St. Baldricks Event

We don't know why this is just coming to our attention. It would seem that an event like this really ought to generate a bit more interest. From the comments:

• SCC, I have a favor. I know how many coppers read this blog, me being one of probably thousands. This coming Friday march 14th at the Chicago Police Academy, they will be shaving heads as part of the st baldricks day event. All donated money for this event goes to research for childhood cancer. God forbid any of us have a child that gets cancer, or has cancer currently, i know it must mean a lot to these families to know so many people are raising money on their behalf. Last year according to their website, 18,000 people across the USA shaved their heads collecting 12.8 million dollars for this cancer research. I have registered for the event at www.stbaldricks.org and they will have many professional barbers and hair people at the academy on Friday shaving heads from 0600 until 1700 giving ALL of us an opportunity to get there. this is the first year I have signed up but i hope to do this every year in the future. Too many people are worried about shaving their head for any amount of time but these poor kids lose their hair while battling a life threatening illness and have to be so strong to get through it, I believe its the least we can do. The fire department raised $84,000 for their event last week and so far the CPD has raised $34,000. Lots of us talk shit about firemen on here, some jokingly some not so much, but lets use this as an opportunity to beat them for a great cause. Hey lets not forget, our hair can grow back and many of these children may not be so fortunate. Its a small sacrifice for a GREAT cause. We have been looked on negatively in the press in many ways but we all know that when it comes to children and elderly we always have a soft spot in our hearts. At least go to the website and see what its all about. We post for signatures for Mette, which was great and I signed, but this too is a cause that we should push for a few days and see how much we can in fact raise. Lots of negatives are posted here, lets see if we can go a few days and raise some money for these kids. I am donating $150.00, some my own and some from a few sponsors. I got started late but if even if 2000 more coppers sign up and can give $100 each, that's 200k raised for something I hope and pray not 1 of us ever has to go through! And lets challenge the new superintendent to do the same along with his command staff. If you want good press, now is the time to get it!

Here's the link and info.

Sneed? Shut Up

What a whiny bitch. She gets caught and called out rehashing discredited stories from the blog, so she whines about how J-Fed won't take her meeting:

• Hmmm: Despite Mayor Daley's furor over drunken cops behaving badly (criminally), police spokeswoman Monique Bond claims Sneed's item stating new top cop Jody Weis may have ordered roadblocks to target drunken cops in neighborhoods where a preponderance of police officers live . . . is "absolutely not true. It's just wrong, emphatically wrong." How many more times, Monique, do I have to request a meeting with Weis?

Sneed, you're a washed-up, has-been gossip columnist in a two-bit paper that won't last another two years in it's current form. This blog has more credibility than you do and it's written by a bunch of amateurs rehashing the news and Rumor Central.

If J-Fed does one positive thing during his three year tenure, we hope it's never taking a meeting with Sneed. She's a Cline/Burke/Daley lackey through and through.

List of Casualties

Along with most of these moves were some not so subtle demotions and retirements.

Anyone have a list of who stayed and who went? It's going to take us the better part of a day to collect a list, so anyone who can help out is welcome to post here.

Changes, We Got Changes

Names being tossed around this morning:

Patterson to Area 1
Avila to Area 3?
Callaway to 007?
Dugan out or up?
Who's getting 008?
Rick Flair to Gang Intelligence?

Updates as we get them.

UPDATE: Lots of sideways movement. This will be one of the biggest sets of changes in 40 years.

UPDATE: The List!

• Patrol Division
• Patterson to Deputy Chief Area 1
• E. Williams to Deputy Chief Area 2
• Rottner to Deputy Chief Area 3
• Gulliford to Deputy Chief Area 4
  
• Sodini to Deputy Chief Special Functions
• D. Dugan to Deputy Chief Patrol
• Helm to ADS of CAPS
• Crump-Hale to 003
• Ball to 005
• 006 - ?
• Calloway to 007
• J. Kupczyk to 008
• Zavala to 010
• Washington to 011
• Keane to 012
• J. Martin to 013
• L. Martinez to 014
• Green to 015
  
• Riccio to 016
• Mealer to 017
• J. Kenny to 019
• Moy to 020
• Doty to 021
• Kuehn to 022
• Boehmer to 023
• Caluris to 024
• Avila to 025
• Administrative Services
• Lodding to ADS
• Investigative Services
• Tommy Byrne to Chief of Dicks
• E. O'Donnell gets Fugitive Unit
• Wysinger to Deputy Chief of OCD
• E. Johnson to Deputy Chief Field Group A
  
• McCotter to Deputy Chief Field Group B
• Yamashiroyo to Commander Area 3 Dicks
• J. Rivera to Commander Area 4 Dicks
  
• Escalante to Bomb and Arson
• Graeber to Mass Transit
  
• Rayl to Vice Control
• Price to Intelligence
• T. Williams to TRU
• Argenbright to Airport
• Ric Flair to Gangs (Schmidt)
  
• Office of Professional Services
• Skahill to IAD
• Kirby to General Counsel

Apologies for the spelling and anything missed so far. It's a very fluid situation and we're sure we'll be making corrections all evening.

