She Knows a Guy

Remember....this is a "reform" mayor:

• A campaign contributor to Mayor Lori Lightfoot landed a $1.6 million no-bid deal with Chicago Public Schools after the mayor personally vouched for him, then delivered computers that in some cases didn’t meet district purchasing standards or work for virtual learning.

  District officials said they bought the used computers in April to meet an “urgent need” as schools scrambled to get devices to students and the district’s traditional vendors faced backlogs. Yet more than a third are still sitting in a district warehouse as backups, a Chalkbeat/Better Government Association investigation has found.

  Mark Aistrope, the CEO of Chicago-based Meeting Tomorrow, who contributed nearly $30,000 to Lightfoot’s mayoral bid, emailed the mayor in late March, saying his company could quickly provide tens of thousands of computers to the school district when it needed them most.

  Early the next morning, Lightfoot wrote CPS CEO Janice Jackson to put in a good word.

This is the Janice Jackson whose top aide (Pedro Soto) recently pled guilty to leaking bid info on a $1 BILLION (with a B) contract to one of the bidding parties. Now you have Groot vouching for a $1.6 million contract to a campaign contributor to this same Janice Jackson?

Groot fit into the Chicago-way of doing business pretty easily, didn't she? And Jackson at the nexus of all this corruption? 

Curious and curiouser.

Shots Fired...by Google-me

Readers will remember we didn't appreciate Google-me when he was here as the political mouthpiece of the Department, but this was a priceless jab at what he left behind for greener pastures on the east coast (click for larger version):

Google-me with the TKO.

We have confirmed via numerous sources that Brownie and Carter completely missed Day One and then ducked out of Day Two after the first stop. Anything else you hear - especially from the CPD Twitter feed - is an ass-covering in progress.

A Visual Representation

So when a District is down 50% manpower, this is what it looks like when two jobs come out:

Two jobs, and the District is left with two cars covering all the District. 

That's a safety issue if nothing else, especially considering the size of 017.

Social "Justice" LA Style

By the inimitable Jack Dunphy of course:

• Former New York mayor Ed Koch, on the occasion of his defeat in the 1989 Democratic primary by the late David Dinkins, was asked if he would again seek public office. “No,” he said. “The people have spoken . . . and they must be punished.”

  Well and properly punished they were, as things turned out. During Dinkins’s single term as mayor, crime and disorder in New York City reached their horrifying zenith. In 1990, 2,245 people were murdered in the city, one factor among many that earned Dinkins the reputation as the most feckless man ever to occupy City Hall. (Only recently has a challenger emerged.)

  Now stepping up to be similarly punished are the voters of Los Angeles County, who in their wisdom have installed George Gascón as district attorney. Gascón is the latest of the so-called social justice prosecutors to win election in some of America’s major cities, following in the path of Kim Foxx in Chicago, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, and Chesa Boudin in San Francisco.

  Gascón was unabashed in embracing social justice themes during the campaign but gave little hint of the sweeping changes he would institute within minutes of taking office. He was officially sworn in at noon on Dec. 7, and at 12:03 p.m. that day an email was sent to all D.A. staff announcing the immediate implementation of nine new policies which go far beyond those he practiced in his former post as district attorney in San Francisco.

As usual, go read it all. Dunphy foresees a bleak future for cities and counties where the Soros-funded States Attorneys and District Attorneys hold sway over the unequal application of the law.

Where's the Monitor?

Remember that Consent Decree thing? 

The big push for "span of control" where a sergeant could only supervise ten officers at a time? This would provide more direct supervision so Officers wouldn't be doing naughty things and supervision could more easily direct missions, strategies and emerging crime trends.

So how is this allowed? (we cropped out the extraneous information):

Murder Central....a Desk Sergeant....and zero field supervision. What exactly are the officers supposed to do if they need a sergeant to sign a tow? Advise them through a particularly sticky domestic? Handle a squad car accident? Run a homicide scene?

