Mixed message on urban violence

Call it the advantage of multiple news organizations reporting happenings – we get a more-thorough picture of reality.

Or perhaps it is the concept of dueling news organizations – with the various sides unable to agree on what they want the message to be. Which still results in a greater picture of what is occurring within our society.

THOUGHTS THAT RUN through my mind as I peruse reports by the Chicago Sun-Times and WBBM-TV – both of which purport to be about the levels of violent crime and murder that are occurring in Chicago.

With some individuals of a certain ideological leaning eager to want to believe that the city of Chicago is amongst the grubbiest, grossest, most violent places that exist within the United States – if not anywhere on Planet Earth.

Which is a gross exaggeration, although there are certain neighborhoods where the levels of violence seem so intense that we have to wonder how we as a people could ever have let conditions get so out of hand in those places. Although many of us choose to cope with such conditions by ignoring such places altogether.

The Sun-Times took the angle in a story published Monday that this very weekend that marks the half-way point through 2019 is yet another of a bloody morass that is modern-day Chicago.

THE HEADLINE ALONE says it all – 56 shot – 4 fatally – in Chicago over weekend.

With a subhead pointing out one incident alone on Saturday where five people were shot on the Near West Side, although in that incident, it should be noted that all five individuals were able to get themselves to area hospitals where they were ‘treated and released’ for their wounds.

Bloodshed galore. It’s a wonder we don’t have Donald Trump engaging in yet another Twitter-motivated rant about how gory Chicago has become.

But then, there was the CBS-operated station in Chicago, which came out with a story the same morning indicating the number of shootings in Chicago are down for 2019 – compared to the past.

ALTHOUGH WBBM-TV INDICATED that this was a particularly harsh weekend of violence in Chicago, overall, it seems there are signs of improvement.

Some 1,229 shootings in Chicago through Sunday – about 100 less than the first half of 2018 and lower than any year since 2015.

Also, we have 236 murders in Chicago thus far this year – which the TV reports indicate is 21 less than the fist half of last year.

And certainly might put Chicago at about 260 or so slayings for this year – if things continue at this rate. Far less than the recent years when the homicide totals reached 700 or more (or the late 1980s when Chicago would easily come close to 1,000 murders annually.

SO WAS THIS Chicago Police Department spin control in trying to give us a bigger picture about the amount of violence and crime occurring in Chicago? Or is it ideological prattle to come up with tales of how bloody and out-of-control the city was on this past weekend?

Or is it really evidence that “facts” can be found to justify any point of view one wants to take on just about any issue.

Personally, I’m inclined to think that some people use the story of urban violence in such ways as to confirm whatever ideological hang-ups they have about life and our society – wanting to further lambast whomever or whatever they have contempt for.

Then again, to those four people who were killed this weekend prior to Independence Day in Chicago this year, it WAS a most-tragic period of time – a moment that their families will forevermore mourn for its great loss!

  -30-

Can Lori Lightfoot really make Chicago a less violent place this Memorial Day?

Lori Lightfoot hasn’t even been mayor of Chicago for one full week, and she’s already promising what may be an overly ambitious goal – eliminating the urban violence that is a Chicago embarrassment every Memorial Day holiday weekend. 

New mayor hopes to put her mark on city's Memorial Day safety

Which sounds nice. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Lori Lightfoot could really make Chicago a nicer, less violent place to be. Of course, this opens her up to criticism from every single smart-aleck (many harsher than myself) who will now try to hang every single violent crime that takes place this weekend on Lightfoot herself.

SO WHAT IS it Lightfoot has in mind?

Basically, it’s a marketing campaign. “Our City, Our Safety,” it’s being called. What it means is that the mayor wants us to get off our fat behinds and DO something,

In the form of attending one of the many events being held in neighborhoods across the city. Which almost reminds me of that old English proverb that says, “Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop.”

Does this make Lightfoot the equivalent of Chicago’s granny, spewing out sayings that basically mean we ought to make ourselves useful for a change instead of sitting around doing nothing?

Could events such as Mole de Mayo festival play a role in reducing … 

SERIOUSLY, THE CITY has a list of hundreds of events taking place from Friday through Monday. The theory being that if we’re doing something and perhaps even enjoying ourselves, we’re less likely to get ourselves involved in something stupid that will cause tempers to flare and lead to the potential for someone to pull out a weapon and use it.

… Memorial Day violence?

