Nice Description Slum Times

Years ago, before The Hiatus, we had shone a spotlight on downtown going to shit. Since then, it's only accelerated its decline, what with the stewardess being beaten with a log and this guy by the House of Blues:

• A Northwest Side man has died after he was punched and suffered a head injury in the River North neighborhood late Wednesday, and police have released a description of his attacker.

  The man, 47, was outside the House of Blues, 329 N. Dearborn St., when two men asked him for money around 11:30 p.m., according to Chicago police.

  One of the men punched the victim, and officers later found him unresponsive on the sidewalk with a head injury. He was taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, police said.

  The attacker who punched the man is a male about 5-feet-11 to 6 feet tall with black hair wearing a black puffy jacket and black jeans, police said.

That description sucks Slum Times. Why do your descriptions always suck?

Let's go over to a real reporting operation - the CWB blog:

• One worker told us the suspect is Black, about 6 feet tall. He has a beard and appears to be in his late 20s or early 30s. An officer who reviewed surveillance video of the attack said he was wearing a black puffy coat and headed north on State Street after punching the man.

Facts are not racist, no matter how hard the media wishes them to be. And a description is just that - a description.

Las Vegas Beating

Guess what isn't receiving national coverage?

• On Tuesday afternoon, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department held a media conference to provide an update on its homicide investigation after a Rancho High School teen student was severely beaten and later died from his injuries.

  A Metro spokesperson announced that the department has eight suspects in custody who will be charged with murder in connection with Lewis’ death. Homicide Lt. Jason Johansson provided details on the incident that led to the victim’s death, explaining that a fight occurred in an alley next to Rancho High School just after school let out on November 1. He said that a citizen found Lewis unresponsive after the beating and brought him back to the school.

  The victim was taken to UMC where doctors determined that he had suffered “non-survivable head trauma.” Lt. Johansson referenced a video of the beating that has circulated on social media, calling it “void of humanity.”

  He said that the fight was over a pair of stolen wireless headphones and possibly a vape pen, which were taken from friends of the victim. All parties involved agreed to meet in the alley to fight, according to police.

  “As soon as a punch is thrown, ten subjects immediately swarm him,” he said. He added that the department was able to identify approximately ten subjects that were involved in the murder and eight of those have been “positively identified” as suspects.

Mutual combatants initially....plenty of blame to go around....until suddenly it wasn't. Then it was ten-on-one. And plenty of video taken by others, circulated all over social media, like some other incident we can't quite recall last month.....

Can you imagine the outrage though, if it was ten white kids jumping on one black kid? Marches, protests, riots, burning, looting, reports on the rise of "white supremacy" and other tried and true grievance mongering.

But since it was exactly opposite that....crickets.

(you see how we wrote that? nothing snide, no "coded language" or whatever the left is calling facts now. we'll be heavily moderating the usual trolls who pop off in here who post and then run to their "progressive" masters to prove the blog is "racist" and try to get that hiring commission to fire any of our visitors)

NYPD Cuts Hiring

All that noise the mayor of New York was making about crime?

It was just noise:

• Mayor Eric Adams’ administration is planning to cut the NYPD’s next police academy class as part of a sweeping reduction in the city budget caused primarily by the multi-billion-dollar migrant crisis, the Post has learned.

  The axing of the new recruits  — which will be officially announced Thursday along with numerous other budget cuts  — will decimate an already strained department that has seen massive losses since the COVID-19 pandemic, sources said.

  “That’s the biggest one,” one source told The Post of the looming NYPD cuts.

  The pending academy freeze comes as an already-struggling NYPD battle to replace the nearly 3,000 uniformed officers who have retired and quit since 2019 – and as overall crime is yet to drop after surging 30% during Adams’ first year in office.

Everyone wanted to be a "sanctuary city" and feel self-righteous until actual there was actual sanctuary shit to be done, now city services in the Big Apple are going to be slashed as crime goes through the roof.

And since Chicago Police policy is to follow whatever New York does first, are mayor Blowie's hiring and promotional classes going to fall short of expectations?

Chicago Federal Judge Did What?

