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-

It won’t be easy to lock up Jason Van Dyke and ‘throw away’ key, it seems

It seems like not all that long ago that a Cook County jury returned the verdict that turned one-time Chicago cop Jason Van Dyke into a convicted killer, albeit one of the second degree.

VAN DYKE: A legal break? Or justice!?

Remember the elation that some people made a point of showing that day, marching through the streets of downtown Chicago to literally make it clear they were ecstatic at the thought that a white cop was off to prison.

IN THEIR WILDEST fantasies for something close to a life prison term. Something that would show what an outrage it was that he thought he could claim self-defense and “just doing his job” to justify the multiple gunshots he fired at a teenage boy – one who happened to be black.

Some went so far as to claim it was evidence that “justice” had been served against a “killer cop.”

While others, I’m sure, sat and stewed at the very thought that a police officer was being punished for doing his job – which on occasion requires use of physical force.

That was then. This is now!

FOR THE SUPREME Court of Illinois came down with a ruling Tuesday that I’m sure will infuriate the masses who were marching in the streets last year.

Basically, they backed up the way that Judge Vincent Gaughan handled the sentencing. Which basically was to give him a light prison term on the second-degree murder conviction, while ignoring all the aggravated battery charges that the jury piled on to their decision.

Those charges, all 16 – one for each pistol shot Van Dyke fired at his youthful assailant, were the ones that were supposed to add up to so much prison time that we’d literally have Van Dyke agonizing at the thought of decade upon decade in prison before finally dying.

Except, perhaps, for those ghoulish types whose idea of humor would be to have Van Dyke use a bed sheet to hang himself in his cell.

THAT DOESN’T SEEM in the cards.

For the Supreme Court rejected a request by the Illinois Attorney General’s office to reject the just-over-six-year prison term that Gaughan handed down.

They wanted the almighty Supreme Court to force Gaughan to resentence him in a way that would be more in keeping for those who want to see Van Dyke killed like a killer cop. Which now just ain’t a gonna happen!

The reality is that while I’m sure there are still legal motions that could be attempted on the off-hopes that a law clerk might be swayed enough to tell his judge to consider the merits of such an appeal, the point is they’re going to be long-shots.

WE MAY HAVE to accept the fact that the legal merits of the Van Dyke case are resolved. Now it’s just a matter of Van Dyke “doing” his time – which with time off for good behavior will come to about three years. He’s going to have something resembling a life left after he is released.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that the separation will turn out to be too much for the Van Dyke family – which may well be permanently fractured. That is something we will have to wait and see for ourselves.

I’m also sure that Van Dyke, now being held in a prison facility in upstate New York himself will think he’s suffering amply – his case is so notorious there isn’t a prison facility in Illinois capable of holding him without constant repeats of that beating incident while in a cell in Danbury, Ct., got national notoriety.

While others, I’m sure, will forevermore claim his fate is still better than the one Laquan McDonald suffered – an eternal rest in death at a Forest Park cemetery. A suburb whose residents likely would have freaked out and called for the cops if the teenager had ever set foot there while alive.

  -30-

I’m sure Van Dyke feels picked upon by reporter-type he wanted to silence

I felt a touch of relief when I learned Wednesday that a Cook County judge tossed out a subpoena that would have forced a freelance writer to get into the inner workings of how he learned the details that make us think Chicago cop Jason Van Dyke used excessive force in the 2014 shooting death of a 17-year-old.

VAN DYKE: Wants people to quit talking

For it was clear that the only reason for dragging reporter-type Jamie Kalvan into the criminal proceedings involving Van Dyke and the death of Laquan McDonald was to harass.

TO PICK AT a reporter-type for butting into something the police mentality would think was none of his business to look into. And to perhaps get the reporting process tangled up in so much legalese that when a jury someday does have to sift through the evidence presented in a trial, it will be so confused that it can’t decide anything beyond a reasonable doubt and will have to go with “not guilty.”

Meaning that getting sidetracked off on only marginally-related issues has little to nothing to do with getting at “the truth.”

It was good to learn that Judge Vincent Gaughan (who once presided over the trial of R. Kelly) saw things similarly; issuing a written explanation of his ruling to toss the subpoena for Kalvan’s testimony on the grounds it would be a “fishing expedition” to try to produce “information that the timeline of events, discovery documents and testimony suggest simply does not exist.”

Now in my own time as a reporter-type, I’ll admit to never having been called upon to appear in court.

