MEDIA WATCH: Hollywood Rahm continues to duck the media now that he can't script reality for all reporters
What better opportunity to ring out with praise for Chicago's (unionized) police officers and to discuss the realities of crime in Chicago than an appearance by Chicago's mayor at Chicago Police headquarters? Well, not on February 1, 2012, and not this mayor. At midnight on January 31, 2012, the Mayor's Press Office (which has more staff than most of the city's media have reporters) issued its daily "schedule" for Mayor Rahm Emanuel. And it made clear he will not be taking questions from reporters:
At the carefully scripted unveiling of "CompStat CPS" on December 13, 2011, at Chicago Police Headquarters, Mayor Rahm Emanuel was full of words (although he avoided a Substance question, and his education aide Beth Swanson never answered it either after being given it in writing) about how the program was going to make the schools safer. Since January 1, 2012, the facts have been pouring out that many Chicago schools (and school teachers and children) are less safe than they might have been, but Chicago's mayor, after announcing that crime had dropped one cold day in January, has been avoiding the questions of reporters. Some speculate that the reason is that his Preacher Patronage program, in the form of "Safe Haven" and "Safe Passage" is proving as dangerously unprofessional as some of the other scams coming out of City Hall. Above, Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy fields reporters' questions while Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard look on after the CompStatCPS unveiling on December 13. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE. January 31, 2012
CONTACT: Mayor’s Press Office. 312.744.3334. press@cityofchicago.org
The Public Schedule for Mayor Rahm Emanuel February 1, 2011
Mayor Emanuel will deliver brief remarks during the Honored Star Case Ceremony for Chicago Police Officer Paul W. Nauden.
WHERE: Chicago Public Safety Headquarters. First Floor Lobby, 3510 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL *
* There will be no media availability following this event.
As reporters learn more and more about Rahm Emanuel's staged protest on behalf of his "school reform" stuff (Longer School Day; Turnarounds; School Closings; Privatization...), the questions grow. And the most appropriate question is why Chicago's mayor is tolerating the dangerous substitution of patronage volunteers for trained law enforcement and school security personnel at the schools and on the streets around the schools in the city's more dangerous communities.
That's it. By pumping up the programs like "Safe Passage" and "Safe Haven" (both of which provide volunteers without professional training or vetting to supposedly do school security work; it's great patronage, but...) as the solution to CPS school security problems, is the mayor really orchestrating a form of lucrative privatization for professional security (within the schools) and professional law enforcement (around the schools)? That's what it looks like.
So the story is growing beyond the Rent A Protest questions, and there is no place more appropriate to ask such questions than at a Star Ceremony at Police Headquarters. And most police officers know that the Chicago Teachers Union isn't the only union Chicago's mayor is trying to bust (or turn into a company union).
May we live in interesting times...
Comments:
By: John Kugler
Clueless... Rahm picked gang symbol (by an MLD) for Chicago vehicle sticker contest winner
http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2012/02/whoa-is-this-true.html
The design for the first Chicago vehicle sticker with Mayor Rahm Emanuel's name on it was revealed Thursday.
The new 2012-13 sticker, which will go on sale in late spring or early summer, was designed by Herbert Pulgar, a Lawrence Hall Youth Services freshman. It features a heart enclosing the city skyline and Chicago's flag with outstretched hands, and police, firefighter and paramedic symbols and hats.
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Since submitting this new city sticker design... Little Herbert has had "police & juvenile section contact" and is now a self admitted Maniac Latin Disciple...
Look at his city sticker design. The HEART is the major MLD Gang Symbol. Look at the hands pointing up to the hats on that sticker... Look closely at the fingers and how they are being held... It's hard to see on this image but those little white streaks around the hats have some in the form of a PITCH FORK.....
Looks like little MLD Herbert pulled a fast one on the City of Chicago...
He made a Maniac Latin Disciple Chicago City Sticker....
He also dug up some of Herbert Pulgar's Facebook photos that include the requisite blunt smoking, gang signs and red bandanas typical of the maniac latin disciples.
