When Mayor Richard J. Dailey died in 1976, there was a succession of short-term mayors, including Michael Bilandic (appointed by the city council), Jane Byrne (an insider who ran as an outsider after Bilandic fired her), Harold Washington (Chicago’s first black mayor, who died in office), David Orr (by succession, for about a week), Eugene Sawyer (appointed by the city council), until 1989, when Richard M. Daley, son of the first Mayor Daley, finally took the Chicago throne. After the first few re-elections, people started joking that his proper title was “Mayor-For-Life,” but in just a few weeks he’s about to retire.

The Chicago Tribune‘s Leon Kass has a personal look back at Daley’s career. Everyone’s heard of the Great Chicago Fire, but how many people outside of this town remember the Great Chicago Flood? That’s when Kass began to sour on Daley:

Opening Day for the White Sox is a day of South Side obligation, and the mayor and yours truly were obligated to attend services at Sox Park. But our plans changed when an underground tunnel ruptured along the Chicago River. Most Chicagoans didn’t even know the tunnels were there, but they sure learned about them when the Loop was flooded and the entire central city was shut down.

A furious mayor wanted political heads on a pike.

One reluctant head belonged to Jim McTigue, a low-ranking North Side city worker, a Cubs fan and tunnel inspector. Daley held a news conference to rip on McTigue, saying McTigue didn’t warn his superiors of the breach in the tunnel that led to the flood. It turned out that Daley was wrong, that McTigue had indeed warned his bosses, and they had ignored him.

“I don’t want to become the Mrs. O’Leary’s cow of the flood,” McTigue told me.

Yeah, a lot of people think the cow was a frame-up too. It’s the Chicago way.

It also turned out that Daley’s friends were making a fortune off the flood.

Yup, that’s also the Chicago way. I remember one hot summer when a large chunk of one of the city’s older residential areas was out of power for days because the substation feeding the area pretty much blew up. Daley was on television ranting about Commonwealth Edison’s incompetence. They probably deserved it too, but Daley was also ranting about how they needed to start over and do things right by bringing in consultants to fix the problem. I’m sure that he had a specific list of consultants in mind.

This is the sort of thing that happens when you have a powerful political machine like Chicago’s. Instead of the rule of law, you get rule by the arbitrary whims of the man in power.

There were many Jim McTigues in the city. Not just fall guys, but business owners, taxpayers, regular folks who were terrified that they’d run afoul of City Hall and get stepped on.

…by the mid-1990s, Daley’s hatchet men had rigged employment tests to build vast patronage armies, allowing him to control all of Cook County and become the dominant political silverback male in Illinois.

Kass discusses another big scandal or two, but then comes to an interesting conclusion about when Daley’s invincible political machine started to falter:

But then he destroyed Meigs Field, the little airport on the lake. He sent his bulldozers out in the middle of the night and slashed the runways with giant X’s. He ruined Meigs because he wanted to, because he could.

“There are three Daleys,” said a prominent political figure who supports the mayor, at least publicly. “There’s the Daley who got elected, the one you liked. Then there’s the Daley who cut all those deals. And there’s the Daley who destroyed Meigs Field. And once he did that, he lost his way.”

I never understood Daley’s problem with Meigs Field, or why he’d been fighting a legal battle to close it. He claimed he wanted to use the land as a nice park for all the city’s residents, instead of a perq for the rich fatcats with private planes — an unbelievable claim for a deal-maker like Daley. After 9/11, the story changed to one of concern about terrorism and having an airport so close to the skyscrapers downtown, as if a small plane could do any more damage than a hijacked truck, or that a hijacked jet from nearby O’Hare Airport couldn’t reach the city center in about three minutes.

(Even if you don’t know Chicago, you may recognize Meigs Field from Microsoft Flight Simulator. It was the airport you started at by default.)

Anyway, one night a crew of workers used bulldozers to carve those giant X’s in the runways, rendering the airport unusable. It was an obscene thing to do to a working airport, and Daley did it with no warning to airport staff, no warning to the people whose planes were now stranded, and no warning to the FAA. For anyone else, sabotaging an airport like this would be an act of terrorism, but in Chicago under Daley, the city just had to pay a fine.

After Meigs, things were different between Chicago and Daley. Chicago had seen the other side of his face. Things went downhill from there. His friends got rich but Chicago floated in red ink. He failed to win the Olympics. Taxes kept rising. He sold off the skyway, the parking meters.

Geoff Dougherty at Chicago Current has a different take on the start of Daley’s decline:

I think the turning point came a bit later for Daley, when the Hired Truck scandal got cranking.

That was a classic Chicago scam. The city was hiring private trucks to do hauling for construction projects, and one day an enterprising reporter noticed that dump trucks were sitting at city construction projects and just waiting for days, doing nothing except transfering city money to the trucking contractor. A few instances of this could be explained by the uncertainties of construction, but this was happening a lot. Millions of dollars a year were were changing hands while the the trucks sat idle.

(I remember that some Teamsters union rep was a little unclear on the concept, because he thought the big scandal was that the do-nothing truck drivers should have been union do-nothing truck drivers.)

