NY TImes Discovers Crime

Shocking discovery - murders happen in primarily minority neighborhoods!

• CHICAGO — This city’s 471st homicide of 2012 happened in the middle of the day, in the middle of a crowd, on the steps of the church where the victim of homicide 463 was being eulogized. Sherman Miller, who was 21, collapsed amid gunfire not far from the idling hearse that was there to carry away James Holman, 32, shot to death a week earlier.
  
  A funeral shooting at St. Columbanus Catholic Church on the South Side left neighbors fretting that no place, not even a church, felt safe any longer. “It’s become the Wild Wild West,” said Charles Childs Jr., who had watched from across the street as mourners screamed and scattered.
  
  
• More than 80 percent of the city’s homicides took place last year in only about half of Chicago’s 23 police districts, largely on the city’s South and West Sides. The police district that includes parts of the business district downtown reported no killings at all. And while at least one police district on the city’s northern edge saw a significant increase in the rate of killings, the total number there still was dwarfed by deaths in districts on the other sides of town, and particularly in certain neighborhoods.

The Times even provides a handy map of neighborhoods to avoid.

And of course, what's an earth-shattering discovery like this without the requisite blame being laid? The Times lists income, education, and racial percentages in its attempt to seek answers.

Nothing about broken homes, though. Missing family structure. And certainly no stats listing access to guns, seeing as how Chicago, Cook County and Illinois currently ban most ownership of handguns. That wouldn't fit the narrative of all guns being evil and needing to be banned - they already are (pending implementation of a court ordered Concealed Carry law that is.)

We certainly hope the local media picks up on this story. Maybe they can start listing the descriptions of offenders.

Crime is Down...Except for.....

Everyone knows overall crime is down in Chicago, right? The mayor and the superintendent keep telling us so. Never mind the fact that CompStat is built to manipulate crime statistics, that it is being debunked by its very creators in New York City, that Milwaukee is in the middle of a crime counting scandal based on their version of CompStat. All that is just nonsense - if Rahm and McCarthy pretend it doesn't exist, the media lapdogs will cover for them.

So overall crime is down, except for those pesky killings and shootings. You can't easily hide a dead body first of all. And someone with extra holes in them is going to be treated at a hospital, so there's an outside paper trail that has to be explained. So the media will accept rises in these types of crimes, but continue to believe (and tell the public) that crime is down everywhere else.

Then this happens:

• Chicago is having a banner year for bank robberies.
  
  As of Dec. 7, the city reported 198 robberies, a 70 percent increase in the past four months, according to BanditTracker Chicago. At this rate, the number likely will cross 200 by year's end and could double the 2011 record of 115.
  
  It's not clear what's causing the jump, though the feds say hard economic times and the holidays aren't always to blame for the crimes.

Up 70%. Nearly double the 2011 totals, and although not in danger of passing the record of 284 set back in 2006, still on the way to break 200.

But overall crime is down? Ladies and Gents, you're being played. These aren't aberrations - these are the trends. You don't have increases in three major categories of this size without the trend being felt across the board. CompStat is all about the smoke and mirrors. Cutting manpower means boosting response times, making people fed up and them leaving without getting a report. If it doesn't get reported, it never happened. Same thing with the OEMC overtime - calls are through the roof, yet they won't hire anyone but they'll pay OT at the drop of a hat. No patrol officers being hired, no ET's processing scenes, no detectives investigating, it all points to pretty much one conclusion.

Media Plays Catch-Up Again

If we were the media, we'd be embarrassed to even report this.

First Sneed:

• Sneed has learned that the bell tolled at midnight Monday for top cops toiling in the city’s top shooting galleries and murder dens.
  
  Translation: A massive police shake-up by Police Supt. Garry McCarthy went into effect late Monday when he made seven executive police moves.

That was reported 04 December at 8:12 PM.

The the Tribune:

• As the Chicago Police Department tries to tamp down the city’s rise in homicides and shootings this year, Superintendent Garry McCarthy announced a shake-up in his command structure, moving seven commanders to different assignments.
  
