Chicago Police

I live in Chicago, a relatively high-crime city where the murder rate is soaring. Lisa Madigan, the Attorney General of Illinois, has just sued the city seeking to change its police practices to prevent violations of civil rights. Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, has welcomed the lawsuit and is looking to acquiesce in a consent decree which will create a new set of rules for the police department and a monitor to enforce them.

This collusive suit is a bad idea. To be sure, the Chicago Police Department needs reform, but this method reduces democratic accountability, imposes unnecessary costs, and most of all runs the risk of letting more people die from uncontrolled crime. And it is very unlikely to do what is most needed: eliminating or reducing the protections against discipline that police enjoy in union contracts or under civil service laws.

For an example of the kind of consent decree that is likely to be agreed upon, look at similar litigation in Baltimore, an even higher crime city with a murder rate that is going up even faster.

The Chicago Police, Police Wrongdoing, and the Ferguson Effect

I regularly read Powerline and I like a lot of what they write, but this post by Paul Mirengoff is really problematic. He writes that “after the release of the video showing Laquan McDonald being shot and killed by the police . . . arrests have declined and gun violence has spiked.” He calls this the Ferguson effect, suggesting that it is the result of “reducing police interaction with the public.” Let me discuss some of the problems with this post.

First, it is outrageous to compare this to Ferguson. In Ferguson, officer Darren Wilson was shown to have acted properly. In Chicago, officer Jason Van Dyke’s killing of Laquan McDonald was a vicious murder, shown on video. The police department and the Mayor’s office covered up the video as long as possible and appear to have engaged in other wrongdoing such as eliminating security footage from a nearby Burger King. I could go on, but see my earlier posts. Moreover, there is strong evidence that the Chicago police department is rife with corruption, as 80 percent of squad car video cams have been disabled by the police officers. “Chicago Police Department officers stashed microphones in their squad car glove boxes. They pulled out batteries. Microphone antennas got busted or went missing. And sometimes, dashcam systems didn’t have any microphones at all.”

As Randy Balko states, “This isn’t a few bad apples. It’s 80 percent. Why haven’t these officers been prosecuted?”

A Mirror of the 20th-Century Congress

by Joseph Postell

Wright undermined the very basis of his local popularity—the decentralized nature of the House—by supporting reforms that gave power to the party leaders.

The Graces of Flannery O'Connor

by Henry T. Edmondson III

O'Connor's correspondence is a goldmine of piercing insight and startling reflections on everything from literature to philosophy to raising peacocks.

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