This seems....unusual:

• As a five-time convicted felon, Glen Prince was facing a mandatory minimum 15 years behind bars when he was charged in federal court with being a felon in possession of a handgun stemming from an armed robbery on CTA train in 2021.

  Instead, Prince’s case was tossed out earlier this month by a federal judge who ruled the statute barring felons from possessing handguns is unconstitutional in light of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision.

  The ruling by U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman is the first of its kind to come down in Chicago’s federal court and joins a host of other similar cases that have thrown the decades-old law into a sort of legal limbo as the issue works its way back to the high court.

And what about pending cases?

• The implications are particularly large in Chicago, where there are hundreds of pending felon-with-firearm cases stemming largely from the U.S. attorney’s office efforts to throw federal law enforcement resources into the fight against the city’s relentless gun violence.

As many might recall, after the lack of comprehensive prosecution at the local level by Crimesha, the US Attorneys office stepped in and started prosecuting Federal Law violations. When applied ruthlessly in Virginia years ago, violent crime dropped by something like 40% overnight. Criminals heard about Operation Exile and didn't feel like doing 10 years in a Federal pen a thousand miles from home. It never went that far here, but it was the only game in town.

Now it's all on hold? We had a couple gun cases go through the US Attorney's Office here and the prosecutors were very thorough. VERY. Multiple prep sessions, intelligent questions, and they seemed to know their jobs as opposed to Crimesha's shit show. And although this was under a democrat administration in a democrat city/county/state, we did end up batting .500 with the cases and the bad guy did get sent away for quite a while.

Government Incompetence

Everyone heard about the freeway fire in LA? Something caught fire under the expressway, burned awfully hot for a while, twisted the steel beams and cracked the concrete. Now the entire structure might have to be demolished and rebuilt, inconveniencing 300,000 commuters daily.

And what burned so hot?

• Some unknown arsonist is believed to have started Saturday's blaze, but that's not the "bad actor" to whom Berlant was referring. You see, the city government leases underpass space to people and companies for storage. In this case, "bad actors" filled the underpass with wooden pallets and containers of alcohol-based hand sanitizer.

Wooden pallets stacked all the way to the ...ceiling we guess? Literally forty or fifty feet high. And sanitizer.....not boxes of little bottles, but something like this we're told:

Hundreds of gallons per container. Tens of dozens of containers.

• The city is currently in a legal battle with a company called Airspace that leased the underpass storage area.

We'll bet they are. But it's the government - spend millions on stuff no one needs, then store it where no one pays attention, and surround it with homeless tents, propane heaters and drug addicts with now sense of personal safety...or hygiene.

Anyone see our underpasses lately?

CWB Strikes Again

CWB still leading the way on reporting crime the big stations won't touch because it's politically touchy:

• A Venezuelan migrant has been charged with shoplifting from three different stores on the Magnificent Mile in a single day. He has been arrested in Chicago two other times since August under different names.

  Police arrested Gregorio Yorman Adrianza-Romero, 25, on Friday after employees accused him of shoplifting from Ralph Lauren, 750 North Michigan, Victoria’s Secret, 734 North Michigan, and Saks Fifth Avenue, 700 North Michigan, according to complaints filed with the court.

And? AND....?

• Judge Charles Beach released him on Saturday afternoon.

Of course he did.

The linked article also reports on at least four other illegals, some listing police station addresses as their home, doing the crimes that Americans can't be bothered to do any more.

We heard that BJ's budget only has $150 million set aside for illegals next year, so either:

• BJ knows something is going to happen with the illegals, or
• BJ is lying through his teeth and his entire budget is nothing but bullshit fantasy numbers.

We could believe either of those scenarios. Unless he's counting on the cold weather to drive down the numbers.

New Category of Crime

The only place for real crime stats:

• Prosecutors have charged a 52-year-old man with critically injuring a woman on the Magnificent Mile this week, according to a Chicago police media statement. Bruce Diamond, 52, will appear for a detention hearing at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse on Wednesday afternoon on a charge of aggravated battery causing great bodily harm.