Is it our civic duty, then, to attend the Mole de Mayo festival in the Pilsen neighborhood, or any one of the many other events taking place in Chicago this weekend.

Maybe you’d rather check out the Lane Tech (as in high school) Carnival, or one of the many places that are doing film screenings (Lilo and Stitch will be showing Saturday at 6800 N. Western Ave., as an example).

What it basically sounds like is that Lightfoot wants to use what I’ve always considered to be one of Chicago’s biggest pluses to her advantage (the mass of activities taking place at any given time).

ANYBODY WHO’S SERIOUSLY bored in Chicago isn’t trying hard enough to find something interesting or enlightening to do.

Now I don’t know if I feel compelled to check out the Mole de Mayo festival in Pilsen, although I’ll admit I went last year and it was an interesting experience stuffing my face with a dish I consider my personal favorite.

Although I feel compelled to try to find something new to do to occupy my time this holiday weekend. And part of that time may well be in some sort of serious contemplation of those people who served in our nation’s military and wound up losing their lives as a result.

That’s enough bloodshed to have to think about, without having to contemplate the number of people killed or wounded (it could wind up being several dozen) in incidents that usually compete with each other in terms of just how insipid they are.

ALMOST AS THOUGH some people are eager to see a life lost in the most pathetic and wasteful manner possible. My own reporter-type days saw me write many a story about someone who happened to be sitting on their porch when they got struck by stray gunfire.

Various types of police will be in force this weekend. Photos by Gregory Tejeda

To try to cope with the incidents that are inevitable this weekend, the Chicago Police say they plan to have an extra 1,200 patrol officers on duty – with some 50 of them riding the Chicago Transit Authority buses and “L” trains to try to reduce the number of moments where someone merely trying to get themselves somewhere wind up being hurt or killed.

While a summer mobile patrol of about 100 officers will be working the parks and Lake Michigan shoreline. The last thing we need is someone killed during a quarrel breaking out at a traditional holiday “cookout” gone awry.

Which may sound like quite a force being put to the streets to deal with potential violence. The reality, though, is that it will only take one child getting caught in someone’s crossfire to taint the holiday weekend – no matter how much Lightfoot tries to reduce it.

  -30-

Cop-related killings become common? As are the accompanying racial rants!

We have yet to learn what kind of prison sentence will be imposed against the Chicago police officer who fired those 16 shots into a teenaged boy who may have been acting erratically enough to make the officer fear for his life.

The incident in suburban Robbins occurred … 

There also is the upcoming trials of three more police officers whom prosecutors say tried to spin the initial investigation so as to make it a clear-cut case of self-defense by law enforcement.

AND NOW, WE have the incident in suburban Robbins where a police officer responding to a call of shots fired at a tavern wound up killing the security guard who was on duty and was trying to subdue the man who had provoked the whole incident.

It’s becoming far too common that we’re having to question the motivations of our law enforcement officers – who theoretically are there to protect the public, but are behaving in ways that arouse racially-motivated suspicions.

As though the only “crime” that was committed in Robbins was that a tavern willing to stay open until 4 a.m. serving intoxicating beverages would have so little sense as to hire an African-American male to provide security.

Some activist types anxious to turn the “ROBBINS, Ill.” dateline into a focal point for their efforts are openly saying that white cop from nearby suburban Midlothian who was assisting would have been more understanding of the situation if it had been a white security guard trying to break up the incident.

THE SAD THING is that there may well be some truth to that line of logic. Although I also don’t doubt there will be other people who won’t want to have to listen to such arguments.

Heck, when the Washington Post earlier this week got into covering the incident that took place Sunday at Manny’s Blue Room lounge and led their story with the fact that a “white” cop killed a “black” security guard, there were ample examples of people who responded by accusing the post of irresponsibly bringing up race.

In this “Age of Trump” in which we now live, there may well be some people who don’t want to hear these types of stories. While others are going to demand they be told!

… on the heels of a trial over a police shooting in Chicago

Now in the interest of disclosure, I should point out I do some work for Tribune Publishing, and in fact was a reporter-type person on call Sunday morning when the incident broke out.

I WAS AT the tavern and at the police station in Robbins, and the conclusion I quickly came to was that the local police weren’t really sure what happened. There was confusion about who shot whom, or how many were shot or what provoked the incident in the first place. It took time before Cook County sheriff’s police (for the incident itself) and Illinois State Police (for the cop shooting a security guard portion) brought out details that made apparent just how absurd this incident was – and I have read follow-up news accounts written by others with great interest.

