Evanston Mayor Elizabeth Tisdahl thinks anyone caught with 10 grams or less of pot does not intend to sell it, and so should only be ticketed and fined — not jailed.
She recently asked the city’s legal department to draft an ordinance that loosens the penalty for anyone possessing small amounts of marijuana. Tisdahl said she wants to keep a young person’s criminal record from hindering employment.
A city committee will study the proposed ordinance once staff drafts it, Tisdahl said.
The elderly man who shot and paralyzed Chicago Police Officer Jim Mullen 15 years ago died in prison Thursday.
George Guirsch had no criminal record when he fired a .357 Magnum at Mullen and three other officers as they knocked on his door while investigating reports of gunfire in Rogers Park in 1996.
“I have a lot of mixed emotions,” Mullen said about Guirsch’s death.
“I really hold no malice toward George. I never really have. He was someone who was disturbed, and you know, there are a lot of officers out there that risk their lives every day. It was just my turn, I guess.”
“I really mostly feel bad for my family because they’re the ones that really have to live with this every day,” Mullen said.
The more important news of the day, Mullen said Thursday, was that his 15-year-old daughter came home from school with straight A’s.
With their weapons drawn, Chicago Police officers launched a new assault on the Maniac Latin Disciples on Thursday.
Supt. Garry McCarthy declared war on the gang in June after a member allegedly shot and wounded two young girls on the Northwest Side. Since then, patrol officers have made more than 500 arrests of gang members.
On Thursday, it was the narcotics division’s turn. Narcotics officers have spent months building drug cases against gang members.
Chicago Teachers Union officials want to make their case directly to aldermen to counter the blitz Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration has undertaken to institute a longer school day.
Union president Karen Lewis sent out letters to aldermen Wednesday, inviting them to attend one of three private meetings at a Loop hotel Monday to “share our vision for Chicago’s public school educators and students.”
Ald. Nicholas Sposato, 36th, said it will be helpful for the teachers union to explain their position directly to him and his colleagues at the Monday meetings.
“I think teachers have gotten vilified lately,” said Sposato, a Chicago firefighter who supports a longer school day. “Somehow or another, things got twisted around about this.”
Ald. Timothy Cullerton, 38th, said a longer day is a good idea, but trying to implement it school-by-school is not the right way to go about it. “It’s just how we implement it and what we do with these extra minutes. . . .I don’t agree we should entice one school against another school,” Cullerton said.
Administrators were searching lockers and X-raying backpacks at a west suburban high school this evening after a live round of ammunition was found in the school this morning.
A staff member at St. Charles North High School found the bullet in a common area of the school, 255 Red Gate Road, at about 9:30 a.m., but officials would not disclose any additional details about its size or exact location. The school’s roughly 2,000 students were placed on lockdown at noon, then sent home about 15 minutes later. All after-school activities also were canceled.
“Obviously we take those things very seriously and worry about the safety of our students,” School District 303 Supt. Don Schlomann said.
A Cook County jury tonight convicted a reputed gang member charged in the 2009 murder of a Chicago police officer.
After deliberating for nearly 2 1/2 hours, the jury found Shawn Gaston, 22, guilty of first-degree murder and attempted murder in the fatal shooting of Officer Alejandro “Alex” Valadez, 27.
The verdict was read about 9:06 p.m. in a courtroom packed with Valadez's family, friends and fellow officers.
Gaston, wearing a black button-down shirt and with his dreadlocks in a ponytail, watched without expression as the jurors filed into the courtroom before delivering the verdict. He looked at his family after the verdict was read, his expression unchanged.
Many of Valadez's relatives were crying softly throughout Wednesday's closing arguments. Their sobbing became louder after the verdict was read, and they hugged and cried in the hallway as people filed out of the courtroom.
A short time later, Valadez's sister Brenda, who is also a Chicago police officer, told a group of reporters that her family is happy Gaston was convicted but is still devastated by her brother's killing. The pain is worst, she said, when she thinks about her brother's son.