It doesn't get better:

 

The very next day....a Desk Sergeant....and the one field supervisor working is going downtown for the business sector detail. So once again, no one watching a District that has had ninety-five murders and three-or-four-hundred shootings.

Someone want to get hold of Ms. Hickey?

Shortages Continue

Is this ever going to be addressed?

017 midnights the other Friday:

 

No Desk Sergeant, no early sergeants.

1711, 1713, 1731 down on the early side; 1722, 1772 down on the late side. No wagon unless a beat car is doing both jobs. 50% unmanned.

But 1740 is headed downtown with three cars.

Coming Soon

We'll just leave this here:

Side effects? What side effects?

This is XiNN

XiNN laying the groundwork for the next "pandemic":

• Authorities in Kazakhstan have denied a report published by Chinese officials that the country is experiencing an outbreak of "unknown pneumonia" potentially deadlier than the novel coronavirus.

  On Thursday, the Chinese Embassy in Kazakhstan issued a warning to citizens living in the Central Asian country that the pneumonia had killed more than 1,700 people.

  "Kazakhstani Health Department and other agencies are conducting comparative research and have not defined the nature of the pneumonia virus," the statement said.
  

So China - long known for telling the truth every time they're asked about anything - releases this "statement."

XiNN - a wholly owned Chinese media subsidiary long known for telling the truth every time they report something - runs with it, even though:

• CNN has been unable to independently verify the Chinese Embassy report and has reached out to Kazakhstan's Ministry of Healthcare for further details.

Figure this one will "arrive" just in time for summer, resulting in all sorts of lockdowns, shutdowns, mask mandates, cancellations and censorship.

Are you seeing a pattern yet?

UPDATE: We're aware it's from July. Do you recall when the media started with their "red wave mirage" reporting before hundreds of thousands of ballots appeared in the wee hours election night? It's called "prepping the narrative."

What the Absolute Fuck? (UPDATES)

Is this fucker even in town?

And if he isn't why isn't the First Deputy taking his place?

• ABSOLUTELY UNFORGIVABLE!!!

  For the first time EVER neither the Superintendent [n]or the First Deputy bothered to attend Operation Santa today. Apparently they both had more important things to do than to visit with the widows and children of our fellow police officers who were murdered serving this city.

  Brown and Carter can never atone for not supporting the families of people like Bauer, Jimenez, Gary, Marmelejo,Smetana, Gordon and more... These men were all killed in the line of duty and left young children behind. It’s not too much to ask that when we lose one of our own that the Superintendent and First Deputy visit their families at Christmas.

  WE NEVER FORGET.... BUT THEY DID!

There are certain things you have to do when you're in charge of one of the largest municipal police departments in the nation. A department that has given approximately five-hundred-fifty lives in service to Chicago.

Brownie might not have a historical attachment to the Department, but Carter's sin is the far bigger slap in the face to the men and women of the Department, living and dead. 

What fucking assholes.

Here's the media coverage.

UPDATE: DAMAGE CONTROL!!!

Brownie is telling people he was there, he just chose not to get out of the car.

• THIS IS A LIE

How do we know it's a lie? Figure it out. 

UPDATE: So this is a two day event. You'd think that the top brass would show up for the entire thing, as every family that suffered a loss deserved to see the top people offering them comfort.

Brown and Carter were shamed into making a photo-op with Santa at the start of Day Two....and then?

• SCC, I was a couple of houses ahead on the route. "Santa's Helpers" arrive shortly before the Brass and Santa to make sure everyone is ready. After the first photo-op, which was posted on the CPD Twitter page, Brown and Carter DUCKED OUT! Neither one appeared at a single family's house after the first one. These two assholes couldn't even make it through a couple of hours on a weekend while the families have to live 24/7/365 without their Fallen Officer. I am totally disgusted by the antics of these idiots.