Even now, there are conflicting stories about how clearly the security guard was identified, and could it be possible for a police officer to seriously confuse him for just another guy with a gun at a scene that had seriously lapsed out of control.

There also are people who want to think the Illinois State Police are rushing their investigation so as to try to absolve the cop of criminal liability.

Which may be an after-effect over the officers who soon will be on trial for allegedly trying to reduce the chance that Jason Van Dyke would ever have to see the inside of a courtroom for the 2014 shooting death of a teenager.

ARE WE GOING to get the same kind of “conspiracy” suspicions against the state police? Is that attitude going to impede the ability of police to seriously get to the bottom of what happened?

Which municipality will find its police tainted next?

That would actually be the casualty for society as a whole if our investigators can’t be trusted to figure out what happened, and if the ideological suspicions of individuals were somehow allowed to predominate in determining how our judicial system will respond.

I’m sure on the date that Van Dyke is sentenced for his second-degree murder conviction, along with all those criminal accounts for each shot fired, we’re going to hear people screeching and screaming on all sides for how unfair the verdict will be.

Just as I’m sure there also are people who will be demanding that the as-of-yet unidentified Midlothian cop should someday become Van Dyke’s cellmate, and others who will be grossly offended if such a moment ever comes close to becoming reality.

  -30-

Is Sept. 11 a date to unify us all, or a date for critics to ‘shut their pieholes’

It has been 17 years since that date when nut cases acting in an irrational way to show their Islamic religious faith staged their attack on the secular western world by inflicting damage upon the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

This became fish wrap in the coming days

That’s the way I recall the events of Sept. 11, 2001 – even though others are inclined to want to think in different ways to justify their own irrational hang-ups along religious and ethnic lines.

IN SHORT, THE bigoted amongst us in society want to remember the happenings of all those years ago as evidence that their warped way of thought is somehow correct; and that those of us who view life in a more rational manner somehow ought to pipe down and keep our crazy thoughts to ourselves

Yes, I remember the happenings of that day and the national mood that followed as a scary time, largely because it bolstered the level of absurdity that already existed in our society.

There were those people who claimed then (and still try to claim now) that our nation was unified – people put aside their partisan leanings and saw ourselves as one.

What actually happened is that the right-wing elements of our society (including many of those who have admiration for this Age of Trump we’re now in) became more outspoken in their thought process – and the rest of us felt a sense of intimidation.

IT’S AS THOUGH many people felt too scared to have thoughts of opposition and felt they needed, as actor Carroll O’Connor’s “Archie Bunker” character would often tell wife Edith, to “stifle” themselves.

The fact that many of us haven’t permanently silenced ourselves may be the ultimate evidence that the “terrorists” of Sept. 11 didn’t prevail. If they had, we probably would have become a nation of people where the majority of us currently agree with whatever irrational thoughts get spewed out via the current president’s Twitter account.

So when I think of all the happenings that will occur on Tuesday (most timed to coincide with 8:48 a.m. and 9:29 a.m. – the moments that day when the World Trade Center towers were struck by hijacked jet planes), to me the focus ought to be less on all the pseudo-military ritual that will take place.

Yes, there will be those who will gather at many a City Hall across the nation to watch uniformed police officers salute and national anthems be played out of some sense that we’re showing we weren’t beaten down by those people who wanted to show contempt for our society because it is a multi-cultural place.

BUT I’D BE inclined to argue that we’re really showing our survival as a society by supporting those of us who differ from the “norm,” or what certain people would like to think ought to be the norm for all of us to follow.

Yes, Sept. 11, 2001 was a date of confusion – many of us didn’t have a clue what was really happening. Our lives seemed thrown all out of kilter.

Yet from the perspective of a Chicagoan, what I recall was that many downtown businesses shut down for the day as the area evacuated. For the most part, life returned to as close to normal as people of certain ideological leanings tried to use the chaos to impose their own thoughts upon all of us.

Perhaps the last thing we ought to be doing is getting obsessed with minute details of pseudo-patriotism. Personally, I think the people who get all upset that someone didn’t show the proper degree of respect for singing a national anthem or reciting a Pledge of Allegiance are the ones who are a real threat to the freedoms upon which our society is supposed to be based.

NOT THAT I’M going to be offended by those of you who feel compelled to attend one of the many ceremonies being held Tuesday to remember what happened 17 years ago. If it makes you feel comfortable, the better for you.

