Posts Tagged ‘police’

It’s time for the Chicago Police Department to use spike strips to fight back against dangerous muscle car street takeovers

Posted: December 1, 2024 by John Ruberry in crime, media, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

Chicago is descending to anarchy, and it’s not just because of the shootings. 

There are also Mad Max style “street takeovers” for Chicagoans to cope with on a regular basis.

Last night, CWB Chicago reports, there were several street takeovers. And at one of them, two people were shot. 

So sometimes shootings and street takeovers are synchronous.

Street takeovers generally consist of domestic muscle cars meeting at predetermined gathering spots–social media gives the when and where–and the where is also always on a main thoroughfare. The street takeovers aren’t 1950s-style cruise night parades, the sports cars engage in such dangerous and possibly deadly activities and as drag racing, drifting and spinning donuts. 

Chicago street takeovers happen about once a month, although the establishment local media tends to ignore them. For the most part, the cops just watch the cars drift. Last night was different because, as once again CWB Chicago tells us. Bricks were thrown at one Southwest Side street takeover and at another Southwest Side motorized mayhem rally, multiple objects at police officers.

I’ve never been a cop, but it’s pretty easy to ascertain how to end them–in Chicago and elsewhere. 

The next time there is a street takeover, cops should just place spike strips on the offended streets. The car will end up with flat tires and possibly damaged wheels and a ruined suspension, but who cares? Driving is a privilege, as we know, not a right. And reckless driving is a crime. And streets are built and paid for by taxpayers for responsible transportation, not dangerous stunts.

Yes, the jackals who attend these might throw more objects at the law enforcement officers who lay down the strips–so cops working to reestablish order need to where riot gear–but word will get out, quickly, on social media of course, that the streets of Chicago are no longer open for street takeovers.

I’m eagerly awaiting the first insurance company to decline a claim on a car damaged during a street takeover.

Yes, speed strips are an easy solution.

Apparently, the CPD owns some spike strips. Two years ago, ABC Chicago reported that a pilot project to use spike strips to combat street takeovers–but apparently this project was grounded.

But will Chicago’s pro-criminal mayor, Brandon Johnson, allow it? He’s an apologist for Chicago’s lawbreakers. For instance, while mayor-elect last year, “Branjo” dismissed a downtown riots, saying that kids make “silly decisions.”

One more thing: According to CWB Chicago, of those few who offenders are arrested at Chicago street takeovers, “the participants who wind up in custody are almost always from the suburbs.” One man arrested last month, a cosplay cop, traveled from Columbia, Missouri with a flamethrower to raise hell at another Southwest Side street takeover.

So Branjo needn’t worry about losing votes if he cracks down on the criminals behind the wheels.

John Ruberry regularly blogs just north of Chicago at Marathon Pundit.

Chicago’s leftist mayor cancelling gunshot detection contract because he’s beholden to his ideology

Posted: September 22, 2024 by John Ruberry in crime, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson

By John Ruberry

Chicago, in Brandon Johnson, has a leftist idealogue as its mayor. Not surprisingly, he’s failing. 

Take away his far-left beliefs, “Branjo” is a big empty suit, one tailored by his former employer, the radical Chicago Teachers Union.

As I discussed last week, Johnson was a backer of the Defund the Police movement, until after he made it to the runoff round of last year’s mayoral election.

Johnson’s approval rating is 25 percent. Crime was the biggest issue of the 2023 campaign. While murders are down slightly, the crime numbers remain horrible. People don’t feel safe, despite the minimalizing of lawbreaking by Chicago’s weak-kneed media.

Despite 33 of Chicago’s 50 alderpersons voting to continue the city’s contract with ShotSpotter, a gunfire detection system deployed in high-crime areas, Branjo is putting ShotSpotter on mute. 

While there are critics of ShotSpotter on the left and right, the general belief of people possessing open minds–meaning people aren’t extreme left-wingers–is that ShotSpotter works. A University of Chicago Crime Lab study said that there is a “3-in-4 chance that the technology saves about 85 lives per year.”

Besides those 33 alderpersons, Chicago’s two major daily newspapers, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune–both liberal publications–favor keeping ShotSpotter. As does Johnson’s pick for police superintendant, Larry Snelling.

Branjo has never explained why, other than fulfilling a campaign promise, his reasons for dumping ShotSpotter. Last week, Chicago’s man-child mayor dismissed ShotSpotter as “walkie-talkies on a stick.”

ShotSpotter, until Sunday night that is, is deployed in 12 of Chicago’s 22 police districts. The problem for Johnson and his far-left cop-hating base is that those districts are minority-majority. However, most of the alderpersons representing those areas voted to keep in ShotSpotter in place. The core of the support for cancelling ShotSpotter in the City Council are alderpersons–some of them are openly socialist–from progressive white wards on the North Side who put Johnson over the top in last year’s election.

This afternoon on X, Silvana Tabares, who represents a Southwest Side ward. bashed Johnson’s shortsightedness.