But hey, don't forget - eight-for-eight on Christmas Eve and New Years Eve regardless of the plans you might have had for your RDO.

This is a Training Slide?

Someone needs to be fired:

Encouraging cannibalism is the height of unprofessional behavior.

Command Changes (UPDATES)

What we've been able to track down:

• Captains:
  
  Parham
  
  Perez
  
  Mullinex
  
  Ramirez
  
  Dunnem
  
  Lamb
  
  
  
  Commander:
  
  Lt. Brown to Commander Narcotics/OCD
  
  Lt. S. Carter to 006
  
  Cpt. McKenzie to 007
  
  
  
  Deputy Chief:
  
  Mohammad from 006 to DC A/South *
  
  Larry Snelling from 007  to DC Academy (was sgt 2 years ago) *
  
  Godsell from Academy to Compstat (replacing Khan & Lemmer)

Good Lord. 

UPDATE: Seems we made City Hall angry by posting the changes before they were official? Or someone at City Hall read the comments and decided a couple of these promos were too controversial?

• Snelling to A/S
  
  Muhammad to D Unit

Nice to know we're living rent free in Groot's head. 

UPDATE: Supposedly, a big pow-wow at City Hall about the spot in 006. The optics look bad, having the First Deputy's wife promoted and having her name attached to the test cheating scandal and a few other incidents. She might get a Captain spot in 022, but the alderman there doesn't want her.

Four Thousand Shot

Friday milestone:

 Congratulations to Brownie and Groot. 

The buck stops with you two.

Just Fire the Teachers

Last we checked, the employees don't get to dictate policy - the bosses do, and that's the City:

• As the fight continues over the safe reopening of Chicago Public Schools in the midst of a raging public health crisis, the Chicago Teachers Union has released for the first time a list of demands it wants met before members return to schools, including lower COVID-19 test positivity rates, testing and vaccination protocols and changes to both hybrid and remote learning.

  Some of the demands are likely to face strong and immediate rejection by city officials who have been adamant that it’s up to them to decide how and when the nation’s third-largest school district will return to classrooms for the first time since March.

Gutless Groot won't actually stand up for taxpayers though. 

One of our commentators claims teachers are demanding $5,000 in "hazard pay." That's probably what they saved in gas and dry cleaning bills already this year.

Glimmer of Intelligence

From Groot, believe it or not. Anyone here ever worked the lockup?

• Backers of a proposed ordinance that would guarantee arrested people prompt access to an attorney say a counterproposal from Mayor Lori Lightfoot could undermine the effort.

  Sponsored by Ald. Leslie Hairston (5th), the proposal would require Chicago police to allow detained people to use a phone within one hour of their arrest to contact family and an attorney.

  The ordinance is backed by the Cook County Public Defender’s Office; legal groups, including the National Lawyers Guild; civil rights advocates like First Defense Legal Aid; and more than 200,000 other individuals and organizations that signed an open letter asking for Lightfoot’s support.

The dozens of times we helped out in the lockup, there hasn't been a single instance of anyone being denied a phone call, usually within forty-five minutes of arrest, depending on the speed of the officer typing the arrest report. It just doesn't happen anymore. Someone actually got Groot to listen to reality.

Guess who the politicians are trotting out for this?

• Hairston invoked the example of former Police Cmdr. Jon Burge, whose notorious crew of officers tortured hundreds of Black men into giving false confessions between the ’70s and ’90s. Many of those confessions were later overturned.

Eeeeek! Jon Burge! By the way, many more of those confessions stood up to multiple reviews and recantations were proven to be manufactured. Burge was suspended in 1991 - twenty-nine years ago, and fired in 1993. There pretty much isn't an officer or detective around that even crossed paths with Burge any more, let alone worked for him - under one hundred for sure.

This is a solution in search of a problem that doesn't exist in any meaningful numbers.

