Another Day, Another Englewood Victim

What matters again? We keep forgetting:

• A 6-year-old girl was shot and seriously wounded Tuesday afternoon in the West Englewood neighborhood on the South Side.
  
  The girl was in front of her home in the 6000 block of South Paulina about 1 p.m. when she was shot in the abdomen, according to Chicago Police.
  
  She was taken in serious condition to Comer Children’s Hospital, police said.

Not sure how the denizens of 007 are going to make this into the police's fault, but we're betting that her "What I did on Summer Vacation" essay is going to be quite the story.

Another Day, Another Officer Down

Kansas City, Kansas:

• An officer with Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department was in critical condition Tuesday afternoon after being shot while on-duty.
  
  The officer, whose identity has not been released, had responded to a report of person being shot at by several people in a vehicle. When he and other officers arrived on the scene, the three or four occupants of the car jumped out and ran away, police said in a news release.
  
  One officer took one suspect into custody at 1:39 p.m., but a second officer was shot at 1:57 p.m. when he tried to make contact with another suspect, police said.

Unfrtunately, this Officer has since died.

And earlier today, it was revealed that the Officer shot near St. Louis is paralyzed from the neck down:

• A suburban St. Louis police officer shot in the neck during a traffic stop is paralyzed from the neck down due to what the Ballwin police chief calls "catastrophic damage to his spinal cord."
  
  Officer Michael Flamion was shot from behind on July 8 after stopping a man for speeding in Ballwin, a well-to-do St. Louis County town of about 30,000 residents. Antonio Taylor of St. Louis was arrested later that day and is jailed on $500,000 bond on several charges, including first-degree assault of a law enforcement officer.

Prayers for all of the fallen and wounded.

Stop the Violence Rally Ends in....

...go on....guess....you know you want to:

• Ohio police on Tuesday were investigating a shooting at an impromptu anti-violence rally that killed a 19-year-old man and wounded a 12-year-old boy.
  
  As many as 300 people filled a lakeside park Sunday night in Euclid, outside Cleveland, for the "Stop the Violence Beach Party" when the shots rang out.
  
  The Cuyahoga County medical examiner said Phillip Banks was shot in the head and died later in a nearby hospital.
  
  Police did not identify the 12-year-old boy. They said he was shot in the back. Paramedics rushed him to the hospital.
  
  Residents had organized the beach party on the shore of Lake Erie.

Yup, it ended in violence. Imagine that.

It's the Courts John

And the prison system:

• Then blue and red lights flooded her block in Austin as police and paramedics pulled up close to midnight Sunday. Two men had been shot at a house party in the 5000 block of West Jackson Boulevard, the end of another violent weekend in Chicago that saw seven people killed and at least 52 wounded.
  
  The toll brings the number of people shot in Chicago this year to nearly 2,200. At least 329 of them have been killed, about 100 more than this time last year.
  
  The spike prompted the Chicago Police Department to form a new summer patrol unit last month to tamp down violence during months when shootings historically rise. First Deputy Superintendent John Escalante said commanders were meeting Monday "coming up with what else we can do for this week."

You can stop having useless meetings first of all.

• "We added resources each day," Escalante told reporters at police headquarters. "Those commanders are here right now, meeting with the chief of patrol."
  
  But he said "the courts, our state legislators, other community activists" need to step up and help the police "hold people accountable for their gun violence."
  
  He cited the killing of Raygene Jackson, 38, who was shot around 4:45 a.m. Sunday in the 4500 block of West Maypole Street.
  
  "I don't mean to victimize this victim any further, this man lost his life," Escalante said. "But our frustration is, in 1995 he was sentenced to 46 years in the Illinois Department of Corrections for a murder. In 1995. He was paroled last year. How and why he's on the street, I don't know.
  
  "But if he was still serving his sentence, he wouldn't be a murder victim right now," he said.

Or he was murdered, he'd be counted in some prison stats and not a Chicago statistic, which would make Special Ed very happy.

• Escalante also mentioned a 20-year-old man who was killed in a double shooting in Austin shortly before 8 p.m.
  
  Carlos Harding and another 20-year-old man were found shot inside a black SUV in the 100 block of North Lavergne Avenue. Harding suffered a gunshot wound to the head and was taken to Stroger Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, police said. The other man was shot in the leg and was stabilized at Stroger, Quaid said.
  
  Escalante noted that Harding had a record of 61 arrests. "Sixty-one arrests at the age of 20," he said. "That's the frustration we deal with. He has, and I believe it is correct but we'll double check, he has 20 convictions. Now granted, most of them are low-level misdemeanors but he has 20 convictions at the age of 20 years old.

