OEMC Shortages

Unfortunately, the vast majority of people calling off sick aren't actually sick - 100% guarantee the media won't touch that one. But OEMC has been reduced to doubling up radio zones:

• 019 is now sharing a zone with 020 and 024
• 002 is now working with 003

No idea if having three Districts on one channel is safe - leave comments below - but after closing a few Districts, it was always amusing that OEMC never shuttered a dispatching position. Politics at play instead of safety and efficiency we suppose. 

Nice Expressways and Roads

So a surprise April snow caught IDOT and CDOT with their collective pants down. Not a single salt truck was on the road overnight, leading to this unsurprising result:

• Fifty vehicles crashed in a massive pileup Wednesday morning on an icy Kennedy Expressway near North Avenue, sending over a dozen people to hospitals with minor injuries.
  
  All lanes of the expressway were closed for hours, while Illinois State Police said it responded to more than 80 more crashes on Chicago-area expressways that were “covered in sheets of ice.”
  
  Three semitrailers and 47 other vehicles piled up about 4:40 a.m. on the Kennedy’s inbound lanes, state police said.

We don't know what watch everyone works, but have you noticed that with less traffic on area expressways, the number of assholes doing about 100 MPH has skyrocketed? We aren't as pure as a west side altar boy - we keep up with traffic easily - and we're being passed like we were standing still most nights.

When can we expect some media criticism of Pritzker and Groot for having salt trucks sit idle in the yards while the Kennedy could have hosted a Blackhawks home opener?

Brown, Meet Your Command Staff

Example #1 of many:

• That piece of shit commander varrick Douglas came into roll call yelling at officers who refused to give their own personal mask to some shithead at a domestic.
  
  Some violent shithead, who has covid, was spitting at his baby moma. The shithead told police if they don’t want him spitting on her, And everyone in the house, they better give him their mask.
  
  Coppers put shithead under arrest for spitting and beating his baby moma. as they were putting him in the car, old varrick shows up. He berated the officers and orders them to let the offender go. Varrick shows up in roll call next day, yelling about how officers “have a duty to give their mask up if someone needs it.” He then tells roll that we have it good, and the community has taken enough abuse from police.
  
  Turns out, the shithead involved in the domestic is related to that bumbling idiot Douglas.

How much of this is true, we have no idea. But we know enough about Varrick that most of it could be.

Suprise Promotions

As the "emergency" began, all promotional classes were cancelled and the Academy transformed into a poor man's 311/911 center. Most officers returned to their units of assignment for a minute or two, but now we're told that the sergeants-to-be and lieutenants-to-be continued taking on-line instruction. The detectives-to-be did not.

Yesterday, all were sworn into their promoted ranks, so Congratulations to all. These classes were supposed to be straight from the lists - no "merit" - so Well Done to everyone who stuck it out.

But (there's always a "but" around here) here's a question for Department observers:

• the sergeant-to-lieutenant jump isn't that big a deal....you just supervise more people and learn to delegate to your sergeants
• officer-to-sergeant is a bigger deal, but we're told that the new sergeants will be doing "hands-on" training for a while, riding with more experienced sergeants. No idea why that wasn't done before, but even if it is, will it be enough? Are these now the Department lab rats for a new method?

Officer-to-detective is the strangest of all of these promotions. They received exactly zero-training aside from the few days before the Academy was shut down. There's a lot of detective work that can be learned on the fly, and any detective you talk to will tell you that. But from a legal and technical standpoint, there's a bunch of book-learning and procedural stuff that has to be taught simply because when you get called to testify, a defense lawyer is going to pick you apart on procedure..and your training.

We worry about this because forty-eight hours ago, the guy sitting next to us was one of these new detectives. Great officer, conscientious individual, good person all around (but on the cheap side when the beer is flowing), but even he's a bit worried about getting hammered at Court and it affecting his career and how he's going to serve the citizens of Chicago (yes, there are some of us who still believe that.)

We're pretty sure he'll be fine...eventually, but is this going to adversely effect the clearance rate that is mired in the low teens for major violent crimes?

