memorial Day this year than we did last year? Probably not.

It bothered us, so we did a little research, and found this on the ABC site (29 May):

• Chicago's homicide rate at this point of the year is up nearly 50 percent. The vast majority of those homicides are gang-related.

  "It's not OK that we had 53 shootings last week, but that 53 shootings is the same exact number of shootings that we had last year, so this is not a new problem. What it is is a new is the solution that we are applying to it," McCarthy said.

He's playing the numbers game again and no one is calling him on it (besides our readers and us). Claiming shootings are down on Memorial Day, but admitting the year-to-year comparison is exactly the same.

And the "perception" thing? We've argued before that the Supernintendo isn't responsible for each and every shooting that occurs on his watch. Even the commanders he attempts to blame at CompStat meetings aren't going to be stopping each and every shooting as shorthanded as they are. But McCarthy pretends he has some magical formula and a whiz-bang computer system that still isn't predicting shit and won't address the elephant in the room - that we are shorthanded, and badly so.

Cameras don't prevent crime. Computers don't predict crime.

Why Aren't They Digging?

This came to us via e-mail.

A website called "JohnWayneGacyNews" has a bunch of videos and interviews of retired cops with a whole bunch of unanswered questions concerning the Gacy serial killings.

We know a lot of people might think, "Gacy's dead. He was executed years ago." True. But a lot of victims may not have been found and their families deserve some closure. That's what we're supposed to do, right? Solve crimes, find people, close cases.

Via this website, a lot of info regarding a property on northwest side that Gacy used to be a caretaker for, is raising enough questions that an extensive dig for bodies shouldn't be out of the question.

One of the persons running the website is a former editor for The Reader, which gives the info a better ring of credibility than we'd otherwise give it. They interview some former CPD detectives and neighbors with interesting stories to tell. Go peruse the website.

Spot the Contradiction

Remember, this is a "Violence Reduction Initiative Program," paying time-and-one-half.

But crime is down.

Huh?

This sums it up nicely:

• So are you telling me, I need comp time/ time 1/2 so bad that I would give up my weekends denied ( which are already denied )to get a break from the dump I already work in and the assholes I work for, to be placed in another shit hole, possibly "foot patrol" on third watch, in a district I'm not familiar with and with someone from those cushy districts who can't deal with a west side/ south savage? Only to make an arrest so that I can be treated like the outside goof by the DSS/ XO because I VOLUNTEERED for this? Um, NOT! Not worth my time, the law suits, the angry bosses, the miserable family at home, and me- the disgruntled police who lives, eats, and sleep shit, I D T S!

Can't wait.

Rahm Pleads for Labor Peace

Of course, he won't do anything to ensure the peace, but he'll blame everyone else except the face in the mirror:

• Mayor Rahm Emanuel acknowledged Tuesday that 90 percent is a “huge number” for the Chicago Teachers Union to achieve in its strike authorization vote, but he’s holding out hope for a pre-strike settlement.

  “Let’s work together, find common ground, find partnership, reminding ourselves …. [of the need to] work together to better serve the taxpayers and our main constituents, “ the mayor said.

• Emanuel pushed for a change in state law that raised the strike authorization threshold to 75 percent, a benchmark so high, at least one education advocate with ties to the mayor predicted that it could never be met.

  Instead, the Chicago Teachers Union roared passed that benchmark, fueled by their anger against a mayor who stripped them of a previously-negotiated, four percent pay raise and tried to muscle through a longer school day.

It would seem Rahm underestimated his charm factor by a wide margin. Good luck teachers, you're going to need some strong spines in the days and weeks ahead. Ninety percent is a good start.

Election Lawsuits

Elections are easier to win if you don't have opponents:

• Yesterday, Democrats filed challenges to all eight of the recently-slated Republican candidates for State Legislature in the City of Chicago. The filings were an attempt to knock Republicans off the ballot, giving the Democrats a free ride in the the November election. If the objections were to be sustained, voters in most districts would have only a single choice on the ballot in the fall.

  "Chicago Democrats have driven this state into the ground, and they're rightly worried about voters punishing them at the ballot box this November," said Adam Robinson, Chairman of the Chicago Republican Party. "It's shameful, but not surprising, that they're attempting to deny Chicago voters a choice. We will vigorously defend our candidates' right to run for office."

The Obama coattails are awfully short this election season and the Republicans will most likely take back the US Senate and hold the House. No telling what will happen on the state level, especially in this corrupt shithole of a state, but down-staters might very well punish statewide democrats just on general principles. That means Madigan and his merry band of thieves have to hold every seat they can by hook or by crook.

New Initiative

Let's spend even more money to cover up the manpower shortage:

• Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy vowed Monday to make sure officers are positioned to prevent downtown attacks like the weekend beating of a Michigan man attending a furniture convention here.

  McCarthy also said the police department could have a “couple hundred” officers work overtime in neighborhoods throughout the city this summer to keep a lid on shootings, which spiraled upward in the first quarter of 2012.

