At the stroke
of midnight in the toddling town of Chicago, will the sounds of celebration
that ring in 2013 be the sound of firecrackers or the sounds of a thug drilling
someone full of holes?
The Windy City
passed the unfortunate marker of 500 murders on December 27th when Nathaniel Jackson,
a 40-year-old man with gang affiliations and a rap sheet longer than your arm,
was shot and killed just months after finishing time in the crowbar hotel.
Mayor Rahm
Emanuel, who had pledged to address the city’s crime problem when he took
office in 2011, attributed the rise in homicides, in part, to a broader problem
with illegal guns.
"Chicago
has reached an unfortunate and tragic milestone, which not only marks a
needless loss of life but serves as a reminder of the damage that illegal guns
and conflicts between gangs cause in our neighborhoods," Emanuel said. [Not
Rahmbo’s pithiest statement to be sure, but it seems this is a crisis he fully
intends to let go to waste.]
Mark
Wachtler has a hard-hitting piece at the Examiner in which he contends that Chicago officials are deflecting
blame for the city’s epidemic of murders.
“It’s ironic that the city’s highest ranking official would lay 100% of the blame for the spike in murders on two inanimate objects, when statistics are suggesting the murder rate may be at least partly tied to corruption inside the Mayor’s own City Hall.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time. One example is when Chicago transitioned from “the bloody ‘80’s” into the 1990’s, a decade even more deadly. The spike in homicides also coincidentally correlates with the election of the city’s new Mayor at the time, Richard Daley. As corruption spread, the homicide rate skyrocketed.”
[SNIP]
“Mayor Emanuel and the city were just humiliated over the past two weeks when a separate trial ruled that the Chicago Police Department is corrupt to its core, from top to bottom, and enlists a mandated “code of silence” that exists specifically to protect crooked cops and criminals within the city’s police force and City Hall.”
In the
aftermath of the Newtown school slayings, there have been incessant and verbose
discussions about gun control. Rahmbo
and his corrupt police department can blame gun and street gangs for the
mounting murder rate, but
it is the mayor himself who has added to problem.
The moment he
took office two years ago, he split up the gang crimes special units and put
them on street patrol. Rather than
hiring additional cops to fill a shortage of law enforcement officers he
transferred crossing guards and office workers to patrol the streets. By doing so, Rahmbo’s City Hall could boast
that it had increased the numbers of the Chicago Police Department. Police union officials came to call this
deception the “Emanuel
Shuffle.”
The “Democratic Machine” went to work in early 2011 when
then-Mayor Richard Daley refused to renew or extend the contract of Jody Weis,
who two years before had been hired by Daley to “clean up the corruption in
Chicago’s police department.”
Weis, a former FBI police officer, did what we was hired to do. He demoted corrupt police commanders
and replaced them with officers he believed were honest. To show just how
rampant the corruption was, Weis removed 21 of 25 district commanders, as well
as a number of top brass. And while the rank and file officers complained about
his crime fighting within the force, Chicago’s murder rate dropped to the
lowest level since 1965.
This
put Weis at odds with the entire police force and City Hall. He was replaced by Terry
Hillard, the former Police Superintendent and a favorite of the police force and
“The Machine.”
It seems
appropriate to quote famous Chicago mobster Al Capone who once said, "I
got nothing against the honest cop on the beat. You just have them transferred
someplace where they can't do you any harm. But don't ever talk to me about the
honor of police captains or judges. If they couldn't be bought they wouldn't
have the job."
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