$71.14???

Possibly flushing a career down the toilet for under $72?

• An Aurora police officer is accused of fabricating a call to extend her shift and get overtime pay.
  
  The officer, [...], 43, of Plano, has been charged with theft by deception after an internal police investigation. She is facing discipline that could include termination from the department, police officials said Thursday.
  
  [She] "deceived the Aurora Police Department by fraudulently creating a service call late in her work shift for the purpose of obtaining funds not due to her in the value of $71.14," according to charging documents.

So what should a "theft of Lieutenant position" be charged with?

700 On Tap

Or, as it's in the 70 degree range Thursday, it may have already happened.

Per HeyJackass.com:

• Shot and Killed: 626
  Shot and Wounded: 3288
  Total Shot: 3914
  Total Homicides: 699

Take a bow Rahm - you earned it.

And ask the pope for forgiveness while you're overseas.

Rahm Runs Up the Tab

Finally putting a price tag on Rahm's tax hikes:

• Aldermen had just gotten done Wednesday voting 48-0 to approve a new budget when Mayor Rahm Emanuel started a round of back-patting from the dais in City Council chambers.
  
  "You can say Chicago tomorrow is better because of the work you have done over the last five years," Emanuel told aldermen.
  
  At one point, the mayor even went so far as to say they had "fixed" Chicago's financial woes, before quickly dialing back that assessment to Chicago merely being "on the right path."

And how much is that "right path" going to cost everyone?

• Left unsaid during all of this optimism? The average family will pay nearly $1,700 more a year to the city and Chicago Public Schools than they did before the mayor took office in 2011 once all of Emanuel’s tax and fee increases take full effect. There's been a series of property tax hikes. There was a water and sewer rate increase, plus a new tax on top of that. Not to mention a new garbage hauling fee, 911 phone tax hike, vehicle sticker fee increase and a tax on cable television.
  
  Even with all of that, taxpayers may be asked for more money in the coming years. Emanuel's plans for shoring up long-neglected city worker pension funds will require the city to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars more by the early to mid-2020s.

And that certainly doesn't count the $1.3 billion in Federal money that might be cut should Trump decide to break the democrats over "sanctuary cities."

FOP, you keeping track of all this? Have Rahm take his 0%, 0% first two year raises and tell him to stick it where the sun doesn't shine.

Quick Answer - No

What was the question? Can Rahm deliver on his promise to hire more police:

• Mayor Rahm Emanuel is off to Rome to witness the elevation of Archbishop Blase Cupich to cardinal after the City Council on Wednesday approved his $8.2 billion budget in record time without a single dissenting vote.
  
  But now comes the hard part: Delivering on the mayor’s $60 million first-year promise to fill 471 police vacancies, keep pace with rising retirements and still hire enough police officers in 2017 to add 250 patrol officers, 37 sergeants, 50 lieutenants, 92 field-training officers and 100 detectives.
  
  Former Mayor Richard M. Daley once promised to bolster the police force by 600 officers, only to “run out of money,” according to then-Police Supt. LeRoy Martin.
  
  Martin’s candid admission to aldermen so embarrassed and infuriated Daley, the police superintendent abruptly retired a few months later.
  
  The question is whether Emanuel can avoid falling into the same trap.

Rahm has lied constantly about the Department. Manpower, killings, death investigations, 1,000 cops to be hired (reassigned), etc. There's no reason to think he's going to stop now. He'll move some people, eliminate some positions, reorganize some bureaus, cover up cheating, and generally, do just enough to keep the various voting blocs off his back. He's a micromanager who can't keep his 9.5 fingers off the throttle. And we don't see the bloodletting tapering off.

NYC vs Chicago

People have been referring to this article for the past few days:

• Why Crime in Chicago Soars while New York is Safer Than Ever

The article is the source of yesterday's post about "FOP Broadside" that took Emanuel to task for his inept management of the Department and resources that had an inordinate impact on the skyrocketing shooting/homicide numbers for 2016.

Granted, the linked article is written by New York reporters who have a vested interest in "rah-rah-ing" their town and its mayor, but they point out a lot of Rahm's missteps and lay the blame squarely where it belongs - City Hall.

Collective Hysteria

We're getting a bit burned out by all this leftist screeching:

Someone want to tell us where this "registry" bullshit is coming from? Oh yeah, the unhinged leftist snowflakes.

And portions of the media, rather than learning from their mistakes, has decided to push the stupid meter up to 11:

• Trump told the press pool following him that he was done for the night and so they could go home.
  