I don’t exactly have my finger on the pulse of the city, so I have no idea whether John Kass or Geoff Dougherty has correctly identified when thing started turning sour for Daley, but I’m pretty sure it was ultimately the parking meters that sealed his fate.

When you do a deal to turn over metered parking operations to a private company, and that company raises prices, increases the number of hours of paid parking per week, and switches to a payment system that is less convenient, you irritate every single driver in Chicago. That can’t do anything good for your re-ection chances.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Mayor Daley’s Turning Points

Bah.

Look, it’s not that this wasn’t a big snowstorm. It was huge. It’s got to be one of the 4 or 5 heaviest snowfalls in the past 50 years. I’m not pretending it wasn’t much worse than usual. But this is Chicago.

It’s not that we’re too tough to notice the snow. But we’ve seen snow before, and we know how to handle it. We’re prepared. We’ve got brushes and scrapers and de-icing spray for the cars. We’ve got shovels and road salt and snow blowers. There’re a couple of thousand guys with pickup trucks and jeeps who attach a plow blade and make a little extra money clearing parking lots and driveways. There’s a guy on my block who owns a small construction company; he brought a Bobcat loader home with him to clean out the alley behind his house.

The condo association where I live changed plow services a few years ago, and the new guys are really good. The first plow showed up Tuesday night in the middle of the snowstorm. Another one showed up Wednesday when the snow stopped falling, and between the plowing service and a bunch of residents with shovels, our parking lot looked pretty much like this.

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There’s a driveway along one building that’s hard to clear with a plow because people park along it leaving too narrow a path, but later on Wednesday they brought some sort of equipment and cleared the whole thing.

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As long as the temperature stays below freezing, snow remains an obdurate mass. Shovels and plows can more it around the landscape, but they can’t get rid of it. All the snow on the driveway pictured above ended up in a massive heap in front of the building.

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Since it’s blocking the public sidewalk, I assume the condo management company has hired a few dump trucks to eventually haul it away.

You know, sometimes a libertarian lesson just finds you. We’ve cleaned out our lot, driveways, and sidewalks. And as this shot shows, so have a lot of other folks in our neighborhood:

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Now take a look at the public street next to our building:

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That was north-looking. Here’s the view to the south.

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Notice anything?

Those of you from non-snowy climates probably can’t tell, but the street hasn’t been plowed. The path down the street is made entirely by wheel ruts and people who’ve dug out their parking spaces. The city has yet to plow the side streets.

The north-south street gets a lot of traffic–it’s a shortcut to a business area–but the east-west street is pretty quiet. That means it looks even worse:

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You can see where people have walked through this area, but there are no wheel tracks. It’s impassable to cars.

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Since I’ve taken these pictures, good samaritans with snowblowers have been clearing the streets, and the roads are becoming more usable.

I’m not quite sure what the lesson is here. It’s not really that governments provide crappy service. After all, city and country crews have been clearing all the main streets and highways. They’re getting a lot done.

I guess the lesson I’m seeing is that in difficult times, most people will take care of themselves and their neighbors pretty well, working together and helping each other out, when they can.

In any case, as soon as the city clears the side streets, we’re good to go.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Cleaning Up the Snow

With her husband already asleep, 84-year-old Anna Jakymek was just turning out the lights when she heard loud noises at the back and front doors about 11:30 p.m.

Her initial thought was that her 89-year old husband had fallen out of bed, but she realized something else was happening when she looked into the front room.

“I see maybe 20 guys come in and see the door knocked open,” she said.

The intruders were members of the Cook County sheriff’s police gang crimes narcotics unit executing a search warrant at the home on the 5600 block of South Kilbourn Avenue.

They had a warrant for a 23 year old Hispanic male suspected of dealing coke and meth. What they found was an elderly Russian couple who had come to America to escape from the oppressive Soviet Union where people had to live in fear of their government. The Cook Country Sheriff’s Police weren’t sure if that was just a clever disguise, though, so instead of apologizing for their mistake they trashed the home anyway looking for the couple’s stash of drugs. They found some aspirin.

“I didn’t believe it was the police. They broke everything. I told them they should have rung the bell.”

After mouthing off to the cops like that I’m surprised she wasn’t arrested for obstruction and resisting arrest. The police were understandably aggravated since the couple had no pets. With nothing left to break, and nothing to shoot at, the cops left.

…the officer explained they had misinformation, but said his job was over, and he was leaving. They left a copy of the warrant, but he absolved himself of any responsibility for the raid or the damage…

Cook County Sheriff, Tom Dart, is positioning himself to run for Mayor of Chicago. I wonder if he’ll be commenting on this incident. I also wonder if his opponents will push for a comment, or if they will just fear being labelled “soft on crime”.

“As soon as we entered the home, we knew this couple was not involved in the activity alleged”

But they still decided to trash the house anyway.

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at They Should Have Rung the Bell

International terrorists, no longer content with blowing up buildings, are now targeting parking lot lights in home center stores. This is a dangerous new development. Obviously Al Qaeda is jealous of our well lit parking lots and feel they can bring America to her knees by darkening our shopping experience one lamp post at a time.