  During his hearing, officials will reveal more information about what happened outside the Burberry store, 633 North Michigan. Here’s what we know so far:

  A 23-year-old woman was on the Mag Mile around 2:10 p.m. Monday when someone struck her in the head with a large object, rendering her unconscious. She was taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in critical condition.

  Police said Diamond “threw a large object” at the woman. A source familiar with the investigation said the object was a log. Chicago cops assigned to patrol Michigan Avenue took Diamond into custody almost immediately.

And who was the victim?

• Citing preliminary information, the source said the woman was believed to be a flight attendant who was shopping while on a layover in Chicago.

Another visitor to our fair shithole. 

And another warning to others to stay away from Chicago.

(yes, we're aware that "blunt objects" are already a category.....but "log" isn't. Check out the only true crime stats at HeyJackass.com)

Already Ahead of You There

We've asked for a list of violations of the law that certain non-demonized segments of society are exempt from having to obey. Finally, here's Step #1:

• The Chicago Police Department was urged Monday to rein in so-called “pre-textual” traffic stops that disproportionately target Black and Hispanic motorists and exacerbate distrust by “fishing” without any actual reason to suspect criminal violations.

  [...]

  “Continued racial inequities” in stops and searches mean that compared to white drivers in Chicago, Black drivers were 1.7 times more likely to be stopped, and Hispanic drivers were 2.5 times more likely to be stopped.

You ever see those political polls, where the margin of error is always 3-to-4%? These are less than that and we're still catching heat for it. So how do they propose to fix it?

• To remedy the burgeoning problem, a coalition of community and advocacy organizations known as Free2MoveChicago is proposing a three-point plan based on what police departments in other major cities have done. It calls for:
  

• Following the lead of Los Angeles by banning police stops for traffic violations when the “primary intention” of that stop is to “fish for other signs of criminal activity.” Amy Thompson, staff counsel for Impact for Equity, called “pre-textual” traffic stops the “reincarnation of stop-and-frisk.”
• Prohibiting all police stops for “low-level” traffic violations, such as a recently expired registration or one broken taillight when the other remains lit. Similar bans are in place in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and San Francisco.
• Requiring Chicago police officers who have pulled a vehicle over for a traffic violation to have an “independent legal basis” to ask the driver to consent to be frisked, or to have their vehicle or belongings searched. 

Point 1 - the vast majority of the Department is already there. Have you been to Traffic Court lately? Fractions of the numbers from even five years ago - camera tickets have replaced that traffic guy with three and four Court Keys. And given the state of the Courts (Crimesha and Evans and Prickwrinkle), arresting anyone is a pointless endeavor as they're home before our shift ends.

Point 2 - the legislature, which deemed these compliance violations as actual lawbreaking, has been supplanted by a committee recommendation that keeping your vehicle in working order is racist. We welcome this step, because next time we get pulled over, WE get to claim that the only reason the police did so was because they're racist against us. We will also save a lot of money in plate/sticker fees. And we'll have substantial evidence of a hostile work environment if an Inspector decides that we need a city sticker and/or a valid plate sticker on our personal vehicle.

Point 3 - again, 90% of the Department only wants the Obama blue card for the TSSSSSSS numbers that make the commander purr with delight when Supernintendo Larritorious rubs their belly. Anything else is a step too far.

No idea who these Free2MoveChicago morons are, but we' guarantee the results they desire will make it an easy choice for more people to be Free2MoveOutOfChicago.

Um....What Now?

So the Ridiculous Machine is cranked up to 11 now. Here's how it's starting:

• A civilian-led police oversight panel voted unanimously Monday to approve a new policy that would ban Chicago cops from “active participation” in hate and extremist groups.

  The move came after the Chicago Police Department investigated, but took little or no action against officers who were found to have connections to extremist and anti-government groups, including Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and Three Percenters.

  The Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability also announced Monday that the city’s Office of the Inspector General had reacted positively to its request to “investigate recent allegations of officer involvement with extremists or hate-based organizations.”