Over-Staffing Lesson

This is indicative of a larger problem, one that we've been railing about since the beginning of the blog:

• More than 50 Chicago Police officers currently assigned to desk duty will hit the streets after spring break to provide stepped-up security at “three to five” Chicago Public Schools plagued by gang retaliation and other violence, Police Supt. Jody Weis said today.

  Until that time, the job of protecting students outside “problem” schools will fall to the Targeted Response Unit, a flexible force of elite officers reassigned to crime “hot spots.”

  After joining Mayor Daley at an anti-violence rally at St. Sabina’s Church, 1210 W. 78th Place, Weis refused to identify the schools in line for special attention. He said he doesn’t want to “tip our hand” or give the bad guys any “lead time.”

Here's the thing though:

• If you can spare these 50 officers from desk duty, then why can't they man cars on the watch?

This is a prime example of over staffing inside spots that has been plaguing the Department for years, especially recent years. Closed Market is another example. If an administrative office can be 20% short while officers spend time babysitting dope spots and high schools, then that office is AT LEAST 20% over staffed, probably more.

We hear about all sorts of front offices where there seems to be anything BUT work being done on a daily basis. J-Fed ought to be eliminating a bunch of these spots as a lot of it is data entry. Do we really need armed "ticket clerks"? Automate, civilian-ize, eliminate paper in the districts and we'll bet you can put 200 more cops on the street daily. Include 35th Street and we'll wager that number climbs to 500.

We'll make no predictions about their effectiveness, but it's bodies in cars. It won't matter much on midnights anyway.

Mette Petition - Again

We aren't going to stick it as the top post for a week again. But we're going to ask that if you haven't already signed the electronic petition, CLICK HERE and do so. We've hit a plateau of 8,600 plus. It really won't take that much extra effort to push it over 10,000.

Forward the link, remind your friends, let people know. It's a small gesture.

Chicago Connection?

Yesterday, we made fun of the local media for attempting to find a Chicago angle to every single story, the reasoning being that they have to make it relevant to the local audience, otherwise, no one will watch them and they all might have to do real work for once. Now, we're about to be guilty of the same thing. First up, this New York Post article:

• Disgraced Gov. Spitzer dropped up to $80,000 on sex with prostitutes, sources revealed tonight.

  Spitzer, a millionaire, was hopping into bed with harlots for as long as 10 years and traveled as far as Florida for call-girl trysts, sources said.

He traveled to meet with them. Others arranged for girls to travel to the rendezvous. This "Emperor's Club" regularly flew prostitutes around the country for trysts. The unidentified "Client-10" is from Chicago. And the wheels started turning.

Where have we recently heard of a prostitute flying into Chicago for a "sex industry job"? And in circumstances that are still the object of much speculation and an upcoming court battle, didn't the "sex industry job" fall through, a disturbance at Midway Airport, an arrest, a number of phone calls from the west coast, an I-Bond, and the prostitute ended up falling/jumping/being tossed out of a seventh story window of a CHA building? Hmmmm.

It's probably just coincidences, but still, conspiracies have been built out of flimsier material than this. It's just funny how the mind works.

Quick Hits

A couple of things. First up, the mayor and city council justify the tax hikes by giving away almost $200,000 on another bullshit claim:

• Five weeks after taking a defiant stand against the settlement, a City Council committee agreed Monday to pay $195,000 to a man who made a "Scarface"-style claim: that Chicago Police officers who detained him during a 2004 drug raid threatened him with a running chain saw, downloaded pornography onto his computer and used racial epithets to insult him.

We're assuming that this chainsaw was located and inventoried by IAD? And witnesses supported this allegation? And the coppers downloaded porn from some website onto this goof's computer for what purpose? The electronic trail must have been something to follow for a $195,000 payout. We're surprised a magical screwdriver didn't appear out of thin air.


