Overnight in Chicago is its own world

I never saw anyone watching “Bruce Lee” films while on the job. But then again, it certainly wouldn’t be out-of-character for the kind of people who keep this city alive while most of us are trying to get some sleep.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported Tuesday on their website about how an inspector general earlier this year decided to conduct “midnight raids” – which consist of just showing up at government offices that are open around the clock.

THEY WANTED TO see just what kind of work – if any – those people were actually doing in exchange for their government-funded salaries.

According to the newspaper, they found one staffer of the medical examiner’s office engaged in the cliché act of any overnight-shift worker – she was asleep at her desk.

Two others were watching Bruce Lee use his martial arts skills to wallop away at a cast of bad guys while speaking very poorly dubbed English.

And yes, they were watching it on a computer monitor that was a part of the Cook County inventory of property.

IN FACT, THE county inspector general’s report indicated that when an investigator showed up at 2:35 a.m. one early morning, they found no one working. Although it would seem that the particular moment was one of those lulls in activity when there wasn’t anything that specifically needed tending to.

Which is what seems to have caused these workers to think they could get away with taking a nap, or watching a film!

Now my own first-hand experience with this kind of life is nearly a quarter-of-a-century old. I was once a reporter-type person with the now-defunct City News Bureau of Chicago who worked the overnight shift.

For me, 1988 was the year that I rarely saw daylight. And for a few of those months, I was the City News “kid” who showed up at the very same medical examiner’s office five days a week – just to check up on things and see if anything occurred overnight.

ALSO, IT WAS a way to check up on final details of ongoing crime and violence stories.

But the lasting memory in my mind of visiting the county morgue five days a week at 5 a.m. each day was the sight of a pair of guys at the front desk who would while away the slower hours (I almost wrote “dead time”) by watching a portable black-and-white television.

I wonder how many collective hours of bad overnight television those guys watched while staying awake to process the bodies that would come in to the morgue from the urban violence that cares less about the clock.

I know some people are going to argue that the guys who got caught watching a martial-arts film were engaged in some sort of egregious act that wasted county tax dollars.

YET I’M NOT sure if I buy that whole-heartedly (and not just because, according to the Sun-Times, the two employees immediately turned off their computer and quit watching the film when they realized the inspector general’s people were present).

To be honest, I can remember moments working an overnight shift when I napped for a few seconds. One really does develop a sense that jolts them back into consciousness when something happens that warrants their attention.

I didn’t sleep through any news stories while covering crime from midnight to 9 a.m. A part of me wants to give the benefit of the doubt to the morgue workers – that they would have suddenly become alert if a fresh corpse had arrived on the premises and needed to be dealt with soon.

Besides, if a Bruce Lee flick is the worst thing the inspector general’s office can find, then perhaps our county government is fine. Somehow, I doubt that is true!

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Will anyone look at suburb corruption?

A part of me wonders if municipal officials in the Chicago suburbs will do their best Dick Daley impersonation when it comes to Dick Simpson.

SIMPSON: Still on the outside



Simpson is the former alderman (from the 44^th Ward that back in the 1970s was up around the Lincoln Park neighborhood) with a liberal sensibility who used to get his microphone turned off during City Council debate whenever Richard J. Daley got tired of hearing him speak.

NOW, SIMPSON IS in charge of the political science department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and his department came out with a study that documents acts of corruption in the 263 municipalities that comprise the Chicago suburbs.

Potential conflicts of interest in more than 60 municipalities and more than 100 people who either are village officials or police officers.

Will those village presidents and police chiefs who rule like potentates within their municipal boundaries decide they don’t want to hear about it, and find a symbolic way of “turning off” Simpson’s “microphone?”

It wouldn’t surprise me if we get a few reactions the equivalent of “Mind your own business!,” before the issue fades away.

BECAUSE THOSE OFFICIALS take advantage of the fact that nobody outside of their respective towns cares about what happens there. So they do what they want.

They also take advantage of the fact that even many of the people who live within their respective villages don’t pay much attention to what their local government does. In fact, I have known suburban residents who reside in those towns because they don’t want to have to care about a local government. They want to pretend it doesn't really exist, except for when they have to buy a village sticker (or stickers) to put on their cars every year.

Such conditions make it possible for local government officials to think they can do what they want. Particularly if, like in many suburbs, there usually are few people interested in holding those elective offices.

Too many suburban government officials get to run unopposed. In some cases, village presidents get to hand-pick their trustees by appointment because not enough people could be found to actually run for election to fill the posts.

SO A PART of me is rooting for Simpson, whose study calls for an inspector general to be created specifically to investigate suburban government entities.

Although I’m sure what will make it possible to ignore this request is the fact that he doesn’t specify who would create this position – or who would pay for it. I’m pretty sure everyone is going to claim they can’t afford to do it, and that it should fall under someone else’s jurisdiction.

While $1 million might not be much to some larger-scale governmental units, that would be a big expense for some suburban governments. And I doubt that state government (which might be the most sensible entity to have such a position) will want to take on any extra expense.

I can already envision the suburban-based legislators lining up to find more practical ways to spend $1 million. Practical being anything that doesn’t focus too much attention on their hometowns, which they’d like to think are bastions of purity compared to that albatross of Chicago.

