A DAY IN THE LIFE (of Chicago): 1st baseball season injury under the stands?

First injury a firefighter, ...

Should we consider the Chicago firefighter the first injury of the 2016 baseball season in Chicago because he was hurt early Friday while dealing with a fire in a storage room under the stands at U.S. Cellular Field?

Sure enough, one of the firefighters who responded to the call had to be taken to an area hospital for injuries sustained during the fire that was discovered at about 2:30 a.m. at the Armour Square neighborhood stadium.

IT WAS NOT a life-threatening injury, and it would appear the firefighter was treated and released long before you are reading this commentary.

... or Kyle Schwarber?

It also seems the fire was contained to the one room and did not cause significant damage to the stadium. Opening Day on Friday against the Cleveland Indians was not in any way threatened, even though White Sox fans got snowed upon.
 

White Sox fans still got to guzzle too much beer Friday afternoon and complain about those new team caps designed by rapper Chance (be honest, White Sox fans will gripe about anything) while having dreams that the ball club may actually accomplish something this season – what with that 3-1 start they got during their opening four-game series in Oakland against the Athletics, despite Friday's 7-1 loss.

In fact, the injury likely wouldn’t have warranted any public attention if not for its location and timing.

OF COURSE, ALL of this will turn out to be a touch of absurd if it turns out that the real first injury of this season was Thursday night in Phoenix, where Kyle Schwarber of the Chicago Cubs wound up on crutches after crashing into teammate Dexter Fowler.

Schwarber underwent an MRI on Friday and officials learned late in the day he's done for the 2016 season. Can their World Series-oriented fantasies withstand this blow?
 

For what it’s worth, Schwarber’s collision didn’t cost the Cubs a ball game – they won 14-6, giving them their third victory of the season and their 12^th straight win on the road. That ties a team record that had lasted 70 seasons.

What else is new along the southwestern shores of Lake Michigan these days?

DO GENTLEMEN REALLY GO TO SUCH CLUBS?:  I wouldn’t particularly want to live near a strip club – but I also have my suspicions aroused any time churches start complaining about such establishments.

Couldn't they scare the business away?

Such as the Sisters of St. Charles, an order of nuns based in suburban Melrose Park who are upset that the Stone Park-based Allure Gentlemen’s Club is so close to their convent.

They have filed a lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court trying to get the club closed down, contending that all the sexual suggestiveness taking place on the premises amounts to prostitution. They say their investigator was offered sex for $250!

Although I wonder why the club, which WMAQ-TV was unable to reach for comment, would choose that particular site for their business. You’d think they’d consider having so many nuns nearby a downer for business – perhaps like that moment in the film “Sister Act” when the nuns acted as greeters for the neighborhood dirty book store and wound up making potential customers feel too perverted to actually make a purchase.

THAT WAS MONEY WELL SPENT:  It cost the Chicago Police Board some $500,000 to go through the process of interviewing 39 applicants for the police superintendent position and recommend three of them as finalists.

EMANUEL: Couldn't he have acted for free?

All of which went for naught when Mayor Rahm Emanuel chose to disregard their suggestions and make his own pick – as part of his political grab to let people know who’s really the boss!

The Chicago Sun-Times reported about the money, which covered the cost of bringing out-of-towners to Chicago for interviews and also the expense of background checks.

Which may be a lot of cash for some. Although in a baseball context, it wouldn’t even buy a decent utility infielder for the season.

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Police shootings always a complex matter; just like the rest of life

I have to admit to sighing when I first learned of the incident this week in the Mount Greenwood neighborhood where Chicago Police officers shot an off-duty firefighter.

Because on the surface, the officers shot at an unarmed man when they mistook his wallet for a firearm of some sorts.

BUT LIFE IS never that simple, and I suspect that when this investigation is complete, these officers are going to be found to have conducted themselves professionally – although I’m sure in firehouses across the city, jokes about donut-stuffed cops who can’t tell the difference between a wallet and a Tech 9 are being told.