Perspective Again

From our comments:

• Of the 11,481,848 tests performed (thru Thursday) 881,032 were done in THREE ZIP codes! That's 7.67%. ZIP code 61820 (Champaign) had 524,856 tests. 3,868 positives. 0.74% positivity rate.

  The Top 3 testing ZIP codes are from Champaign/Urbana??? Not Chicago?

  Could it be that University of Illinois MANDATES their students get tested 2x a week (On-campus living) and 3x a week (For off-campus living). Athletes 4x a week (off-season) and 7x a week (in-season)

Massive testing of a captive population that is the least susceptible doesn't give any sort of realistic picture.

They Did Hit Him

The "Shots Fired At / By Police" post the other day did result in the assailant catching lead:

• A Rogers Park man was ordered held without bail Thursday after allegedly shooting at police, who fired back and wounded the man earlier this week, authorities said. The shootout occurred Tuesday afternoon near the Metra station at Ravenswood and Lunt avenues.

  Chicago officers were trying to arrest Kenneth Olugbode, 25, for allegedly attacking his ex-girlfriend and stealing and threatening to kill her dog, Cook County prosecutors said in court Thursday. Officers pulled over Olugbode about 5 p.m. Tuesday in the 6900 block of North Ravenswood Avenue in Rogers Park. After being boxed in by an unmarked police car on Ravenswood, Olugbode allegedly got out of his car and fired two shots at three officers, prosecutors said.

  The officers returned gunfire, hitting Olugbode in his shoulders, his right hip and right hand, prosecutors said. Olugbode was taken to St. Francis Hospital in Evanston in serious condition, but his condition has since stabilized, prosecutors said.

We have no idea why Crimesha wouldn't have I-bonded him out already. This injustice must not stand!

In the meantime, good shooting by the Officers.

Now the Media Reports It?

We guess since the feebs are involved, it's okay now?

• The FBI and Metra Police Department are asking for help identifying the gunman who opened fire with a collapsible rifle on the McCormick Place platform last week.

  As CBS 2 [....] reported Wednesday, the FBI released startling video Wednesday of the man, who had just stepped off a train when he fired the rifle.

  Around 10:20 a.m. on Dec. 1, a man got off a northbound Metra Electric District train at the McCormick Place station, pulled out a collapsible rifle from his backpack, and fired a single shot while standing on the platform, according to the FBI and Metra Police.

That "CBS 2 reported Wednesday [09 December]" is hilarious as we told everyone about this on 04 December....and the CWB blog got it on 01 December. We were so far behind the curve on this one we can't even pretend to charge SeeBS $50 for stealing it.

Contrarian Articles

Florian and Marty have been busy. 

First, Sohnke takes a look at our own Chicago socialists:

• If the Chicago City Council had a Mount Rushmore for sheer stupidity, the likenesses of its six-member Socialist Caucus would certainly feature prominently.

  A group of cranks with crackpot ideas, these six ideological extremists include: Daniel La Spata, the delicate flower of the 1st Ward; 20th Ward militant Jeanette Taylor; Byron Sigcho-Lopez, the revolutionary who represents the 25th Ward; the 33rd Ward’s flighty Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez; 35th Ward blowhard Carlos Ramirez-Rosa; and the 40th Ward’s hip-hop artist-turned-officeholder, Andre Vasquez. The Chicago City Council’s version of “The Squad,” all but one was elected in 2019, and all six have backgrounds in community organizing.

  A cult of action, community organizing is best defined as the practice of activists identifying a specific aggrieved population, and inflaming passions over their presumed plight. When a base is roused over the [supposedly] lamentable conditions in which they exist, activist leaders take collective action to apply pressure to local officials to redress their grievances, mainly by insisting the affected group receive money.

The Preib conducts an in-depth analysis of some Cook County judges tossing some sand in the gears of the "wrongful conviction" movement:

• Have judges in Chicago had enough of Cook County prosecutor Kimberly Foxx and her media enablers? It appears they have.