  The changes mean that McCarthy has replaced 19 of the city’s 23 district commanders – some because of retirement -- since he became superintendent in May 2011.

That was 05 December at 5:03 PM, twenty-one hours after Sneed.

Unfortunately, Sneed seems to have cribbed her column from our posting of 12:09 AM on 04 December, which was drawn from a comment at 7:46 PM on 03 December.

So our readers beat Sneed and the dead-tree media by over 24-hours on her "scoop." Congratulations readers.

JJJr Facing Prison?

Gee whiz, why didn't this come out during the "campaign?"

• Sneed has learned U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., who handily won re-election Tuesday despite a lengthy stay at Mayo Clinic for depression and bipolar disorder, is in the midst of plea discussions with the feds probing his alleged misuse of campaign funds.
  
  “No one has pled guilty, but plea discussions are ongoing,” said a top Sneed source, who said Jackson is still undergoing treatment at Mayo Clinic.
  
  Sneed is also told Jackson, who returned to Mayo Clinic after undergoing outpatient treatment in the seclusion of his home in Washington, D.C., is not only being investigated for allegedly using campaign funds to decorate his Washington home — but also Sneed hears he may also have used campaign funds to buy a $40,000 Rolex watch as a gift for a female friend.

Anyone who thinks the Chicago media didn't delay or bury this story for weeks, maybe even months prior to the election is a moron.  We had rumors in our comment section for the past few weeks that JJJr was negotiating with the feds and the Mayo hospital stay was merely cover for this scandal.  

We know the media reads this site,  None of them could have looked around?  Given voters the chance to cast their ballots based on this info? Oh, but that would deny Madigan, Quinn and/or Rahm the chance to appoint a US Representative that they could control.

The media is part and parcel of the problem in Illinois.  They fail to do their duties as "watchdogs" day in and day out.  This is merely the most glaring and obvious example.

ABC Town Hall Meeting on Violence (UPDATE)

More claptrap from the media.

We'll link it here, but really, anything we'd want to say is only diminished by the inanity they pass off as "reporting." Town-hall meetings, useless platitudes, an entire community in thrall to a culture of violence and dependency they've created over the past half-a-century.

Just read below about the guy who tried to shoo the bangers off his front porch and got a few shotgun rounds in his body for his troubles. He's dead, and so is the other gentleman with a job who confronted the bangers a few weeks ago.

Epic fail.

UPDATE: To the so-called "grammar police:"

Thrall - Noun: The state of being in someone's power or having great power over someone: "she was in thrall to her abusive husband".

A slave, servant, or captive.

Synonyms:

slave - serf - slavery - servitude - thraldom - helot

No shit that communication isn't one big tweet. You just proved that in spades. Now go get a dictionary and your shine box you ignorant fuck.

Murders Still Up 25%

As McOutOfTown gives a speech at the ICAP conferences about how he single-handedly introduced police work to Chicago, USA Today does a front page spread on the Chicago bloodbath:

• Driven by gangs, drugs and guns, the bloodshed in President Obama's adopted hometown has resulted in a body count that exceeds the 312 murders this year in New York and 212 in Los Angeles, cities with populations dwarfing that of the Windy City. The toll here is up 25% from 2011: 391 through Sept. 23.
  
  Last week, two men who had been beaten to death were found in the trunk of a car. The same day, a 17-year-old boy and a 33-year-old man were found shot to death. Those and others to be added to the official tally push the number of homicides in Chicago through September to the 400 mark for the first time since 2003. That year, 601 murders were documented here; annual totals have been in the 400s since 2009.

This lie is still making the rounds:

• Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy have deployed more police to the most deadly areas, sought help from federal agencies and swept up guns and drugs and the people who possessed them.

Moving around existing assets isn't "deploy[ing]" - it's shuffling the deck. The rest of the article is a mish-mash of "reverends," some "former" gang bangers and a bunch of smoke-generating that solves nothing.

ABC - Intellectual Thieves

You know why no one respects these assholes?

Because no one likes a thief (no link for thieving media whores):

• Only days after Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel asked for federal agents and U.S. Marshals to help combat the city's wave of violence, about 50 Chicago police officers have arrived in Charlotte to work perimeter security details for a week at the Democratic National Convention.