The incident in question, which is one of the most unusual police shootings I ever have heard of, occurred in one of those “cop enclave” neighborhoods at the far southwestern edge of the city – one of those places populated by police and firefighters and other city workers who have to live within the municipal boundaries even though they’d probably prefer to live just a few blocks further south in a suburban community.

Which is also one of those places where shootings just don’t happen – which also adds to the “bizarre” factor of this whole incident. As if “cop shooting firefighter” wasn’t weird enough.

For it seems the wife of the firefighter had called 9-1-1 after he called her and told her he “couldn’t take it anymore.” She took that as evidence he was suicidal – hence, her call to emergency services to inform the police.

SO WHEN POLICE encountered him in the area around 103^rd Street and Pulaski Road and they saw him with a black object in his hands while in a crouching position, they presumed the worst.

They defended themselves, according to the Fraternal Order of Police. Although I’m sure certain others will not want to believe that.

None of this particular commentary ought to be interpreted as trying to shift blame on the firefighter – who according to news reports has been with the Chicago Fire Department for about two full decades and was also trained as a paramedic. It is more one of those tragic incidents in which there probably is no “good guy” and trying to come up with blame is pointless.

Because everybody manages to share some form of blame for what happened. At this point, what we all ought to be focusing on is the physical well-being of the firefighter – who on Friday remained in critical condition at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn.

WE SHOULD BE hoping that he manages to recover from his wounds; both the physical ones he received Thursday and the emotional ones his wife thinks he has been suffering from for some time.

And as for the police involvement in this? If my attitude toward law enforcement opening gunfire on an unarmed man (it seems the pistol he owns was at home, and not on him) comes across as nonchalant, perhaps it is because of being a reporter-type person for some 26 years.

I have always thought of police officers as being people no better or smarter than the rest of us – but who take on a risky job in which people can get killed when they screw up. In short, their “bad days” are worse than those of you or me. There’s also the fact that we give police deadly weapons because we anticipate times when they will have to use them.

So while I fully sympathize with an injured firefighter whose wounds have an element of stupidity behind them, I’m also not going to be surprised if some sort of official investigation ultimately determines this particular incident to be “justified” use of force.

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Residency for mayor, but not employees?

CHICO: Easing residency for public safety?

I find it ironic that mayoral hopeful Gery Chico this week came out for easing the residency requirements for city workers, at a time when an overly strict interpretation of “the law” when it comes to mayoral candidates could work to his benefit.

There are those people who believe that Chico, the one-time head of the Public Schools board, the City Colleges of Chicago and the Park District, would become the new front-runner, should Rahm Emanuel be unsuccessful in convincing the Illinois Supreme Court to keep his name on the ballot for the Feb. 22 municipal elections.

AFTER ALL, SAY the legal critics, Emanuel can’t run for mayor because he has NOT been a Chicago resident for a long-enough period of time – in accordance with that strict reading of relevant law.

There are those who think the people pushing this view are Chico’s backers (including Alderman Edward Burke), if not quite Chico himself.

So we have a case where overly-strict residency requirements are good for Chico if they bump off his most serious Election Day opponent. Yet he’s going around getting the endorsement of the International Association of Firefighters local that represents the Chicago Fire Department employees.

The way he’s doing that is by telling them this week he’d ease the residency requirement. I’d say that the move would also get Chico the endorsement of the Chicago Police chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police – except for the fact that the cop union has already endorsed him! But to keep the cops from feeling neglected, he made pledges Wednesday to put 2,000 more officers on the streets by the end (if elected) of his four-year term.

NOW I DO see the one major difference. “Mayor” is an elected position. We don’t pick our police officers and firefighters, or their leaders, at the voting booth. So I’m not quite calling the Chico campaign hypocritical when it comes to the concept of residency and government.