  Then he -- get this! -- went out with his family to get dinner at the 21 Club.
  
  The media has pronounced this to be a crisis of democracy.
  
  It should be noted they previously enjoyed Obama slipping away from the press, treating it as some charmingly roguish behavior from a man who just wanted to finish his waffle.
  
  Also, the White House attempted to make the idea of Obama slipping out of the White House unannounced a viral meme which people would find endearing. Remember the #TheBearIsLoose hashtag when the White House tried to make Obama slipping out to have lunch at popular local restaurants to Meet the Folks was a thing?
  
  But now it's a constitutional crisis. Because the people who have lied to you for years are telling you so.

What was it Obama said 8 years ago? "I won." and "Elections have consequences." How about all you butt-hurt social justice warriors simply "MoveOn"?

Baby Killer Caught

Charges finally:

• A man who was caring for 2-year-old Kyrian Knox in the summer of 2015 "snapped" and killed the toddler after the lactose-intolerant boy was fed milk and cried for a whole afternoon, police said.
  
  Kyrian's dismembered remains were found in the Garfield Park Lagoon on the West Side on Sept. 5, 2015. Police said in a news conference at the park Tuesday afternoon that Kamel Harris, 41, was arrested on murder charges in Kyrian's slaying after investigators learned that blood they recovered from the man's vehicle belonged to the boy.
  
  Harris, of Rockford, was charged Tuesday with first-degree murder, felony concealment of a homicidal death and felony dismemberment of a human body.
  
  He was brought to Chicago on Monday from the Winnebago County Jail, where he was in custody on unrelated charges.

Hopefully, this brings some closure. Not to the usual suspects who pretty much abandoned the child to strangers for whatever reasons, but to the coppers who responded to the floating body parts, the divers who recovered more body parts, the police guarding the scene, the detectives working the scene and the case - this had to be one of the more horrifying homicides in living memory.

FOP Broadside

The National FOP Lodge is doing Dean's job for him:

• Mayor Rahm Emanuel wears the jacket for Chicago’s 50 percent spike in homicides and shootings because he allowed police manpower to dip dangerously low, before reversing course with a hiring surge that will be difficult to execute, a national police union chief charged Tuesday.
  
  “When the mayor wants to look at who should ultimately bear the brunt of the blame for things that have gone wrong with public safety in Chicago, the first place he should look is in the mirror,” said Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police.
  
  “Police officers are running from call to call because they’re short-staffed and there are nowhere near enough investigators to follow up and catch perpetrators. He was the mayor and the department has gotten smaller. The threshold responsibility of any elected official is to provide safety. He has not done that. He runs that department like an arm of his political operation with far greater attention being paid to rhetoric and optics than to the reality of the situation on the street.”
  
  Adam Collins, Emanuel’s communications director, could not be reached for comment.

No surprise there - when confronted with uncomfortable facts, Rahm hides. In the meantime, one has to wonder why Dean is letting the National FOP do his heavy lifting. Dean is supposed to be the voice of the lowly blue shirt, but his criticisms of the mayor are pretty much non-existent.

Another Dart Disaster

Carrying on his tradition of horrible ideas:

• Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart is calling for abolishing the state’s cash-bond system, saying it’s unfair to low-level defendants who can’t afford to pay and puts society in danger when defendants with violent backgrounds have the money to post bail and are freed until trial.
  
  Dart is believed to be the first elected official in Illinois to propose that the General Assembly scrap the system, said Cara Smith, his top policy official. It would require a change to Illinois’ bail statute — a daunting political challenge.
  
  Currently, judges set bail for most people charged with crimes. Defendants typically need to pay 10 percent of that amount to obtain a bond to get out of jail before trial. In some cases, judges allow for a “recognizance bond,” in which no payment is required.
  
  Dart is proposing a system in which a judge would decide whether a defendant should be released from jail until trial based solely on an intensive background investigation by the court’s staff.

Because Dart's crack investigative staff has done so well at deciding who gets to wear electronic monitoring bracelets - at last count, there were upwards of a few hundred felons that Dart's people had no idea where they were. That just screams competence. And his declaration that he won't bother following Federal law regarding criminal illegal aliens. Now he's going to "trust" assorted felons to show up at court without anything to compel their appearance. After releasing dozens, maybe hundreds of violent offenders onto the streets, closing down Divisions of the jail and under-staffing the rest.

