Police said two officers observed a drug transaction involving a man inside a vehicle around 2:10 p.m. and tried to arrest the suspect at the scene. During the arrest, a bundle of suspected drugs wound up underneath a police vehicle, authorities said.
As one officer worked to control a gathering crowd and pursue another man who fled with the drug bundle, his partner was surrounded by a group of people, said police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi.
The group “implied that they had weapons” and threatened the lone officer, though no one in the group displayed a weapon, Guglielmi said. For his personal safety, the officer backed away, and someone in the group grabbed the suspect and fled, Guglielmi said.
“Out of an abundance of caution, he backs away from the arrestee. An individual comes and grabs the arrestee and another individual comes and grabs the narcotics,” he said.
Guglielmi said the officer’s statement didn’t indicate how many people were in the group but did confirm a gunshot was fired a short distance away from the arrest, possibly as a distraction or intimidation tactic.
(Featured image is “Turntable” by Andrew Malone. Used under a creative commons license.)
I don’t want to say that “it’s happening!” but I found the responses to the tweet below to be absolutely fascinating:
Report
This sounds…familiar.
Dateline, 1972
Criminals, Out Of Control! Police Helpless!
Be Afraid, Children, Be Very Afraid!!
From the article:
“If the cops had fired their weapons, news media would have been all over them, metaphorically skinning them alive. Politicians would have demanded their heads. Democratic presidential candidates, and the two campaigning for mayor, would have held repeated news conferences.”
Umm, yeah.
I don’t know the circumstances of the arrest, and neither does the reporter.
But he is unquestioningly sure it was a good bust, he knows who the bad guys were, and he knows the street thugs need to be made afraid, very afraid, or cats and dogs will start living together.Report
That’s John Kass for you. A Mike Royko pretender from jump.Report
In the ten years before that article ran, the violent crime rate in the US had doubled, and in the twenty years after, it nearly doubled again before peaking in the early 90s and beginning the long decline we’ve seen since then. Criminals really were out of control.Report
The responses to this tweet are almost universally of the “this is good,” and dude is seemingly randomly blocking people (or at least, I can’t figure out the pattern that triggers the ban hammer).Report
John Carpenter needs to make a threequil “Escape from Chicago”Report
One man with a gun can control 100 without one.
Vladimir LeninReport
An armed society is a polite society.
NRA
Also NRA:
The only thing that stops a bad cop with a gun is a good mob with a gun.*
* I’m quoting that from memory. Someone may need to check it.Report
Personally, I think it’s good when the police are reminded that the people are not answerable to them. I’d prefer the people would find less menacing ways to remind the police of that, but these days…Report
The police unions have successfully blocked all the less menacing avenues.Report
But, in the 1930’s, unions for people who weren’t cops were good!Report
I think even now, even police should be allowed to unionize, because the alternative is worse.
Just, the power of police unions needs considerable cutting back.Report
Holy crap. What’s the alternative?Report
Like I’ve said before, police unions should not be allowed to involve themselves in any matter that is not straightforward contract negotiations or employee/management relations. If it involves something for which a normal citizen would face arrest and charges, the union is hands off. Likewise the union can not negotiate special rights for it’s members with regard to criminal investigation.Report
@Jaybird,
Oh I dunno. A new mayor coming in and firing all the LEOs because they think they supported the old guy, for instance.
Anyway, I disagree with @dragonfrog in that I think abolishing LE unions might be a reasonable compromise, but Oscar’s suggestion of keeping them out of criminal matters seems better to me.Report
…how is Chicago firing all of the cops and starting over worse than what Chicago has now?Report
@Jaybird,
It might not be, but every city is not Chicago.Report
I guess I’m just in a place where I don’t see the possibility of the police force changing with every new mayor as worse than keeping the police no matter what, even if they (insert most egregious examples from the last few years).Report
You’re assuming that every police force is equally bad, and that bringing in a new mayor won’t make some of them worse rather than better.
More to the point, though, it’s not clear that eliminating unions is a necessary step to solving the problem. Doesn’t mean it’s not worth considering as a compromise, like I said, but if the question is about an ideal approach….Report
If “ideal” is on the table, let’s have a society that no longer needs police at all.