  The Chicago officers, in their distinctive uniforms and checkerboard-brimmed hats, said they had been instructed not to talk with reporters about their out-of-town assignment.

Then they have the audacity to label this an "ABC News Exclusive" by Brian Ross and Rhonda Schwartz.

Except that we covered it nearly 48 hours ago in the post labeled "Road Trip." And while we don't crave notoriety, media whores not doing their job but taking credit for ours is getting just a teensy bit annoying.

Rahm Lies, Media Sucks it Up

Rahm has to handle a few softball questions, then gets this at the end of his interview on Meet the Press:

• GREGORY: Mayor, before you go, I want to ask you about a huge crisis in your own city, and that is of course the murder rate, it’s up 31 percent from a year ago. Forty shootings just last weekend, nine left dead. A couple of people shot, even near the President’s home on the south side. What are you doing to address this?

  MR. EMANUEL: First, we put more police on the street. Getting kids, guns and drugs off the street. Our crime rate is down 10 percent. And our, in fact, our shootings have declined from what was basically we lost the early part of the first quarter of the year, and we brought them dramatically down. We have a-- a gang issue on parts of the city. Overall, overall crime down 10 percent. And we’re making efforts actually to reduce the gang conflicts because it’s gang-on-gang issues. It does not affect the whole city. But anywhere it happens we’re going to be dealing with it.

  GREGORY: Is this not a crisis in your estimation? Is it something that’s being overblown or is this something that you have a hard time containing at the moment?

  MR. EMANUEL: No, we’re containing it and the-- and the question I have is not whether people say a crisis or challenge, I’m going to do everything I can to make sure every child when they’re going to school can think about their studies not their safety regardless of where they live. And that’s my first priority.

  GREGORY: Rahm Emanuel, mayor of Chicago, thank you as always. We will see you down in Charlotte this week.

Let's just point out the lies:

1. More police on the street? Bullshit - there are less than ever. Taking 500 cops out of their street units and putting them "back on the streets" isn't "more police." But the media treats this like gospel. The retirements haven't abated either;
   
2. Crime rate is down 10%? Do we really have to go through this again? Murder, shootings, bank robberies and auto theft are all up. Not to mention the lowest number of officers on the street during the past two decades. The only thing that would remotely bring the crime rate down is a massive influx of people to Chicago - maybe that's the reasoning? Sanctuary City and all?
3. Containing it? We aren't containing it and the "boxes" aren't working. We're lucky we aren't digging trenches, closing roads and raising the bridges to keep it where it's at. "Containing it" is about as humorous as "treading water."

But Rahm puts it out there and the liberal, compliant, bought-and-paid for media stooges eat it up like so much crap that they do. Do you like how he managed to fit in "the children" in the last line? Thank goodness Rahm (call me Helen) Lovejoy is thinking of the children - like that excuses everything else he does.

Clue for the Media

See if you can follow this:

• Bank robberies are UP - these are reported to the FBI. Lying to the FBI is a very big no-no. People go to prison for this;
• Auto Thefts are UP - Insurance companies report to stock holders and won't pay out without quite a bit of paperwork;
• Shootings are UP - the Tribune, either by accident or by design, published the actual number of shootings as compared to last year;
• Murders are UP - it is extremely difficult to hide a dead body, Drew Peterson aside.

We can't locate the Arson numbers at the moment, but it was UP earlier in the year. No idea if it leveled off or dropped at the moment.

Now, you can prove that these crimes are UP, but you want to believe everything else is down? Not just down, but down by 9% to 15% according to Rahm and McNumbers? Go read the CompStat book we've touted here a few times. Go look at the Milwaukee PD that is in all sorts of hot water for downgrading assaults, batteries and other crimes. Go look at any other metropolitan police force that is using the CompStat method of counting crime

We're leading you to the water here, but you're still drinking the Kool-Aid. Wake up.