Isn't this the gang we were supposed to have "obliterated" last year after members shot two children? And now they might be designing Chicago city stickers? At the very least, this needs some serious review.
Our irony meter just exploded.
By: John Kugler
Corporate Media Catch Up Again with Indy media
In less than a month, two major game changing stories have been broken by independent news organizations:
1. rent-a-protestors -
http://www.substancenews.net
2. gang banger city sticker - http://shavedlongcock.blogspot.com
the corporate media now is exposed for the lack of independence and knowledge to report news rather than press releases from the ruling class.
By: John Kugler
Detroit citizens self-defense killings
Detroit citizens no longer rely on police as self-defense killings skyrocket\rBy Mara Gay Sunday, February 5, 2012
http://www.thedaily.com/page/2012/02/05/020512-news-detroit-vigilantes-1-5/
The people of Detroit are taking no prisoners.
Justifiable homicide in the city shot up 79 percent in 2011 from the previous year, as citizens in the long-suffering city armed themselves and took matters into their own hands. The local rate of self-defense killings now stands 2,200 percent above the national average. Residents, unable to rely on a dwindling police force to keep them safe, are fighting back against the criminal scourge on their own. And they’re offering no apologies.
“We got to have a little Old West up here in Detroit. That’s what it’s gonna take,” Detroit resident Julia Brown told The Daily.
The last time Brown, 73, called the Detroit police, they didn’t show up until the next day. So she applied for a permit to carry a handgun and says she’s prepared to use it against the young thugs who have taken over her neighborhood, burglarizing entire blocks, opening fire at will and terrorizing the elderly with impunity.
“I don’t intend to be one of their victims,” said Brown, who has lived in Detroit since the late 1950s. “I’m planning on taking one out.”
How it got this bad in Detroit has become a point of national discussion. Violent crime settled into the city’s bones decades ago, but recently, as the numbers of police officers have plummeted and police response times have remained distressingly high, citizens have taken to dealing with things themselves.
In this city of about 700,000 people, the number of cops has steadily fallen, from about 5,000 a decade ago to fewer than 3,000 today. Detroit homicides — the second-highest per capita in the country last year, according to the FBI — rose by 10 percent in 2011 to 344 people.
On a bleak day in January, a group of funeral directors wearied by the violence drove a motorcade of hearses through the city streets in protest.
Average police response time for priority calls in the city, according to the latest data available, is 24 minutes. In comparable cities across the country, it is well under 10 minutes.
Citizens like Brown feel they have been left with little choice but to take the law into their own hands.
The number of justifiable homicides, in which residents use deadly force in self-defense, jumped from 19 in 2010 to 34 last year — a 79 percent rise — according to newly released city data.
Signs that vigilantism was taking hold in the city came earlier, around Memorial Day 2009, when former federal agent Alvin Davis decided he’d had enough of the break-ins at his mother’s home on the east side. She called the police again and again, but the brazen robberies continued. Davis, then a 32-year-old Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, snapped.
Prosecutors said he spent days chasing and harassing the teenagers who were allegedly robbing his mother, even shoving his federally issued firearm into one of their mouths. No one was killed, but by the time he was done, Davis had racked up charges of unlawful imprisonment and assault. In August 2010, he was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison.
But many residents in his mother’s Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood are sympathetic to Davis, whose case is on appeal.
“He basically did what a lot of us wished we could do,” said Ken Gray, 58, who lives down the street from Davis’ mother.
One high-ranking official in the county legal system, speaking to The Daily, said the rise in justifiable homicides mirrors a local court system that’s increasingly lenient of the practice.
“It’s a lot more acceptable now to get your own retribution,” the official said. “And the justice system in the city is a lot more understanding if people do that. It‘s becoming a part of the culture.”
Detroiters are arming themselves with shotguns and handguns and buying guard dogs. Anything to take care of their own. And privately, residents say neighborhood watch groups in Detroit are widely armed.
“It’s like the militiamen who stepped up way back when. That’s where the neighborhood folks are," said James “Jackrabbit” Jackson, a 63-year-old retired Detroit cop who has patrolled the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood for years.