ALTHOUGH I ONCE did have to give a deposition in a lawsuit filed by a woman who had lost her municipal government job. She was suing for damages, claiming city officials went out of their way to single her out for abuse.

I recall that deposition as being one in which I was asked to recall every petty action and insult that might have ever been directed her way in my presence.

Which was difficult because most of the stuff was so petty and minor I had long forgotten about the details. It was the kind of petty trivia I made a point of forgetting so as to avoid clogging my brain with stupid stuff. I have enough significant detail to remember without the trivia overflowing my mental capacity.

Besides, like many other reporter-types, my view is that anything relevant to a story I report actually goes into the copy I write.

JUST AS I’M presuming Kalvan has done the same with his own stories. My own self-interest would say that my stories could be offered up as evidence.

Of course, defense attorney-types want someone they can have answer back to them, and get caught up in double-talk. Then again, prosecutors will do the same; if it benefits their case.

The legal process is most concerned with coming up with a “guilty” verdict – with “not guilty” being the end result if guilt cannot be proven beyond that shadow of reasonable doubt.

This is an ongoing criminal case involving Van Dyke, who’s going to have to show that the 16 shots he fired at McDonald were not excessive and that the teen male truly was a serious threat who had to be “put down,” so to speak.

I DON’T DOUBT Van Dyke will do whatever he feels necessary to prevent his reputation from permanent damage – although it’s most likely that even an acquittal would not clear him in the minds of a certain segment of society.

The ones for whom only a conviction will assuage their anger.

In short, this is a very serious issue with significant life consequences to many people.

Seeing that the case will get bogged down in just a bit less trivia by refusing to turn the case into a legal proceeding about reportorial process may be the first step to thinking the courts may someday get at “the truth” about why Van Dyke acted the way he did toward McDonald.

  -30-

What should we think of homicide tally – on the rise, decline or nonsense?

The partisanship of politics is going to be played with the violence tallies for Chicago – regardless of how many people are killed and whether that’s less or more than in the past.

Homicide tallies on decline in Englewood neighborhood this year -- will it last?

We’re going to hear tons of rants from all sides over the fact that some 600 people have been killed in Chicago this year. That total was reached last week, and some are more than eager to say that means Chicago remains as violent a place as ever.

ALTHOUGH I COULDN’T help but notice the official Chicago Police Department spin that was placed on the tally. They pointed out the fact that in the Englewood neighborhood, the number of murders during 2017 was only 45.

Which is far less than the 79 murders that took place in that neighborhood’s police district during the same time period last year – a year in which Chicago had 780 slayings, more than in any year during the 21^st Century.

The point being that the neighborhood often thought of as the most violent in Chicago (unless you want to hang on to old memories of the West Side’s North Lawndale neighborhood being the “American Millstone”) is experiencing a decline in urban violence.

A fact, I’m sure, that the conservative ideologues amongst us who want to believe that Chicago is all that is wrong with our society will not want to believe. They’ll want to emphasize that 600-plus tally. Then again, they’ll only want to believe the worst.

JUST AS I’M sure they’ll want to continue thinking of the city to the east, Gary, Ind., as the “murder capital” of the country – even though a raw reading of the numbers don’t back that up (there are more violent places than the one-time “City of the Century”).

Then again, in this era where the “fake news” label is thrown about, they’ll believe what they want.

The reason I bring up Gary is the fact that their homicide tally thus far in 2017 is also 45. As in Gary being as violent in a technical sense as the Englewood neighborhood.

New downtown Gary mural doesn't erase "murder capital" image. Photo by Gregory Tejeda

Should this mean we should disregard claims that Englewood is getting better because it has the same tally as Gary, Ind.? Could bringing that Whole Foods supermarket into the neighborhood be having a slight impact on making the South Side neighborhood a more livable place for its residents?

OR COULD IT mean that numbers can be used to make just about any claim one wants to do? That without context, no homicide tally really means much of anything!

Keep in mind that I’m not trying to downplay the level of violence we’re experiencing in Chicago. Any one death is a tragedy; it certainly isn’t something to be celebrated.

Yet I can’t help but think that many of the people who get obsessed about keeping track of the death tallies for Chicago are more interested in perpetuating the image of Chicago as an excessively violent place that no self-respecting person would want to live in.

Which in my mind is an attitude that discredits itself, and not just because I often view Chicago as being the Greatest City on Planet Earth. I sense that the people most eager to spew such talk are the ones who have no interest in actually resolving the problem of our violence level.

THEY CERTAINLY WOULD be disappointed if our incidents of violence actually declined. They want to keep the image of a “hellhole” alive, and it won’t really matter what the actual numbers are for the homicide rate.