  McCarthy said he knew of three downtown mob attacks over the weekend, including the Michigan man jumped on North State; a couple robbed on the CTA Red Line, and a man beaten in the Gold Coast area.

NBC also covers this:

• Chicago police on Monday outlined a new crime-fighting initiative.
  
  Officers who are regularly making arrests and writing tickets will be able to get more time on the street and overtime pay, according to a memo released by the Fraternal Order of Police.
  
  The move comes after a particularly violent weekend in Chicago, with at least eight dead and more than 40 injured in shootings throughout the city and a string of wilding incidents in the downtown area.
  
  The "Violence Reduction Overtime Initiative" begins Thursday, and officers will be able to work Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays on their regularly-scheduled days off and scheduled furlough days.

Evidently, you sign up, you report to 61st and Racine, they deploy you. Anywhere.

Our dream would be to see everyone turn it down until there's a firm commitment to hire officers. That won't happen because (A) everyone needs a bit of money in these troubled times and (B) there's already a class of 200 on tap to be announced in the next week or three as a new part of Rahm's "strategy."

Terror Charges

Interesting timing to say the least:

• It's been nearly a month since Chicago police raided a Bridgeport home and arrested several people on charges that they were plotting an attack on the NATO summit.

  In this Intelligence Report: That case is going to be the first legal test of Illinois' state terrorism law.

  Even though state government has preached preparedness, since 9/11, counterterrorism law enforcement and especially prosecution has been at the federal level. Tuesday that will change in Illinois. Three men arrested just before the NATO summit are expected to be indicted on terrorism charges by a Cook County grand jury.

Come for a visit, stay for the next 25 years (if Anita can get a conviction.)

Illinois RICO

An interesting approach:

• Local prosecutors have a new way to target street gangs under a measure Gov. Pat Quinn signed into law today.
  
  The new law is modeled after the federal racketeering law known as RICO, which was originally designed to target mobsters but in recent years has been used repeatedly by the U.S. attorney's office in Chicago to target the top leadership of street gangs.
  
  Now the state version will allow county prosecutors to take similar action against a street gang as a whole, instead of individual members.
  
  "We may convict the soldier, but we never get the general," said Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez, whose office drafted the legislation. "This bill will allow us to attack gangs in a different way."

Anita, you never convict anybody. You plea everything you can and CI everything else. And your office drafting actual legislation doesn't actually fill us with confidence, especially after watching you a few years back attempting to interpret the Second Amendment. We also don't see the County having the financial resources to actually track down gang assets the way the feds do.

Whatever - we'll take a wait-and-see attitude on this one. New strategies have a very short half-life around here if you've noticed.

Irony

The irony meter is exploding on this one:

• The first rule of adventurous traveling: Things are almost never as bad as your mother thinks.

  The second rule of adventurous traveling: The "almost never" exceptions can be pretty bad.

  Further, if you’re writing a book called “The Kindness of America,” as hitchhiker Ray Dolin is, you might be tempting fate. Dolin learned this when a stranger shot him Saturday evening in rural Montana where Dolin was trying to hitch a ride.

Cops later caught the asshole, a drunk with a history of assault and intimidation. But when you set out to write a book about the kindness of strangers in America, the last thing you're expecting to get is shot.

McCarthy Watch Begins

A comment popped up that G-Mac is going to be on Good Morning Chicago (Fox 32) today, attempting to explain, or spin, the body count, the maiming totals and the rapidly increasing destruction of the Chicago tourism industry.

If true, we hereby declare "McCarthy Watch" has begun. Those NATO coattails are looking awfully short after this weekend.

Tommy Skilling's Seven Day Forecast is showing a carbon copy of this weekend on tap. 84 Friday, 90 Saturday, 92 Sunday.

Add Another "Mugging"

Or "gooning." Or "wilding."

• A man walking home from work was attacked and beaten by a large group of people on the city's Gold Coast late Sunday, police said.
  
  The 36-year-old man suffered only a cut to the head during the 10 p.m. attack in the 800 block of North Dewitt Place, police said, citing early reports.
  
  It was unclear whether his many attackers also robbed him.
  
  The man was taken to nearby Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where he was expected to be released sometime this morning.
  
  Police had no other details.

Evidently, not even a description of the attackers.

Add 2 Dead and 10 Wounded

The hits just keep on coming - long into Sunday night and even this morning:

• Two people was killed and 10 others wounded, at least two critically, in five separate shootings on the South Side, police said this morning.

  Five of the victims were wounded at a party near 50th Place and Halsted Street in the Back of the Yard neighborhood at about 11:30 p.m. Sunday, police said, citing early reports.

As a side note, anyone notice that phrase?

• "...citing early reports."

It appeared in another form in yesterday's Tribune:

• Police officials on Sunday were still compiling a list of confirmed shootings and victims....