Dart Disaster

Tommy owns this one 100%. From a friend in the county, these are the current members testing positive for COVID-19 (click for larger version):

So Dart has been releasing everyone. In fact, he's released so many, he doesn't even know who's in and who's out, so he's ordered his staff to conceal all info:

• Cook County [Jail] released hundreds of inmates from its jails during the coronavirus crisis. But good luck trying to find out who is back on the streets or what crimes they are accused of committing. The prosecutors and public defenders, who handle the cases in special COVID-19 court hearings, keep a close hold on the information and refuse to share it with the public or other law enforcement agencies.
  
  The Cook County Sheriff’s Office that runs the jail says it doesn’t know who was released because of the coronavirus.
  
  Even the Chicago Police Department says it’s in the dark about inmates who have been released. “The greatest fear people have is the fear of the unknown,” Kevin Graham, president of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, told The Washington Times. “We don’t know what is occurring, we don’t know why people are being released, we don’t know their offenses, and we don’t know if these people pose a danger to society.”

We've seen different reports that say gun offenders and rapists are among the released. A detective friend tells us that two released inmates have already contributed to the Chicago murder count....as victims of homicides. We guess that's a win-win, but how much money is Dart going to waste trying to track down two assholes cooling in the morgue?

Once again, an Illinois democrat's asinine policies come with a body count.

Carnage Continues

At some points, you would think heads were going to roll in the Department:

• 2020 MURDERS BY DISTRICT (through Sunday, 12 April)
  
  011: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (20)
  
  006: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (16)
  
  010: xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (14)
  
  007: xxxxxxxxxxx (11)
  
  003: xxxxxxxxx (9)
  
  008: xxxxxxx (7)
  009: xxxxxxx (7)
  
  012: xxxxxx (6)
  014: xxxxxx (6)
  
  004: xxxxx (5)
  015: xxxxx (5)

Those are just the Top Ten (plus ties).

Fillmo' had another one last night, recording a killing in seven of the last ten days, so we're guessing the Constitutionally questionable checkpoints aren't working too well....or they are, but not on the correct blocks.

Maybe Groot should require exempt members to buy buildings in 011.

...and the Dog?

Some heartless assholes in Little Village:

• A man and his dog were fatally shot while out for a walk Tuesday in Little Village on the Southwest Side, police said. The 20 to 25-year-old and the dog were on the sidewalk about 3:32 p.m. in the 2800 block of South Keeler Avenue when they were both shot, Chicago police said. The man was hit throughout the body and head.
  
  He was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital where he was later pronounced dead, police said.
  
  The Cook County medical examiner’s office hasn’t released details about his death.
  
  The dog was dead at the scene, police said.

Maybe the dog was the actual target?

This is Completely Safe

After "decontaminating" a certain police station, this is how personnel disposed of the cleaning supplies:

Just pile it up in the hallway.

Perfectly safe.

Willie Wilson Again

Mr. Wilson donated another 12,000 masks to the FOP yesterday afternoon.

Let's see if these supplies end up warehoused and not in the Districts they were meant to be distributed to like way too much of the donated equipment has.

Thanks again to a decent human being.

Fair vs Unfair Criticism

Our old friend Jack Dunphy is noticing the same thing we are:

• I’ve been a cop for nearly 40 years. For the last 20 of them, I’ve had the good fortune of being granted the platform, first at National Review Online, later at City Journal, Ricochet, and here at PJ Media, to write on behalf of my fellow police officers when their actions came under what I considered to be unfair criticism. Police work has grown more difficult since I began, all the more so when cops’ split-second decisions are scrutinized by an uninformed public after having been mischaracterized in the media, sometimes deliberately.
  