TRUMP: Should we care what his fans think?

My point being that I’m not going to get obsessed with that “600” total that we surpassed last week – other than to admit it is sad to have so many incidents that resulted in families out there losing loved ones.

Nor am I going to over-exaggerate the significance of that 57 percent drop in slayings within the Englewood neighborhood; unless we can see it turn into a trend that lasts for several years.

The real story will be what occurs in 2018 and 2019 and the coming years in Chicago – a long-range view that I’m sure the ideologues amongst us will find to be “boring!” but is more relevant than any of the nonsense they prefer to spew.

  -30-

Independence Day casualties – 15 dead, 101 shot, one killed by own fireworks

I’m sure there are some people who are looking to the figures offered up for the now-complete Independence Day holiday weekend and saying to themselves, “Donald Trump has a point.”
 

ATF help not in time for Independence Day casualties

This holiday weekend was particularly long (stretching from Friday afternoon to early Wednesday). So perhaps it shouldn’t surprise that some 101 people were shot – and 15 died.

AND AS THE Chicago Tribune pointed out Wednesday in its report, about half of those shootings occurred in the last 12 hours of the extended holiday weekend.

Something about summer heat and fireworks and the fact that many of the people who feel inclined to have them aren’t among the most stable of individuals in our society.

So explosive devices can cause heated tempers that can result in other types of deadly devices being used.

This revelation shouldn’t be shocking. Even though the idea of even one death ought to be appalling.

BUT IT IS just the type of tidbit that will get the Trump types all worked up. Trump, of course, being the guy who played partisan politics earlier this year by saying he’d “send in the feds” to respond to Chicago violence.

 

Coping w/ the city's levels of violence

It was only last week that he gave any indication just what his vague threat actually meant; federal Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents were reassigned to Chicago to work with a Chicago Police task force meant to reduce the flow of firearms within the city.

That same task force also is getting help from the Cook County sheriff’s police. I don’t doubt that the additional staffing will help in some form. Although we can make a serious argument that Trump’s effort (which amounts to some 20 federal agents contributed to the task force) is long overdue.

Quite frankly, if Trump were serious about addressing the problems of crime and urban violence, such an effort would have been made long ago. And it wouldn’t have been done in the form of threats to the city.

WE REALLY DO get the impression that this is more of a lame effort meant to entitle Trump to continue to make his snide comments about the city. And they won’t even be particularly well-thought-out comments – they’ll be the usual Twitter trash.

Trite snippets of no more than 140 characters that are meant more to appeal to the segment of society that already agrees with him, rather than try to explain his motivations for his actions.

My point is that I don’t think much of the federal effort. I don’t think it will do much of anything to reduce the amount of violence that is occurring in the city. I don’t think Chicago will be any safer a place because of the presidential initiative.

Actually, much of the city already is fairly safe. It is select neighborhoods that have problems, and I’m pretty sure that the voter demographic of those segments of Chicago are such that Trump personally could care less whether they ever get better. After all, they were the parts of Chicago where he only got about 1 or 2 percent of the vote in the November 2016 elections!

Would Trump build in Chgo if truly dangerous?

THE SAD PART, though, is that many other Chicagoans also don’t care much what happens in places like the Englewood neighborhood. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn many Chicagoans don’t know where on the South Side the neighborhood is, and would never dream of setting foot in it.

It is that type of apathy that allows for the current conditions – too many of us figure it’s “not my problem” if it isn’t occurring in our specific neighborhood. And on the occasions when such actions creep into our neighborhood, we look for the excuses that the people who did it were from somewhere else.

As things were, it seems Chicago police made arrests of 58 people during the holiday weekend on assorted weapons and narcotics charges. But as the Chicago Tribune reported, that didn’t stop the outburst of violence during the final hours of the holiday weekend.

All in all, a tragedy. Although somehow, I suspect many people will feel more sympathy for the death in the Gage Park neighborhood of a man killed late Tuesday when he bent over a fireworks tube that hadn’t ignited. It suddenly shot off, and he was hit in the head.

  -30-

Some criminal acts won’t wither away

Crime is all about us, and sometimes we get a quick resolution.
 

Tinley Park P.D. still searching

Either the so-called stick-up man falls asleep in the getaway car, or does something else absurd (think of those people now sitting in Cook County Jail on criminal charges they beat a mentally-retarded man, and videotaped it to post on Facebook) to give themselves away.

