Who are you to be questioning us? Is anybody shocked the attitude exists?

I have written about enough governmental entities throughout the years to know that officials really don’t like being questioned.

Questioning the coppers? None of ya bizness!

By anybody! About anything!

SO I CAN’T say I’m shocked to learn of the Chicago Tribune report detailing how the Chicago Police Board did a pseudo-investigation about everyone who, in the mindset of the coppers, had the nerve to think they could speak out at their public meetings.

Those laws requiring that governmental entities do their business in public? That doesn’t really mean people are enthused about the possibility of having their actions scrutinized. Or as one-time Mayor Richard M. Daley once put it, “Go scrutinize yourself. I get scrootined every day.”

In fact, I don’t doubt that police in particular don’t want anybody else looking all that closely to the ways and means by which they enforce the laws. Which, sadly enough, are just like sausages – it would sicken you to know some of the things that occur in the name of justice.

So according to the Tribune, it seems that some 60 people who filed the requests to speak before the Police Board were actually investigated prior to being permitted to speak.

THE POLICE KNEW in advance if there was anything they could use against the individuals who wanted to speak out against police practices. I suspect that in their mindset, they were prepared to arrest anyone who tried to speak out – if they could get “the goods” on them to back up a charge.

And then we wonder why some people are less-than-trusting of law enforcement personnel in general, and uniformed police officers in particular.

The Tribune actually pointed out that the 60 people whom they found were investigated date back to 2018, but found officials admitting that the background checks, which is how police prefer to think of them, actually date back years further.

It reeks of intimidation, almost as though people are supposed to know better than to want to question the police. Which actually reminds me of a Cook County sheriff’s deputy I once knew who complained about how some officers took their authority far too seriously.

AS I REMEMBER him asking theoretically, “Who really polices the police? It’s nobody.”

Although like I said, it seems public officials in general really don’t care for scrutiny.

I remember one board of education I used to write about on a regular basis that always made a point of publicly disclosing every single person who sought information through the Freedom of Information Act, which is supposed to be about making the details of government operations easier to obtain.

But instead, this school board viewed it as a trouble-maker list; those people who had the nerve to think they were entitled to find out what was really happening. Just think how dangerous those people would have been if they had police powers just like the coppers themselves?

  -30-

Your personal video can no longer get you put in the pokey by the police

During the two-plus decades I have paid attention to our political people and the way they govern, I have seen some hard-core partisan actions taken. I’ve seen mean-spirited acts meant to single out certain segments of society for abuse.

The high court on Thursday saved us from our Legislature's worst instincts.

Yet the thing that allows me to continue to have faith in our form of government is that it often seems that sense and decency prevail. Someone comes along to do the “proper” thing.

SUCH AS WHAT happened Thursday with the Illinois Supreme Court, which issued a ruling that struck down the eavesdropping laws that were enacted a few years ago that made so much of everyday observation a criminal act.

As it turns out, part of the law was already struck down – the part that made it a crime to record anything involving the police. Legislators who approved creation of that stupid law claimed people were using all those newfangled cameras in their cell phones to catch the police in improper acts.

Which meant the police were under constant supervision that could inhibit them from doing their jobs.

These are the kind of people who think the real problem with that Rodney King police beating in Los Angeles in the early 1990s was that some smart-aleck happened to record it with a video camera.

CATCHING THE POLICE in improper behavior? They were just doing their jobs, some would have us believe.

Now, the entirety of the law is struck down. The people who were eager to protect government officials from being caught in their own incompetence have been determined to have gone too far.

In this case, the state Supreme Court ruled in favor of Annabel Melongo, who had objections with a court transcript in a case she was involved with. She had several telephone conversations with a court reporter supervisor at the Criminal Courts Building, and she recorded at least three of them.

In Melongo’s case, she made the recordings because she wanted to make an issue of what she saw as the court reporter’s incompetence. She created a website where she wrote about her problem, and included snippets of the recordings she had on the website.

PROSECUTORS USED THE law to determine that Melongo WAS the problem. She had six counts of eavesdropping filed against her. A jury ultimately could not reach a verdict, and the charges eventually were dismissed.

But because such a high bond was set against this “threat” to our society, she spent about 20 months in jail while the criminal case was pending.

Naturally, this case was filed by the state’s attorney’s office, which claimed that the problem was in the jury that wouldn’t give them a “guilty” verdict. They wanted the charges reinstated.

Their attorneys actually argued before the state Supreme Court that the intent of the Legislature (which was to favor the actions of law enforcement and other legal system types over those of the public) had to be respected, and that trying to alter it was outside of their legal authority.

IT SEEMS THE court didn’t buy into that argument.