  So it saddens me to observe some of the asininity on display among some of my fellow police officers in recent days as fear of the coronavirus pandemic brings the country to its knees. Reason and common sense have in some places been abandoned in favor of a level of social control rarely seen in any country that calls itself free, much less in the United States of America. Here in Southern California, we have seen police officers ticketing a surfer on an otherwise empty beach, citing people for sitting in parked cars while watching a sunset, and, in what may be the most farcical display of them all, using not just one but two boats to corral and arrest a lone paddleboarder off the coast of Malibu.
  
  I do not discount the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic. Indeed, I am of a sufficiently advanced age to be considered a high-risk patient if I were to contract the disease. But neither do I discount the genuine threat to liberty posed by the various orders, decrees, edicts, and mandates lately imposed by the nation’s governors, mayors, health commissioners, and every other sort of government functionary exercising their newly discovered power to limit the freedom of their fellow citizens. In the case of the people being hassled for watching the sunset, cited above, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department was so proud of this exercise of authority that they made it their pinned tweet on their Twitter account.

He (and we) are of a generation of cops who remember exactly what the oath was we took years ago, and it wasn't to be petty tyrants in the service of political agendas.

Here's a bit of advice that hasn't steered us wrong in the decades we've been around:

• Lacking a declaration of Martial Law, the City can still unilaterally close down stadiums, museums, park buildings, licensed businesses and such. We enforce those ordinances.
  
  But restricting movement and peaceful gatherings on the public way or upon private property absent any sort of criminal behavior or intent, you better take a long hard look at the order being given and the person giving that order and under what authority it is being issued.

Closing down church services? Conducting checkpoints on the public way? "Sweeping the corners" without warnings and making arrests without any sort of dispersal order as happened on the west side last week? And then promptly disavowed by the mayor? You can guess exactly where that one is going....and you better be sure you're ready, willing and able to take that ride under the bus.

House Arrestee Murderer

Once again, the stupidity of Cook County courts and jails:

• A man on house arrest for carrying a gun without a license allegedly shot and killed a 15-year-old boy who lived across the street from his Lawndale home, Cook County prosecutors say.
  
  Dequawn Little, 21, was allegedly close enough to his electronic monitoring box, located in the dining room of the house, that he didn’t trigger a violation, according to a bond proffer prepared by the Cook County state’s attorney’s office.

So let us get this straight:

• arrested on a gun charge
• granted electronic monitoring
• gets another gun while on monitoring
• goes outside, fires gun, kills juvenile
• all without triggering any sort of alarm

Great system you got there Toni, Crimesha, Dart and Evans. Seems to be working fantastically!

Low Class Slum Times

This appeared in the Slum Times a few days ago:

• Over a 10-day period late last month, as the COVID-19 outbreak was taking hold, Chicago Police officers called in sick more than 5,300 times.
  
  Data obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times through a Freedom of Information Act request shows officers assigned to a unit that has little to no face-to-face interaction with the public called off work more than any other group of officers between March 16 and March 25.
  
  Those officers are assigned to the CPD’s Alternate Response Section, which typically works out of a city-owned facility at 2111 W. Lexington St. — sharing a building with the city’s Department of Public Health. Officers assigned to ARS answer phone calls from members of the public who want to report a non-emergency criminal act, such as a vehicle break-in.
  
  The section is staffed by officers “on permanent light-duty awaiting reassignment as well as those officers who have been stripped of their police powers,” said Luis Agostini, a CPD spokesman.

You know who else works there?

• Officers recovering from catastrophic injuries, surgical recoveries, heart issues, cancer patients.

Officers don't just get to sit at home until they're cured or die.  Medical time - while somewhat generous - is finite. If you're gone for a year, you can be placed in a no-pay status. But while undergoing treatments, you might be susceptible to medical complications (lowered immunity, medicines that prevent your blood from clotting, chemicals that render your bones brittle, make you nauseous, cause vomiting or other uncomfortable bodily issues.)

In an effort to maintain insurance coverage during what would undoubtedly bankrupt just about any middle-class household, the Alternate Response Section allows Officers to earn a living and maintain some dignity while working toward a pension.

The Scum Times seems to be implying these Officers are calling off work even if they have zero contact with the public at large, when in fact, many are already in fragile health and they might be calling off due to chemotherapy side effects, internal medical complications or similar issues.