BUT MANY TIMES, we don’t get the quick resolution. Sometimes, we never get an official end to a case – even though the masses of us have to figure out a way to get on with our lives; or else we’d be a neurotic mess if a lifetime’s worth of horrors accumulated.

What brought this to mind was a pair of stories that turned up this week about criminal acts from a decade or so ago that technically remain unsolved to this day.

Although in one case, the man many suspect of committing the crime is now “doing the time” (remember “Baretta?”) has been in prison for several years and likely will rot away what remains of his life at the Menard Correctional Center in Southern Illinois.

We’re talking about Drew Peterson, the one-time Bolingbrook cop who a decade ago was all over the news because of the disappearance of wife number four, whom he married not long after wife number three died drowned.

THAT DEATH INITIALLY was thought to be accidental, but was later ruled a homicide, and Peterson is now serving a 38-year prison term for it, along with more prison time he picked up for supposedly trying to hire someone to kill the state’s attorney who prosecuted him.

But the disappearance of wife number four, Stacy, remains an unsolved incident, even though Peterson’s son, Stephen (himself a former police officer in Oak Brook) said recently during the “Monster in My Family” program on the Lifetime cable TV network he now thinks his dad killed his step-mother Stacy.

Not that he knows anything specific that would result in a resolution of the case – the public’s suspicions that “Drew did it” may well linger on for decades to come.

 

Peterson still rotting in prison

Although I’m sure the Lifetime network will be the big beneficiary. They are, after all, the same one that gave us that 2012 film “Untouchable” that purported to be the Peterson story starring actor Rob Lowe in the lead role, Maybe they’ll find new reasons to keep putting the Peterson saga on television?

THERE ALSO REMAINS the incident that in some minds will forevermore cling to the name of the Lane Bryant chain of clothing stores – the slaying of five women at a store in suburban Tinley Park that occurred nine years ago Thursday.

Officials in Will County (the crime occurred just right across the county line from Cook) say they’ve chased down some 7,000 leads, and Tinley Park police have one detective who remains on the investigation.

Not that there has ever been anything close to an arrest. Or the finding of anyone who bears a resemblance to those police sketches of the man who supposedly forced six women into a backroom of the store, then shot them with a pistol.

Five died. One survived.

THIS INCIDENT STICKS in my mind because my mother at the time lived in Tinley Park just a few short minutes drive from the store, and I remember trying to visit her that day only to encounter local police who were searching everyone in the area.

I had to justify to a cop that my mother actually lived nearby. Then again, I later learned the shootings had occurred within the past half hour.

The frustrating part is that I really don’t know any more about this criminal incident now than I did that day. The rumor mills out in the suburbs have spewed their share of stories and theories about what happened that day.

But for those with a direct interest in the case, they don’t even get the Drew Peterson outcome – that sense of someone being locked up for a differing crime!

  -30-

When reality follows fantasy and gets incredibly stupid in the process

Does President Donald J. Trump think he can literally engage in some form of tough talk with the street gangs of Chicago and get the street youths to quit killing each other?
 

Were there political lessons in 'Hill Street?'

It would seem the president with the overbloated ego has some form of that vision bopping about in his orange-tinged head. Although if I could offer a bit of advice to the president, I’d have to suggest he watch some television.

SPECIFICALLY, DIG OUT a cable television channel carrying that old television series of the 1980s – “Hill Street Blues,” which those of us of a certain age will remember for the number of scenes shot in Chicago (and which used the outside of the old Maxwell Street station for its namesake police district).

I used to love watching that program back when I was in high school, and don’t need to dig out my set of DVDs of the program’s seven-season run to remember the stretch of episodes that offered up a ludicrous story line.

The “president of the United States” was going to come to The Hill and was going to have to pass through territory controlled by street gangs. Presidential aides and police met with gang leaders to work out a truce, and the president was going to have to meet with those gang leaders as a way of showing them respect – in order to get their permission to pass through the gang turf.

Of course, circumstances worked out that the president had to cancel his trip. He never met with the gang members, or in some cases their family members. The gang leaders were offended at what they saw as a presidential snub.

WHICH RESULTED IN mini-riots within The Hill district.

 

Did actor Seaverns' hair ...

These three episodes that came during the series’ first season are ludicrous (although the late actor Trinidad Silva as Jesus Martinez, leader of the Los Diablos gang was remarkably humorous and gets chuckles from me to this day).

The presidential press secretary with the overbloated hairdo and ego to match who manages to offend the gang members all too often is just someone who could never manage to get political work in reality.