If you've been on the scene of a shooting recently, and judging by the numbers a lot of us have been, you know that CPIC is banging for paper cars to call them ASAP all the time. They call before the victims even get to the hospital on a few shootings. The need the numbers so they can feed them into the giant CompStat Computer and then predict where the retaliation will occur.

But our inner conspiracy theorist notices that they're still keeping the press in the dark as long as possible and twisting the statistics so every media outlet has a different set of numbers.

5 & 35? 6 & 20? (UPDATE) 8 DOA & 40 Maimed

So many numbers floating around, so hard to nail down totals. Suffice it to say, this weekend was a disaster for Rahm, McCompStat and their contention that their crime strategies are working. Some of the highlights (lowlights?):

• Numerous downtown "multiple offender incidents," a.k.a. wildings. Any number of tourists got their asses handed to them, including a guy who's going to be eating through a straw for the next six weeks. We wonder if he'll ever come back to Chicago or any of his friends, family, acquaintances, etc. Tax payers already know to avoid downtown like the plague - tourists are going to learn one way of the other;
• An unverified story of the Critical Mass/Naked Bike Ride people getting jumped and lumped by the gangs roaming downtown. The mental picture is pretty scary.
• As the revelers were pushed onto the Red Line and out of downtown, numerous fights broke out at every single stop on the El. Reddit.com has some citizen reactions to the trail of mayhem as it headed back south. A couple of commentators related that not a single Mass Transit Unit was available for the fights and when the trains eventually got to 95th Street, the problem spilled out into the surrounding streets and neighborhood.
• Thirteen people shot in an eleven hour span in the 010 District.

Sounds like someone needs to be demoted in 010. After all, CompStat doesn't tolerate mis-deployment of resources. And McCarthy has said we have all the police we need to control Chicago street gangs. So obviously, someone is fucking up big time in 010 and the only one we can think of is the triple "meri-clout-orious" promoted political hack in charge.

There Are No Police To Send

That decision to discontinue CTA Special Employment is looking pretty short sighted and stupid now, isn't it?

Along with the disbanding of Summer Mobile eight years ago.

And not having a uniformed citywide response unit that could go and put out the "hot spots" that are turning the downtown tourist areas into flaming infernos.

But hey, what do street cops know?

Odd Connection

Someone point out to Garry that every time he opens his mouth to brag about numbers or tout some new initiative, people seem to get shot in great numbers.

We would like to see a weekly speech at this point. Preferably Mondays to recount the weekend body count and Thursdays to prep everyone for the next fifty people being scraped off the street with more holes in their bodies that what they started the day with.

A Wild(ing) Night

Any word on 018 blowing up overnight?

Oh wait - here's a portion of the story popping up on BreakingNews.com:

• Chicago police this morning were looking into at least three separate downtown muggings that were carried out by separate groups of attackers, as the city gears up for its busy summer festival season.

  The attacks occurred among hundreds of tourists and music lovers emptied out of Grant Park for the Chicago Blues Festival, which city officials tout as the largest free blues festival in the world.

  One incident involved up to 10 attackers, which included seven youths and three adults, who beat and robbed a man in the 500 block of North State Street at about 9:50 p.m., police said.

  The victim, a male tourist in his 40s, was being treated at Northwestern Memorial Hospital with a broken jaw, police said.

  At about 10:20 p.m., a couple was accosted by a group at the Red Line station in the 100 block of North State Street, just below the Chicago Theatre, police said.

  In that attack, the couple were robbed and the man beaten by an unknown number of attackers, who fled. The male victim was also taken to Northwestern with non-serious injuries.

There seems to be something missing here, though "Red Line" might be a clue.

Remember, the last week of school is coming up and all the lil darlins' will be bored by 1700 hours on Friday. Has Quinn activated the National Guard yet?

And for the record, the "three" "muggings" that are being "investigated?" Add a zero to that for incidents occurring last night in 018.

Crime is down and if no one reports it or the media doesn't get a hold of it? It never happened.

Remember, Crime is Down

And crime strategies are working!

• Three people have died and at least 14 have been wounded in shootings since Friday afternoon in Chicago.
  
  The first shooting happened about 4:43 p.m. in the 5100 block of South May Street when two men were killed and three others were wounded.

And that's just Friday into a hot Saturday. The bodies continued to hit the floor all day long:

• Three men were shot and critically wounded in the West Englewood neighborhood today.
  
  Someone shot the three about 11:25 a.m. in the 7400 block of South Ashland Avenue, according to police News Affairs ....
  
  
• A 20-year-old man was shot dead and his 19-year-old brother was wounded when they were fired on while sitting in their car on the Far South Side today.
  
  It happened at 10:23 a.m. at 111th Street and Edbrooke Avenue, according to police News Affairs ....
  
  
• Police are seeking a person who stabbed three relatives with a kitchen knife early Saturday in the Lawndale neighborhood on the West Side.
  
  It happened during an argument that turned physical about 3:15 a.m. in the 2800 block of West Polk Street, police News Affairs....

Hotter day on tap for Sunday. Watch yourselves.