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Not Everyone Who Peeks Up Skirts is a Terrorist

Mayor Daley will now have to find a different excuse to raise our taxes so he can funnel cash to his buddies.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Chicago Dodges a Bullet

Lousy weather, long commutes, rising unemployment and the highest sales tax rate in the country are to blame for the Windy City being near the top of our list. High rates of corruption by public officials didn’t help either.

A big factor in our advancement was apparently public corruption:

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois, which includes Chicago, has been very busy in recent years. They convicted 385 public officials of crimes over the past decade, a per capita rate that puts it in the bottom third of big U.S. metros.

The Northern District office boasts of recent successful prosecutions, including “a corrupt former governor of Illinois, Chicago officials who rigged city hiring, individuals who lied about their support of foreign terrorism, corporate executives who cheated public shareholders and traditional organized-crime bosses who were responsible for notorious murders.”

Illinois’ record of public corruption, particularly in the governor’s office, is staggering. Five of the past nine governors have been charged with crimes, and three, as of now, have served time in prison.

Then there’s our economy:

The misery in Chicago runs much deeper than just corruption, though. Unemployment is expected to surge to 9.2% in 2009, up from 6.6%. The Tribune Co. is mired in bankruptcy, while big local employers like Midway Games, Motorola, and the University of Chicago Medical Center have all announced big layoffs.

Residents have been showing their dissatisfaction with Chicago with their feet, perhaps fed up by the average low temperature of 17 degrees in January. There has been a net migration of people out of Chicago for seven straight years, a trend that is expected to continue.

The article also mentions our winter weather, our sales tax—at 10.3% it’s the highest in the country—and the Cubs’ century-long losing streak, but for some reason it neglects to mention last year’s sudden surge of murders.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at #3 With a Bullet

It was the headline on the home page that caught my eye:

Ex-Ald. Troutman pleads guilty in corruption case

The former alderman admits taking cash to support zoning changes and permits for developers.

Really? She “admits taking cash” from developers. Like she was just minding her own business when some developers offered her cash out of the blue?

The first paragraph of the story inside paints a more realistic picture.

In an about-face from earlier pledges that she was innocent of corruption charges leveled against her, former Ald. Arenda Troutman pleaded guilty in federal court Wednesday to scheming to extort cash in exchange for supporting zoning changes and permits for developers.

Yeah, that sounds right. I don’t think she was selflessly blocking unwise zoning changes out of concern for her ward, only to be seduced by developers waving wads of cash.

This is one of the reasons libertarians don’t like pervasive government: It allows corrupt government officials to stick their nose into everything and squeeze people. Troutman wouldn’t have been able to do this if she didn’t have control over the permitted use of every piece of land in her ward.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Why They Are Corrupt

A 27-year veteran Chicago police officer was shot in the head and killed by a woman who grabbed his gun during a struggle outside a police headquarters on the North Side early Wednesday, authorities said.

Officers who responded to the scene at Belmont and Western Avenues around 2 a.m. then shot the woman several times, critically wounding her, they said.

Belmont District Officer Richard Francis, 60, was taken to Illinois Masonic Medical Center and pronounced dead just before 3 a.m., according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office. He was the first police officer fatally shot in the line of duty since 2002.

In other reports, the woman is described as mentally disturbed. And somehow she managed to take a gun away from a veteran officer and kill him with it. No rhyme or reason to it.

My condolences to the Francis family. I’m sorry for their loss.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Officer Down

A national survey says the average price for regular gasoline rose about 17 cents in the last two weeks, with the highest price in Chicago at $4.07 a gallon.

I keep telling myself it wasn’t foolish of my wife and I to buy our first SUV this year because the high prices are only temporary.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at We’re #1! We’re #1!

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Cook County Forest Preserve District is tearing down the last of the toboggan slides:

The last toboggan slides in the Cook County Forest Preserve District will come down despite an impassioned plea to preserve the historic attractions enjoyed by generations of city and suburban residents.

The Forest Preserve Commission approved contracts Tuesday to demolish the storied, southwest suburban Swallow Cliff slides and a set of similar slides at Caldwell Woods on Chicago’s Far Northwest Side.

Caldwell Woods is just a few minutes away, so I went over and took some pictures a few weeks ago. Then a lot of other stuff came up, so I didn’t get around to posting them until just now.

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This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at No More Tobaggan Slides in Cook Country Forest Preserves