Dead bodies appearing on 014:

• A possibly homeless man died after he was found unresponsive in a Northwest Side police station lobby Monday night.

  Paul Schmatko, 47, who was possibly homeless, was pronounced dead at 9:05 p.m. at Norwegian-American Hospital, according to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office.

  Schmatko was found unresponsive in the Shakespeare District police station lobby at 2150 N. California Ave., according to the medical examiner’s office.

Bereaved family and lawyer appearing in 3...2...1...

And finally, Sneed recycling already disproved BS:

• Gulp! Sneed hears rumbles new Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis may have ordered roadblocks to target drunken cops in neighborhoods where a preponderance of police officers live.

Those roadblock locations are published weeks in advance. There's nothing suggesting that he's targeting coppers - but if you're a copper who gets caught up in one, better not expect any breaks. Try to keep up here Sneed - this isn't Cline's Department anymore.

Abbate Plea Falls Through

And perhaps it's going to trial; he returns to court 30 April.

Bench or jury? Unknown. But we all know the media will be playing the tape over and over, further polluting the jury pool.

Angels, One and All

Honor students and future heart surgeons, each and every one:

• Emily Green came to hear about the murder of her son Ruben Ivy. He was shot Friday outside Crane High School just after classes let out. The mother of the accused killer -- Crane student Devonte Smith, 15 -- came to hear the allegations against her son.
• Smith and Ivy have juvenile criminal histories, a source said. Smith had 15 arrests for offenses including aggravated assault with a weapon, domestic violence, mob action, marijuana possession, and aiding and abetting the sale of a stolen vehicle, the source said. Ivy had been accused of mob action, criminal damage to property, criminal trespass, gambling and marijuana possession.

And the payoff?

• Coincidentally, Emily Green said she still carries a bullet from when she was shot in the head and foot in a disturbance that broke out at Crane when she was a student there in 1984.

Expect a very long hot and bloody summer.

Pay Up You Deadbeats

We aren't going to pay for everyone damnit:

• Kentucky Representative Tim Couch filed a bill this week to make anonymous posting online illegal.

  The bill would require anyone who contributes to a website to register their real name, address and e-mail address with that site.

  Their full name would be used anytime a comment is posted.

  If the bill becomes law, the website operator would have to pay if someone was allowed to post anonymously on their site. The fine would be five-hundred dollars for a first offense and one-thousand dollars for each offense after that.

If you hop over to AceofSpades, his comment section is full of support for this idea, mostly from people named Dick Hertz, John Smith, Al Coholic, Ben Dover and Heywood Jablome.

As someone pointed out, there's no long tradition in this country of publishing material anonymously or using a pseudonym. None whatsoever. And we're ashamed to say that Rep. Couch claims to be a republican for some reason.

NY Scandal with Chicago Twist

You have to love the Chicago media. It doesn't matter what happens anywhere on the entire globe, they just have to find a local angle to make it seem relevant to a Chicago audience. The New York governor getting caught up in a prostitution operation is no exception:

• The federal investigation into an international prostitution ring that has ensnared New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer also uncovered an alleged encounter between a prostitute and an unnamed client in Chicago, court documents show.
  
  Identified only as "Client-10" in court documents, the man requested that the prostitution ring, Emperors Club VIP, send a prostitute known as "Chrissy" from Los Angeles to Chicago on March 4, according to the indictment dated March 5.

What we wouldn't give to have "Client-10" identified as a high ranking member of the political combine here though. That'd be fun.

Two Things

Another JibJab video:

• CLICK HERE for a Hawaiian treat. Remove all spew-able beverages from the area.

Keep them coming.

And if your boss is late for a meeting, fear not - it seems that anyone who has a Blackberry wired into their e-mail calendar system, the program doesn't (or hasn't) allowed for Daylight Savings Time. A Department wide e-mail went out explaining the glitch.

Only the best cars, computers, equipment and computer programs for this Department.

Inside Info or Misdirection?