Although you thinking that Tuesday is an excuse to force your thought processes on others – if you think about it, that’s a downright un-American concept to have.

  -30-

Is this the calm before the storm?

VAN DYKE: Protector of the public?

The idea of August as being the summer doldrums gets reinforced all the more this year – what with the trial of the Chicago cop who faces criminal charges for the shooting death of a teenager back in 2014 finally scheduled to take place.

Come Sept. 5, the Cook County courts will finally get around to holding the trial that will decide the fate of officer Jason Van Dyke – the man who got captured on crude video firing 16 shots into the body of a 17-year-old who may, or may not, have been acting irrationally.

McDONALD: Could he have been a scholar?

THERE’S NO DOUBT that Van Dyke fired the shots that killed Laquan McDonald. The issue in this trial is going to be whether his actions were justified as part of his duties “to serve and protect” the people of Chicago.

Which is going to be a judgment call. It’s clear that no matter what, the public perspective will be such that Chicago will be seriously split. This verdict is going to leave the populace of Chicago seriously p-o’ed.

For every single person determined to believe this is an instance of a police officer committing cold-blooded murder, there’s going to be another individual wanting to believe that McDonald got what he deserved – and that perhaps we ought to be thinking of giving him a medal.

A concept that will seriously offend those who have been outspoken in their rhetoric that Van Dyke belongs in prison. They probably won’t be happy until they hear word that “inmate” Van Dyke was assaulted by fellow inmates while in prison.

THESE FACTIONS OF people are going to be going at each other once the trial gets underway. Which means we ought to regard the next few weeks of August as being the calm before the storm.

How will their reputation be altered?

Before the sides start going at each other with full force. Before the rhetoric gets ultra-ugly, and before things get said and done that manage to bring embarrassment to the public perception of Chicago.

I say full force because we got a little taste of what will be forthcoming this very weekend.

It was the Bud Billiken Parade, and the parade’s co-grand marshal, rap singer Vic Mensa, managed to ruffle the sensibilities of police. Mensa on Saturday carried a “Convict Jason Van Dyke” banner. Police officers on duty to maintain order during the parade gathered around him.

WORDS WERE SPOKEN between the two sides, and Mensa at one point taunted the police to arrest him. Daring them to make a national story out of the event by taking him into custody!

Police maintained enough professional restraint to avoid escalating the incident. But it is likely once the trial gets underway and we begin getting the daily dribble of testimony, we’re likely to learn something that offends the public sensibility to the point the outbursts will get out of control.

I’m not making a judgment, as the outburst could easily come from either side of those in our society who are going to take offense.

It could easily come from those people who are offended by the testimony that will be presented in the form of animation.

FOR IT SEEMS that the Van Dyke legal defense team wants to give us a very technical version of what happened – depicting some 5 of the 16 shots, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

Even if relocated, Cook will get tainted by trial

Perhaps they think that an overly technical visual version of what happened will somehow make the incident seem less offensive and brutal.

Which is a concept that will offend those inclined to believe the worst about police and their brutality towards the people, particularly the segment that could never be described as Anglo in complexion.

I don’t know if it will become (I hope it doesn’t turn out to be) a race riot. But I suspect the next few months will provide anecdotes that will embarrass our city’s public perception – and we’ll all be very grateful come the arrival of 2019.

  -30-

Who will try to make bigger political hash of weekend incidents of violence?

One might try arguing that the protest march of last week to Wrigley Field was an over-blown event that didn’t live up to its hype. But then, we get weekends such as this past one that help underscore the serious problem that exists in parts of Chicago.

EMANUEL: Is it all his fault?

For this past weekend was one of many petty incidents that left people dead (12 in all) or wounded (71 gunshot victims). There was one six-hour period on Sunday when five of the fatalities occurred and 30 more were shot.

THE OVERALL TOTAL for the period from 5 p.m. Friday through 5 a.m. Monday is the 71 people shot – with 48 of those shootings occurring on Sunday. The so-called day of holiness, when we’re all supposed to rest (unless you’re Jewish, in which case it’s Saturday until sundown).

I’ve noticed that in recent stories, the emphasis is placed on the number of people who got shot – even though when I was a police reporter-type person, I usually focused on the number dead.

Which back then (the late 1980s) was an era when the homicide tally in Chicago usually came close to 1,000 per year. Trying to tally every person who got wounded would balloon the figure up to a ridiculous tally.