• Your initial top priority should be to eliminate corrupt cops. Indict them, fire them, or convince them to quit. Your commanders will say they can’t afford to lose the manpower, but you’ll get a lot more done when everyone is on the same side.
• Use the money you would have paid the bad cops to give some overtime to patrol. Maybe use a little of it to repair some of Chicago’s ancient police cars so the extra cops will have something to drive.
• Speed up the investigation of all allegations of police misconduct. If the complaints are legitimate, the victims have a right to receive swift justice, and you need to show that police are not above the law. On the other hand, if the complaints are not legitimate, the officers have a right to be out from under the cloud of suspicion as quickly as possible.
• When a cop is actually convicted of corruption, have someone make a big 8″ by 10″ photo of him and a sign explaining how he disgraced himself and post it in police headquarters where other cops will see it. A web page wouldn’t hurt either. (TarnishedStar.com is available.)
• You may know a lot about law enforcement, but as an FBI agent-in-charge you’ve never had to deal with some of the issues you’ll be facing now, such as real estate, hiring, training, procurement, and union negotiation. You need to pick staff that understand these things, otherwise you’ll be doomed.
• You have no patrol experience, and a lot of people will tell you to do a few ride-alongs in police car to get an idea what it’s like. It sounds like a good idea, but it’s not. The ride-along will be stage-managed so you don’t see a damned thing that’s real. Also, right now you know you are ignorant about patrol, so you’ll probably be careful and rely on your subordinates, but you could do an awful lot of damage if you start to think you understand patrol after a week of riding in a police car.
• No matter how well you do this job, the powers-that-be within the City will force you out in a few years. There’s nothing you can do to avoid this, so there’s no point worrying about pissing people off. Screw them all, and make changes that you can be proud of.
• Bust a few crooked politicians. Take over the investigations at the end and slap the cuffs on yourself. The rank and file will accuse you of grandstanding for the media, but it will keep a few cops out of the crosshairs after you’re gone.
• Focus on the most emportant part of police work, fighting serious crime, and let everything else slide.
• No matter how tight your manpower, it’s always worth assigning cops to clear the warrant backlog.
• No matter how many cops you have available, it’s always a waste of time to bust a restaurant for selling foie gras.
• Use your SWAT teams to stop violent incidents, not to start them. Dynamic entry into a suspect’s house may be a great way to gather drug evidence, but eventually one of your shooters is going to kill a 92-year-old grandmother or shoot a baby’s fingers off. It’s not worth the risk just to bag a few minor dealers.
• Teach cops how to exploit an arrest. They haven’t done their job unless they’ve looked up the offender’s probation status, asked him about his associates, and asked him if he knows someone who has an illegal gun. Someone should also ask him if he knows any crooked cops, or if a cop has ever asked him for a bribe.
• Speaking of bribes, you should offer rewards to cops for reporting bribe attempts. This doesn’t have to cost money. The department can offer cops rewards that no criminal could ever match as a bribe, such as a bump in seniority when bidding for their next shift assignment. (I think CPD may already do this.)
• If the department was a business, analysts would say that almost the entire value of the department consists of human capital, also known as trained and experienced people. Within the department, training should never stop.
• At the low end, you need to make sure that training and mentoring skills are a requirement for promotion.
• You also need to retain the people you’ve trained, so treat them well.
• I don’t know much about how the police contract works, but here’s something you can give the working police without costing the city a dime: Eliminate the residency requirement. Let cops live in the suburbs and work in the city if that’s what they want to do.
• You need a training program at the high end too. The U.S. army trains its generals, and big companies often rotate their managers through all the major functions of the business before putting them in charge. No one should be considered ready for a top slot unless they’ve spent time in patrol, detectives, human resources, and internal affairs.

Anybody else have some bright ideas? Leave a comment.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Some Advice for the New Top Cop

I’m not particularly willing to let cops get away with stuff, and this sounds pretty awful, but…I think the cops might have done the best they could in a difficult situation. Here’s how it all went wrong:

When Fletcher refused to open her door, police were called. Although Fletcher cracked the door, she still refused to let her visitors into the house.

But police officers wouldn’t take no for an answer and pushed their way in. Fletcher ran and got the hammer she keeps beside her bed.

A few more facts paint the whole picture: Fletcher is only about 5 feet tall but weighs 160 pounds, so she’s not exactly a frail old lady, and she has schizophrenia and dementia. The police say she became agitated and violent.

Let me put that a little differently: The officers were facing a crazy lady swinging a hammer. That could mess you up bad.

I don’t know much about policing, but I think of all the ways the cops had of stopping her—gun, riot stick, fists, tackling, pepper spray—the taser may have been the least damaging. It sounds like a tough call.

I think part of my pro-police reaction to this incident is because I don’t care for Mitchell’s viewpoint. For example:

Unfortunately, despite Fletcher’s documented mental condition, police officers — including a sergeant — resorted to the same tactics they use when they are dealing with violent criminals.

They were dealing with a violent criminal. She attacked them with a hammer. That she has a mental condition excuses her behavior as a legal matter—she stops being responsible for her behavior when she stops being in control of it—but it doesn’t change the tactical situation the officers were facing. Once they were under attack, they didn’t have a lot of choices.

On the other hand, I’m having trouble understanding why the officers entered Fletcher’s home in the first place. They were sent to do a welfare check on a woman, and she met them at the door and refused admittance. Why did the officers insist on forcing their way into the property?

I really have no clue how police are supposed to handle a welfare check, but I’d hate to think that cops could enter my home against my will just because some third party told them to check on me. I’m hoping there’s more to it than that.

However, if officers broke the law by entering Fletcher’s home, then they lost their right to self-defense, just like any other home invader. When she came at them with a hammer, their only legal option was to stop trespassing and leave.

The ethics of violent confrontations often depend on very specific facts, and those facts often get left out of newspaper accounts. I’m filling in a lot of the gaps with guesswork about what was going on, so my opinion here could change on a dime if I learn better facts.