“Judged in terms of the legislative purpose of protecting conversational privacy, the statute’s scope is simply too broad,” read the opinion issued unanimously by the state’s high court.

Which many of would have come to the conclusion back when the Legislature (in the Rod Blagojevich days) gave its approval to this measure.

Particularly since if strictly interpreted, it could make any tourist a criminal if – while in the process of taking pictures in the Loop – they happened to catch a glimpse of a cop or two in the background. Which isn’t exactly an impossibility.

  -30-

Government meddling in other people’s business way too headache-inducing!

One of the reasons why I personally would never contemplate running for electoral office is the fact that I’d get stuck taking the blame for the screw-ups of other officials beneath me.

OBAMA: Does the president feel ...

While it may well be true that a public official is responsible for those who answer to him, I can’t help but wonder how much of the Tylenol Barack Obama is consuming these days.

FOR ONE RIGHT on top of the other, a pair of stories have cropped up that would have us think that Obama deserves to be thought of in the same class of people as J. Edgar Hoover or Richard Nixon – if not Joe McCarthy (not the Yankees manager version) himself.

The ideologues are getting all worked up over recent Washington Post reports about how the Internal Revenue Service was giving extra scrutiny to certain groups claiming tax-exempt status.

None of the groups ultimately was denied that status, but it seems they resented having so much attention paid to them. Particularly since many are politically-motivated groups whose desire is to promote candidates who push their conservative ideological thoughts on issues.

We’re hearing the screaming that the government is out to get them – although coming from these ideologues, I wonder if what they’re really upset about is that anyone would have the nerve to “scrooten” them (remember Mayor Daley, the second?).

MAYBE IT’S ONLY okay when their opposition is the one facing the scrutiny from the government?

Now I don’t mean to downplay the concept of the government turning into “big brother” and deciding to meddle into the private affairs of people. It is a serious problem, and Obama himself quickly joined in the gaggle of people criticizing the IRS.

Although I suspect he’s more upset about the fact that everybody on the ideological spectrum against him is going to blame this on him. He’s going to have to take the heat for this – particularly when the sympathetic leadership of the House of Representatives decides to hold hearings to give those voices a microphone and television camera to amplify their thoughts all the moreso.

... something more like this these days?

But what makes it worse is that this has to crop up in the public ear at the same time that the Justice Department decides it has to resort to reporter-harassment in order to advance its criminal investigations.

THAT’S WHAT IS usually behind any incident where prosecutors decide they need to go after a reporter-type person’s notes or telephone records – they are unable to figure out a case by themselves, even though they have subpoena power.

In this case, the Associated Press learned that federal prosecutors had managed to get records of about 20 telephone lines – both at AP offices and, in some cases, the home telephone and personal cellphone lines of reporters.

It seems that a Central Intelligence Agency disruption of a plot to bomb an airliner became known, and someone was upset enough to want to punish someone – most likely whoever let it be known to reporter-types that this was going on.

Personally, I can appreciate how someone might be offended by having prosecutorial-minded people wading through lists of places one called on their telephone. Although if anyone tried subpoenaing my home phone records, all they’d really get is a list of which restaurants I patronize for carryout food.

BUT THERE’S THE greater principle at stake about some respect for privacy – which I suspect the ideologues facing what they see as harassment from the IRS oftentimes are not willing to respect for others.

It is why I am less than sympathetic – even though we may well have IRS agents who stepped across the line of decency in their investigatorial behavior. And a president wondering what he ever did so bad in life to deserve all the harassment he gets dumped on him on a daily basis!

  -30-

How public is our cellphone use?

The whole point of cellular telephones being so readily accessible  is that we’re supposed to be capable of using them from anywhere at a moment’s notice.

So a part of me wonders how the whole concept of restricting the cellphone access at the buildings that serve as courthouses in Cook County is going to work.

FOR THE PAST month, there have been big signs at the entrances to those courthouses – telling us of all the types of items that people will no longer be able to bring inside the buildings with them.

Those include portable telephones. And the signs have told us that the restrictions will take effect as of Monday.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported this weekend that there will be some leeway used during the next few weeks – a grace-period during which people will be allowed to keep their phones on them provided they keep them turned off.

Which ought to be the common-sense approach to handling this particular issue.

EXCEPT THAT THERE are always those who will figure some people can be pushed around at will. Including many of the people who are among those who have business at the courthouses.

For many of them are criminals – in that they have committed some act worthy of a criminal charge that they may well plead guilty toward in the near future.

Yet too much of this is being done by people who seem to think their lives are lacking unless there’s someone whom they can abuse.

If it means they think they can pick on people by taking away their telephones, it just strikes me as an act of bullying by our county court system.