Experts and community member all know ShotSpotter provides a vital tool for first responders to render aid to victims of gun violence.

Beginning tonight, every gunshot victim bleeding in the streets of our city will be a worth sacrifice in the eyes of our mayor for his radical agenda.

Every single one.

Here are some headlines about ShotSpotter from CWB Chicago in just the last three days:

Branjo’s inner circle is comprised of fellow leftists. Earlier this month, on the Fran
Spielman Show podcast, a moderate downtown alderperson, Brian Hopkins, ripped the mayor.

“When you’re a democratic socialist who has some very extreme, left-wing views, that closes off a lot of opportunities to grow relationships with centrists or even moderate Republicans,” Hopkins said. “The city is suffering from that.”

A couple of, well, normal people were part of Johnson’s core staff early in his administration. Rich Guidice, the mayor’s first chief of staff, resigned his spring and he was replaced by a left-wing radical, Cristina Pacione-Zayas. Earlier this month, an office reshuffling ended up with an experienced and respected intergovernmental affairs officer, Sydney Holman resigning. Now in charge of lobbying the City Council and state legislators for Branjo is another extremist, Kennedy Bartley, who called police officers “f*cking pigs” in a 2021 podcast.

Chicagoans are only 16 months into Johnson’s four-year term as mayor.

As Barack Obama once said, “Elections have consequences.”

More murder victims will be one of those.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Presidential election warning from Chicago: Media malpractice gave the city its failed leftist mayor, Brandon Johnson

Posted: September 15, 2024 by John Ruberry in crime, election 2024, elections, media, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

Last year’s mayoral election in Chicago presents a media deja vu moment with national implications.

Yes, I’m talking about Kamala Harris.

Brandon Johnson, an organizer for the far-left Chicago Teachers Union while serving as member of the Cook County commissioner–a rubber stamp body controlled by board president, Toni Preckwinkle, a leftist like Johnson.

Paul Vallas, a centrist Democrat, ran a wonky white-paper dominated campaign that was centered on hiring more police officers and prosecuting more misdemeanors. He lost. 

Johnson campaigned largely on platitudes. His political career is a creation of the Chicago Teachers Union, and aggressive campaigning by the CTU, including door to door work, identifying Johnson’s supporters, and getting them to the polls, pushed “Branjo” over the top. 

Republicans? Are we doing that? 

Back to my point.

As a commissioner, Johnson could only point one accomplishment in office, the non-binding “Justice for Black Lives” resolution that passed in 2020, which called for diverting funds from law enforcement to social services.

The extreme left loves symbolism. It also hates the police.

Also in 2020, Johnson said of the Defund the Police movement that it was “not a slogan, it’s an actual real political goal.”

Chicago’s mainstream media, Fran Spielman of the Chicago Sun-Times is a notable exception, are compliant lapdogs for the left. If at all, they barely challenged Branjo on his thin resume and his far-left beliefs.

Before the first round of voting for mayor, Johnson was asked about his support of Defund the Police and cutting law enforcement, Johnson flippantly replied, “Ask better questions.”

Finally, at a law enforcement forum before the second round of balloting, Johnson was asked about his backing of the Defund movement. “I said it was a political goal,” Johnson replied, “I never said it was mine.”

So the media, even though crime was the biggest issue of the 2023 Chicago mayoral campaign, dropped the Defund issue. 

The Chicago media barely vetted Johnson. Just as the national media didn’t do so on Joe Biden’s senility in 2020–and it all but ignored Hunter Biden laptop story. A year later, the national media elite is ignoring or minimizing the far-left political position of Kamala Harris, and her politically convenient flip-flops on them.

Last week, in her weekly podcast, the aforementioned Spielman interviewed centrist Chicago alderman Brendan Reilly, who supported Vallas in last year’s election.

Reilly, who may be candidate for mayor in 2027, said that Johnson was en route to becoming a “one-termer” who was “woefully unprepared” to lead America’s third-largest city, and a mayor who is a beholden to the “radical left.”

Johnson, who has blamed Richard M. Nixon for Chicago’s violence epidemic, is rumored to have suffered from panic attacks. The mayor regularly points his finger at white supremacy when his discussing city’s many ills.

The warning signs were there on Johnson for anyone who did some digging. But the Chicago media barely reported on them. Last week, a Fox Chicago reporter revealed that his City Hall staffer in charge of working with City Council and state legislators to advance the mayor’s agenda, Kennedy Bartley, made vile anti-police comments in a 2021 podcast, including calling law enforcement officers “f*cking pigs.”

This is Johnson’s inner circle. The mayor has resisted calls to fire Bartley.

As for crime, while Johnson has not defunded the police, his choice as police superintendant, Larry Snelling, says the CPD is short nearly 2,000 officers. 

Chicago faces a $220 million budget deficit for this year and a nearly $1 billion for 2025. In response, Branjo announced a hiring freeze, but two days later, he exempted the fire and police departments from that freeze. 