But at a time when political observers watching this particular election cycle are engaging in debates over what, exactly, does Illinois law have to say about residential status for an elected official, the whole concept of demanding proper residency for a city official has risen to a new level of attention.

EMANUEL: Easing his residency?

So it seems odd that at least one of those candidates for mayor is choosing this moment in time to get a little bit lax with the residency requirements for other city personnel.

Now I realize that residency has been a long-festering issue, particularly when it comes to employees of the agencies that are supposed to ensure the public safety of city residents.

WE MAKE JOKES about those “cop enclaves” in neighborhoods such as Jefferson Park on the Northwest Side or Mount Greenwood on the Southwest Side – the latter of which bears so much resemblance to neighboring Alsip that one can’t easily tell where city ends and suburb begins. (For the record, I have two uncles who were Chicago police – one who lived in Mount Greenwood, just three blocks from the city limits, and another who lived out near Midway Airport, although upon his retirement, he found himself a literal country estate in Arkansas to escape what he had come to see as the urban zoo).

I’m sure there are many police officers and firefighters who would have no qualms about moving those few blocks out further into a suburban town – if not for the residency requirement that has been in place for decades.

There are those people who make arguments in defense of residency requirements by claiming they are needed to keep the “middle class” living in the city. Without them, they say, Chicago would become a home address for very wealthy people who live in or near downtown, and the rest of the city would become for the very poor.

Actually, I think it is the quality of the public school system that is more important in that regard. A lot of people, if they don’t already live here, make a point of moving to the city in early adulthood. It is the belief that the local public schools are too low quality (and the parochial or other private schools too expensive) that causes too many people to leave – creating a case where roughly two-thirds of the Chicago-area’s population lives in a suburb, rather than the city itself.

MY REASON FOR thinking the residency requirement has merit is because it would be nice to have the public safety employees on hand.

I know there are suburban towns that are forced to ease up on residency requirements – or else they wouldn’t be able to hire and keep qualified public safety employees. The mode in those places seems to be requiring their workers to live within something like a 10-mile radius of the home town, or requiring them to live in town for a few years, then easing up on residency once they become veteran employees.

I’d like to think Chicago has enough to offer that it doesn’t have to ease up on residency in order to find qualified workers. People who talk about easing the requirement seem, to me, to be surrendering on a certain level. If Chico really does believe that residency for those city workers isn’t all that important, then perhaps he should make some sort of statement telling the people who are eager to boot Emanuel from the ballot based on residency technicalities to ease up.

Fat chance that will ever happen!

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EXTRA: Shane, Come Back!

“Don’t retire, Mayor!”

That was the cry that came from a man attending the funeral services Thursday of Corey Ankum, one of two firefighters killed last week due to a roof collapsing underneath them.

IT WASN’T QUITE along the lines of Joey’s chant in the closing scene of the 1953 film “Shane,” but it was worth noting nonetheless.

The political cry came as Daley was stepping on stage at the Apostolic Church of God to deliver his eulogy for Ankum, whose widow, Demeka, happens to be one of Daley’s secretaries at City Hall.

For the record, Daley got a bit choked up at one point while saying that Ankum was among the rare individuals who deserve to be called a “hero.”

Daley himself didn’t give any indication of hearing the shout, but it caught the attention of many of the nearly 3,000 people who crammed the church’s main chapel. Among those people was former Sen. (and mayoral hopeful herself) Carol Moseley-Braun.

NO WORD ON what reaction she had to the shout, which came in a place that I’m sure she’d like to think is one where her candidacy would be the political preference.

One other notable moment. Rev. Louis D. Jones, while presiding over the funeral service, noted the presence of Chicago Police Commissioner Jody Weis, and offered to alter the program to give him a chance to say something sympathetic about Ankum – who actually worked as a patrol officer in the South Chicago police district for just over one year before quitting to join the Fire Department.

Weis chose silence, which may have saved him from saying something that the rank-and-file cops would mock mercilessly on many future occasions.