It’s just television, we’d have to think. But then I can’t help but think he bears a resemblance to the way that Trump would conduct himself in such a situation – saying all kinds of arrogant and foolish things without thinking first, then thinking he’s above the situation and the whole event can be cancelled.

 

... bear resemblance to '80's-era Trump?

THEY EVEN GOT the Trump hairdo correct on actor Charles Seaverns as “presidential aide Parker.”

Now what made me remember these 36-year-old episodes? The fact that Trump on Wednesday made his latest “Chicago pot-shot” by implying once again that he’s THE MAN who will have to come in to eliminate the urban violence that befalls our city.

Specifically, he talked of seeking out the Rev. Darrell Scott of Ohio, who was a prominent clergyperson who backed the Trump presidential campaign and who says he is meeting with members of “top gangs” in Chicago who supposedly are willing to partake in a “sit-down” to “get that body count down” in our city.

Two points to consider. When police in the past have said they were meeting with gang members, the ideologues amongst us got all upset that we were giving those gangs some sort of official recognition. Wouldn’t Trump be doing the same thing?

MORE IMPORTANT, WHAT exactly are the “top gangs” in Chicago? Does he think that urban violence bears any resemblance to “West Side Story?” Or perhaps that 1979 film “The Warriors?”

 

TRAVANTI : Can Furillo talk sense to Trump?

We truly have a president venturing into territory of which he knows nothing (and yes, I know the sarcastic comment is to say there are many issues of which Trump knows nothing). We truly are best off disregarding anything he has to say on this issue.

Because the levels of violence we are facing these days in Chicago is a serious problem. We don’t need them being escalated by someone who thinks our society is nothing more than material for his own reality show.

Particularly since “Hill Street Blues” gave us the same story line decades earlier – and in a far more entertaining manner than anything Trump could achieve.

  -30-

Do we really care what Garry McCarthy thinks about anything these days?

During the nearly three decades I have worked in the news business, I have done my share of interviews with people whose legitimacy to talk on a certain issue was questionable.
 

McCARTHY: He doesn't wear uniform any more

Usually, it was because they were “there,” as in available to talk and their comments could result in copy that filled newspaper space in between the ads – not because there was some great solemn truth that needed to be recorded for posterity.

MY POINT BEING that sometimes the stories we read or hear are merely being done to fill space. We shouldn’t presume the “great value to society” of any of it.

Such as one story I read Tuesday morning about the “evolution” of sorts of Tila Tequila – whom I have to confess to not having a clue who she is or why I’m supposed to care about this evolution – to a Donald Trump political supporter.

Or all the many stories I have read or heard about in recent days by which Garry McCarthy talks about the homicide rate in Chicago – which did a significant jump during 2016 to a two-decade high level (although not a record high as Trump implied earlier this week).

McCarthy has been gone from the post of Chicago police superintendent for more than a full year. He’s not employed here any longer. In fact, the last I had heard of him was talk that he was being considered for some sort of law enforcement post in London – potentially involving Scotland Yard.

YET HE’S BEING treated as some sort of authority on Chicago and our city – even though it could be argued that if the man really had any special knowledge or understanding of Chicago, he’d still be employed here.

For what it’s worth, the general theme of many of these stories (including an interview for CBS’ allegedly-prestige program “60 Minutes”) is that it is the fault of the “Black Lives Matter” movement that the crime rate is on the rise.

The premise being that the activists who have been so eager to draw attention to the perception that police are the REAL criminals who single out black people for their targets have created conditions by which police are not as aggressively policing the neighborhoods.

 

EMANUEL: Still having his own hide

Thereby making it more likely that violence is on the rise. Black people who are concerned about the number of black men being killed are actually to blame, or so McCarthy says.

ALTHOUGH TO TELL you the truth, reading the McCarthy comments makes me think initially that they were coming from the crackpot types who oft wear their hoods or other costumes while spouting white supremacist language.

I’m not calling McCarthy a Klansman or anything like that. I’m just saying that I’m not sure McCarthy is saying anything that really adds to the public understanding about the rising violent crime rate in Chicago.

Particularly when added to the fact that McCarthy is our city’s past – the guy who wound up being sacrificed politically so that Rahm Emanuel could keep his mayoral post in the wake of the public revelation of just how Laquan McDonald actually died. Even though to the activist-types most upset about this issue, nothing short of Rahm’s resignation will appease them!

McCarthy has moved on professionally. It would be nice if he’d move on personally as well. Because these kinds of reports aren’t telling us anything that truly adds to the public comprehension of the issue.