Rahm Contradicts McBorrowedTime

The end game continues:

• Mayor Rahm Emanuel tried Monday to skin back ­— ­or at least clarify — Police Supt. Garry McCarthy’s claim that Chicago Police are “treading water” in the fight against violence after another weekend bloodbath on Chicago streets.

  “I talked to Garry about that. That’s not [what he meant]. What he was talking about is a particular area at a particular point. Overall . . . crime is down 9-to-10 percent. That doesn’t just come your way. You have to go work for it,” the mayor said.

  “Where we have tried new tactics — like in Englewood where you see a 25 percent drop in homicides — how do we take that to other places? In the [Grand Crossing] district, we saw we had a problem, put [in] new leadership [and] we’ve seen a dramatic change in just the last three weeks . . . We have to now deal with what’s happened in Grand Crossing over the weekend — and we will do that.”

Rahm doesn't have people walking back what McFigureHead said - Rahm walks it back himself. What does that show besides a micro-manager desperate to stop the hemorrhaging (both literally and figuratively) that is destroying his political legacy before his eyes.

And the citizens aren't helping matters any:

• At least nine people were hurt in six separate shootings across the city in an evening that included three double shootings, police said.

And the Tribune inadvertently exposes McCarthy's lies from yesterday:

• Through Monday, the city had 1,648 shootings, 152 more than the same time last year, according to preliminary police statistics. The city also had 52 homicides for August, 17 more than all of August 2011.

But yesterday, shootings were down (but only in select communities - don't read the fine print).

NEWSFLASH MEDIA MORONS: Shootings aren't being prevented - they are being pushed from one area to another. We have no police to "hold" a neighborhood, so the jagoffs go down the block or around the corner to do their business....but never the alley for some reason.

The media types are being led around by the nose.

Forbes Magazine

Everyone seems to have a Chicago angle lately. This one was pointed out by Forbes Magazine:

• Here in Chicago we are fretting about crime. Philadelphia is hosting a jump in violence, with an 86 percent rise in homicides in June alone. But, otherwise, we are mostly alone. Other major cities are continuing the decades-long decline in crime rates, while Chicago has seen a nearly 40 percent spike this year. (You can see a nicely visualized breakdown of the city’s crime, by ward, with this newly released interactive tool.)

  The spike recently spread to the Magnificent Mile, the squeaky clean shopping district downtown. It led one Alderman, granted anonymity perhaps to escape the wrath of Mayor Emanuel, to suggest that these shootings in safe areas mark “when we start becoming Detroit.” That taps into a huge fear here—turning into the gutted city up north. Lines like that, though, are usually associated with simple, sensationalized ideas about urban violence.

  One person who has spent much of his career dispelling these easy notions of crime is Jens Ludwig, a researcher at the University of Chicago. He has an op-ed in Crain’s this morning laying out three reasons why Chicagoans should be concerned with crime.

Good reads about the current unpleasantness.

NY Times on Chicago Violence

The mouthpiece for the national democratic party has discovered Chicago is having crime issues:

• Rahm Emanuel’s first reading material each morning, at 5:30, is not a budget update, a legislative proposal or a packet of headlines. It is an e-mail from the Chicago Police Department listing the crimes that were committed during the night that just ended. By 7 a.m., he is calling Garry F. McCarthy, the police superintendent. That is unlikely to be their final conversation of the day, or even of the morning.
  
  Mr. Emanuel listed safer streets among his top three priorities when he became mayor a year ago, but Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city, is now testing that promise. Homicides are up by 38 percent from a year ago, and shootings have increased as well, even as killings have held steady or dropped in New York, Los Angeles and some other cities. As of June 17, 240 people had been killed here this year, mostly in shootings, 66 more deaths than occurred in the same period in 2011.

Once the New York Times starts making Chicago a talking point, Rahm's national ambitions are going to be sharply curtailed.

Outlaw Knives!

Of course, the pro-knifers will say that "if you outlaw knives, only outlaws will have knives."

• Police have issued alert after a man walking his dog was attacked and his throat slashed in the Lakeview neighborhood on the North Side.
  
  The man told police he was attacked around 11 p.m. Sunday in the 1200 block of West Byron, according to a community alert issued by police.
  