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Supreme Court issues ruling against Chicago in legal case (no, not THAT one)

The Supreme Court of the United States ruled against Chicago city government in a case that will have national impact with the way local governments conduct themselves.

No, the high court did not rule on the case challenging the ban on firearms ownership within the city limits. Monday’s unanimous ruling relates to the fire department, which was sued by several African-American firefighters who took the written examination to qualify for promotions – only to have the city suddenly try to impose a higher score on the exam to actually qualify.

THAT RESULTED IN most of the firefighters who got promotions during the 1990s being white people.

Those black firefighters had filed their lawsuit in U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois, and along the way it was tossed out by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago on the grounds that the firefighters waited too long before beginning their legal fight. The law says such a lawsuit must be filed within 300 days of the act alleged to be improper.

Attorneys for the city argue that the first legal action was filed 430 days after the test results were announced. In short, the merits of the case were ignored because of a technicality – which is common in court fights.

But in issuing a unanimous ruling on Monday, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the high court that the lawsuit could be heard on its merits. They said that each promotion that relied on the test results extended the time period.

WHICH BASICALLY MEANS that Scalia found a technicality that allows the lawsuit to be resurrected from its death due to legal technicalities.

The end result is not that anybody is going to get promoted now. It merely means that the lawsuit can be brought up again in the courts at the Dirksen Building. Which means it will be years before anyone actually gets anything resembling financial compensation because they were denied a promotion.

It also means many more years of legal bills being incurred as the city has to resume its defense of the fire department’s decade-old conduct.

Now a part of me is discouraged that my home city is going to get hit with legal bills estimated to run into many millions of dollars. I’m sure that some politically-partisan people will find it hilarious that a Democratic-leaning city such as Chicago gets whacked with such high legal bills.

BUT I DO derive some pleasure out of the fact that this court ruling by the Supreme Court helps to ensure that a ruling eventually is made on the merits of the issue – which is just how relevant those written examinations ought to be when it comes to these public safety agency promotions.

Monday’s court ruling wasn’t a surprise, since reports from a few months ago when arguments were heard by the high court indicated that the justices publicly expressed their concerns about the city’s conduct.

What is involved in this case is the examination given to prospective fire department officers. Typically, anyone who scored 64 or better was considered to have “passed” the examination. But after the exam was given, city officials then imposed a higher standard of 89 – saying they were not likely to promote anyone who scored less than that, even though they techically passed the exam with a lower score.

The result of that change was that only 11 percent of firefighters who got promoted as a result of that examination were African-American (in a city where black people account for just over one-third of the total population).

TO MY SENSIBILITIES, this appears to be changing the rules in the middle of the process. So Scalia’s ruling that the lawsuit needs to be resurrected and heard in court would seem to be an obvious one.

But this case will tick off those people who were celebrating last year when the same Supreme Court ruled against New Haven, Conn., for the way in which they used test results to determine firefighter promotions.

In that city’s case, the fire department tried to ignore test results that would have resulted in a disproportionate share of white firefighters qualifying for promotion. The Supreme Court said that act was improper, and the kind of people who want to ignore racial and ethnic factors in hiring wanted to believe that they had achieved a major victory.

No more of this messing around with test results, which should be absolute – they say. If the end result is fewer black public safety officials, perhaps it is just evidence they weren’t qualified for the job.

THAT KIND OF narrow-minded logic is warped in that it ignores the harm that can be caused when a public safety agency doesn’t bear some resemblance to the people whom it is protecting.

Now, we have a case where black firefighters in Chicago are likely to have to receive some financial compensation (even though I’m sure the legal fees being wracked up will wind up consuming most of whatever financial judgment or settlement is ultimately approved to resolve this case).

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How will these tests be spun politically?

I’m sure there are some people who viewed the Supreme Court of the United States’ ruling last year concerning tests administered to firefighters trying to gain promotion as some sort of blow to the concept of “affirmative action.”