IF ANYTHING, I wonder if it’s because we in the news business are still in holiday season mode. Within a week, we ought to be up to speed and thinking about serious news.

Many reasons for why homicide on the rise

But we’re still feeding off the results of the past few weeks by which many people were on their holiday breaks. It may well be that during this time period, McCarthy made himself available to talk about an issue that truly IS in the news these days.

But that doesn’t really mean McCarthy has much to say. If anything, we ought to regard his comments as nothing more than space filler – about as intellectually worthy as the reports about the most ecologically-efficient way to dispose of your now-dead Christmas tree.

Certainly not by dumping its carcass out on the curb; similar to the way Emanuel dumped on McCarthy just before Christmas of 2015.

  -30-

We really are a dual city, Chicago is

The weekend leading into Halloween 2016 is going to go into the memory banks of a segment of Chicagoans as a glorious moment, and perhaps even a historic occasion.

For it was the World Series being held in Chicago, and by the Cubs, no less!

THREE GAMES PLAYED at Wrigley Field in the Lakeview neighborhood to capacity crowds, plus many more crowded into the local taverns so they could say they were a part of the scene.

There were many thousands more who decided to claim to have been on hand for the event merely by gathering in the vicinity of Clark and Addison streets. Technically, they were loiterers. But because they did manage to behave themselves, nobody was looking to have them arrested.

Yet Chicago really is a city of neighborhoods and regions that often have little to anything to do with each other. This Halloween weekend, or World Series weekend, if you prefer, may be the ultimate evidence of that.

For while North Side Chicago, and those people who spiritually consider themselves a part of it, were obsessed with “the Cubs!,” there were other parts that were seeing the periodic outbursts of violence that occur in Chicago.

THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES reported Tuesday that 17 murders occurred during the weekend, although the Wall Street Journal says the figure is actually 18 – and that the total for 2016 thus far is 614.

Which could result in the year ending with a tally of somewhere about 700 homicides.

Not quite like the days of the late 1980s when the homicide total would typically average two or three a day and would invariably end with a total of just under 1,000 per year.

But considering how much some people freaked out (usually to reinforce their own partisan political ideological hang-ups about urban life) when the murder rate reached 500 a couple of years ago, you just know they’re going to react to 700 as though the hordes have run amok.

SOME HAVE TRIED hinting that all the extra police on hand around Wrigley Field to ensure that all the Cubs fans were “safe” might have left the rest of the city short-handed. Although any rational look at the situation would show that to be nonsense.

But yes, all of the homicides of the Halloween weekend took place in South or West side neighborhoods where it was likely that the Cubs, or baseball in general, wasn’t really the focus of the weekend routine.

Heck, it was probably just another weekend in the life of Chicago for the locals – except for the 17 (or 18) who died. For them, it was the finale of their life in this realm of existence.

If you want to be sarcastic in your world view, it could be said that the presence of the Chicago Cubs in the World Series was the end of world as they knew it (Yes, you can cue the R.E.M. song lyrics in your mind, if you must).

THERE IS A degree to which I think people take the homicide stats too seriously. They make too much of them, particularly since they get obsessed with just the numbers without giving any thought to the individuals who no longer exist.

For 17/18 isn’t just a number. Those are people whose families are now going to have to do their part to enrich the funeral industry. In the next few days will be the rituals that will allow their families to see them off and begin coping with the loss.

Something to keep in mind; that not all the “sadness” you may see in coming days will be from people upset that the Chicago Cubs fell short to the Cleveland Indians in the World Series.

And if by chance the Cubs do pull off that athletic comeback that enables them to win a World Series on Wednesday, not every person who doesn’t share in the joy of the moment is a disgruntled Chicago White Sox fan who can’t get with the program.

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Bloody, yet birthy during holiday weekend – Chicago now over 500 dead

Crystal Myers of the Back of the Yards neighborhood gave birth Monday to a son, and if he survives he’s going to have one heck of a birth story to share with people.

Because the Labor Day holiday weekend was one that saw 13 people killed and dozens more wounded – including his parents. It also was the tally that boosted Chicago to having in excess of 500 homicides for the 2016 calendar year thus far.

CONSIDER THERE ARE nearly four more full months to go this year. Who’s to say how high the death toll will get for Chicago – although I can only hope we won’t experience the days of the late 1980s when the city used to get close to 1,000 murders per year and where in some neighborhoods gunfire and death were just a common fact of daily life.

Myers’ son is going to be able to point to write-ups in both the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times of the circumstances under which he was born a few weeks early on Monday.