Sounds great!

A Capone-type Indictment?

Nice going Fast Eddie:

• The feds aren’t finished with “Fast Eddie.”
  
  Five years after onetime powerhouse Chicago Ald. Edward R. Vrdolyak walked out of prison, federal authorities have quietly unsealed a new indictment outlining Vrdolyak’s role in a scheme to pocket millions from Illinois’ nearly two-decade-old settlement with tobacco companies.
  
  The fact that the former 10th Ward alderman received money from the settlement isn’t news — it was revealed during his original sentencing hearing in 2009. But the new 19-page indictment alleges Vrdolyak was promised $65 million from the settlement even though he “did no work on the Tobacco Lawsuit.”

So this was a combination "No Work, No Show" job? We thought that disappeared when the Outfit went legit.

Things That Make You Go, "Hmmmm"

Here's a map that someone sent us. It shows, via the red shading, the vote for Trump by neighborhood in Chicago:

And here's a map our readers are very familiar with:

This means something.....we just can't put our finger on it.

Rahm to Cost Taxpayers

Amazing how we're expected to follow all sorts of laws, but Rahm can just ignore Federal Law so he can pander to yet another group in search of a third term.

We certainly hope that Trump enforces immigration laws as they're written, and he sticks it to city's that think they don't have to follow the law. Because if Rahm tries to raise taxes to cover the millions, or billions Chicago won't have, we might actually see a populist challenge to the Machine that could get somewhere.

And Dart serving time in prison would make our decade.

Those Protests?

People have been speculating that they aren't genuine. That protestors are being paid and transported in from elsewhere. This would seem to confirm some of that speculation:

• Now, courtesy of a Zero Hedge reader, we have visual confirmation of how a substantial portion of these professional, paid protesters arrive at the site of the protest, in this case Chicago.
  
  As our reader notes, "I have a video of 5 city blocks on the West side of Chicago lined with busses from Wisconsin (Badger Bus Lines) bringing in protestors. The Sears tower is visible in the background."
  
  The video was taken at 3:30pm on South Canal Street in Chicago on Saturday. As our reader points out, hundreds of the participants that took part in the downtown Chicago protests from November 12 were bused in using these vehicles. Other arrived by train.

True? The weather is correct for the weekend. Canal street is one of the few locations that allow buses to park for free, and there was no Bears game at Soldier Field (nor in Tampa as it turned out). Forty-five buses that we counted, many registered with Wisconsin companies.

We also managed to scan the arrest queue in CLEAR to see the addresses of a bunch of those arrested - almost none from Illinois for some reason....it certainly makes one wonder.

Targeted Enforcement

So the "Trump Effect" didn't last all weekend. Even the Tribune was howling about the numbers:

• Five people were killed and at least 32 others were wounded in shootings in Chicago from Friday afternoon to early Monday, a weekend when city, state, county and federal police agencies conducted “targeted enforcement missions” to combat violence on the South and West sides.
  
  The toll was down from the more than 50 people shot each of the last two weekends. But the number was still twice as bad as the same weekend last year when just 18 people were shot, one of them fatally.

The weekend last year actually touched the freezing mark. And no one seems knows exactly how many homicides there are:

• With more than 675 homicides recorded so far this year, Chicago could easily surpass 700 homicides before the end of the year for the first time since 1998, according to data kept by the Tribune.

The Department has the homicide count around 660+ and HeyJackass has Chicago at 690.

But this "Targeted Enforcement Mission." Someone posted that the Tact teams, Saturation teams, and other teams from Area North put on uniforms, lined up 50 or 60 squad cars and drove to all the "hot spots," lights and sirens blaring, ruining the television watching for the evening.That seems to be a slight exaggeration:

• Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said the department deployed an additional "several hundred" uniformed officers as well as officers from the Cook County Sheriff's Department, Illinois State Police and FBI to three city districts: Gresham on the South Side, and the Ogden and Austin districts on the West Side.
  
  Forty-four people were arrested in the targeted zones, including 16 felony arrests and one homicide suspect. Officers also recovered 12 weapons during the mission's 30-hour window, Johnson said at a news conference Monday afternoon.

Too bad we don't have a dedicated city-wide team that could do this all the time....like SOS. Or TRU. Or MSF.

Merit Sgt Packages

Once again, the Department is asking for "merit" packages from those interested (or connected enough) for Sergeant. The paperwork is due 19 December if we have the correct info.