“They’re ready to fight,” Jackson said. “We don’t hardly see police anymore.”
The city’s wealthier enclaves have hired private security firms. Intimidating men in armored trucks patrol streets lined with gracious old homes in a scene more likely seen in Mexico City than the United States.
That kind of paid protection can run residents anywhere from $10 to $200 per month, and companies say business is good.
“We’re booming,” said Dale Brown, the owner of Threat Management Group, which along with Recon Security patrols neighborhoods like Palmer Woods in black Hummers.
“We’re paramilitary, but we’re positive. I’m not a vigilante. I’m an agent of change.”
The Detroit Police Department, grappling with deep funding cuts in a city with a spiraling budget crisis, acknowledges that response times are high and says it is working on a plan to lower them. But a spokeswoman for the department insists the rise in justifiable homicides is unrelated.
“It’s not about police response time because often the act has already taken place by the time the police are called,” said Sgt. Eren Stephens. She said citizens have a right to defend themselves.
“Anytime a life is lost, we’re concerned,” she said. “But we can‘t be on every corner in front of every home. And we know that there are citizens who will do what they have to do to protect themselves.”
That’s the terrifying position in which Kevin Early found himself in November when he was held up at gunpoint outside his home in the upper-middle-class Rosedale Park area. Neighbors called the police, but it was 25 minutes before an officer arrived.
Early, the director of the criminal justice studies program at the University of Michigan’s Dearborn campus, reasoned with the men for more than 20 minutes before he sensed they were about to shoot him in the head — then he ran. As his attackers fled in the opposite direction, neighbors emerged from the street’s stately homes with shotguns.
“All I could think of was my daughter coming home,” Early said. “I didn’t want her to see me shot dead.”
Weeks later, Early packed up his home and left Detroit. He hired Threat Management to supervise the move.
“Where else do the police come to your house after you’ve been robbed and ask you, ‘Why did you call us?’ ”
Mara.Gay@thedaily.com
By: John Kugler
West, South Sides Go Up
Crime is down!! All is well!!
A man was shot dead and another was critically wounded within minutes of each other in separate shootings late this afternoon on the city's West Side.
About 5:43 p.m., a 30-year-old man was shot on the 3000 block of West 25th Street. He was pronounced dead at the scene, said Police News Affairs [...]. As of 6:15 p.m., the Cook County medical examiner's office was not notified of the death.
About 5:41 p.m., another man, described as being in his 30s, was critically wounded in a shooting near Pulaski Road and Lexington Avenue. He was shot in the abdomen, O'Brien said.
Two people are dead and five others were wounded tonight in an apparent drive-by shooting near a liquor store on the South Side, officials said.
The shooting happened about 6:46 p.m. near or in a store located on the 2500 block of East 79th Street, police said.
Someone want to add the Friday night, Saturday and Sunday total casualties up?
Plus, it's a three day weekend - we still have to get through Monday.
And we're looking at straight middle-to-high 40's all week. Perfect shooting weather.
http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2012/02/west-south-sides-go-up.html
By: Bob Busch
Crime data on the Web
John.
Go to this site and put the address of a school in the search box.http://chicago.everyblock.com/crime
By: John Kugler
CPS gambles with security
just saw this post on second city cop about schools pulling out police to get some extra loot.
No More School Officers?
This comment appeared after the School Officers got bitten late last week:
* Last week the schools opted to remove officers all together here in 11 and the powers that be decided the schools that do have officers still do this... one inside officer and one officer outside in a squad car the outside Guy is to patrol the area and take jobs (not school jobs) close to the area
Makes perfect sense to....wait Aw F it im going back to bed
We made a few calls and it appears to be true.
What seems to have happened is that the school principals were offered a choice:
1. Keep your assigned school officers or
2. give them up and we'll give you a portion of the money spent on their salaries.
Evidently, the CPS would reimburse the CPD for the salaries of officers assigned to the school. If the principals see dollar signs and can get a few grand to spend on their own pet projects, well....
And if a few officers get bit during the course of the day? Well, we'll be out of the school business shortly.
http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2012/01/no-more-school-officers.html