We'd be morons and fools to deny that each of those three listed organizations don't have some who hold extreme views. But we know plenty of morons and fools who deny the existence of extremists in their own ranks, #blm and antifa and the alphabet mafia and hamas supporters among the left just to name a few. 

Politics attracts extremists who usually can't get normal people to listen to their tripe otherwise.

Here's where it gets disturbingly hilarious:

• The newly approved policy is intended to spell out in the greatest detail yet which groups police should not join if they want to avoid discipline.

  “Given the seriousness and urgency of this issue, we feel it’s important we vote on this policy today,” Commissioner Remel Terry said. “We will continue our work to ensure that the Chicago Police Department effectively implements this policy, monitors the implementation and provides regular reporting on the outcome.”

  The policy expands on a departmental order barring officers from joining “criminal organizations” by prohibiting them from participating in organizations that use force to deny others’ rights, achieve ideological goals or advocate for “systemic illegal prejudice, oppression, or discrimination.”

  Perhaps most notably, the policy prohibits membership in groups that “seek to overthrow, destroy, or alter the form of government of the United States by constitutional means.”

Really? 

"...alter the form of government of the United States by constitutional means." 

You mean exactly as the Founders intended, operating within the Constitutional framework?

• The banned organizations would be identified by the police department’s counterterrorism bureau, but the list would be kept from the public. 

Ah yes...."secret lists." How very Stasi and Stalin-esque of you. So we're operating in a dictatorship already? We had no idea or we would have shot a lot more commies and socialists.

These are the morons attempting to make policy. The fools attempting to destroy any protections you thought you may have had under the law. These are the assholes who are going to attempt to force the police to go door-to-door, dragging people out of their homes and into the rail cars. They got a taste of totalitarianism with their vax mandates ....and they liked being able to force people into compliance.

Pay attention to people who tell you EXACTLY who they are.

Devil's Lettuce Strike Again

We thought legalizing weed was supposed to reduce crime?

• Officials say a Chicago man fatally shot his friend in the head and then picked up the fallen man’s marijuana cigarette from the ground and walked away.

  Quntin Buchanan, 25, is charged with two counts of murder and another count of robbery for stealing the victim’s blunt, according to court records. Judge Maryam Ahmad ordered him into custody after she heard about the allegations during Buchanan’s detention hearing at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse.

  Jeremiah Pruckler, 20, and two childhood friends got together to hang out and smoke pot in a rear vestibule of the Dearborn Homes, 2900 South State, last Tuesday evening, prosecutors said. Surveillance footage allegedly showed Buchanan arriving a few minutes later, wearing a face mask and a hoodie with the word “Quality” printed on the back. Witnesses told police Buchanan sat on a nearby staircase for a few minutes.

  He eventually walked up behind Pruckler and shot him once in the back of the head, prosecutors told the judge. Pruckler’s friends ran for safety. But Buchanan, prosecutors said in a written proffer, “bent over the victim’s body and picked up the victim’s blunt that was near victim’s body.”

So marijuana is now a gateway drug....to murder. 

Better outlaw it, quick!

Look Who Woke Up

We had a post yesterday - labeled Pension, Rumors - and this response appeared in the comments:

• Just about EVERY fact listed is complete fabrication and a shameful example of journalism!!!
  Irresponsible posts like this is exactly what divides the membership unnecessarily. John Catanzara Jr, President Chicago John Dineen Lodge #7

John has graced us with his presence here and there over the years, before and after his election....less so after the election because he had access to other mediums to get his message out. We were always fans of his Friday video messages.

But we also have noted some changes over the years as he became entrenched in office. It happens to all elected persons. It's normal. Sometimes, you get isolated in an echo chamber of sycophants. Sometimes, you have to play nice with people you wouldn't waste the piss on if they were on fire. How you grow (or shrink) in office says a lot about you as a human being.

We have also noted here and elsewhere, that if your people are coming here for information, then you have probably failed as a communicator.

Accusing us of "journalism" is a low blow. We are a reader driven site and more than a few of our posts every week are rumors seeking more information than is readily available from the Department, the politicians and the FOP. The thing that all of those entities have is their communication skills suck.