But we imagine cops are the problem for....for...well, for something we guess. Arresting some asshole 61 times before age 20 pretty much means you're doing something that attracts attention to yourself. So blame the courts and the prison system for releasing these oxygen thieves back on the street, not the cops doing their part to keep the streets safer.

Shortages on the Horizon

This popped up in the comment section a few days ago:

• So drove a copper to the 4th floor to retire the other day. Came back with 2 gems.
  
  1) Payouts on CU are taking 16 weeks, instead of the usual 6. (Excuse was they had a lot of people retire in May/Jun
  
  2) Total number of coppers signed up (so Far) to retire in Jan 2017?? In excess of 1000. Yes, that's One Thousand! How many are presently in the academy? How much are our taxes going to go up to pay the pension fund with 1000 more retirees?

One-thousand retirees? By next January? Is that even possible? We're assuming it's because the "55 and out" provision expires, but do we really have a thousand cops at or over 55?

The Department has absorbed the loss of 2,000 coppers because it happened in small increments, so no one actually noticed until the cars started going unmanned and the days off were getting denied.

But one-thousand in the next five months? The Department will collapse. Literally.

Can anyone verify this at all?

Zero-for-Three

This is what happens when you rush an investigation based on nothing but lies and "feelings:"

• Baltimore Circuit Court Judge Barry Williams has ruled that Lt. Brian Rice, the highest-ranking Baltimore City Police officer to be charged in relation to the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, is not guilty of all the charges he faced — involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment and misconduct in office. Gray died on April 19, 2015, a week after he suffered a severe spinal cord injury while being transported in the back of a city police van. His death prompted riots last year in Baltimore.
  
  Rice is the third officer charged in the Gray case to get a full acquittal from Judge Williams.
  
  “The judge decided that there was no proof of any of the charges yet again,” according to WJZ’s Mike Hellgren, who was inside the courtroom as the verdict was read.

The State's Attorney, who was assuring everyone that she'd indict everyone even remotely connected with the case, didn't even bother to show up for the trial or verdict, attempting to sidestep the damage she did to the process that is supposed to protect all citizens.

Missed It

As someone pointed out, the media must have missed the "Days of Rage" that may or may not have been threatened last weekend. Rumor has it that 5,000 protesters were abducted and run through the wood chippers in the basement of the Homan Square "Black Site."

Baton Rouge

(post moved from 1441 hours yesterday to stay at the top today - regular posting appears immediately below)

Three dead, three wounded in what is pretty much a declared war on the police.

Check the news links and such on the right hand side for more updates than we could possibly do.

July Numbers

After a slow start to the month, the carnage has picked up:

• Five people were killed and at least 42 more have been wounded in shootings across the city since Friday evening, according to Chicago Police.
  
  The weekend’s latest homicide happened Sunday morning in the Englewood neighborhood on the South Side.

This after the Sun Times pointed out that racist assignment practices left the Englewood District with a mere 509 officers assigned to one of the smallest Districts while Jefferson Park is generously allotted 250 officers (on paper) to handle an area nearly three times the size.

The HeyJackass numbers tell a slightly higher story for this weekend:

•  six dead, fifty-two wounded as of Sunday 2100 hours

And July has been on the skimpy side:

• twenty-seven dead, two-hundred-nine wounded

Past July's have numbered over fifty dead, so this is going to look good at the end of the month...until Special Ed opens his mouth and jinxes the whole thing again.

Englewood is running away with the homicide totals since summer began, far outpacing Harrison. Must be all the white police not relating to the community.

Another Off Duty Save

A drowning child saved by an off-duty sergeant:

• An off-duty Chicago police officer saved a young boy’s life at a suburban pool party on Saturday, fire officials confirmed.
  
  Emergency personnel from the Orland Fire Protection District responded to a home on Steeplechase Parkway in Orland Park at around 6 p.m. for calls of a young boy drowning, according to a release.
  
  The boy, between the ages of 10 and 12, was in full cardiac arrest, authorities said.
  
  When emergency responders arrived, officials said the boy was conscious and breathing thanks to the quick-thinking actions of a guest at the pool party, who happened to be an off-duty Chicago police officer who had emergency training.

Nicely done sergeant.

Aldercreature Threatened (UPDATE)

(part of this post references a comment that was accidentally deleted yesterday)

The Department of Transportation affixed signs honoring a known gang banger the other day - Aldercreature Beale was pissed off:

• Honorary street designations are a Chicago tradition mired in political controversy.
  
  On Thursday, a new dustup was added to the pile.
  
  Transportation Committee Chairman Anthony Beale (9th) angrily demanded that the Chicago Department of Transportation take down signs put up without authorization earlier this month to honor former gang member-turned-community activist Hal Baskin.
  
  Beale had initially intended to hold the ordinance in committee during Thursday’s Transportation Committee meeting.
  