Someone either has a great imagination or a source of information so near the halls of power that we're amazed it ever makes it outside of City Hall. From the comments:

• Word is that the next wave to go will be District Commanders: Georgas to stay due to Mara & Corp. Counsel, Cmdr Kevin Ryan juice with the Park District Mitchell (19th Ward) is the only thing keeping him from getting dumped. Leo Schmitz is on the bubble due to "questionable" search warrants from Area 4 Days, J-Fed is "very concerned" about Feds looking at civil rights violations (Looking at Area 2 gun team also when Wedster was the boss). Carter will not be the commander of 022. Capt Kenny will definitely be a D/C or Deputy Chief by week's end. Also, Dugan getting ready to put in papers,
  Skahill needed a good showing at So. Side parade to save her job.
  Sodini to move up - a deal is being worked out with Kirby to go to another city agency as the City does not want her coming back to defend coppers in private practice, she has too much knowledge of where skeletons are buried and could embarrass people when she starts subpeoning folks to defend her clients. Look how ex Chief of Staff Needham makes monkeys out IAD and OPS when he defends coppers, they don't want that happening again. Daley likes Tobias, J-Fed told to "not help Tobias, but don't hurt him." Rayl, incompetent fat fuck, saved by Bridgeport buddies, but will be moved back to a District Commander. Cmdr. Evans out. J-Fed wants all FBI buddies at Airport, Traffic and Mass Transit due to terrorism concerns with airports and downtown area. It's nice to drink with City Hall buddies of Brian Murphy, you get all the scoops......

Let the wagering begin.

Rumors of Movement...and More

Well, with something like a dozen or more exempt spots open by Friday, this might be the week that a large number of promotions occur in waves or in one fell swoop. And with those promotions, a large amount of hangers-on will be following their people around, too.

We're getting more rumors of papers being dropped over the weekend. Someone mentioned Ernie Brown. Someone else said Eugene Williams. If true, it would certainly lend a bit of credibility to a comment earlier this year about almost 70 lieutenants and above might be gone this year. We've certainly passed twenty or so with the recent February and March movement.

We're also hearing that one of the recent promotions might be rescinded in light of past extracurricular activities. Someone mentioned that Sneed might be working on some stuff. If Sneed is working an angle, you can bet that either Burke or Daley or even a past superintendent is actively working to undermine J-Fed.

City Over a Barrel?

Has the FOP suddenly stumbled into a position of power during negotiations with the City?

We were noting the frequency with which J-Fed seems to be throwing out "ideas" to send everyone into a tizzy. We also remember that the FOP and the City have a "gentleman's agreement" not to negotiate the contract in the media. Yet every time J-Fed opens his mouth, he brings up a situation that not only begs for a response, but ought to be the subject of negotiation at the bargaining table, not in the papers. Also, the increased emphasis on movers and parkers in assorted districts hints that the City is noticing a drop off in officer related revenue generating.

One must imagine that J-Fed doesn't have much experience with contracts as he's a former feeb and feebs don't have contracts per se. Is he merely a stalking horse (as many have opined in the comments) for the mayor's Olympic dreams? Or something else entirely?

Regardless, you can be sure the mayor is really going to have his people demand the kitchen sink in concessions for this contract.

Illusion of Safety Revisited

We've been noticing some variation on the following theme in most of the reporting about the Crane High School shooting:

• Friday's shooting occurred in full view of one of five Chicago Police cameras stationed within a block of the Near West Side campus that is heavily patrolled by police and school administrators at dismissal time -- as a number of students watched.

Cameras. Everyone is mentioning the cameras. Near the cameras. Under the cameras. In view of the cameras. Once again, this supports our contention that cameras do not prevent crime. All they do is provide a better eyewitness than your regular run-of-the-mill civilian. And that's only if it happens to be looking in the right direction.

Cameras provide the illusion of police presence without actually spending the money on a real live police officer. Again, we'll let everyone know that NO ONE is watching these things. No one at all more than 90% of the time. And even if they were, the camera isn't going to magically transform into an officer to protect someone.

As one of our west side readers noted, how about someone does a story on why three public schools within a two mile radius eat up literally hundreds of man hours worth of police service each and every day during the school year? And why there are FIVE cameras around Crane alone? That'd be some interesting reading.

Video Greetings

Happy Southside Irish Parade Day:

• CLICK HERE for another fun video

It never ends.

Spring Ahead

Daylight Savings Time starts three weeks early this year. We had forgotten until the Watch Commander told us we'd all be working a seven hour shift tonight. Which makes up for the nine hour one we did this past fall.

Another hour of daylight for CPS honor students to kill each other.

Bad Timing on Alcohol Study

This is just throwing gas on the fire:

• People who do not drink alcohol may finally have a reason to start -- a study published on Friday shows non-drinkers who begin taking the occasional tipple live longer and are less likely to develop heart disease.
  
  People who started drinking in middle age were 38 percent less likely to have a heart attack or other serious heart event than abstainers -- even if they were overweight, had diabetes, high blood pressure or other heart risks, Dr. Dana King of the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston and colleagues found.

Moderation must be the key? Damn these medical studies!