This is also evident in two recent posts we did in October:

• FOP Changing Rules? - where amendments clearly in violation of national rules and that were submitted outside of the time limits for proposals attempt to restrict viewing FOP financial documents;
• Phone Call Backstabbing? - where FOP leaders are supposedly making phone calls to units where their critics work, trying to get them dumped from phone call spots.

But it was a rumor about possible Pension Changes (that likely triggered an avalanche of calls to the Lodge) that provoked John to magically appear in our comment section. Had John and the board been making trips to Roll Calls, promptly answering calls/emails, not ruling everyone "Out of Order" at meetings, proposing bullshit amendments to restrict paperwork access and calling Homan Square to get people dumped....well, perhaps rumors would appear less?

We've given credit where earned and given criticism where deserved. The first few years of this administration were loud, boisterous, confrontational, and (in our opinion) exactly what was needed tp shake things up. Lately however (our opinion again), John's people are running to keep their spots and forgetting they serve the membership.

Nolan lost twenty-seven of twenty-eight seats to the Citywide Team in the nineties and we were there. Is history repeating itself?

Who Said What?

This is interesting:

• With Chicago’s ongoing migrant crisis becoming more pronounced by the day, local activist Tio Hardiman is calling on Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to reverse policy when it comes to its sanctuary city status.

  “I was one of the first community leaders to call for a reversal,” Hardiman told The Center Square. “I’m happy to see a lot of other people getting on the bandwagon now. We have too many issues to fix in Chicago right now to be trying to fix an issue that was self-created.”

  Hardiman argues the reasons for his position are as apparent as they are endless.

  “There have been over 7,400-plus armed robberies in Chicago this year; over 540 people have been killed and the crime continues to increase,” he said. “Now, we have a mayor spending more time attempting to fix a crisis that was created by bad policy.”

Created by bad democrat policy Tio. You forgot that part. Those damn illegals are taking away the grant money, skim, and graft that was supposed to be yours!

When you've lost Tio, you've definitely lost the libtarded element of your bloc.

Compliance Problems

So the Washington Gun Law YouTube site has a great video up the other day. This Second Amendment lawyer seems well versed in all sorts of laws across the nation and this particular video is about Illinois and governor Porky's attempts to get the guns:

Some interesting history and states contained within the video. For instance, we had forgotten that this "law" was introduced as an insurance regulation. The legislature removed all of the insurance language, inserted the gun control verbage, then voted it out of committee to the floor - without the required three readings and without public comment - passing it in the dead of night so that Illinoisans woke up to a bright new dictatorship that 95% of people had no idea about.

The inevitable lawsuits followed and two Illinois Supreme Court judges - who each received $1 million cash bribes campaign contributions from Fatass - declared the legality of this monstrosity. Amazing! The US Supreme Court should be on tap.

The compliance numbers are interesting though:

• FOID holders - 2,415,484
• FOID holders who are sheep - 2,906

Meaning 0.12% of FOID card holders are currently in compliance with the law. Each of the sheep declared (on average) 2.88 items for registration - guns, accessories and ammo - for a grand total of 8,379 items. If each of the 2.4 million FOID card holders has 2.88 items to be registered:

• that's 6,956,585 potential items

So 0.12% of the soon-to-be-illegal items are available for confiscation right now....halfway through the registration period (01 Oct 2023 until 01 January 2024). That's not twelve percent....that's a fraction of one-percent, and it's remained under one-percent the entire first forty-five days of ninety.

Why do we bring this up? Because some asshole - politician or boss - is going to have a bright idea of going after some of these guns. You know, to make an example. Oh, they'll be "careful" about it....some grandmother, probably snitched on by some libtarded relative who always started arguments at Thanksgiving dinner. Granny's house will be raided, Granny will be led out, politely, to a waiting squad car. She'll be taken to a police station, fingerprinted, spend overnight in a cell, see a judge, have her FOID card revoked, be released on no-bail (because Illinois is civilized that way) and she'll get fined....maybe.

And then the authorities will be emboldened. And someone will pick the wrong house. You know police are exempt from most of this law, but some boss or politician will expect you to enforce it on your neighbors because a mentally ill trans person in Highland Park broke the law.