  When he was told that the Chicago Department of Transportation had already renamed a healthy chunk of 65th Street as “Hal Baskin Street,” Beale let CDOT have it and demanded that the signs be taken down.
  
  “The department is putting the cart before the horse. They’re operating outside the scope of their job. They need to wait until it has passed City Council before they start erecting these signs. The signs will come down until it is passed,” the chairman said.

Now, we have ZERO doubt that Beale's committee would have rubber stamped the signs honoring a "retired" gang banger. The political winds being what they are, the effort we assisted in denying Fred Hampton a street sign years ago would fall on dead ears today. The politicians are all about pandering to low-information, no-impulse-control criminal types spouting a false narrative. Baskin would have gotten his sign anyway even while belonging to a gang that has a body count rivaling many banana republics.

But the "process" was violated, so Beale was "disrespected" and it's surprising gunfire didn't erupt.

Now, according to a commentator, Beale is getting death threats and he's gone to...surprise!...the police for a case report, protection and resolution. If anyone has the RD number, we'll helpfully publish it so anyone can FOIA the report.

And no one will make the connection between a gang banger, an organization whose "power" derives from intimidation, and threats made to an aldercreature over a sign that is pretty much a waste of taxpayer money.

UPDATE: Here it is for any interested parties: HZ 348848

Comments Lost

We hit the wrong button and lost about 40 comments yesterday afternoon - mostly submitted between 1300 and 1500 hours. If you notice yours is missing, kindly resubmit it. Many apologies for that.

Closed post - informational only.

CPD Shooting Overnight

Can't wait to see how the "community" spins this one:

• A man was shot by a Chicago police officer during a police investigation into a suspected "gun house" Saturday evening in the West Garfield Park neighborhood.
  
  Gang Investigations Officers responded about 9 p.m. to the first block of North Kilpatrick after police received a tip that an auto repair/car wash business was storing weapons, according to a statement from Chicago Police.
  
  When the officers entered the business, they saw a man who matched officers' suspect description, police said. When he saw the officers, the man ran away and, as he did, he pointed a handgun at an officer.
  
  One of the officers then opened fired, striking the man in the leg and arm, police said. No officers were injured in the shooting.

At least five guns were recovered, so the information was good. Was it someone from the hood who realized that the dealers in heartache and death aren't the police, but rather the criminals?

Coming Soon - Bussing Cops

Does no one have a clue over at the Slum Times?

• Chicago has 22 police stations scattered across the city, and white police officers hold at least half of the jobs in 12 of them — including two stations serving black neighborhoods on the West Side, where murders and shootings are rampant.
  
  Black cops have more than half the jobs in just two police stations — both on the South Side, one serving Hyde Park, Kenwood, Bronzeville, Grand Boulevard and Washington Park, the other covering Roseland and West Pullman. Some districts have hardly any black officers at all.
  
  Hispanic police officers hold more than half the jobs at only one police station, a district that includes Little Village, one of the city’s most heavily Mexican neighborhoods.

So....what exactly? This is news? Or yet another subtle dig at contractual protections?

• More than 70 percent of Chicago’s nearly 12,000 police officers are assigned to one of the city’s 22 police districts. They include Chicago’s street officers, the most visible cops in the city, the ones most likely to respond to calls for help, but not the department’s detective units and other specialized bureaus.

There's that bullshit 12,000 again. How many news outlets have done stories on how more officers are retiring than being hired?

And it's leading to this crap:

• State Sen. Kwame Raoul, D-Chicago, says he thinks Chicago needs more black officers assigned to black neighborhoods — which are often patrolled by rookies, black or white, who are typically assigned to high-crime beats because they have no seniority to transfer to other assignments.
  
  “You can’t presume everything just based on race,” Raoul says. “But there’s an increased likelihood that, if you have an African American, they’re more familiar with the nuances of the African American community. There’s a certain cultural competence that can allow for officers to distinguish between one individual who may be dressed in a hop-hop type of attire that’s not a threat and somebody who is, in fact, a threat.

So with Kwame's vast experience as a police officer in minority neighborhoods, he.....what? He isn't? So what''s the basis for his "vast" knowledge here? Oh, race-baiting agitator? Amazing.

Perhaps Kwame could explain why so many minority officers bid out of predominantly minority neighborhoods where they're called all manner of names, race-traitors, etc. We suppose they get sick of the bullshit heaped on them by those Kwame says they should "relate" to. We imagine they don't want to relate to assholes.

Districts are majority biddable positions. If someone wants to go somewhere, they have to weigh things like seniority to figure out what watch they'll get or what kind of vacation they can bid for. Then there's the high crime busy spots and the lower crime, retirement spots. Most shitholes, like 011 and 015, get all the new kids when all the senior people bid out. 011 and 015 eat up coppers at a tremendous rate - most people bid out as soon as possible. That has nothing to do with race and everything to do with cops going to wherever their seniority can get them.