Update: Here’s an example of how important missing facts are: According an AP wire story about the incident, when social workers came to see the woman, they saw through a window that she was swinging a hammer around, so they called the police. When the cops arrived, the landlord let them in. This suggests the police knew about her condition and were entering the home because the social workers were afraid she’d hurt herself.

These kinds of stories are less about principles or ideals or values than they are about what specific people did what specific acts. Tomorrow, another random fact could come out which swings the story the other way.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Tasering During a Welfare Check

Driving-related fines and fees provided the city treasury with more than $210 million last year. That represented about 4 percent of the 2006 budget, a small, but significant amount. A projected 2008 revenue shortfall of a similar size, $217 million, has brought predictions of a menu of tax, fee and fine increases to plug the gap.

That’s not an incentive that’s going to favor the ordinary citizens of Chicago.

Daley administration officials insist their system is fair, and they say that motorists who think they’ve been cited in error are guaranteed due process.

They can contest their tickets by mail or in person before an administrative hearing officer, presenting photos or other proof to bolster their cases, officials say. If found liable, they can appeal the decision in Cook County Circuit Court.

An administrative hearing officer is a city employee, not an independant judge, so it’s a stretch to call this due process. Consider the experiences of Heather Thorne, who found a police officer writing a parking ticket for her car:

“I asked him where the sign was,” said Thome, 35, a temp worker. “He said there used to be a sign on ‘that’ pole, and it hasn’t been there for two years. My logical question was, ‘How can you write a ticket?’ And he told me he doesn’t want to, but his boss tells him he has to go out every day and write tickets.”

Thome said the cop advised her to appeal to the city’s Department of Administrative Hearings. She did, by mail, with a photo of the scene—sans sign—enclosed. She still was found liable.

Well, that just means that Thorne needs to appeal to the Cook County Circuit Court in order to get this matter heard before a real judge, right?

Not exactly. You see, the ticket was only $50, but the fee for filing the appeal would be $93.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Traffic Enforcement Profiteering in Chicago

As many as two-thirds of the 520 prosecutors staffing Cook County’s felony courtrooms are expected to be no-shows, officials in the state’s attorney’s office said. Prosecutors throughout the 835-lawyer office are being urged to attend today’s County Board meeting instead.

“I told all the assistant state’s attorneys for special prosecutions — gang crimes, financial crimes — to attend that meeting,” said Scott Cassidy, chief of special prosecutions. “They’re using their vacation time.”

The coordinated day off by prosecutors demonstrates their fury toward the County Board and its president, Todd Stroger, over what they call broken promises to pay them as much as public defenders.

The board is offering the non-unionized prosecutors a one-time raise of 3 percent, plus a lump payment of $1,000. Meanwhile, the unionized public defenders are getting cost-of-living adjustments retroactive to 2004, amounting to a raise of more than 12 percent, according to Bernie Murray, chief of criminal prosecutions.

Some of the prosecutors are seeking more permanent time off from their jobs:

In a blistering letter to Stroger, State’s Attorney Richard Devine said Monday that 52 prosecutors have quit since February, “twice the normal rate.”

…

“I have more friends talking about quitting. And it’s not the young people. It’s the senior people. They have families. They have tuitions to pay.”

That can’t be good for the prosecution in Cook County. I’m guessing that most of the prosecutors who quit aren’t going on to prosecute somewhere else, and I don’t think criminal law experience is very helpful in civil litigation, so I figure a lot of them are just switching to the other side of the aisle.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Labor Action by Cook Country Prosecutors?

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This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at April In the Windy City

You probably already know about the first incident: Officer Anthony Abbate attacked Karolina Obrycka, a 24-year old bartender at Jesse’s Shortstop Inn, because she wouldn’t serve him any more drinks. I should probably say “allegedly,” but there’s video of the incident so I feel pretty confident. Everyone in the world can watch a drunken off-duty Chicago cop beat down young woman in a bar.

To my mind, however, the worst part of the incident is getting very little press. It is rumored that some cops offered Obrycka a bribe if she would back off, and then threatened to plant drugs in the bar and in Obrycka’s car if she didn’t back off. I suppose this could be anti-police spin put out by someone with a political motivation, but if there’s any truth to it, this a very bad thing.

When Abbate attacked Obrycka, he wasn’t on duty, he wasn’t doing police work, and he wasn’t using police powers. He was just a drunk jerk that beat up a woman, and he happened to also be cop. With 13,000 cops in this city, there are always going to be a few troublemakers. To borrow a phrase from the Rodney King trials in California, it appears Abbate didn’t commit any of his crimes under color of authority. In a sane world, his barroom brawling has nothing to do with Chicago police in general.

But if Abbate’s buddies really are trying to bribe and intimidate witnesses, we’re no longer talking about one guy with a bad attitude. We’re talking about a criminal conspiracy within the police department: They’d have to steal the drugs from somewhere, plant them on innocent people, and then perjure themselves to explain how they found them, all of this under color of authority. (And if word of this gets out in a big way, every defense attorney in the city will be telling the jury that the police framed their client.)