  Cook County judges Timothy Joyce and Arthur Hill, for example, recently refused to reverse the convictions of gang members Wayne Antusas and Nicholas Morfin at the behest of the Foxx administration. The men were convicted for their role in the 1995 murder of two girls in a botched gang hit.

  Not only did two different judges refuse to reverse the convictions of the two men, despite Foxx prosecutors asking them to do so, but Judge Joyce also stated he now has doubts about his decision two years ago to drop the conviction of a third gang member, Matthew Sopron, convicted of ordering the gang hit gone wrong.

As usual, click over to the links and read the entire articles.

Alternative Media Strikes Again

The big media won't touch it because of all the politics involved - but BlockClubChicago did:

• Restaurants and bars across the state are banned from serving customers indoors, but there are two places in Chicago where you can still legally drink inside a bar: the city’s airports.

  Despite an emergency travel order requiring travelers from 46 states to quarantine upon landing in Chicago, people are still allowed eat and drink alcohol inside bars at Midway and O’Hare. That’s because the airports are exempt from Gov. JB Pritzker’s Tier 3 mitigation measures.

  Allowing indoor drinking at high-traffic airports is dangerous, one doctor said, calling the move “ludicrous.”

"Ludicrous" because those spots went to big name political contributors and contractors. And you can't pay the pipers if you aren't selling $19 dollar burgers and $25 beers.

Lost Perspective

The country as a whole has lost all sense of perspective, by which we mean people - mostly the media and democrats - are driving a panic to shut down the economy and control the populace.

Here's something most people don't know:

• The Illinois Department of Public Health says that they've performed 11,481,848 tests for COVID (as of Thursday afternoon). That's a lot of tests.
• The entire population of Illinois is 12.67 million, minus whoever has moved out recently. That works out to around  90% of the population.

Do you know nine-out-of-ten people who have gotten tested? We don't. We barely know four-out-of-ten and that's mostly because the Department has been ravaged by COVID. Among our non-police friends it's even lower...maybe two-out-of-ten. They aren't sick and they aren't traveling, so why get tested? ILDPH isn't telling anyone how many repeat tests they've done, but no doubt it's tens of thousands.

Do you know the fatality rates nationally? This guy does:

He's the Governor of Florida and his state is open for business based on science.

How about some actual perspective? Our Stat Guy has some numbers:

• People 20-49 - the bar hopping public - it's a 99.98% recovery rate.  In reverse, that's a .02% fatality rate.  Put that into perspective, that's 1 out of 5,000 people.
• One's odds of dying in a car crash (according to the National Safety Council) are 1 in 106.
• People 0 - 19, the recovery rate is 99.997%.  In reverse, the IFR (Infection Fatality Rate) is .003%!!!  Or 1 in 33,333.

There were a bunch of headlines Thursday reported more people died of COVID Wednesday than died on 9/11 - over 3,000. First off, they don't report how many had extensive comorbidities, nor how many fell into the elderly category. Do you know how many people die in the United States every single day?

• approximately 7,100 of all causes.

You've noticed a massive uptick in funerals? Even though you can't go to the church services or the funeral homes, we haven't noticed any more than usual. What we have noticed is a massive increase in boarded-up businesses. How is it that we notice that - which doesn't affect us nearly as much as dozens more dead friends and relatives would?

Some troll, no doubt directed here by the Stan Rather scandal links, was spouting off about ICU's being at capacity, morgues utilizing refrigerated trailers and doctors/nurses freaking out:

• ICU's are not anywhere near capacity - we happen to frequent some of our finer medical facilities on a weekly basis, and there are plenty of beds;
• We also happen to frequent the Cook County Morgue semi-regularly. No reefers on standby for overflow bodies;
• We haven't seen a nurse freaking out since we forgot to take our shoes off after walking the dog in the rain the other day, but she relates no work-related freakouts either.

Perspective has been warped. Badly. It needs to stop. Sensible precautions are called for, but wholesale panic-mongering is not.