  The attacker walked past the victim, grabbed him from behind and cut him on the throat with a knife, the alert said. The man was taken to a hospital with injuries that were not life threatening. The suspect fled on foot.
  
  The attacker was described as black, about 30, 6-foot-1, dark complexion with an afro hairstyle and a white T-shirt with black stripes and black shorts, the alert said.

Whoa! A description? And a sketch of the offender at the link? Who let all this through at the Tribune? Racism!!!

Walter Again?

Walter must being going through our archives:

• I know I’m not the only Chicagoan who’s angry about guns, and the murders on our streets; two more shot dead Monday night.

  That makes it ten dead and more than 40 wounded in acts of violence since Friday, and City Hall is spending more time worrying and whining than stopping it.

  Ask a cop, any cop on any street, what the neighbors need and the answer you’ll get (I’ve been getting it) is that cops need more cops.

  In the past two years, about 1,000 Chicago cops have retired, replaced by only 150 new officers hired in that time.

Keep digging Walter. You still have a very large historical hole to dig yourself out of with us, but you may make it in a few more years.

Tribune Takes Notice

Mary Schmich writes what has to be the most disjointed and shoddy opinion piece ever to appear in the Tribune:

• But Chicago is two cities.

  The violent city is one that visitors — just like residents of safe Chicago — are unlikely to visit. Last weekend most of the violence, as usual, occurred there.

  The stricken neighborhoods, on the South and West sides, happen to be mostly black and Latino; their ethnicity is far less relevant than the fact that in those neighborhoods, jobs are scarce, gangs are seductive and common, and poverty, entrenched through generations, is as pervasive as the grief wrought by the violence.

  What scares many people outside the chronically afflicted neighborhoods is that last weekend's violence extended into picture-postcard Chicago.

Evidently, she hasn't been paying attention that past few years. We couldn't make heads or tails of her entire article.

Carlos Sadovi writes a play-by-play of the set-up to steal an iPhone:

• Someone in the group began yelling at the girl, causing her to walk away, then began hitting another teen in the group, the man said Wednesday.
  
  "This was right next to my friend, so I put my arm over her to make sure she wouldn't get hit," said the man, who asked not to be identified out of concern for his safety.The man's wife stood up to get away from the group but left her iPhone on the seat. One of the teens snatched it up and said, "I'll take this." The man said he told the teen to give the phone back, but the teen ran for the door and the man lunged toward him.
  
  "Then I got swarmed by the whole group," said the man. "They were just pounding me. I was just trying to protect my head as much as I could, I knew there was nothing I could do about it. I was stuck. They did a number on me."

Kass does a column, writing about the doctor from Northwestern :

• The doctor has a name, but I'm not going to give it to you. He's the victim of a crime and asked that his name not be used, and we're going to keep it that way.

  But he did want to tell you his story, because something is happening in Streeterville, the quiet downtown neighborhood of urban professionals who must have once believed that wealth and geography could insulate them from things.

  There were similar attacks in Streeterville last year. News organizations at first called them "flash mobs," but that made the police angry. These young people didn't mob up to dance. They mobbed up to hit people.

  And, in at least two separate incidents last weekend, the one involving the doctor and another in which a Michigan man's jaw was broken, robbery was not the motive.

  They didn't rob them. They beat them for fun.

Kass applies feather-lite touches and dances around the subject, never quite coming into contact with it, but he's close with that last line.

• They beat them for fun.

This is the generation of no parents. No supervision. No order. No limits. These are the ones that are bringing back dog fighting in a big way. That have no conflict resolution abilities. That have no moral center. The end result of "immediate gratification" and "if it feels good, do it" that has been polluting society since the 1960's.

These are the broken, and quite frankly, we don't see a fix that doesn't involve putting thousands of them in prison and hundreds in the ground. Our opinion of course, but we're the ones on the front lines seeing it each and every day.

Mope-rah at it Again

No link for her bullshit, but here's a humorous passage pointed out by one of our readers:

• But I find it hard to believe a Chicago cop would Taser a defiant pregnant white woman over a parking violation.