Choose wisely.

Social Media Warning

From a reader:

• Hello SCC.
  
  
  
  Please search your email for any BS radical liberal garbage e-mails ending in “@proton.me”
  
  
  
  If you can, please remind the troops that the cop hating agitators have teams working on Twitter to doxx the men and women of the CPD. One of these asshole, Eric Scheidt, using the screen name @SchaumburgBrad, is working with the bastards at JinxPress and John Arena. He has multiple email addresses from the @proton.me encrypted email provider. It’s a popular email service with pedophiles and cyberstalkers as it is virtually untraceable.
  
  
  
  He’s doxxed me, Anita Padilla, and dozens of others. They went after 2 cops this week for Twitter and are emailing COPA anonymously almost daily. Jackass Andre Vasquez retweeted the JinxPress hit job.
  
  
  
  It’s a coordinated effort by these assholes. Very, very coordinated and using pedophile-esq email servers to hide themselves should shock no one.

Arena is still around, still trying to be relevant and doxing media types, too?

Remember guys and gals, the internet is forever, and if you're posting things your mother, grandmother and first-grade teacher might be shocked to read, maybe think twice before attaching your name to it. And cull your "friends" lists often. The number of fake profiles and requests we get to join social media sites are (obviously) trolling operations.

How Outrage is Manufactured

You can tell that it's a day ending in "Y" because someone from the Slum Times wrote about something racial....and Alden Loury is really bad at it. He begins by breaking the law (apologies that this is behind the Slum Times paywall - you have to pay to be called a racist we suppose):

• The last time I was pulled over by a police officer was a couple of years ago on DuSable Lake Shore Drive. Seeing two other drivers who were pulled over, it dawned on me that I probably needed to slow down, as I was driving probably a good 10 miles per hour above the speed limit.

  Then, I saw the flashing lights behind me. It was my turn to pull over.

  As traffic stops go, this one was fairly routine. The officer was cordial. He told me I was speeding and asked for my license. After returning from his squad car, he told me to slow down. Painless, except for the speeding ticket he gave me.

Note that he doesn't tell us anything about the officer....except he was cordial. We can probably interpret that as "professional" but who knows? But based on this single event, a column is born of racial injustice!

• I hate getting tickets. Who doesn’t? But I was more curious than angry. Were there police waiting to catch motorists on the North Side? To find out, I headed north, purposely driving the speed limit to get a sense of how many others were over the limit.

  Practically everybody passed me with ease from 39th Street on the South Side all the way to Hollywood Drive on the North Side. Yet, not a police car in sight.

  I didn’t see another police car until I got back to the South Side, where a motorist was pulled over not far from where I’d gotten my ticket.

  I wasn’t surprised by the discrepancy, but I brushed it off. Maybe the cops would be catching speeders on the North Side the next day.

Or maybe a chronically undermanned police department with a unit that has maybe four cars up on LSD happened to be  working the south side rotation that day?

Nah....gotta be racial profiling!

• I was wrong. Racial profiling of drivers is alive and well in Illinois.

  For months this year, I worked on a project with colleagues from WBEZ and journalists with the Investigative Project on Race and Equity to document the widening racial disparities in traffic stops in Illinois. Two stories were published by WBEZ and the Sun-Times.

  We found Black motorists were the subjects of nearly 31% of all traffic stops in Illinois last year, even though just 14% of the state’s adult population is Black. In 2004, Black motorists were the subjects of about 17% of traffic stops statewide. Several Black men recounted the many times they’d been pulled over by police. Some shared details of tense encounters.

WBEZ is a bunch of commie fabulists who cherry pick data and bend numbers over backwards until they scream for mercy. But this is ridiculous - black motorists are 14% of the population and 17% of statewide stops? That's likely what's called the "margin of error."

And those "details of tense encounters"? Loury cites exactly.....zero. He just threw out that "scary narrative" without citing anything.