They want to believe that these tests are some sort of absolute that can be used. And if it turns out that these tests wind up producing higher ranks of firefighters and police officers that are more Anglo than the patrol ranks or of the population, that’s just the way it is.

AFTER ALL, THE best qualified are the ones who are passing these tests.

So I’m curious to see how these same people (the ones who deep down don’t want to have to acknowledge that the old way of picking public safety officials may very well be so flawed as to best be scrapped altogether) react to a court case now pending before the Supreme Court – one out of Chicago that could wind up costing our beloved home city millions of dollars.

All because the tests caused too many white people to get promoted, at the expense of “qualified” black firefighters.

The Chicago Tribune newspaper used its website Monday to report that hearings on the case appeared to indicate that the same Supreme Court that ruled 5-4 (with Justice Sonia Sotomayor on the losing end) in the case involving New Haven, Conn., firefighters had problems with the arguments being made by attorneys for Chicago who were trying to defend the use of the tests.

WHILE THIS IS just a reportorial observation and nothing will be definite until the high court actually issues a ruling, it would seem there are cases where the courts are willing to admit there are problems with the tests.

What is at stake in this new case is a test for Fire Department promotions given during the late 1990s. After some 26,000 people took that test, department officials said they would only consider hiring people who scored “89” or better – a much higher standard than had ever been applied before.

As it turned out, that produced a group of people who got promotions who were primarily white. Many of the black firefighters (about 6,000) who got scores that usually would have resulted in consideration for promotions wound up getting passed over.

The U.S. Solicitor General office had attorneys arguing on behalf of those who were challenging the test results, saying that Chicago city officials knew their handling of the test was discriminatory. NAACP attorneys were in agreement with that argument.

THE CITY’S CORPORATION Counsel got its day in court, with attorneys arguing on behalf of Chicago government that the use of such tests is necessary and that there is a time limit for people who wish to file legal challenges to such tests – a limit they claim most of those complaining failed to observe.

Personally, I know that latter point is one that many judges take seriously. I have seen many legal battles in my two-plus decades as a reporter-type person that ended unsuccessfully for the challenger because their legal paperwork did not comply with the letter of the law.

There are cases where the courts are more than willing to ignore an otherwise legitimate challenge because of a missed deadline or improperly-filed document.

But the Tribune report noted that justices, particularly Ruth Bader Ginsburg, were more concerned about trying to get to the substance of the argument.

IT WILL BE interesting to see what happens if the Supreme Court ultimately rules in a way that implies the tests were flawed. For that would force the issue back to the U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois, where one of our city’s federal judges ultimately would have to decide just how much in compensation all those black firefighters who might otherwise have qualified for promotions are entitled to.

Like I wrote earlier, I find this case intriguing just because I’m sure so many people were convinced that the Supreme Court’s ruling last year was somehow a victory for those people who don’t want to have to take racial composition or concerns into account in public safety, or any area of public policy, I would think.

In that case, city officials in New Haven tried in 2003 to overturn test results when they came back “too white” (although some like to claim it is a “big deal” that one of those firefighters denied was Latino).

I would interpret this activity thus far as saying that it is simple-minded to think that race is no longer a factor in the way in which our society’s institutions operate. For those who want to think.

THOSE PEOPLE (MANY of whom probably thought Sarah Palin was downright hilarious earlier this month when she mocked Barack Obama’s “hope-y, change-y stuff” campaign theme of 2008) thought they had a “victory” that could allow their limited view of our society and racial balance to prevail.

I personally would find it hilarious if Chicago, in its legal defeat, wound up socking an uppercut to their view of how our society should operate.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Could Chicago’s legal defeat turn into a “victory” for people whose sensible view (http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2010/02/supreme-court-chicago-black-firefighters-hiring-test-civil-rights.html) of our society should prevail?

People are still quibbling over (http://www.helium.com/debates/251643-did-the-supreme-court-rule-correctly-in-the-new-haven-firefighters-case/side_by_side) what significance should dominate in the New Haven, Conn., firefighters ruling by the Supreme Court.