But we have this imaginary "black cops for black hoods" mentality appearing among the morons. Among those who know better, we get this:

• But Wesley Skogan, a Northwestern University professor who specializes in police issues, says race shouldn’t factor into the assignment of police officers, an issue he says was debated by Emanuel’s Police Accountability Task Force.
  
  “It flies in the face of police research,” says Skogan, who, like Raoul, was among the experts who served in working groups to help the task force suggest reforms for the police department. “Cops are blue in color, with race predicting very little about their behavior or performance.”

Amazing. Now apply that to the supposed "profiling" going on - cops see and profile behavior. If you act like an ass, you are going to attract attention. It's natural. You know who cops don't notice? The guy driving a clean car with working equipment and up-to-date plates, obeying the traffic laws and not talking on their cell phone.

But the media has to find a racial angle to everything - it's overplayed, it's insulting and it's bullshit.

There She Goes Again

Karen Lewis's buddy is calling for the abolition of the police:

• After the fatal shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile last week, Page May and the rest of Assata's Daughters don't want police to change. They want police to disappear.
  
  Through a microphone Friday evening, May made the case to a mostly young and diverse crowd in Washington Park for abolishing a system of police and prisons she called fundamentally racist.
  
  "This isn't just an issue of a few bad apples," she told them, "And this isn't an issue that we think can be reformed or fixed with more policies."

Funny, we were thinking the exact same thing. Not about the police though. HeyJackass.com lists 2,179 people (and folks) shot so far this year, 358 dead. Of those, 10 were shot by the police. That's what? Half-of-one-percent? Statistically insignificant? That's a rounding error of the carnage on Chicago's streets. One police shooting for every 218 people shot? Sounds like great odds.

And as for disbanding the police, has anyone of these idiots looked east lately? Baltimore PD was ordered to stand down, to give the community room "to destroy." The police weren't disbanded, but they weren't serving or protecting by political design. So we can see exactly what happens when the police aren't there.

Page May, AssHoleO's Daughters and #blm wants this to happen.

Reserve Your Spot Early

You can see what actual leadership looks like:

• Please join the Northsiders Retiree Luncheon at BIAGIOS, 4240 N Central Avenue, on Tuesday, 9 August, from 11:00 am - 1:00 pm.
  
  Milwaukee Sheriff David A Clarke, Jr. will be a guest speaker.
  
  Interested members MUST RSVP no later than Monday, 1 August, by contacting Paul Vitaioli at: (See the FOP site for the rest of the info).

 Maybe Special Ed and Weezie can go and pick up some pointers.

Have Incompetence, Will Travel

Once again, the "meri-clout-orious" process damages another Department:

• The Chicago State University Police Metropolitan Alliance of Police have no faith in Chief of Police Patricia Walsh and want her removed immediately.Union representative Ray Violetto said in an email that the officers have “lost the trust that the Chief of Police can manage the department."
  
  Neither Walsh nor a university spokesman could be immediately reached for comment.
  
  Prior to coming to Chicago State, Walsh worked with the Chicago Police Department, where she was the deputy chief of the Bureau of Patrol for Area South, the highest ranking female in the department in 2013, the Tribune reported. She was also a detective, a sergeant, a lieutenant and a commander.

"Merit" all the way. And when put in charge of another Department without anyone to turn to (or blame), promptly drives it into a tree. Why anyone would hire a CPD member over the rank of lieutenant, we have no idea. And even the lieutenant rank is pretty shady nowadays.

The Policeman's Wife

Jack Dunphy does it again - a timely and heart-wrenching article.

Go read it all.

If we tried to quote it, we wouldn't know where to start and couldn't do it justice.

Rock the Badges IV

Save the date:

The day starts with a Motorcycle ride:

06 August.

IPRA Overstepping

IPRA has come out with its Quarterly Report.

Seventy-three pages of stats, charts, fluff and some meat.

And this little recommendation:

There is a reason that there is no General Order, Special Order, directive or similar that says when an Officer may unsnap, unholster or display their sidearm. That reason is because the Department (and law enforcement professionals in general) realize that each situation is unique and must rely on the officers' individual observations, experiences and "gut instincts."

You cannot legislate or write a directive for that, and you'd be a fool to try to. But here comes IPRA! They're going to insist on disregarding everything cops know, are trained for, have experienced, and come up with some bullshit policy that will hamstring, handcuff and endanger police every single day. They are trying to make it a fact that you will be shot first before returning fire. Your safety and your life mean that little to them.

FOP, you better be all over this shit. PBPA, you better step up. State? National? They better be involved in discrediting and blocking this before it gets enacted.