As it is, I’m not impressed with the whole “bringing in new mayors and them not being allowed to fire the bad ones” system to the point where I can’t imagine that a system where mayors could run on firing the bad police would be worse (even taking into account that some hypothetical politicians might possibly be tainted by corruption on some level, hypothetically).Report
I think you’re underestimating the degree of support there is for bad police. Half the country, give or take, thinks all the stuff we decry as police abuse is good and actually the whole point of having police.Report
Which is why we shouldn’t risk them being able to be fired?Report
Who would do all this firing?
And why would they do such a thing?Report
From above: “A new mayor coming in and firing all the LEOs because they think they supported the old guy, for instance.”Report
Yes! Because it’s easy to construct a scenario where the new mayor is coming in because of a perceived “softness on crime” on the part of his predecessor.
The idea that politicians are only going to use unfettered power to fire people working for the government in responsible ways seems… weird.Report
Unions are important because they protect the good cops?
How many examples do I have to find of cops getting fired because they *DON’T* shoot someone do I need to find for you to say “okay, maybe that isn’t exactly what unions are doing”?Report
I guess I just can’t grasp the logic of going from
“make cops easier to fire” to
“More justice for all”.
Modern policing came about in the 18th century, and police unions only in the 20th.
Do we see any evidence in the centuries of “at will” policing where the police didn’t incorporate all the same biases and injustices of the larger society?
There’s a step missing in that line of logic, that needs to be filled in.Report
Well, if you’d read the above comments, you’d see that the conversation evolved from the claim that police should be allowed to unionize because “the alternative is worse”.
I was looking at the abuses enabled by the police unions and said “holy crap… what must the alternative be to be worse than this sort of thing?”
And, apparently, police getting fired by the new mayor is worse than what we have now.
This is what I am skeptical of.
Because I don’t know that mayors being able to fire police would be worse than what we have now.
All of the examples I’ve seen so far of why it would be worse strike me as being things that happen right now.
Sort of like one of the arguments against legalizing pot was that that if we legalize marijuana, then college students and high school students might smoke it.
“I’ve got some bad news”, might begin the response to that argument.
So, too, here.Report
Embracing a system of corruption where the police serve as the mayor’s private milita seems self-evidently worse.
I don’t know why you are fixated on this one solution to the exclusion of all others.
For example I think Oscar’s idea of stripping police unions of their power to defend against misconduct charges seems reasonable and effective.
Another is to strip police misconduct itself away from the police department, and create civilian review boards.
There are others I’m sure.Report
Embracing a system of corruption where the police serve as the mayor’s private milita seems self-evidently worse.
The leap to “the mayor can fire cops” to “therefore, the cops will be the mayor’s private militia” is a leap that need a little bit more filling out.
I mean, is the argument that Police Unions have private militias under the current system? Police chiefs?
I mean, if they do, you’d think that if we are stuck with people having private militias, we’d at least want them to have to win votes. I didn’t vote for the guy in charge of the police union. I didn’t vote for the police chief, either.
I might be nice for these militia commanders to be accountable.
Or have you embraced a complete lack of accountability for your tinpot dictators running around your city with their own private militias?Report
We just need to look at history and see examples where police did in fact become private militias belonging to whatever warlord or local politician took power. We see it in current kleptocracies or feudal societies.
Civil service, the idea of a nonpolitical bureaucracy isolated from political pressure became a thing for very good reasons.
Introducing more accountability to the police is a very good thing.
We just need to remember who we want them to be accountable to.Report
And, um, the fact that mayors cannot fire police officers is what stands between us and what happened in history, is it?
We just need to remember who we want them to be accountable to.
And, if I were to look at how we do things today, who would I conclude they are accountable to?Report
It’s kinda nice to hear all the bleating of the police unions in CA now that police discipline records are forced open to public scrutiny.Report
This should be in one of the daily links posts!Report
From the perspective of Chicago gangs, they believe they’ve paid politicians for protection, so what this officer was doing was violating the code by interfering on their turf.
https://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/January-2012/Gangs-and-Politicians-An-Unholy-Alliance/Report