UPDATE: Yes, we've heard of the abusers. We also know the City refuses to weed them out for political reasons.

Paul Vallas Asks Questions

From a Paul Vallas social media post:

• LET'S BE STRAIGHT ABOUT OUR SUPPORT FIRST RESPONDERS
  
  Complaints from the family of a 911 operator who died of complications from the Coronavirus that he and his co-workers weren’t provided adequate protective gear, among the continuing stream of concerns expressed on social media about lack of city preparedness and support for its “First Responders”, may be legitimate. This raises a number of direct questions the city needs to answer.
  
  1.) Police Officers are saying that they are not getting “replacements” for their used PPE Kits. Each Kit has one mask and one pair of gloves, neither of which are reusable.
  
  2.) Are Police and other city employees still being required to swipe in and out despite the fact that it is the complete opposite of social distancing and exposes Officers to devices that could have been touched by someone with the virus?
  
  3.) Are First Responders waiting as long as a week for their coronavirus test result and if so are they still requiring them to be on duty while they await the results?
  
  4.) Is or is there not a 14 day quarantine directive for First Responders who have been in contact with an infected colleague or citizen?
  
  5.) Why are cleaning services only cleaning work stations of an effective member and not the common areas, swiping machines and door handlers? In the Area 1 Detective Division, were a detective tested positive, there was no cleanup of common space, door handles, etc. A sign was simply posted at the Detectives work space telling people not to use it.
  
  6.) Are there 8,000 face shields donated by Ford Motor Company and Troy Design and Manufacturing, consignments of hand sanitizers donated by Malort and 125 infrared thermometers for testing for the virus that have not been distributed and if so why?
  
  It also needs to be stated publicly and unequivocally by the city of Chicago that active duty “First Responders” who die from Coronavirus will be classified as a “Death in the Line of Duty” with the Officers family receiving full death benefits. Prior to the Officers death there were rumors that the City was not going to go that route. In a city that annually pays many tens of millions in settle EMT’s and millions more to,private law firms to negotiate the settlements it would be the height of disrespect to discern were active duty first responders contracted the virus.

This might be the hard liquor talking, but he seems like he'd give us a fair shake.

Creeping Totalitarianism

Some major league push back in other states:

• When a Christian church in Louisville, Kentucky, was told they were not allowed to attend Easter Sunday church service in their vehicles, the group sued the liberal mayor giving the order, and the city. A federal judge ruled Saturday that the church was right about their religious liberties being violated, permitted the establishment to hold drive-up service, and offered a firm rebuke of the mayor for attempting to “criminalize” the “celebration of Easter.”
  

Then there was this in Colorado:

• In an incident caught on video, a former Colorado State Patrol trooper said he was handcuffed in front of his 6-year old daughter on a near-empty softball field Sunday by Brighton police officers enforcing social distancing rules. The department apologized Tuesday afternoon, calling the incident an "overreach by our police officers."

The only ones violating the "social distancing" in that case were the police confronting the father/daughter (who live in the same house) playing by themselves. Here's to hoping the former cop gets a nice settlement.

Compare this to what happened on the west side last week with "checkpoints" being put in place attempting to restrict public access to public streets. We've gotten more than a few e-mails about what went down during the week and we're looking into it. Seems Groot held a press conference Thursday or Friday and disavowed all knowledge of what 011 and 015 were doing in regard to dispersing groups of people, which isn't reflected in the arrest queues.

Don't get caught up in some boss's shady shit Officers.

Still Short Equipment

A bunch of donations are NOT making it to the troops:

• According to members of the Chicago Fire and Police Departments, the Ford Motor Company has generously donated 8,000 face shields, 3,000 of which were to be distributed to firefighters, with the remainder issued to police officers.  Malört, a firm which manufactures hand sanitizer, has similarly donated consignments of the hand disinfectant specifically earmarked for police and firefighters serving Chicago.  In addition to face shields and hand sanitizer, 125 infrared thermometers were also provided to the CFD for the purpose of testing firefighters for the virus.
  
