Originally Posted by Joe Obenberger

I'm writing from the heart of Chicago's Financial District, from my office at 115 South LaSalle Street, a short one-block walk to the Federal Reserve Bank and the Board of Trade. I come here every day to work and at night, I walk a block-long alley to get back to my car. I've been working in the Loop every day for decades.

Show me any cop who's ever filled out any 60-page contact report. It's never happened. This is propaganda coming from the Benevelont Order of Patrolmen, the police union, who are resisting any changes in their usual ways of doing business.

Those usual ways recently have had a bright light shined on them, and as with roaches and other insects, the cops are scurrying away into the shadows and trying desperately to get the light disabled.

For as long as there's been a Chicago Police Department, it's been typical for badge-heavy cops to ignore every standard of decency, law, and constitutional rights, to do what they think their job is, in just the way they want to do it. One small microcosm is the common sight of police cars sliding through stop signs without flashers or sirens or any reduction in speed, announcing to all that they don't think that the laws that apply to everyone else apply to them. They just don't stop. And that's how they've treated the people they encounter, especially minorities and especially in the South Side and West Side where the Blacks predominate. In Summer, they park helicopters with xenon searchlights over one or both, surveiling people going about what's normal. I've seen sweeps where every male within three blocks of a rape has been rousted, taken to the police station there to remain for several hours, until the victim comes in to make an identification. In fact, I've seen a concealed carry license denied twenty years later for such a male who was released without charges after that happened just because the police had made a record that he was taken in for aggravated criminal sexual assault.

After their alarming pattern of murdering people has been exposed with the release of video evidence, along with their reaction by disabling the microphones and sometimes the cameras, the police are hot under the collar. They are sulking. They are claiming that if they can't do things their way, they really won't do the job very much at all. It's all pressure to go back to business as usual, the law be damned, rights be damned.

Don't believe so uncritically all that you see published. Some of it is propaganda by those with an axe to grind.

Were I a Black man in Chicago, I'd be agitating for the creation of a permanent, standing, special Grand Jury For Public Corruption Matters, located on the first floor of the courthouse, open every day of the week, in which citizens with evidence of police crimes could come forward, give evidence, have the matter investigated, in the presence of Grand Jurors who had the power to formally indict any cop or other public official for crime. That would drive out the criminals who masquerade as good guys by wearing a badge. Their departure to prison would make room for new cops with zeal and a dedication to serving the public rather than abusing it. I'd also be agitating for mandatory Army ROTC in the junior and senior high schools to give students a healthy respect for weapons and some marksmanship training. In that way the fascination with guns can be diverted to a healthier direction and the number of innocents slaughtered by gang bangers with guns but no gun skills can be decreased - it's impossible to actually get the guns off the street, and at least some innocent lives can be saved. Finally, the City has to change its course of discouraging honest citizens from concealed carry and gun ownership. Nothing deters gun crime more than the prospect that your intended victim just might kill you dead.

-JD