The attempted cover-up, if it’s real, is a much bigger story than the original beating, but there’s no video so it won’t be making the national news.

There’s also the question of why it took so long—about a month—for Abbate to be charged. My first thought was that the officers who took the complaint from Obrycka were understandably reluctant to investigate and charge one of their own. But that can’t be right, because these kinds of incidents are investigated by the Internal Affairs unit (or maybe it’s the Office of Professional Standards) which exists only to investigate and charge other police officers.

So what took so long? Well, for Superintendent Phil Cline and the rest of the Chicago police brass, the incident at the Jesse’s Shortstop Inn was not about an injured woman. It was about an embarrassment to the department.

I think they were waiting to see how embarrassing it would be. The more press it got, the more severely Abbate would have to be punished to prove the department was tough on bad cops. Given that there’s video of the incident all over the Internet, I think officer Abbate is in for a world of hurt.

Shortly after the Shortstop Inn video hit airwaves, the charges against Abbate were upgraded from a misdemeanor to a felony. Is that because police were trying to soft-pedal his crimes but couldn’t get away with it once the video came out? Or is it because once the video came out the police brass wanted to show how tough they were by smacking Abbate around a bit more?

(I might even feel sorry for the guy. If something stressful happened in his life—divorce, death in the family—and if this was an isolated incident in response to that stress, it’s possible he could be rehabilitated and returned to duty after punishment, treatment, and restitution. Possible.)

Speaking of smacking Abbate around, when Superintendent Cline was on a local talk radio show a few days ago, he had this to say:

He’s been charged criminally, and we’re moving to fire him and if I could hit him with a baseball bat, I would. But I can’t.

Oops. I think maybe it’s poor public relations to talk about beating an officer under his command with a baseball bat while trying to reassure the public that he won’t tolerate police brutality.

Tom Needham, Abbate’s lawyer, could use Cline’s comments to paint the department as the villain, but that’s not where he went with his response:

Needham also says he admires Superintendent Phil Cline and understands the frustration that apparently led to the comments Cline made on WLS radio.

…

“When people make comments like that, I think it emboldens other people to make comments like that, but I don’t think the superintendent meant that literally,” Needham said.

My, how gentlemanly of him. Of course, there’s an inherent conflict of interest when it comes to investigating police misconduct: The more misbehavior they find, the worse the department looks. I think Needham was just reminding Cline that they have common interests.

There’s still more confusion related to this case: When Abbate appeared in court, police ticketed press vehicles and blocked access to the parking lot. Superintendent Cline responded by relieving the commander, which makes it sound like he was running press interference for a bad cop. However, the courtroom is located at Area 5 police headquarters, and the commander there has a responsibility to keep order. So maybe he was just keeping the police lots clear for police business, and Cline scapegoated him when the press started complaining. Or maybe not. I don’t know how I can tell.

Meanwhile, another bar fight has come to light, this time at the Jefferson Tap. Apparently, a bunch of cops beat up a bunch of businessmen. This has taken a lot of twists and turns. Some people are saying the businessmen were well-known for making trouble, and that they made fun an officer who was crying because his father had just died.

I don’t know a lot about the social protocols of the barroom, but I think that’s probably the equivalent of walking up to the cops and saying “Hey, let’s fight!” It’s kind of unsporting for the losers to complain about it afterwards.

To add to the confusion, another version of events has surfaced in which an employee at the bar asked the officers for help throwing out the unruly businessmen. This could completely exonerate the officers involved and maybe even stick the businessmen with a charge of aggravated battery, but I’m suspicious that this story took so long to emerge.

The story continues (if I’m getting this right) that someone at the bar called 911, but when the patrol units arrived, they found an off-duty supervisor at the scene who told them they weren’t needed. Now, because they trusted the word of a fellow officer, they’re being sucked into the investigation.

So, were the cops jerks? Were they provoked? Or were they doing their duty? And why did the responding police leave? Does it matter that their unit is rumored to have some heavy clout working for them? We may or may not get a good answer, but supposedly Internal Affairs has video tape of the incident.

It has taken me several days to write this post for various reasons, and events have been passing me by.

First, Mayor Daley returned from an out-of-town trip, and shortly thereafter Superintendent Phil Cline announced his resignation. Is Cline a political schemer who went to far? A scapegoat for the Daley administration? Or is he a loyal underling who just took one for the team? In this town, I can’t begin to guess.

Second, the media is now reporting that officer Anthony Abbate’s brother Terry Abbate beat up an out-of-town cop in O’Callaghans bar on Hubbard street. And yes, they say there’s video of that too.

Third, in non-bar-fighting bad news for the Chicago Police, there are rumors of more indictments in the corruption scandal in Special Operations Section.

When the bartender at the Shortstop Inn told Anthony Abbate she was cutting him off, he is reported to have yelled “Nobody tells me what to do!” The joke here, the irony, is that Abbate is a police officer. He probably tells a lot of people what to do every day and expects to be treated with respect. Still, I know how he felt. I don’t like people telling me what to do either. That’s why I’m so wary of the police.