Even public officials face violence

I remember back a couple of decades ago to an afternoon I spent as a reporter-type person with the now-defunct City News Bureau of Chicago, which on that particular day had me working at the Belmont Area detective bureau (the one on the site that Chicago old-timers think of as the site of Riverview Amusement Park).

I was checking on what turned out to be a pair of miniscule (from a news judgment standpoint, I’m sure the victim vividly remembers the incidents to this day) shootings that took place on the North Side.

SOMEHOW, THE CONVERSATION turned to the requirement that police officers be armed at all times (even when they were off the job). I recall one of the homicide detectives telling me, “I don’t take the trash out without wearing” his pistol.

Now I’m sure some people are going to read that anecdote and wonder why it is fair that a police officer can wear a pistol, but a so-called law-abiding citizen cannot. That is a topic for a different day (and no, I don’t support the concept of “concealed carry,” since I think too many people are likely to get excited and careless and overreact and shoot themselves).

But I couldn’t help but remember that cop who by now is retired and may well be living elsewhere other than Chicago (my uncle Mike who was a Chicago cop for a few decades retired to Arkansas) when I read accounts of a firefighter who was attacked in the Lincoln Park neighborhood.

As reported by the Chicago Tribune, the firefighter was found at about 4 a.m. on the sidewalk near Halsted and Dickens streets. He underwent surgery Wednesday morning at Illinois Masonic Medical Center, and officials said he was “in bad shape.”

I’M SURE AT his age (24), he probably was the foolishly fearless type who thought he could wander into any neighborhood and be safe. After all, he was a firefighter. If burning buildings weren’t about to take him down, why should he feel threatened walking through a neighborhood whose residents would like to think they are the elite of Chicago.

But the simple fact is that crime can happen to anyone, at anytime, and just about anywhere.

Perhaps the copper from the depths of my memory was merely ahead of his time in wearing his holstered pistol while walking out to the alley behind his home to take out the trash.

Now I know that some people are going to complain that too much attention is being given to this incident, or to a string of other crimes that have occurred in recent weeks in the Lincoln Park neighborhood.

POLICE HAVE BEEN claiming that the individual incidents do not appear to be necessarily connected to each other. So it isn’t likely to be one person committing a batch of serial acts. It’s just likely the potential for violence that can break out anywhere – even in places where local residents thought they were immune.

By comparison, the numbers or types of incidents fall short of what some people are too willing to accept as just the routine way of life in certain inner-city neighborhoods, particularly if they were on the West or South sides of the city.

Think about it. How many of you who now are sympathetic toward that firefighter would be thinking to yourself “he was an idiot to be walking around out there” if the incident had happened at 63rd Street and Stewart Avenue – the heart of the Englewood neighborhood?

Things like this can happen anywhere. I couldn’t help but notice the Tribune newspaper website’s other “big” story for Wednesday – it seemed like too perfect a pairing to go along with the attacked firefighter.

I’M TALKING ABOUT the attacked mayor.

No, not Richard M. Daley. He, after all, has his security detail that recently went so far as to help capture one of three men who escaped from an Indiana state prison when that man happened to wander into the town where the Daley family has their summer cottage.

It was Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett who got beaten up when he threatened to call police to break up an incident involving a man who was beating up an older woman at the Wisconsin State Fair.

Trying to do “the right thing” got him a few punches and scrapes on his upper lip and cheek, along with the national attention of being a public official whose layers of security were not enough to keep him immune from the potential for violence that we all confront in life – even if some of us are in denial and want to think we can hide from it.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: A firefighter is trying to recover from a beating he took in what is supposed (http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2009/08/police-investigate-lincoln-park-beating.html) to be one of Chicago’s elite neighborhoods.

Even a mayor can become (http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2009/08/milwaukee-mayor-to-talk-about-beating.html) a crime victim, particularly when he leaves his security detail at home.