• The statistics and stories were all too familiar for me. I’ve been stopped by police at least a dozen times, mostly on the South Side and usually because I forgot to turn on my headlights or a tail light was out. Most of those encounters have stuck with me. During my first traffic stop, two state troopers searched every inch of my car — under the seats, in between the seat cushions, even unloading my trunk. One trooper even asked if I had anything on me that I didn’t want him to find.
  

So he admits he got stopped for.....compliance violations! Not for driving while black. Amazing.And the trooper stop - no context whatsoever. Did he give consent? He doesn't deny it. He's manufacturing outrage.

And then the "SCARY CPD!"

• There are those who say Chicago police target Black and Latino drivers to look for more serious crimes, like guns or drugs. But last year, collectively, Black motorists were stopped by Chicago police four times more often than whites, even though there are more white adults in the city than Black.

"...those who say..." Well that's definitive of racial profiling. There are those who say the election was stolen from Trump - we're supposed to believe you but not him? Why? As for stopping blacks at four times the rate of whites, we could hold a seminar on why that might be - economic inability to maintain a street legal car, failure of the schools (and social promotion) in classes to teach proper driving in the CPS system, lack of a two-parent household that might be able to take a teen out for practice sessions, etc.

Then he goes off the rails, undercutting the racial profiling angle without even knowing it:

• And practically everywhere I shop in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods, I see bulletproof glass, employees checking my bags before I exit or merchandise in locked cases. In some stores, buying batteries, detergent, deodorant and even a $3 tube of toothpaste requires shoppers to get a clerk to unlock a case — and the employee takes the merchandise to the check-out counter until you’re done shopping.

  Recently, I couldn’t bring myself to ring a bell for customer assistance in the toothpaste aisle. I just left. I’ll buy it someplace else, I told myself. I am not a threat or a thief. Yet, everywhere I turn, there’s someone communicating to me, in some way, that I am. That other Black people are as well.

Um.....where are these stores located? Black neighborhoods? So there aren't any (or very few) white, brown or Asian people around? Who exactly are the shop owners worried about "liberating" the goods on the shelves? 

• It’s degrading. It’s dehumanizing. And it’s exhausting.

Kind of like your writing. The demand for racism far outstrips the supply, so softballs like these have to make sure the grievance machine has plenty of fuel. But as we pointed out at the start of this post, it's behind the paywall, and the audience he's trying to reach isn't paying to read it.

Fire Fighter Dies

Fell through a roof during a fire:

• A firefighter who was described as “loved by so many” died Monday morning after battling a blaze in Lincoln Park, according to the Chicago Fire Department.

  Firefighter Andrew Price, 39, was trapped but eventually rescued after the fire broke out at 2430-2432 N. Lincoln Ave., according to fire officials. The four-floor building contains the Lincoln Station restaurant on the ground floor and apartments on the upper floors.

  “He took a fall,” said CFD spokesperson Larry Langford. “He fell through the building.”

We've said this before, but you couldn't pay us enough money to climb a ladder, walk/run across a burning roof, dragging equipment, while someone else is cutting ventilation holes in the roof....that they're standing on. 

Godspeed Firefighter Price. Prayers for his family, friends and co-workers.

Faster Please

Good news from the lobby:

• Over the past five months since arriving in Chicago, Andrea Carolina Sevilla’s parents have been unable to enroll her in school even though the reason they left everything behind in their native Venezuela was for her to have access to better education.

  In Venezuela, she said, she was lucky she could even attend school. Many other teenagers start working at an early age to help out their families, who often face extreme poverty.

  But she did not have the same luck in the city that she once dreamed of visiting. The family went from sleeping on the floor of a police station, to a crowded shelter, to a house on the Far South Side, and then back to the floor of the police station after her stepfather Michael Castejon, 39, couldn’t afford the rent. He could not find a job that paid enough without a work permit, he said.

  On Nov. 3, they set out to go back to Texas. And from there, they would go to Venezuela, the country they fled to seek asylum in the United States. They’re among the countless number of migrants who have chosen to leave Chicago in recent weeks in their search for a better life. They’re looking for warmer weather, more resources or to reunite with friends and family in other places.

