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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A DAY IN THE LIFE (of Chicago): Should employer stand by worker?

I’m finding it encouraging that Millikin University, a Decatur-based institution of higher learning, is willing to stand by the employment of the head of its psychology department.

Because the very notion that the professor, James St. James, caused the death of his parents and sister nearly a half-century ago would scare many companies into thinking that they have to do whatever is necessary to break their ties.

IN THIS PARTICULAR case, St. James was born under the name James Wolcott. When he was 15 back in 1967, his parents and sister, Elizabeth, were found shot to death in their house in Texas.

James was put on trial for the slayings, but he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, he was ordered held in an institution – and six years later, he was he was released.

That means the criminal case was resolved. Wolcott (now St. James) did his time for this incident. It is resolved. It’s not like St. James is a long-hidden fugitive who has been on the lam.

So the people who are eager to have the professor’s head on a pike are being irrational. They’re letting their personal hang-ups overcome any sense of sense.

WHICH IS WHY I’m glad to learn that Millikin says they expect him to continue to teach there when classes resume come autumn.

I’m not that worked up over it, and I wonder about the Texas newspaper that stirred up this particular story (which is now being picked up by the Chicago “press”). It was meant to focus on the aftermath of the slayings of nearly an entire family. They searched for what became of the son, and found St. James under his new name living in Decatur.

Because we ought to consider that St. James is a case of someone who screwed up in life, yet managed to fix up his situation and get the higher education needed to help make a productive life out of his. Isn’t that what we want to happen more often?

Closer to Chicago, what else is pending in the minds of Second City residents?

GETTING AN EXTENSION?: Former Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr., has 11 more days to go until he faces sentencing for his guilty plea on criminal charges related to his using campaign contribution money to buy all kinds of tacky memorabilia for his office.

For which he’s expected to make financial restitution. But a federal judge in the District of Columbia on Friday gave Jackson more time to come up with the cash – some $750,000.

The judge postponed until Oct. 25 a hearing that would allow the federal government to seize his homes in the South Shore neighborhood and in Washington, along with an individual retirement account. So he may manage to come up with some cash in order to keep a roof over his kids’ heads.

Although many of those items (including some that once belonged to people like Michael Jackson and Muhammad Ali) will be auctioned off at some point. Will they gain additional cachet from once having been in Jackson’s possession?

A SEE-THRU SIGN?: The squabble between the Chicago Cubs and the owners of those buildings across the street who make money by letting people on their roofs to see into Wrigley Field to catch a glimpse of ballgames is getting more twisted.

The owners reached a deal that still has a decade to go that allows them to sell their views of Cubs games – with the Cubs getting a share of the proceeds. Yet the Cubs’ desires to revamp Wrigley Field include erecting advertising signs that would block the views.

But the Chicago Sun-Times reported Friday about the see-through advertising signs the team is considering, if the owners don’t lighten up in their threats to sue the Cubs.

It makes me wonder who would want to advertise on a see-through billboard – Victoria’s Secret?!?

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Now she’s got papers to prove it!

Remember Jimmy Piersall?

He’s the one-time ballplayer turned White Sox broadcaster and Cubs coach who used to spout out all kinds of wacky statements (remember what he said about baseball wives?).

AND BECAUSE BACK when he was a ballplayer with the Boston Red Sox he had a bout with mental illness, he turned the whole thing into a joke, often saying, “I’m crazy, and I’ve got the papers to prove it.”

All of which means that mental illness certainly doesn’t have to have a stigma behind it. Except if you purposely want it to have one.

Maybe it’s evidence of my own mental deterioration as I get older, but when I learned Monday of the fate of Judge Cynthia Brim, I couldn’t help but think of Piersall – whose own career played off the notion of his instability to the point that I think he achieved more in life because of it.

He certainly never would have had James Stewart portray him in a movie if he’d have been perfectly sane, would he?

BRIM, OF COURSE, is the judge who was facing criminal charges of battery for an incident in which she shoved a sheriff’s deputy in a courtroom at the Daley Center.

Assaulting a uniformed officer of the law. That’s serious. It’s the kind of felony that may only take a couple of seconds to do, but can devastate one’s record for life.

Except that Brim “beat the rap,” so to speak. She was found on Monday to be not guilty, by reason of insanity.

BRIM: She's had better days

Which sounds bad. We in Cook County now literally have a judge who has the papers to prove that she’s not quite all there.

PERSONALLY, THERE HAVE been many judges who – throughout the years – I have questioned their mental processes because of the off-the-wall rulings they have made on so many issues.

None of them had an attorney argue their mental stability, as did criminal defense attorney James Montgomery when he represented her during her trial. He convinced a judge that she was “legally insane” at the time she pushed that deputy.

Meaning her mental state was so off that she shouldn’t be held accountable.

According to the Chicago Tribune, it seems that Brim – who got re-elected to her current judicial post in last year’s elections – has a history of illness. Five hospitalizations during the past 19 years, and a medication regimen that she apparently had stopped taking.

MEANING SHE’S PROBABLY fine, so long as she’s on those meds. Of course, prosecutors argued unsuccessfully that she made a conscious choice to quit taking her medication – which means she ought to be held criminally responsible for her actions.

I’m sure there are those people who are going to argue that an insane justice – even if just insane temporarily – is something that we just can’t have. I’m wondering how long it will be until we get the serious talk of trying to remove her from the post to which she has nearly six years to serve.

Although I’m more concerned with the idea that she keep on that medication.

There’s no legitimate reason to dump her so long as she’s capable of being productive professionally. Which means Judge Liam Brennan (imported from Will County just for this case) may well have made the right call.

IN FACT, I wonder if we’re all worse off if we try to turn the name “Cynthia Brim” into some sort of poster child for punishing mentally ill people.

At the very least, I don’t think she’ll ever do or say anything as absurd as the many outrageous comments that have come from Piersall throughout the years.

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