Law enforcement is one of the most important functions of government, second only to national security. We trust police officers with a lot of power, because it’s necessary to keep our city safe and secure. Police officers who betray that trust—whether by corruption, police brutality, or outright criminality—betray us and betray their fellow officers, and it is right that they should be subject to prosecution and public ridicule.

If by any chance a Chicago Police officer reads this, I know you’re not all like the the bad cops I’ve been writing about, and I know the resulting loss of respect for the police has hurt you all. I hope things get better soon. When I’m out and around in the city, I’m still glad to see you all out there.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Cops Gone Wild

It’s a mix up that will cost tax payers tens of thousands of dollars. The anti-war demonstration at Washington Square was supposed to start at noon and the Chicago Police Department was ready. But the protesters were a no show, and police say it was a big waste of time and money.

…

“We never got a permit from the city,” said John Beacham, Illinois Anti-War Coalition.

The police showed us what they say is the permit — approved months ago — with John Beacham’s name right at the top.

“I know nothing about that. We applied for a permit and there was never any confirmation of the permit from the city and a long time ago we decided not to have a demonstration,” said Beacham.

Doesn’t the City of Chicago phone first?

It sounds as if no one from the Chicago Police actually bothered to pick up a phone and call someone at the Coalition.

The City’s application for a parade permit asks for a the address and telephone number of the sponsoring organization. It also asks for the name, phone number, and pager number of a person to contact and of the person signing the application. Then, in a touch of irony, the parade sponsors are supposed to submit the permit application to the City’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications.

Perhaps the information on the application was wrong or missing, but shouldn’t that have told them something?

Beacham had one more theory as to why the police department should have known protesters weren’t showing up.

“The city is usually spying on us and watching us carefully, so we just figured they understood there wasn’t a demonstration today,” said Beecham.

That might be a little paranoid, or self-aggrandizing, but he’s got a point of sorts. Even if the application had no contact information, shouldn’t the Chicago Police have been capable of finding someone to tell them what was going on? In fact, isn’t “finding someone to tell them what’s going on” a pretty good description of much of police work?

Even if the contact information was wrong or fake, how hard could it have been to track down someone from the Illinois Anti-War Coalition? The ABC7 News Team certainly had no trouble finding John Beacham when they wanted to.

I wonder if the the police did in fact coordinate with the Illinois Anti-War Coalition, and the group just backed out at the last minute without telling them. Or maybe this was some sort of clever setup—having people ready to answer the phones and discuss the event plan, maybe sending someone to meet with a police commander to discuss the protest site—just to make the police look stupid.

If so, you’d think the police spokesman would have said something about it. Instead all we hear about is a parade permit issued months ago, and there’s no mention of followup or coordination meetings with the parade’s sponsor.

Frankly, even though the report shows a lot of uniformed officers, I can’t believe this was really a Chicago Police operation. They may have been in it, but there’s no way they were running it.

Update: From a Chicago Tribune article, it appears that someone did call the group, eventually:

Police didn’t learn of the cancellation until police called group officials shortly before the scheduled 10:30 a.m. protest start-time to confirm, she said. That’s when the organizers told the police they were bagging the march, she said.

As a result, police stood in pairs around downtown at major intersections with nothing to do. Now the city may ask the group to pay for the inconvenience.

Am I getting this right? If the group had shown up, the police services would have been provided free of charge (as they should be), but because they didn’t show up, the police are going to bill them for manpower costs?

I don’t see how the city can charge the group for police services when there was no prior agreement to provide police services, unless the group deliberately deceived the police into wasting resources.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at The Anti-War Protest That Wasn’t

At some point in the film, the narrator—possessed of a tooth-rattling basso profundo usually reserved for more elevated art forms, such as NFL highlight reels — proclaimed, apropos of nothing, that “Chicago ain’t no sissy town!” He was, if memory serves, quoting an alderman or some other species of criminal native to the Windy City.

But it turns out that Chicago is a sissy town because that “stormy, husky, brawling … City of the Big Shoulders,” in Carl Sandburg’s evocative 1916 poem, seems hellbent on putting a chokehold on just about everything that makes a city a city. Namely, fun. Local pols evidently are more dedicated to rooting out gluttony among residents than reining in a police department neck deep in an ugly torture scandal.

It pains me to say it, but Gillespie is right. This city is run by a bunch of pussies.

Not too long ago they wanted to put a casino downtown where people could gamble away their paychecks if they wanted to, now the city has taken, uh, a more risk-averse attitude:

Over the last year, the Associated Press recently reported, Chicago snuffed out smoking “in nearly all public places” and pulled the plug on using cellphones while driving. This April, the “Hog Butcher for the World” (Sandburg again) became the first city in the country to ban the sale of foie gras, on grounds that force-feeding geese to make the tasty treat is more cruelty than Al Capone’s adopted hometown can bear.

In July, the City Council held hearings on banishing trans fats from Chicago’s fast-food chains, as if such a move could do much to clear arteries in the birthplace of the deep-dish pizza (Men’s Fitness magazine has declared Chitown the fattest city in the U.S.). There was also talk of forcing dog owners to implant identifying microchips in pooches (though not pit bulls, because if the council got its way, the breed would be no more welcome in Chicago than Mrs. O’Leary’s cow). Council members, the Chicago Tribune has noted, “have threatened to use their legislative might to improve living standards for elephants … require taxi drivers to wear crisp white shirts and matching pants and socks … [and] require cigarette vendors to display photos of diseased lungs prominently.”