She wasn't Tasered for a parking violation you ignorant bitch. She was Tasered following her blatant disregard for the lawful orders issued by a police officer in the State of Illinois and attempting to defeat an arrest by fleeing the scene. Once the offender refuses to present ID for a second citation (littering), it becomes an arrest situation and any attempt to drive away is classified as resistance to arrest. Look it up.

And then this:

• Remember the Anne and Elizabeth Hatch fiasco?

  They are the daughters of then-Minnesota Attorney General Mike Hatch. In 2005, the sisters were thrown out of a North Side nightclub, allegedly because they had too much to drink. The police charged that Elizabeth struck a police officer, knocking the officer’s glasses off his face, and that Anne slapped an officer and kicked out the rear passenger-side window.

  Despite the ruckus these young women allegedly put up, at no point did police officers use Tasers.

Um, not to put to fine a point on it, but as our readers point out, Chicago Police weren't issued Tasers in 2005. If we recall, only Sergeants had Tasers in 2006/2007 and general issue of Tasers didn't occur until the reign of J-Fled in 2008. So Mope-rah is showing her ass again, attempting to race-bait where no race-baiting existed.

How very....typical, shall we say?

And the honeymoon is over with the CPD and the Slum Times it seems. Their reporters have evidently been to medical school and graduated as doctors. Look at this turning of a phrase by the Slum Times Medical Professionals:

• Rent appeared exhausted as she left University of Illinois at Chicago Hospital in a wheelchair Wednesday afternoon. Accompanied by Hobbs and obviously in the advanced stages of pregnancy, she declined to comment on the advice of Saulter.

Wow. J-School and Johns Hopkins Medical School no doubt. Maybe they can come to the Academy and teach all the recruits how to profile pregnant women as opposed to loudmouthed fat people.

And then they can point out the section of Illinois law that lets pregnant women act the fool, assault officers and attempt to defeat lawful arrests. We'd go back to the Academy for that one.

Channel 2 Endangers Police

Creating the story instead of just covering the story:

• I am posting this to make people aware of this no good low life who fronted off my partner and me in front of the protesters as we video taped them in front of Prudential Plaza. First of all I would like to thank my Brothers and Sisters in Blue who came to our aid, backing us up getting us out of a very hostile situation caused by this inept reporter for Channel 2.
  
  Follow the link below to see his picture.
  
  This guy calls himself a reporter, but is no more than a liberal activist for doing what he did or is as dumb as a box of rocks. His name is Mike Puccinelli and works for CBS Channel 2 News.
  
  The short of it:
  My partner and I were assigned as ET's, to video Tape the "Police Perspective" of the NATO Demonstrations. We had no special riot gear on other than our body armor and gun belts. As we were working the crowd at Prudential Plaza, looking for those wearing mask's, we stopped to film some masked protesters when Pucinelli approached us with his camera man, inciting the crowd which started to grow in size. He kept asking me, by my name and star number why I was filming these people on the public way. Inciting the crowds even more as he asks "Are you under orders from Mayor Emanuel or Superintendent McCarthy to film these people. What gives you the right to film these people." The whole time the crowd swelled, becoming more and more vocal and hostile towards us. Officers had to break rank from the curb line to come to our aid. My partner sensed the danger and started pulling me out backwards by my vest while I continued filming the hostilities. Pucinelli didn't like it either when I turned the camera on him showing the look on his face and in his eyes, as I think he knew he screwed the pooch on this one. He could not stand it that we did not respond to his nonsensical questioning devised to do only one thing. Yes, he knew exactly what he was doing, and that was to incite the angry crowd, and hopefully, at our cost and risk to great bodily harm, they would do something stupid so he could record his BIG CAREER MAKING NEWS STORY and his 2 minute claim to fame. THIS NO GOOD SOB PUT TWO POLICE OFFICERS LIVES IN DANGER, JUST TO RILE THE CROWD FOR HIS OWN PERSONAL GAIN!!!
  