Although I suspect that’s what the people trying to use this issue for political purposes want to do. They probably want us to hear the number of people wounded, then make the assumption that it’s really the number dead. Former New York Mayor (and current Donald Trump apologist) Rudy Giuliani did just that in a series of Twitter tweets he sent out this weekend.

McCARTHY: Trying to bolster his campaign?

WHICH IF THEY were true would make this city a ridiculously violent place – instead of one that doesn’t even come close to leading the nation in a homicide rate.

Not that I’m trying to understate the problem. We do have parts of Chicago that are ridiculously violent, and the people whom life’s circumstances give them no other choice but to live in those neighborhoods, are enduring ridiculous conditions that no one ought to have to put up with.

But listening to the political people trying to use these figures to justify their own partisan rants strikes me as being even more vulgar than the fatalities themselves.

Garry McCarthy, the one-time Chicago Police superintendent who now is amongst the many running for mayor against Rahm Emanuel come next year’s election cycle, took his own pot shots.

GIULIANI: Bringing N.Y. to Chi?

HE CLAIMS EMANUEL’S efforts to improve urban life are ignoring the parts of the city where violence is the problem. Although I can’t help but think no one is going to take seriously this claim coming from McCarthy.

It may be true that those Black Lives Matter activists concerned about police brutality want Emanuel out! But those same activists also blame McCarthy’s police department for escalating their concerns. They’re certainly not about to want him to replace Rahm at City Hall.

McCarthy’s rants come off as trying to shift blame for a problem that escalated during the time he was police superintendent.

The fact that Giuliani (who was New York mayor back in the days when McCarthy was a New York Police Department official) is throwing in his own two cents merely makes the whole issue entirely partisan.

IT MAKES US wonder why Trump himself didn’t jump into the rants, since the man usually isn’t the least bit bashful about using his Twitter account to spew whatever nonsense happens to motivate him on any given day.

TRUMP: How long until he jumps into mix?

It also has us wondering how much any of these officials are really concerned about urban violence in Chicago.

Are they, on a certain level, thankful for weekends such as this past one; because it gives them something to complain about publicly with regards to Chicago? For McCarthy told the Chicago Sun-Times that he accused Emanuel of “mak(ing) everything a diversion” to avoid talking about crime. Listening to such rants makes me wonder if he’s just as guilty of diversionary tactics to focus entirely on this issue.

Although the sad part may be that, to a certain segment of Chicago, the most tragic death of the weekend is none of the above -- but instead that of the suburban Mundelein teenager who died Sunday night due to a seizure suffered while attending Lollapalooza.

  -30-

Can cop firearm reporting rule work?

The part of me that, many years ago, was a full-time cop and crime reporter appreciates the fact that police officers are going to have instances where they use force on people.

To the point where we issue them firearms. Why else would we do so if we didn’t expect there to be occasions when they’d have to kill someone else “in the line of duty.”

WHICH IS WHY I’m skeptical of a new proposal that would require police officers to report for the record every single instance where they reach for that sidearm and use the threat of shooting someone as a way of intimidating them into submission.

A consent decree offered up by the Illinois attorney general’s office (and enforceable by the federal courts) to help govern the operating policies of the Chicago Police Department includes that very provision, and it is one that the police themselves don’t think much of.

Soon-to-be former Illinois attorney general Lisa Madigan may be adding to her legacy of 16 years in that post, but many of the political people don’t think much of the policy, with possible mayoral candidate Paul Vallas (the one-time Chicago Public Schools CEO) jumping on the bandwagon and saying he thinks it’s a bad idea.

Personally, I don’t comprehend how a reporting requirement would work. Or if there’s any way it could work. It just seems too far out of the realm of what is practical.

CURRENT POLICIES REQUIRE that police officers be capable of accounting for every bullet they fire with their sidearm. If they pull the trigger and try to shoot someone, they have to be capable of justifying why they felt compelled to do so.

Police officers don’t (or aren’t supposed to) go around shooting people just for the sake of trying to intimidate them into submission.

My own memories of talking with street cops back in the day (which in my case was the late 1980s, back when the city’s murder rate for a few consecutive years averaged 900-something per year) was that if an officer reaches for that pistol, it’s because he seriously thinks someone’s life (possibly his or her own) is in danger.

VALLAS: Appealing for cop votes?

In short, it is a “shoot to kill” type of situation. Otherwise, reaching for the pistol and waving it about to try to scare someone (or firing off “warning” shots) is out of line, and just as reckless and inappropriate as killing someone who didn’t pose a threat.