“My nephew, who was born three months after my brother was murdered, will never know what his daddy's hugs and kisses feel like,” Brenda Valadez said, surrounded by her parents, Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez, and dozens of other relatives and police officers.
“His daddy will not be there on his first day of school. His daddy will not be there to cheer him at T-ball or guide him through life and share all those wonderful memories that wonderful and loving fathers share with their sons.”
Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Wednesday he will no longer tolerate “cannibalizing” rodent control, tree-trimming and other housekeeping services because of a pattern of absenteeism on Mondays and Fridays in the city’s third-largest department.
One day after releasing attendance records he claims show a pattern of abuse by Streets and Sanitation employees seeking to extend their weekends, Emanuel explained why he shined the light on garbage collection crews and plans to do the same “department by department.”
“Information, in the past, was held among the few and this was accepted practice. Go ahead. You can be sick on a regular basis on Monday and Friday. You can also play the game, look at the contract, figure out how to game the system,” the mayor said.
He told them that abuse by a “few bad apples” had forced an unacceptable level of cutbacks in rodent control and tree-trimming services. And he warned the ward superintendents who supervise garbage collection crews that, if they fail to “manage it tightly” and come down hard on chronic abusers, they will be “held accountable.”
Earlier this week, the city released 13-months of attendance records that, Emanuel claims, show a pattern of abuse. The stats show roughly 6.6 percent of the workforce has unscheduled absences on Mondays, compared to 4.5 percent on Thursdays and 5 percent on Fridays.
Lou Phillips, business manager of Laborers Union Local 1001, countered that those same records underscore his argument that Emanuel’s earlier claim of a 33 percent daily absenteeism rate was exaggerated by lumping together employees who call in sick with those on duty disability and restricted duty.
A trial program to analyze and hopefully reduce youth shootings in two of the city’s most violent neighborhoods was endorsed today by a City Council committee.
The Chicago Youth Shooting Review would look at all shootings, fatal or otherwise, involving people under 21 in the 11th District on the city’s West Side and the 4th District on the Southeast Side, said Commissioner Evelyn Diaz, who runs the city’s Family and Support Services Department.
The effort “could make our neighborhoods safer and improve the quality of life for all Chicagoans, especially for Chicago’s school-age young people,” Diaz said.
But Mayor Rahm Emanuel said higher taxes and charging tolls on Lake Shore Drive are non-starters, although some of Ferguson’s dozens of other ideas are worth a closer look.
In addition, Ferguson also suggests creating a 1 percent Chicago city income tax, much as New York City imposes, for new revenues of $500 million per year. In suggesting the tax, Ferguson’s report points out that the State of Illinois increased its income tax to 5 percent last year, but froze the amount distributed to municipal governments, thus effectively reducing the percentage of the tax that cities receive.
But such a tax might also prompt people to move away. The report conceded that it might lead city residents to move to the suburbs to avoid the tax.
Ferguson also suggested an income tax for non-Chicago residents who work in the city, which he said is done in Philadelphia, Cleveland and Detroit.
Oak Lawn resident Jack Cummings said “I don’t think that’s right. … We need to work somewhere. We’re coming here to work. I don’t think you should tax us. We’re already paying to come down here. We’re paying to eat. We’re paying to do our jobs. I don’t think that’s right.”
Taxing suburbanites is the goal of several options presented by Inspector General Joe Ferguson.
“Folks from the suburbs come in and work in the city, take their money back home, come back into the city so they can enjoy high cultural events or otherwise,” Ferguson said. “So who bears the burden for the cost of the roads and the lights and the police protection and all that sort of stuff?”
Thankfulness. What a powerful cure for poverty.
The New York City Police Department possesses the capability to shoot down any type of aircraft if the city experiences a 9/11-type of attack in which commercial airliners or other aircraft are used as Kamikazes.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly told CBS TV news program 60 Minutes that the force had the “device and training” for such an attack and “would have some means to take down a plane in an extreme situation."