  As puzzling as it may sound, particularly with Ms. Lightfoot, Chicago’s scintillating leader with the aura of Lawrence of Arabia at the helm, none of this reported bounty has been distributed to whom it was intended. Although the face shields were donated on March 28, according to members of the CPD and CFD, the protective gear and sanitizer was seized on April 2 and is undergoing a review according to departmental policy. Members of both departments have also disclosed there is a shortage of N95 masks for police and firefighters, both departments have been forced to continue performing their duties with outdated hand sanitizer, and police recruits have been assigned the responsibility of disinfecting police vehicles without being issued protective clothing.
  
  The fact city policy has forbidden distribution of this equipment, of course, prompts the critical question: Why has Mayor Lightfoot not intervened and suspended CPD or CFD policy requiring evaluation of donated face shields and hand sanitizer? While CPD and CFD policy is the result of prudent deliberation, there are circumstances when a crisis looms, and broad mayoral discretion is unavoidable. COVID-19 is certainly one such crisis. As mayor of a city in the throes of the coronavirus, it is undeniably within Lightfoot’s authority to rescind the regulations to direct the donated face shields and hand sanitizer from being issued to CPD and CFD personnel. If the White House can direct federal agencies to accept Emergency Use Authorizations allowing the suspension of clearance processes, and if the Cook County Board can allow Cook County’s mean mom, Toni Preckwinkle, expanded power to contend with Covid-19, then it is unquestionably within the authority of Lightfoot to take the resolute step to temporarily suspend CPD and CFD standards to ensure its employees are issued the proper safety equipment.

We don't know what you all have gotten, but aside from the badly prepared and heat-sealed "PPE's" assembled by recruits in one of HQ's larger rooms and a few gloves we got from ambulance crews, we've seen no masks, no non-expired sanitizer and nothing resembling an actual vehicle sanitation kit.

Nice Gesture

Someone who has taken a lot of heat here over the years:

• Southwest Side Ald. Matt O’Shea will bring lunch to all of the city’s police districts, detective divisions and headquarters on Tuesday, his office said.
  
  O’Shea, who represents the first responder-heavy 19th Ward, will deliver more than 1,900 pizza, pasta and salad lunches, his office said. The alderman will be joined by interim police Superintendent Charlie Beck at the 9th District, O’Shea’s spokeswoman said.
  
  O’Shea’s 19th Ward Youth Foundation launched a GoFundMe three weeks ago and has raised more than $76,000 for front-line medical workers and other first responders. Its goal is to raise $100,000.
  
  His office said the purpose of the initiative is not just to provide meals to those on the front lines of the COVID-19 struggle, but to support local restaurants whose business has suffered because of the pandemic.

Sure it's political - what isn't in this town? Hopefully, it covers all the watches....after all, we never close, even in the midst of a health emergency.

(comments closed here because we don't feel like weeding out all of the BS that's sure to pop up - just say thanks and move on...there's plenty of time for politics tomorrow)

End to an Ugly Week

It may be that more Chicagoans died of lead poisoning this past week than COVID-19 complications.

Per HeyJackass.com:

• Last Week’s Totals (4/5 – 4/11)
  Shot & Killed: 23
  Shot & Wounded: 56
  Total Shot: 79
  Total Homicides: 25

April has already tallied thirty homicides in just under twelve days, helped along by some very warm spring days.

Oooo, Poor Baby

Nerve, cheek, gall, chutzpah, audacity, irony - there are a lot of names for this:

• Remember Jessica Huff? She’s the woman who allegedly stole piles of hand sanitizer, high-grade face masks, gloves, and disinfectant wipes from storage areas and patient rooms at the University of Chicago Hospital last month as the COVID-19 outbreak surged.
  
  Huff was a patient at U of C at the time. Police allegedly found the hoard of precious life-saving materials in her room, ostensibly where she could have access to it while others could not.
  