His parents, Myers and Albert Moore, were sitting on a porch in the South Side neighborhood where the stockyards once existed when someone snuck up the gangway, fired nine shots, then fled.

Doctors at Stroger Hospital managed to save the baby, while both Myers and Moore were recovering from their own gunshot wounds and it was uncertain Tuesday how they would turn out.

THE SUN-TIMES REPORTED a lack of a motive for the shooting, although police speculated to the newspaper the incident may somehow be tied in to a shooting that took place the day before.

Here’s hoping for the kid’s sake, at least, that both survive along with the boy. Who gets to begin his life as the human face of just how absurd urban violence has become.

And how divided we are as a society in determining what the real problem is and what needs to be done about it.

For the record, 13 people were killed across the city, with 65 people suffering gunshot wounds. Most of the violence came on the holiday itself – some 31 of the 65 were shot from Monday 6 a.m. to Tuesday 3 a.m., according to the Tribune.

THE USUAL TRIVIAL analysis says that urban violence picks up during the summer months – the intense heat that we in Chicago think of as routine for August somehow gets us all riled up and crazy and our tempers go flying off the handle!

Could this line of logic mean that cooler weather will bring cooler temperaments and that the rate of shootings ending in death will decline in coming months? Who’s to say? The fact is that people tend to want to view the statistics concerning urban violence in ways that back up their own personal hang-ups.

There are those who will want to put the focus on trying to keep firearms out of the hands of people who can’t keep control of themselves, while others will want to view it as the fault of certain types of people living down to their nature.

Which usually will result in those individuals wanting to scream and screech their bigotries aloud and claim their own need to keep a weapon on hand.

WHILE OTHERS WILL want to “tsk, tsk” the situation away and pay attention to their own isolated neighborhood where they’d like to pretend such things never happen because the local residents are “just too civilized” to do such things.

I’m of the belief that such acts can take place anywhere at any time – a holdover from my own police reporting days of three decades ago where I encountered so many nonsensical acts that I came to realize there is no making sense of any of it.

With that thought in mind, I’m willing to wish Crystal Myers’ son into this world and I’d like to tell him the circumstances behind his birth are the screwiest he’ll ever encounter in life – it’s all uphill from here!

I only wish I could make him such a promise, and have it come true.

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Tribute to nurses instead of Speck would be a welcome relief for neighborhood

It was with a personal touch that I read the Chicago Tribune account of Dr. John Schmale, who discovered a stash of slides in a water-flooded basement bringing back to life his little sister Nina Jo.

Who was one of the eight women who died nearly 50 years ago when she was in an apartment being shared by several student nurses at the old South Chicago Community Hospital nursing school that happened to be stumbled upon by Richard Speck.

HE WAS A commercial seaman whose ship happened to dock in the ports along the Calumet River, and he got drunk in a tavern that now is a vacant lot, when he got the urge to find those young girls.

One got raped, while eight were stabbed and slashed to death. One nurse had the temerity to hide under a bed and would up surviving the attack.

Schmale talks of wanting to create a memorial to the July 1966 incident that would remember the young women and let us know of the potential human beings they never got the chance to become.

Which would be a relief, since much of what gets remembered of that long-ago mass murder was of Speck – both in his gruesomeness that night, the way that death penalty law got altered in the 1970s so that his own death sentence was never carried out, and that crude prison-made (it appears) porno film featuring Speck himself.

NOT THE MOST pleasant of accounts to recall. Something I wouldn’t even bother to acknowledge if not for Schmale.

For I am a South Chicago neighborhood native, although I haven’t lived in the neighborhood proper in a long time.

But my usual route to get there includes a trip on the Bishop Ford Freeway to 103^rd Street, where I then venture east. Which takes me through the neighborhood where the crime took place.

I can actually venture up toward 100^th Street to check out the townhouse where the slayings took place, if I’m in a particularly ghoulish mood. I most definitely venture past Trumbull Park.

WHICH IS ONE of those assets that theoretically could help make the South Deering neighborhood a nice community to live in. Although I recall the news reports that came out at the time of the crime that acknowledged the initial Chicago Police Department reaction was to roust all the would-be delinquents who were hanging around the park at the time to see if any of them were involved in the brutal slayings.

It’s something of a daily reminder of what once happened there. Although I’m sure that with the passing of a half-century, there probably are way too many people too young to know. And some who probably could care less what happened before they arrived in the neighborhood.

They may figure there have been countless crimes committed in the area since then, so many that getting worked up over this one is somehow a waste of time.