WHAT I DON’T get is just how a reporting requirement of drawing a weapon could possibly work. After all, the decision to reach for the pistol is usually a reactive one – it happens in a matter of seconds.

Political people, including Vallas and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, say they fear causing an officer to have to spend that extra second thinking could be the difference between an officer able to do his job and one who gets the official police rituals performed at his (or her) funeral.

I also wonder if we fully trust officers enough to think that at the end of every shift they work, they’re going to do even more paperwork to acknowledge every incident where they felt compelled to reach down to grab their pistol.

Will we start getting people filing claims that a cop pointed a pistol at their heads? Will we start hearing stories of some cop playing “cowboy” and waving his firearm over his head?

AT A TIME when we have a significant share of our society not really trusting of law enforcement (that’s actually putting it mildly), while others throw their support to police officers usually to reinforce any racial, ethnic or whatever other hang-ups they may have, this could cause more confusion.

MADIGAN: Adding to legacy?

Although I do have to admit I approve of the notion of some sort of restriction on firearm use – even though I’m sure some would argue there already are sufficient limits on our police officers.

There may be people who think there’s nothing wrong with a cop using his/her pistol to intimidate a “punk” by pointing it upside his temple to scare him into submission. The problem is that life always presents situations (such as misfired shots) where something can go drastically wrong.

Disarming the police altogether might be a solution, but it isn’t one that is the least bit practical in our society of today.

  -30-

EXTRA: Can we truly get justice for Emmett Till all these years later?

I have to admit to being curious to learn what the “new information” is that could seriously make the Justice Department think it worth their time to reopen the investigation into the 1955 slaying of Emmett Till – the Chicago kid who was visiting family in racially-segregated Mississippi and managed to offend the local racial mores.

Still waiting, some 63 years later

The Associated Press reported Thursday on a Congressional report from March indicating that the Till slaying is officially up for investigation again.

WHAT STRIKES ME as odd about this is the timing – we’re now in the Age of Trump where the last thing you’d expect anybody to be doing is to dredge up an old criminal case that goes a long way to showing how the concept of “Make America Great Again” is a crock.

The Till death (he was severely beaten and his body dumped in a lake with hopes that his remains would never be uncovered) was one that motivated many people into realizing there was something wrong with the segregationist ways of old.

Even though I suspect the kind of people who look kindly upon the Donald Trump campaign theme think we lost something significant in our society when those ways of old were diminished.

It may be the kind of people who will try arguing that two men went on trial for the Till killing (both were acquitted by all-white juries inclined to look favorably on them).

AS THINGS STAND now, Justice Department officials admit they have suspects as to who killed Till – but they’re all dead. Nobody’s going to go to prison for what happened to Emmett.

Priorities; Yankees more important!

So what realistically comes of reopening the investigation?

There could be some value to forcing our society at-large to face up to what happened. Because it’s all too easy for the passage of time to dim the view of the atrocities of that era.

Besides, perhaps the sensibilities of the ‘past’ need to become publicly offended before we can truly move on as a society from the taint of our history.

  -30-

No more cries of “Jerry Jerry” echoing from our TV screens (except in reruns)

Perhaps it’s the ultimate evidence of just how clueless and unaware of pop culture trivia I can be, but I honestly didn’t have a clue that Jerry Springer’s television program was still in production.

SPRINGER: Rides off into sunset of retirement

At least not until I read the news reports indicating that the production company that puts the show together is no longer going to do new episodes.

FOR THE RECORD, the show that once was a national sensation/embarrassment that was produced from our very own NBC studios in Chicago lasted some 27 years – and there are in excess of some 4,000 episodes in existence.

It hasn’t been produced in Chicago since 2009, and to tell you the truth, I guess I thought the show went off the air sometime shortly thereafter.

Not that I cared much. I never paid much attention to it when it was in Chicago, and wasn’t about to continue to follow something I never gave much thought to in the first place.

Which, if anything, is the American Way of doing things.

IF I FIND something too stupid to spend time with, I choose to ignore it. I certainly don’t go about trying to get it shut down or censored. If enough people were to take that attitude, the ratings would plummet to the point where the tacky TV would just go away.

The type of activity the 'Springer show' gave us … 

Or at the very least, shift over in reruns to those many countless cable TV stations that fill their airtime with all those long-forgotten programs from decades past.

Which is bound to become the fate of Jerry Springer’s show.