Police sources later admitted the NYPD owns a Barrett .50 caliber machine gun, which is fitted to a police helicopter for extra security such as when a U.S. president visits the city. The .50 caliber is used in Iraq and Afghanistan mounted on U.S. military Humvees and helicopters.
Two Chicago Police officers are being considered for life-saving awards after they pulled a man out of a burning van early Saturday on the Near West Side, officials said.
“They were in the right place at the right time,” said their supervisor, Monroe District Capt. Hootan Bahmandeji. “If they weren’t there, this guy probably would have died.”
Monroe District officers Ken Carlyon and Monica Perez saw the flames, rushed over, and pulled a 31-year-old South Side man early Saturday out of a burning Chevrolet Express van that crashed into a median at Morgan and Harrison. The man suffered smoke inhalation but declined to be taken to a hospital, Bahmandeji said.
For the first time in three years, a new class of Cook County sheriff's police recruits will start training for open slots in a move that top officials hope will fill the department's depleted ranks.
The new class of 25 officers, which includes existing courtroom deputies and jail guards, is part of a plan by Sheriff Tom Dart to fill a hole of about 50 police officers. They begin their training today on the campus of Triton College in River Grove, sheriff's officials announced.
Dart's plan to allow his deputies and jail guards the chance to shift jobs arose from his inability to secure funding to hire.
This is actually a billboard outside of Lambeau Field touting the dangers of cheese. You can read the story here if you're interested, but we suspect this might be a harbinger of the NFC Central Division this year. A lot depends on Detroit - and we can't believe we just typed that....Detroit?Beginning this morning, the silence on the South Side will be more deafening than golden, as an organization that worked so long to become relevant is once again faceless.
Monday night ended the eight-year run of Ozzie Guillen managing the White Sox after the say-anything skipper met with board chairman Jerry Reinsdorf at the United Center earlier in the day. The meeting lasted about a half hour and ended with the two men who have enjoyed a father-and-son relationship saying a tearful goodbye. The Sun-Times learned before the game against the Blue Jays that Guillen and Reinsdorf agreed to part ways, with a trade to the Florida Marlins still in the works.
The Sox confirmed the news after the Sox’ 4-3 victory. Guillen leaves behind 678 wins, as well as delivering the franchise’s first World Series title after an 88-year dry spell.
As Chicago's 1991 municipal elections approached, Mayor Richard M. Daley was consolidating power for his first re-election campaign. In Springfield, two state senators — Daley's brother John and his political ally Jeremiah Joyce — introduced a "shell bill," an empty vessel into which lawmakers later would stuff an astonishing public pension giveaway to Chicago union officials.
That pension giveaway was among more than 100 provisions eventually added to the shell bill, but never debated by either chamber of the General Assembly. Instead, 10 members of a bicameral "conference committee" that evidently never held a meeting shaped the legislation to achieve their political goals. By the time the heavily larded bill was ready for passage by the two chambers, another Chicago Democrat, state Sen. Emil Jones, assured his colleagues that the bill wasn't controversial. "These provisions incorporated within this bill have been agreed to by the (city) administration and the pension system and the laborers," Jones told his Senate colleagues the day the bill passed in January 1991. "The people in the city of Chicago came together and agreed."
Twenty years later, as the Tribune and WGN-TV reported last week, 23 retired union officials from Chicago stand to collect about $56 million from two ailing city pension funds, thanks to the 1991 law. More union officials evidently are in the pipeline to receive the lavish benefits included in that legislation.
Sure enough, two days after the pension changes passed the Legislature — departing Gov. James Thompson signed it into law — the city's unions lined up to endorse Mayor Daley's re-election campaign. He would serve another 20 years with organized labor's support and acquiescence.
In 1897, mayoral candidate Carter H. Harrison II successfully campaigned as "the cyclists' champion." Bike-riding mayor Richard M. Daley expanded on-street marked bike lanes to 115 miles in his 22 years in office.
Emanuel plans to outdo both Daley and other bike-friendly U.S. cities.