Last week, the "merit" packages for Detective were due. And if past practice is followed, the Department will make a load of Detectives, then a month of two later, make a bunch of Sergeants, many of which will just have completed Detective training, meaning the D-Unit will be short and people on the list will have burned up a spot that could have gone to someone committed to spending some actual career time in the Areas.

Of course, a certain number of those blessed to have spent all of eight weeks in the D-Unit will now be deemed qualified to be supervisors in the Area and drive the abysmal clearance rate down another few percentage points.

More Taxes

Prickwrinkle has to be glad for Hillary's election debacle because it provided cover for this:

• Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle personally ensured her controversial new penny-an-ounce pop tax passed Thursday by breaking a rare tie vote among commissioners.
  
  The two-term board president stepped further into the glare of a spotlight because she's counting on the $224 million a year the beverage tax is expected to bring in to balance the books for a while.

Prickwrinkle doesn't seem to have gleaned any lessons from the mobility of the tax base. When Chicago enacted a dime on every bottle of water, people stopped buying water in Chicago. Suburban grocery stores and shopping clubs had to bring in water by the truckload to keep up with demand. We don't think Shortshanks reaped even half of the revenue projections his bean counters said would be generated.

We predict a similar situation with the County. Especially when we read this:

• It won't apply to drinks bought with a Link card issued to families in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program because additional consumer taxes can't be added under the federal program.

Imagine that.

We also heard that this tax was levied for "health related" reasons. How much of the tax is going to "health related" programs? We're betting zero. And it says they're taxing iced tea drinks - what if the tea has no sugar? Diet sodas? Zero calorie sodas?

We're lucky enough to live close to a border where they don't tax the shit out of their citizens. Hopefully you do to.

What Hath Trump Wrought?

Far be it from us to sing the praises of a guy who hasn't even taken office yet, but this weekend, per HeyJackass, there has been a precipitous dropoff in the amount of dead people in Chicago.

As of earlier Sunday night, only three people had been killed. And the only thing that has changed is there's a new President on the way in.

Looks like some more of that good sort of "hope and change."

UPDATE: Five homicides for the weekend. We suppose the shock wore off. Thankfully, the media will start blaming Obama any moment now...the way they blamed Bush for everything.

Trump Feeds Officers

Another gesture by the President-Elect:

• Another class act by new President-Elect Donald Trump. This time he’s feeding the officers who are forced to babysit protesters.
  
  In a recent tweet by Twitter user and police officer @ChiTownCheese, he shows us the amazing spread that President-Elect Trump had provided in Trump Tower for the police officers working the Chicago Anti-Trump protests.

Pictures at the link above.

You know, we're thinking that if this guy ever visits Chicago, we're going to make sure he gets to park wherever he wants to. No tickets for him. We know some people who can make that happen.

Like a Cheetah!

Look at him go! Over fences! Through walls!

• On his way to a press conference Friday evening, Chicago Police Supt. Eddie Johnson helped officers arrest three carjacking suspects on the West Side, authorities said.
  
  Johnson was headed to a 9:30 p.m. press conference in the South Austin neighborhood to discuss the department’s anti-violence initiatives this weekend, according to police spokesman [...].
  
  While on his way, he came across a stolen car being pursued by police and helped officers arrest three people when it crashed near Quincy Street and Laramie Avenue. The Lexus sedan had been stolen in Cicero....

After ensuring that ISR's and TRR's were completed, Special Ed suspended everyone on scene.

But we're telling you - like a freaking cheetah!

HQ Infestation

The Public Safety Building is the subject of an anonymous OSHA complaint because otherwise, the City won't do a thing about it:

• State authorities are investigating a bed bug infestation at Chicago Police Headquarters.
  
  [...]
  
  This year officers kept personal belongings in Ziplock bags, desk crevices were taped to trap bedbugs. The goal was to avoid officers getting bit.
  
  In 2014, an officer had bites on his ankle. Another had bites just below the calf. One was bitten on the back of the neck.
  
  “I do not understand why the department would not take the position of being protective on their employees because it is in their best interest to protect the entire building,” said Marlon Harvey, Chairman Safety Committee FOP Lodge 7.
  
  A few months ago, an anonymous complaint was sent to the Illinois Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Illinois OSHA). Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office received this letter. It requests information be sent by November 3, 2016 about the “pest control plan” at headquarters.

Personally, we blame bed bugs on the people bringing beds to Public Safety Headquarters - irefightersfay.

We kid! We kid!!!