Chicago Cops are Fed Up

Posted by Jack

“A veteran Chicago police officer with 20 years in uniform wants out, fed up with how dramatically his work has been upended since the release of the video showing an officer shoot Laquan McDonald 16 times. Like many colleagues, this cop believes his proactive style of policing has become a relic of the past because of fears over lawsuits, firings, even indictments, the Chicago Tribune reports. He and other officers say the anti-police furor over the vivid footage continues to sink morale, hamstring officers, and embolden the criminal element, contributing to a shocking jump in violence to levels unseen since the late 1990s. “The bad element knows that policemen aren’t willing to do the job the way they did it (before),” said the cop, a supervisor who’s getting his resume in order. “They’re right in tune with how police are policing.”

Two key measures of police activity appear to back up concerns that cops have pulled back on their aggressiveness. Arrests have dropped sharply in 2016, to 72,069 through Oct. 20, a 24 percent decline from 95,213 a year earlier and the fewest in at least five years. Even worse, street stops over the period have plunged to 91,438, down 82 percent from 513,161 a year earlier. A longer, time-consuming form officers must fill out for each stop has played a significant part in the drop. By early October, 465 officers retired or quit, already more than in all of 2015 and each of the two previous years.”

In 1991 I worked in Chicago on a task force and there were only two Chicago cops that we felt were trustworthy enough to work with us. 70% of us came from the west coast, because the further west you went the better cops you had. Since then the training has improved from coast to coast. California was always way out in front when it came to the best trained officers. The quality of new hires has generally improved too all over the USA. But, there is obviously some serious problems that remain inside Chicago PD and some other large city departments that really brings down the image of the average cop. So, as much as I support law enforcement I’m not going to deny that there are cops who abuse their authority, there are! Not many, but it doesn’t take many to sully the profession. At least, it’s much better than it was 20 years ago. Law enforcement overall was improving at a steady rate and crime was falling. Then along comes Obama and his attitude towards police. This created a climate of problems, where none had existed until he (Obama) opened his mouth.

Every single time Obama sicked his people on a police officer or a police department, it turned out they had the wrong story! They caused riots, shootings and officers died because of their false vision of law enforcement. Aside from the rare, rare cast, there was no injustice, no abuse, no racism, on the police side of things, but I can’t say that for the Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch and Obama side. They had an agenda based on false assumptions about cops and they looked long and hard for facts to support their beliefs. However, it wasn’t there, least not in today’s law enforcement!

We can always find a bad example to point too in area of society, simply because were are nation of 350M people! Statistically speaking, you name it you will find it if you look hard enough among 350 million people! But, to indict a whole profession like law enforcement over the very few bad cases that we encounter every year is a gross miscarriage of justice. That’s what we have in Chicago right now. The ACLU leaned on the cops and the cops didn’t like it. So, the cops slowed down their aggressive police work and substituted it with compliance to the letter of the law – but, that doesn’t get the job done. Of course the ACLU thinks they’ve done a wonderful thing by slowing down the cops. However, they fail to recognize that it came at a high price.

More than 750 people have been murdered in Chicago in 2016, the police said, a 58 percent increase over last year and the highest total since 1997. There have been more than 3,500 shootings in the city this year. Over Christmas weekend, at least 60 people were shot, 11 fatally, according to The Chicago Tribune. The ACLU didn’t murder these people, but they were a significant part of why homicides have gone out of control.