A part of me is actually surprised someone hasn’t taken the backlog that has developed through the decades and created a separate Jerry Springer channel. “Jerry TV,” all “Jerry” all the time.

WHERE ONE COULD always tune in to the sight of someone being cracked over the head by a chair, or trying to beat up her husband after learning he impregnated the neighbor’s teenage daughter (only to have them separated by Steve Wilkos or many of the other t-shirted security personnel -- many of whom once were off-duty Chicago cops -- who became an integral part of the Springer program).

… at the show's peak

If you think I’m exaggerating, keep in mind that Springer used to defend his programming choices by claiming he was merely reflecting the reality of a certain segment of our society. Most definitely the tacky parts, but it is real.

Personally, the last time I remember seeing the show, the guest was a woman who used the program to inform her racist boyfriend she was dumping him. She being white and her new boyfriend being a black man.

As though it was somehow enlightening to see some Southern white male feel humiliated on national television. Of course, in this Age of Trump, we’d probably be expected to feel empathy for the white guy, and perhaps we’d allow him to get a sense of public “vengeance” on his girlfriend.

WHOM YOU HAVE to admit engaged in a bit of trashy behavior by wanting to make a spectacle out of dumping the jerk she no longer wanted to have in her life.

Hollywood gave Springer a moment of fame

How big a sensation was Springer? I still recall the 1998 film “Ringmaster,” which allowed Jerry Springer to play the part of himself as host of a tacky TV show called “Jerry” (only based in Los Angeles, rather than our wonderful Second City). Which in my mind is only memorable because it was the first time I ever heard of actress Jaime Pressly (and the sight of Springer clad in a gaudy Western outfit).

Now, it’s all done. Although at age 74 with such a long run, perhaps retirement has been earned.

And we can all spend years speculating on how much our society was degraded by watching such trivial nonsense – even as we watch those reruns over and over and snicker as much at the period fashion sense as much as we do the tacky behavior.

  -30-

Sometimes, the answer is so stupid

The Chicago Sun-Times on Sunday devoted three full pages inside the newspaper to reporting on the official city investigation into a 2016 incident in which an off-duty police officer shot-and-killed a black man.

The death of Joshua Beal in one sentence

The man, as was reported at the time, was from Indianapolis, and was only in the Mount Greenwood neighborhood on the city’s far southwest corner because he was serving as a pallbearer for his cousin – who was buried at one of the cemeteries nearby.

THE INCIDENT ERUPTED into black activists coming to the neighborhood to protest the police and make comparisons between local law enforcement and the Ku Klux Klan. Which provoked outcries from neighborhood residents against those activists.

It was an ugly racial moment and came right at the point of the 2016 Election Day in which Mount Greenwood wound up being one of the few places in Chicago where Donald Trump actually got significant numbers of votes. “Make America Great Again,” indeed!

The Sun-Times went into great detail in reporting the city’s investigation, which it turns out the newspaper only found out about because they had to sue Chicago city government in order to get the documents.

So after all this hassle and all the outcry, it seems the moment that sparked anger on all sides was one so banal that it seems pathetic in today’s day and age. Except to those, I suppose, who really think this Age of Trump we’re now in is improvement.

IF ANYTHING, THE newspaper’s front-page headline kind of summarized up the whole affair to where we may not need to read the lengthy news report. It shows just how insipid the whole affair was.

Just another stupid slur that likely is heard in barrooms and households across the city – only usually slightly whispered so as not to provoke a brawl.

So if there is a grand lesson to be learned from this affair, it’s actually one that I would have hoped most of us already knew. The sad part of this affair is that someone out there is probably taking a perverse sense of pride that this was said.

They may even think that somehow, their right to freedom of expression is being silenced by reporting just how stupid the comment was. Which is the ugly part of this whole affair.

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When do we allow police use of force?

It’s the simple fact that truly is terrifying if you think about it too closely and for too long a period of time – police have the legal authority to kill people.

Midway Plaisance doesn't magically isolate university from rest of Chicago

Anybody who doesn’t realize that isn’t thinking too closely. Why else would we arm our law enforcement officers if we didn’t expect there to be situations in which they’re going to have to use their weapon on another human being.

I WONDER IF we have the student body at the University of Chicago not being fully aware of that reality. For last week, dozens of students protested on campus against the private police force that the university uses to patrol the campus and surrounding Hyde Park neighborhood.

Specifically, they want their officers to ditch their firearms. They also talked of more funding being provided for mental health services, which makes me think those students think the police are something along the line of social workers.