Crime is still sky high since Johnson took over. Murders are down, but only a little bit.

Johnson has driven the Chicago train off the rails. Ironically–and the Chicago media ignores this other story–the mayor has a massive polite detail, said to number anywhere from 125-150 cops. Johnson clearly doesn’t want to defund his police protection.

Back to Harris. 

Will the mainstream media drop its biases and finally vet the vice president?

Or will they wait, until a year or so after she’s sworn in, when another “woefully unprepared” office holder, one who is beholden to “the radical left,” fails again, for so-called journalists to finally sound the alarm about Harris? Maybe not. The media was all-in on Biden until his cognitive decline couldn’t be explained away after his June debate with Donald Trump.

Biden, whose mind was clearly slipping in 2020, is arguably a tool of the far-left. 

Will Harris, arguably an intellectual lightweight, end up in the same position if she wins the presidency?

John Ruberry regularly blogs from just north of Chicago at Marathon Pundit.

Another bitter harvest of demonization? The My Lai massacre and the Sonya Massey killing

Posted: July 28, 2024 by John Ruberry in crime, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

Did demonization of cops lead to a police-involved murder? Just as demonization of the military may have contributed to the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War?

Earlier this month, Sonya Massey, a black woman from Woodside Township, Illinois, was shot to death, according to police bodycam video footage, by Sangamon County deputy sheriff Sean Grayson. Massey called the police because she believed there was a prowler at her home. The cop, who has since been fired and is now charged with murder and other charges, has a rocky employment history, being employed either part-time or full-time by six different central Illinois police departments in four years, although in one of those jobs, for a small-town police department, he was let go because wouldn’t reside within 10-miles of the village.

Grayson is white, and the racial angle has brought rare national media attention to downstate Illinois. 

He is a military veteran who left the service under a general discharge. According to KSHB-TV in Kansas City, Grayson “was discharged from the U.S. Army for serious misconduct during his year-and-a-half service in Fort Riley.”

According to KSDK-TV in St. Louis, Grayson has two DUI convictions, one in 2015 to which he pleaded guilty to, and another the following year he weas found guilty in a bench trial.

In his last job, according to Capitol News Illinois, prior to being hired full time by the Sangamon County sheriff’s office–another deputy sheriff position with Logan County–Grayson’s performance was poor. In a report, a chief deputy wrote that Grayson need “extensive” training after failing to follow commands. The same officer wrote that Grayson needed “additional traffic stop training, report writing training, high-stress decision making process classes, and needs to read, discuss and understand issued Logan County Sheriff’s Department policies.”

Capitol News Illinois offered additional disturbing details. “Seven months on. How are you still employed by us?” the chief deputy asked Grayson in a meeting about his job performance. “I don’t know,” was his reply.

As for My Lai, the massacre, which occurred in 1968, saw at least 300 civilians killed, including elderly people, children and infants. Some women and children were brutally gang raped. The only soldier convicted for the massacre was 2nd Lieutenant William Calley. Originally given a life sentence of hard labor in a military court martial, President Richard M. Nixon commuted that sentence to three years of house arrest.

At the time, Americans wondered how Calley, a junior college dropout who failed most of his courses, became an officer. While he did score well in a military exam, Linda Greenhouse, writing for the New York Times in 1974, said of Calley that he was someone who “apparently failed at almost everything he had tried to do.” Between quitting junior college and enlisting in the US Army in 1966, Calley’s jobs included working as a bellhop and as a dishwasher.

Normally, such a background wouldn’t be considered the makings of officer material. While the anti-war movement hadn’t reached its peak in 1966, plenty of young college graduates were being told by their parents and peers to dodge the draft, in a stealth fashion, by enlisting in the National Guard instead.

In short, the talent pool for American military officers wasn’t deep during the Vietnam War. Hence, Calley.

As for Grayson, he was hired for his first part-time police job, in the small town of Pawnee, in August 2020. That was six years after the Michael Brown killing in Ferguson, Missouri and the Laquan McDonald murder in Chicago. Both were of course police-involved killings–ones that ramped up anti-cop sentiment.

And three months before Grayson started his law enforcement job in Pawnee, George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Not only was the anti-police rhetoric sent into hyperdrive by the media and agenda-driven leftist politicians, but it was also the beginning of the Defund the Police movement.

Four years after Floyd’s murder, because of retirements and struggles in hiring replacements, many police departments don’t have enough cops. For instance, three months ago, Chicago’s police superintendant, Larry Snelling, said of the CPD, “We’re down close to 2,000 officers.”

The ACAB–All Cops Are Bastards–sentiment so many Americans believe in, or have been indoctrinated in, may be offering a bitter harvest.

The Massey shooting death could be the beginning of a tragic trend.

UPDATE July 30:

Yesterday the Washington Post reported that Calley, 80, died in hospice care in April. Citing the Social Security Index, the New York Times confirmed his passing. The cause of Calley’s death is not known.

John Ruberry regularly blogs in Illinois at Marathon Pundit.

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