YET IT DOESN’T surprise me that Chicago gets all the attention when it comes to corruption stories, which usually get covered for their titillating factors rather than the elements that deprive the citizenry of good government.

Too many people were intrigued by former Gov. Rod Blagojevich because of his funky hair and foul mouth on tape than they were the elements of what he actually did while in office.

City officials can get a national reputation. Whereas not even the most well-known of suburban officials have anyone who has ever heard of them outside of maybe a 10-mile radius of their home towns!

So picking out an indictment against a city official can get a prosecutor some news attention. While going after a suburban official? It’s like, What’s the point?!?

IF ONLY WE could see their actions for what they are. I think we’d soon realize that some of the most honest and sincere political people in our area are on the City Council. Along with some of the most incompetent. Most boring.

And a few who are truly corrupt.

Just like any government body, regardless of location.

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Go watch Obama in action while political payback takes place at City Hall

Barack Obama is truly like Adlai Stevenson in one respect. The regular Democratic organization that dominates Chicago’s politics wants us to pay attention to their do-gooder with national interests, rather than to the activity that takes place at City Hall.

Hence, reporter-types are getting lots of leaks informing them of the many politicos coming and going from the federal building complex in the South Loop from which Obama is running his transition team.

FAKE INDIGNATION THAT the people found out about Obama’s meeting with Democratic primary opponent Hillary Clinton is tossed about, and we’re also allowed to learn of just about every other bigwig who is traipsing through the Second City – in hopes of gaining a prominent job within the Obama administration.

In a sense, Chicago is now the axis upon which the world of U.S. government rotates. But that shouldn’t be mistaken for Chicago politics itself.

If anything, Obama and his goo-goo nature (with just enough pragmatism to know when to get real and compromise) is supported by the Chicago Democrats because he distracts attention from the funky business at City Hall, similar to how Adlai Stevenson’s gubernatorial and presidential aspirations reflected well upon the Chicago political people of 60 years ago (thereby allowing them to go about their local business unwatched).

That lesson got reinforced in my mind when I read about the City Council’s activity this week. Or actually, I should say their lack of activity. For in the end, the measure that caught my eye was something they didn’t do.

LONG-TIME ALDERMAN Bernard Stone (who represents the far northern tip of Chicago up by Evanston) wants to know where the city’s inspector general gets the nerve to go investigating anything connected to his office.

Stone tried to amend the city budget proposal by deleting all money set aside for maintenance of the inspector general’s office – which is the entity that investigates claims of government corruption.

It is meant to be an internal investigator that puts up the image of Chicago government not tolerating illegal activity.

Yet to Stone, the inspector general’s office exists purely to investigate the executive branch of Chicago government (ie., Mayor Richard M. Daley and the city government agencies to which he appoints directors).

STONE SEEMS TO think the City Council (the legislative branch of Chicago government) is off-limits to any such investigator.

It seems that Stone, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, is still upset that the inspector general’s office did an investigation of absentee ballot fraud that wound up focusing on a superintendent of the alderman’s ward.

That superintendent has since been indicted on criminal charges related to claims by prosecutors that residents of Indian and Pakistani descent were being pushed to fill out absentee ballots in ways meant to benefit the alderman back when he last sought re-election in 2007.

Prosecutors say the superintendent used his credentials from his job with the Streets and Sanitation Department to intimidate some of those people into going along with the absentee ballot actions.

STONE BARELY WON that election, which is embarrassing for him considering he’s been in the City Council since 1973 and is the second-longest serving incumbent alderman.

So now, it was political payback for having to campaign harder than he would have liked for re-election. It’s not like Stone feels any shame about this approach, telling the Sun-Times, “he’s come after me, so I’m going after him. That’s the way the game is played.”

That payback, in Stone’s mind, would have been to shut down the inspector general’s office by depriving it of $5.8 million set aside for its operations in the city’s upcoming fiscal year.

Fortunately for the public good, the members of the council’s budget committee were not inclined to go along with their colleague. They didn’t exactly vote against him. They just refused to support the concept of letting his resolution come up for a vote at all, tabling it for future consideration.

SO IN THEORY, it still exists. But it is highly unlikely that Stone will ever get anyone to publicly support shutting down a government investigative agency because it tried to do its job.

I’d like to think that the council’s budget committee is showing a new way of thinking about city government. Perhaps the aura of Obama is spreading, and our city officials will start thinking about public service in a high-minded manner that will soon start to reflect the public good. Then I realize that such a thought makes it sound like I’ve been sniffing too much glue lately.

“High-minded” is far from the intent of many of our city officials. “Practical politics” is what they consider important – measures that impact a person’s life (even if just for a short-term gain while suffering a long-term loss). For I know that the Stone mentality is imbedded in the City Hall character. Mind one’s own business. Investigate somebody else (you’ll probably find something just as funky over there).

That story probably says more about Chicago’s political character than any trivial tidbits that were picked up by reporter-types who hung out at the federal building that same day while Obama met with former general election opponent John McCain.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Chicago’s inspector general once offered to take a pay cut in order to help ease (http://www.suntimes.com/news/politics/1284132,stone-cut-inspector-general-budget-111808.article) the city’s finances. The City Council rejected the offer.

Public servant Bernard L. Stone is hard at work (http://www.goodforthe50th.com/) for the people who live on Chicago’s far northern edge.