Now I understand those students are miffed about the death last week of Charles Thomas, a student who was shot and killed by a University of Chicago police officer.

Various news reports indicate the student was walking around the neighborhood in the middle of the night, waving about a metal bar and screaming various taunts. Police say that when they tried confronting the student, he raised his weapon (a metal bar can be as deadly as any pistol) and approached police.

AT WHICH POINT, the officer fired and the student was killed.

He was only 21, and some reports indicate he was in his final year of college before receiving a degree, with a 4.2 grade point average.

I know some people who found humor of a sarcastic tone from those facts – the idea that a kid was on the verge of completing college with a very respectable grade point average would appear to be someone who had the whole wide world at his fingertips.

Yet he winds up dead, right on the verge of the beginning of the adult portion of his life. Talk about life being unfair! Talk about a situation that most definitely warrants a stream of profanities to describe it most adequately.

YET I’M WONDERING how many of those students have a false vision of the world around them, and how many of them think Hyde Park is some sort of barricaded island with the surroundings walled off by the kind of ways that Donald Trump dreams of erecting along the U.S./Mexico border – rather than just some Chicago Park District lands to the west?

It’s not just the neighborhoods surrounding the University of Chicago campus.

For on Saturday, there was an incident in the West Side’s Austin neighborhood where two teenagers were shot. One, who is 13, appears likely to survive his wound to the thigh.

But the other, who was 16, appears to be deceased from his multiple gunshot wounds. He didn’t get as much of a chance at life as the University of Chicago student.

HE’S NOT ALONE. For the Chicago Sun-Times reported about 13 other people being shot in various incidents scattered across the city on Saturday. While WBBM-TV reports a total of 21 people in Chicago being shot since Friday night.

You just know those students complaining about their police (which amounts to having private security for the campus) would be even more miffed if there had been an incident involving a student being shot by someone from outside the campus community.

Would we be getting students up in arms over why their police aren’t equipped with even more firepower? So as to fight off those “outside” forces that pose a threat to their physical well-being?

It is sad that we’ll never get to see what contributions Thomas could have made to society had he lived. But many of us would be complaining even more loudly if police in such an incident had done nothing.

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EXTRA: Now 56 shot, 11 dead, but I still say the 10-year-old most tragic

The Chicago Tribune felt compelled up update the story they published for Sunday with a Monday report telling us of more dead in the city this weekend. One of the deceased is an activist-type who had dedicated her life to trying to combat the problem of urban violence.

Although I still say the most tragic of the deaths is that of 10-year-old Gustavo Garcia, who was merely sitting in the back seat of an automobile when another car pulled up alongside and gunfire occurred.

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EXTRA: How time passes

Some of us always want to think of the presidency of John F. Kennedy as a moment of youth and vigor being shot into our national psyche (while others want to think of it as the moment the “grown-ups” lost control).

White House and Chicago pols intertwined in the past

So what should we think of the fact that Kennedy, if he somehow magically were still alive, would now be 100?

IT WAS ON this date a century ago that Kennedy was born in Boston (he was 46 at the time of his death). We’re probably never going to come to a consensus as to how he should be regarded.

Chicago turned out vote for JFK

And we likely will forevermore dispute the significance Chicago and its electorate played in his 1960 ascension to the White House. Or just how much in debt the Kennedys were to Mayor Richard J. Daley in turning out the vote that put Illinois in his Electoral College column that led to victory?

Although the part that most astounds me over the idea of a centenarian Kennedy is that it means his “first lady,” Jacqueline (whom we perpetually envision in her youthful form) would herself now be 87!

Of course, that’s not the only “anniversary” we could be acknowledging this day. There’s always the labor dispute that got ugly in the South Deering neighborhood on Memorial Day eighty years ago.

ANYBODY WHO THINKS that the Chicago police conduct of the 1968 Democratic Convention protests was an isolated incident doesn’t know of the protest that turned ugly when Republic Steel officials called the police – who then came in, began beating picketers and wound up killing 10 men (all of whom were local residents who worked at the plant).

A leftover structure from the old Republic Steel plant

It’s no wonder that neighborhood residents still pay an annual tribute to those who died. And the fact that Daley himself always tried to justify the police conduct of ’68 by saying no one was killed as a result.

Just one discrepancy, for those who want to nitpick.

The actual date of Memorial Day back in ’37 was May 30. So it will be 80 years ago Tuesday that people lost their lives at a now-remote site along Avenue O.

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