In four years, he wants to create 100 miles of protected bike paths -- not just painted lines on the street but paths separated from car traffic by posts or other dividers. By next summer, he wants the city's first large-scale bike-sharing program, starting with 3,000 bikes.
During a hearing Sunday, Judge Adam Bourgeois ordered Don Shedrick held on $30,000 bond, according to a Cook County Criminal Court clerk. Shedrick is scheduled to appear for a preliminary hearing on Wednesday, according to the clerk.
Shedrick, 44, was behind the wheel of a 1999 Mercury Marquis at 3:15 a.m a. when police spotted him talking on a cell phone while driving near Oak and Clark streets, according to police News Affairs Officer John Mirabelli.
“He rammed the Mercury into the squad car, causing the squad car to hit a parked vehicle at 300 W. Institute Pl.,’’ said Mirabelli. One officer in the squad car he rammed was taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital for injuries that were not life-threatening.
But Shedrick continued to flee while other assisting officers gave chase. While in the 800 block of North Sedgwick Avenue, he exited the car and began running away on foot, but officers caught him, said Mirabelli.
Shedrick, of the 7700 block of South Laflin Street, was charged with aggravated fleeing while causing injury and leaving the scene of an accident involving injury, the officer said. Both charges are felonies. He was also cited with driving while using a cell phone, damage to public property, driving on a revoked license and driving without insurance.
Gunshots were fired in the direction of Chicago police officers late this afternoon as they were breaking a up a fight in the South Side's Auburn Gresham neighborhood, police said.
No officers were hurt, and none of them returned fire.
The City Council’s most powerful alderman suggested Friday that Chicago privatize the collection of city ambulance fees to raise a dismal 37.5 percent collection rate that has created a $50 million-a-year debt.
Finance Committee Chairman Edward M. Burke (14th) described the ambulance fee debt as “low-hanging fruit” that would go a long way toward maintaining Chicago Fire Department operations at a time when Mayor Rahm Emanuel has demanded a 20 percent cut.
“If private ambulance operators in Illinois can collect their fees, the Fire Department needs to investigate whether or not privatizing that function would be helpful. I’m not talking about a collection agency. That’s after-the-fact a year down the line. I’m talking about current collections,” Burke said.
As for Emanuel’s vow to wring $15 million in unpaid water bills from four impoverished suburbs — Harvey, Robbins, Dolton and Maywood — Burke essentially said, good luck.
“How do you enforce collection? We can’t very well turn off their water so that the poor citizens out there can’t exist,” he said.
An off-duty Chicago police officer shot and wounded a pit bull after it and another dog growled and advanced on him as he was getting out of his car Thursday night on the Near West Side, police said.
The dogs' owner and his family said the dog that was shot about 8:20 p.m. and its sire were able to get out of the yard by pushing on the gate of the family yard in 700 block of South Claremont by the owner's grandson. The officer is a longtime neighbor of the owner's family.
The officer told investigators he was getting out of his car when the two dogs came up and growled at him, said [...] a police spokesman. The officer retreated, but the growling continued and the dogs advanced on him...
"Our sentencing date is going to be continued," Sorosky said, when told of the news that U.S. District Judge James Zagel kept Cellini's Oct. 3 trial date intact and asked that prosecutors have witnesses ready for Oct. 5. Blagojevich's sentencing right now is scheduled for Oct. 6. "It's not going to happen, I'm telling you. It would taint the Cellini jury. I'm quite certain it will be continued."
San Juan Capistrano homeowners Chuck and Stephanie Fromm were fined $300 for holding a Bible study in their own home and were told by officials that ongoing gatherings of three or more people require a conditional use permit. The Fromms were warned that they would be fined $500 per meeting if they continued to hold the Bible studies.
"We not only have the First Amendment of the Constitution on our side, but we also have the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000, which we at the Pacific Justice Institute have used effectively on many, many cases."
"These are uncertain times for the global economy. These are challenging times for our families. This is our plan to help. This is our way forward, together.” |