Which may be why shifting the focus off Speck (he wound up dying in prison nearly a quarter of a century ago) would be a plus. The real crime of murder isn’t so much the violent act itself, but that it causes a loss of life that could have contributed something to society.

PARTICULARLY IN THIS case, where potential medical personnel were involved.

I also recall a moment in high school where I had to give a speech – mine was about the death penalty, and I used a lame argument for capital punishment that Speck didn’t deserve to live after what he did.

Although now that I think of it all these years later, I’m inclined to think the Speck punishment (spending the last 25 years of his life locked up) was most appropriate – particularly because of that porno-film incident – which I recall seeing along with several General Assembly members in Springfield who used it as a chance to investigate prison security.

Seeing Speck showing off his pair of blue panties and babbling about how his incarcerated life turned out made him such a pathetic joke – one that truly isn’t worth paying too much more attention to.

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2016 is here; everybody wants to be 1st

First baby: A girl named Jaylaine, born at 12:01 a.m. at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in suburban Park Ridge.

First murder: A 24-year-old man who was shot dead at about 2 a.m. in the Bronzeville neighborhood when he was arguing with another man who happened to be armed with a pistol.

NEW YEAR’S DAY is one of the quirky days of working in the newsgathering business. We get all obsessed with documenting the “first” of all sorts of things that typically wouldn’t get much mention, if any at all.

Particularly if they had happened just hours, or even minutes, earlier. Because they would then have been amongst the final activities of 2015. The old year, ancient history. Been there, done that! Let’s move along.

Yet you’d be amazed at the number of people who get all worked up over being acknowledged as a “first.” Take the ‘first baby’ saga, which is one I had my fill of way back in 1989.

Because on Jan. 1 of that year, I was a reporter-type person for the now-defunct City News Bureau, and I was on duty that overnight shift. I wound up having to make the call between dueling hospitals (one of which may have been Lutheran General, if I remember right) that were claiming to have had babies born just as the clock was ticking off the final seconds of the old year.

I ULTIMATELY MADE the judgment call of a tie, and other news organizations followed our lead. Which resulted in a third hospital that was just moments behind claiming I had somehow cheated them out of recognition.

The concept remains the same annually

I still recall the frantic phone call City News received at about 3 a.m. on 1/1/89, as a top hospital administrator felt compelled to give me a piece of his mind that we wouldn’t recognize his claim to have a “first.”

You’d think at that hour he’d have better things to obsess about. Apparently, he didn’t.

All I know is that for the past quarter-century, I have always associated the thought of the “first baby” with neurotic hospital administrators desperately trying to get themselves some press for actions that don’t involve allegations of medical malpractice on their parts.

THAT IS WHAT I suspect the desire to be a “first” is for many officials – a chance to get mentioned in the news publications and programs for something that doesn’t involve their screw-ups.

The site of many more firsts, come Monday

Such as the fact that on Monday, somebody is going to be awarded the first marriage license in Cook County. Clerk David Orr made sure we in the news media are aware of this fact – issuing a statement telling of the $800 in prizes to be given to the soon-to-be wed couple.

The Palmer House Hilton, Lettuce Entertain You restaurants, iO Improv Comedy Clubs, LaSalle Flowers and Bryan Docter photography all are kicking in to that prize package – which I’m sure means a whole slew of free advertising to be generated for those companies by whichever couple feels compelled to be at the clerk’s office in the Loop when it opens at 8:30 a.m. Monday.

Personally, I wonder what kind of people would feel compelled to get up early and force themselves to the head of the line, just to get themselves on the Monday evening television newscasts as the first newlywed couple.

ALTHOUGH I DON’T think anybody is as extreme as Jim “Moose” Murphy, the guy who for nearly 20 years in the 1980s and 1990s used to camp out on New Year’s to ensure he was the head of the line to get the first permit issued for the year by the Forest Preserve District.

Murphy, who died in 2009, was with the Antler Dancer’s Sportsmen’s Club, which used to like to have a huge-scale party (with liquor flowing freely) each summer in the forest preserves of southwestern Cook County near suburban Palos Park. For Murphy, it was absolutely essential he had permit Number 000001.

Although Murphy’s saga always reminded me of that episode of The Simpsons in which Lisa and other Springfield residents of some intellect got a permit to hold a Renaissance-type costume event in the town gazebo – only to find that the town thugs were already gathered there and refused to leave.

I would have feared for the physical well-being of anyone who had tried to cut in front of Murphy and his crew in that line. It would have become an ugly scene.

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