So the grass WASN'T greener? Imagine that, you could have saved yourself the wear-and-tear hiking thousands of miles just to see snow on Halloween. And US taxpayers could have been saved hundreds of millions of dollars.

Of course, the government databases now loaded with all sorts of unverifiable illegal alien information won't be used to apply for loans, unemployment benefits, or absentee voting in the near future, right?

Changes to Pension Rules?

We've been reading the comments in our post from a few days back about the Chicago Contrarian article dealing with the pension and we'll say we've found out a few things we didn't know.

We also saw this info - anyone got a handle on this?

• What the union ISN'T telling you is the following (which is being agreed to):
  
  1> there's going to be a tier 3: increased contributions of 12%.
  2> police and fire pension funds will merge, making them a public safety pension fund with less overhead
  3> tier 2 will get what CFD just got (highest 4 years averaging instead of highest 8 years) but early retirement penalty is staying
  4> health care at 55 deal stays but it will go up to 5% annuity (up from 3.5%) to retire early before it kicks in (to have a lower annuity) or encourage people to stick around
  5> phase-in increased contributions for tier 2 (probably 10-11%)
  6> in exchange, the city will agree to iron clad contribution increases, but the 90% funding ramp will be pushed back to 2065 to buy them more time to stabilize
  7> in the future, raises will be lower but there will be far more non-pensionable incentives and bonuses and pay

We're thinking this is going to make it harder to (A) keep cops around, (B) harder hire people to make this a career, and (C) provoke a few lawsuits along the way.

We did get this from a couple of readers:

Mandatory retirement pushed back to 65. Since cops die earlier according to the actuary tables, this means less years of pension payouts - a rather cynical way to "improve" the health of the pension instead of taking solid steps....such as capping the pension at the highest testable rank instead of gold braid incentives that go to the political promotions.

All is Well! All is Well!!!

Don't worry....those promises about the money going to shore up pensions?  Still 100% legit! Pinkie-Promise:

• With the betting window closed on the first full month of operation at Bally’s temporary casino, the Medinah Temple site raked in more than $7.6 million in October, a 12% decline in average daily revenue compared to its first few weeks. 

  The latest monthly cash count announced Wednesday by regulators at the Illinois Gaming Board put the River North betting house near the top of the state’s roster of 15 casinos — but well behind city tax revenue projections for Chicago’s desperately underfunded police and firefighter pensions. 

  Bally’s adjusted gross revenue — its profit after paying winners — shook out to about $245,446 per day in October, down from an average of roughly $278,268 from its Sept. 9 opening through the end of that month. 

  And while the new casino at 600 N. Wabash Ave. remained the second-biggest draw for Illinois gamblers among the state’s gaming destinations, monthly admission figures suggest the excitement could be wearing off.
  

We wrote a while back about City budgets being predicated on total fantasy numbers...."projections."

That's exactly what's happening now. None of these projections have anything to do with reality, like the looming recession or the dying tourism or the hotels being turned into shelters or downtown leases being defaulted on and office space being abandoned.

Quite frankly, we wonder if the casino will ever end up being completed.

Down the Rabbit Hole

Some days when we're bored, we venture down assorted rabbit holes on the internet just to see what's brewing in the background. You can usually disregard ninety-to-ninety-five percent of what appears there, but sometimes, there are stories out there on the edges.

• A walking tour of the soon-to-be illegal alien camp at 38th and California. This thing is huge, fenced off and a flashpoint for the neighborhood. You want to see where a few hundred million of your tax dollars are going to go? Watch this video. the walking tour starts at 1:51.
• Job fair!  But not for Chicago citizens.....for illegals. The black community is shocked to learn that since they showed they were willing to listen to Donald Trump instead of voting blindly for the democrats, they're now in danger of being replaced by the illegals. The host of this video is awesome (/sarc).
  
• The First High Court case against a vaccine manufacturer.....in Britain. Remember, Big Pharma was granted blanket immunity from lawsuits here in the US. Now that the science is proving a higher incidents of heart attacks, strokes, blood clots, spontaneous miscarriages, etc., well....they're sorry about that. But it was for your own good!

Open post in the meantime.