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at City of Tiny Testicles?

One of the biggest problems with the “living wage” idea is that the Chicago City Council can’t actually make the big-box retailers pay a higher wage. All it can do is prevent them from paying low wages. Retailers will then have to choose between paying higher wages and paying no wages at all.

Target and Wal-Mart have already responded with threats to pull out of the Chicago market. Home Depot is expected to follow suit.

“Wal-Mart and Target could pay their people a living wage. Then we wouldn’t have this problem, and people could actually live on the money they made,” [Ald. Leslie] Hairston said.

First of all, not everybody wants to live off their wages. A lot of people are working only to supplement their income.

Second, nobody is forcing people to work at Wal-Mart. They can quit and look for another job any time they want. If the local job market makes that hard, it’s not Wal-Mart’s fault.

Fortunately, Mayor Daley is trying to put a stop to this bad idea before the City Council scares away the dozens of big-box stores planning to open in Chicago in the next few years. Thousands of jobs depend on the City making the right decision.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Chicago’s Living Wage

Larger ImageJeff Fest

I stopped in at the Jeff Fest (a.k.a. The Jefferson Park Community Festival) on the northwest side today. It’s one of the many festivals going on this summer in Chicago.

(My photos can also be seen as a slideshow without the commentary.)

Larger ImageGetting a Ride

Here’s Chicago’s most famous Elvis impersonator:

Larger ImageRick Saucedo

A few more sites around the fest:

Larger ImageCamera Girl

Larger ImageA Couple Enjoying the Show

Larger ImageTasty Goodness

Larger ImageGirls Posing for Me

Lots more photos after the jump…

Larger ImageMidway

Larger ImageRelaxing

Larger ImageLove the Shirt

I used to have a shirt like that.

Larger ImageFolks

Larger ImageConcert Crowd

That crowd is watching Rick Saucedo, Chicago’s most famous Elvis impersonator. That sounds kind of hokey, but Rick is the real deal. He’s played Elvis on Broadway, and he’s released 11 records. He has a great voice and a lot of entertaining original material. His music was a terrific background to my festival visit.

Larger ImageRick Up Close

Larger ImageRick's Drummer

No comments for the rest of these pictures. I hope you like them.

Larger ImageA Couple Of Guys

Larger ImageAnother Couple

Larger ImageA Couple of Girls

Larger ImageA Woman's Best Friend

Larger ImageA Girl's Best Friend

Larger ImageFun With Face Painting

Larger ImageAnother Kind of Body Art

Larger ImageBalloon Girl

Larger ImageGirls in the Crowd

Larger ImageCamera Guy

Larger ImageHeading For the Gate

The whole collection can also be viewed here or seen as a slideshow.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Jeff Fest 2006

The World Naked Bike Ride plans to hit Chicago and at least 25 other cities around the world Saturday as a peaceful protest against international oil consumption, according Chicago ride organizer Aurora Danai.

“We don’t expect everyone to be OK with this,” said Danai, a 26-year-old Bucktown resident. “We’re just trying to have a good time and raise awareness.”

Now in its third year, World Naked Bike Ride is a way for communities to simultaneously protest oil use and promote positive self-images by ditching motor-powered vehicles and the body coverings society demands people wear, Danai said.

World Naked Bike Ride organizers expect people in at least 14 countries to participate in Saturday’s ride. Locally, Danai expects about 300 people to bike, skate and even jog during the event.

The Chicago ride will take place at night, Danai said, out of respect for parents who do not want their children exposed to adult nudity.

On that note, welcome to the blogroll, Leslie.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Naked On the Bus

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Marathon Pundit

Actually, it’s not so much a toll road as a toll bridge over the Calumet river, plus a few miles of feeder ramp. The river is active with shipping, so the bridge has to rise up 125 feet. It’s a substantial structure. It’s priced that way too. For the last decade or so, Illinois tolls have been 40 cents, but the 8-mile Skyway costs 2 bucks.

It’s a shortcut in terms of driving distance, but during busy times it hasn’t always been a time saver. It gets pretty congested. A few months ago, the Skyway decided to try to improve driving times with congestion pricing, as shown here:

Skyway Congestion Pricing

Congestion pricing is an economically sound approach to fighting highway congestion by increasing the prices during normally congested times. With enough of an increase, some drivers will choose to start their trips earlier or later, and congestion will be reduced.

It almost worked. The only problem is that the Skyway combined congestion pricing with an across-the-board price increase for cars from $2.00 to $2.50. Suddenly, thousands of cars an hour needed change at the toll booths. The result was predictable:

Skyway Congestion

The previously efficient toll plazas started having long lines of vehicles.

It looks like it’s going to work out for the better, however. The City has responded to the congestion by doing something I’ve been wanting them to do for years. Starting June 17th, the Chicago Skyway will start accepting I-Pass transponders for electronic toll payment.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Some Relief For Skyway Congestion