  Mike Pucinelli, a real credit to Channel 2 News. I would like to ask all of my Brothers and Sisters in Blue to familiarize your self with the photo of him linked below and if you see him on the street, extend to him all the professional police service he deserves and tell him the two ET's he fronted off in front of Prudential Plaza would like to buy him a beer and have a little talk. You know, MAN to man.........
  
  I will be filing a complaint through the Media Affairs Office. If the results are not satisfactory, I will hire my own attorney and take care of business myself.
  
  God Bless the CPD and CFD,
  ET JTM,
  Unit 477
  
  http://chicago.cbslocal.com/personality/mike-puccinelli/mike_puccinelli/

Typical See.B.S. antics. Someone should remind this asshole that if citizens and media are allowed to film on the streets, nothing stops the police department from doing the same thing.

How about revoking this asshat's media credentials for starters? And CBS's as well.

Channel 7 Reveals Plans

Is there anything these assholes won't do to compromise officer safety?

• For months, Chicago police have said they would not deploy officers in riot gear to deal with NATO protesters.

  In this Intelligence Report: Thursday's demonstrations are providing a better look at precisely how Chicago police are prepared for the possibility of civil disorder.

  Several protest venues Thursday were calm on all both sides, and Chicago police certainly appeared to be following through on their pledge not to aggravate protesters by showing up in black turtle suits and riot helmets.

  But what happens if demonstrations go violent, if the police in regular uniforms cannot control crowds? The answer was a few blocks away.

Then they reveal staging locations, vehicle descriptions and possible response times to anyone reading. We catch a lot of flack sometimes for stuff we publish, but we aren't posting stuff like Channel 7 is. We delete dozens of things like that every single day. The stuff that does make it through, more often than not, is accompanied by links to the media outlet reporting it. Our "scoops" as it were, are few and far between. Some of them end up big, but there aren't as many as people think there are.

Manpower Shortage = Channel 2 Story

Of course, they make it sound like the officer is to blame:

• With about 1,400 vacancies, the Chicago Police Department has a critical shortage of officers. Perhaps that’s one reason why police sources are upset with police brass assigning a cop to patrol a privately-owned downtown building.
  
  The Better Government Association and the 2 Investigators checked out the tip that infuriates residents and business owners in high crime areas.
  
  [...] The 2 Investigators watched day after day, as Officer Pagan ambled his way around the commercial space at the Merchandise Mart.
  
  “What are you supposed to be doing here?” CBS 2′s Pam Zekman asked Pagan.

How about he's following orders you troll? Seriously?

We all know there are cushy spots in various districts and if you're heavy enough, you land one. But it sure sounds like the officer was where he was supposed to be, cushy spot or not. The beef should be with HQ or City Hall, but they aren't the ones walking around on the beat, so Channel 2 needed a bunch of shots of someone to direct their scorn at and guess who's the patsy? Even when Channel 2 thinks they're doing the "right thing," we still get the short end of that stick.

UPDATE: And how about this angle - the officer (who is on his assigned post) is watching 30,000 people on a daily basis, keeping pick pockets and beggars out of the building.

Rahm has how many cops again? Sitting in front of his house, driving his wife and kids around, parked around the clock, all to protect how many people? We mean, he's not more important than any other citizen, is he? We haven't heard about any credible threats to any of them. The mayors of other major cities get by with a driver, if that, and they usually pay for it themselves.

Burke has how many drivers and bodyguards? They are more important than Joe Citizen by what measure? Vague threats from 30 years ago?

NBC Fires Producer

Some sort of accountability, but they won't identify who they fired, and there hasn't been any other action against the writers who did the story:

• NBC News has fired a producer for editing a recording of George Zimmerman’s call to police the night he shot Trayvon Martin, a person with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.

  The person was not authorized to talk about the situation publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity. The identity of the producer was not disclosed.

  An NBC spokeswoman declined to comment.

  The producer’s dismissal followed an internal investigation that led to NBC apologizing for having aired the misleading audio.

And if you notice, the New York Times hasn't written anything about the entire incident for a week now. Now why would that be? We don't purport to have any answers, but we can read. This investigation should have been allowed to run it's course without everyone from the president on down pushing agendas, left and right.