  She’s been held in the county jail since then on a burglary charge as well as on an outstanding warrant from DuPage County.
  
  Yesterday, CBS2 aired a sob story piece from Jessica, who took to the airwaves to (wait for it) complain about an alleged lack of face masks, gloves, and other protective equipment in the jail hospital.
  
  Isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think?

SeeBS is making her out to be some sort of victim, when she's been the one stealing stuff that First Responders and hospitals have a damn hard time finding.

We're really missing the vigilantes that used to take care of this sort of behavior.

An Interesting Turn of Events (UPDATE)

So a juvenile assailant gets shot on the Red Line after attacking a security guard.

But it turns out that the "unarmed security guard" was doing what smart people do, and armed himself before patrolling the Red Line, in violation of his company's policy and in violation of the company's contract with the CTA. Then he lied about it. A lot:

• New details emerged of Thursday morning’s accidental shooting aboard the Red Line near Belmont on Friday afternoon.
  
  Eric Camp, a 38-year-old guard who was working for a CTA security contractor, was shot in the leg and a 16-year-old girl suffered a graze wound after a gun in Camp’s jacket pocket fired during a physical altercation on a southbound train around 4 a.m., police said. Camp and his partner were asking the girl to stop panhandling on the train, according to a CPD report.
  
  Prosecutors charged Camp with felony aggravated unlawful use of a weapon, misdemeanor possession of a firearm, and an unspecified municipal violation.

Turns out the juvenile female has quite the distinguished record:

• The girl is charged with two felony counts of aggravated battery of a transit employee in connection with Thursday’s incident. Prosecutors also charged her with felony robbery and felony aggravated battery in a public place in connection with an Apr. 2 robbery at the Roosevelt Red Line station.

And now, one of our intrepid commentators has this unpublished bit of news:

• OT: 16 year old girl causing disturbance on CTA train at 4 in the morning Thursday gets accidentally shot during struggle with security guards. CTA is outraged and demands security company fire the two security guards involved because the CTA is committed to the safety of it’s passengers. Interesting because the 16 year old was with the two people that killed the former Marine on Tuesday by pushing him in front of moving CTA train. She is also wanted for a beating and robbery on the subway.

That tidbit doesn't seem to have hit the media yet. According to the recent charges in the Arlington Heights home invasion, it would seem that this young offender is eligible for her very own Felony Murder case.

UPDATE: An arrest is made:

• A North Center man was charged Saturday with murder for allegedly pushing a former Marine into the path of a Red Line train in the Loop this week.
  
  Ryan Munn, 18, was arrested at his home on the 2100 block of West Bradley on Friday evening. Police said he was identified as the person who punched and pushed 29-year-old Mamadou Balde from the Jackson station platform around 5:13 p.m. Tuesday.

You can see his mugshot over at the CWB blog. He has quite the number of run-ins with the police, too. He seems to hang out with the wilding crowds/flash mobs that loot Michigan Avenue shops (video at the CWB blog link), but like most of those offenders, Crimesha didn't seem to charge him despite the video evidence.

Sounds Familiar

We've been asking this question on-and-off for over a week now:

• SPRINGFIELD — Like many Chicagoans and other home-bound folks across the state, red-light cameras must be getting bored.
  
  With many city and suburban streets looking like the main drag of a ghost town, the hated traffic enforcement cameras are, not surprisingly, catching fewer drivers running red lights during the coronavirus pandemic.
  
  In Chicago, red-light violations were down 45% in March compared to the month before, according to city figures. And compared to March 2019, red-light violations in Chicago were down 54%, numbering just 19,840 in March 2020 compared to 42,812 in March 2019.
  
  And the shutdown was only in effect for part of last month.

Like we said, Groot needs Chicago up and running, committing traffic and parking violations to feed the government coffers.

Since the media is stealing story ideas from the blog (again), maybe they can try asking about sales tax revenues next? Convention revenues? Landing fees at the airports? Don't forget Prickwrinkle's share. Then after they blow you off, try the Tollway Authority and then State government accounts.