ALTHOUGH I DON’T doubt there is some semblance of a problem that court officials are trying to take care of.

For the stated reason for the tougher regulations is that some people are persisting in using the camera functions on their cellphones in order to take pictures during court hearings.

In some cases, these pictures are being posted as ways of publicly identifying those who have the temerity to testify in court against people who have street gang connections.

In others, they are being put on the Internet as ways of trying to embarrass judges for their professional conduct. Be honest, any video clip can be edited into something that can make someone else stupid!

SO YES, COURT officials may have a legitimate beef with the way people are using their cellphones.

But I’m all for allowing the sheriff’s deputies stationed inside each court room to rule over their domain with an iron fist on this issue. Let them confiscate the phones of people who can’t use them properly.

Let those people who get caught have to face the prospect of a serious criminal charge! It would be totally appropriate.

The hassle, however, that will be caused by banning them from the buildings outright is just ridiculous – particularly since the logical expectation of not permitting people to bring their phones into the building is that there will be some place where people can store them.

AND I’M VERY sure that there’s no way the sheriff’s police (who patrol all these buildings) want to be responsible in any way for someone else’s portable phone.

I do know that other court systems restrict the public from bringing phones in to the building – in Will County court in Joliet, only people who purchase a special license (a couple of hundred bucks for the year) from the county can have their phones.

Which means attorneys who work there can walk around with their phones, while everyone else gives them the “evil eye” of resentment. Is that really what we want at the Criminal Courts building – giving those defendants yet another reason to think they’re being “abused” in life.

The cellphone restrictions just strike me as being petty and vindictive – and I’m sure there will be many outbursts in coming weeks at the courthouses both in Chicago or the surrounding suburbs.

  -30-

Bring out the video cameras!

I’m wondering how many people are going to feel a smart-aleck attitude and start whipping out their cell phones or whatever other portable device they happen to carry when they find themselves in the presence of a police officer.

Although I’m also wondering how many cops are going to start pulling out similar recording devices to take pictures of people whom they think are paying a little too close attention to them.

THERE HAVE BEEN several stories in recent years concerning the laws that make it a felony criminal offense to take pictures of police while they’re on duty.

Ever since Rodney King got beaten by police in Los Angeles, there have been those who view the “problem” as the fact that anyone would think it appropriate to photograph or videorecord police officers while they work.

Because invariably one can easily capture “evidence” indicating they were less than professional in the performance of their duties.

But the American Civil Liberties Union, which occasionally does its own random recording of police just to remind them that somebody’s watching, has filed lawsuits that culminated in a Monday ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States.

THE NATION’S HIGH court upheld a federal appeals court that ruled the laws against taping were improper. That lower court said it impinged on a person’s right to freedom of expression by saying that police were off-limits.

Of course, what really outraged people was the fact that the lawmakers who put a restriction on photographing police officers made it one of the more severe categories of felonies – one that can carry a prison term of up to 15 years.

In short, one had the potential (until Monday) to spend a significant portion of their lives in incarceration if a police officer got it in his (or her) head that he/she was being watched too closely.

It doesn’t surprise me to learn that police officers feel that way about themselves.

I’M JUST PLEASED to learn that the Supreme Court issued a ruling that tried to bring some semblance of sense to our law.

Because the honest truth is that there are so many cameras being erected by so many interests in so many public places that it probably is unrealistic for us to think that somebody isn’t watching us somewhere.

Even the police often have those cameras erected on poles around the city and even in many suburbs. I recently heard of a case where an alderman seriously believes a newly-erected police video camera was positioned to look into his campaign office's windows. Why should police get to watch us closer than we can watch them?

After all, the police are supposed to work for us and protect us? The people who would support such laws are the ones using questionable judgment – which the Supreme Court knocked down.

COULD IT BE that the police were more interested in controlling the images of themselves in action? Because with all the cameras, it is impossible to avoid capturing them in some form.

I was just waiting for the moment when some tourist decided to take a picture of their relatives/friends on State Street with the Chicago Theater marquee in the background – along with an unintended image of some police officer being forced to use restraint on someone.

Just think of the black eye it would have given our city for that person to be prosecuted – particularly if that video had somehow shown the officer to be using legally-questionable tactics in the performance of his/her duties.

Which means what the Supreme Court of the United States actually accomplished by their action on Monday was to ensure that a law that was completely impractical to enforce is now off our statutes! We’re all spared some headaches.

  -30-

The newest trend – marijuana crops being “hidden” right out in the open

Signs like these exist all throughout the area surrounding Lake Calumet, which likely added to the 'cover' for the marijuana fields discovered this week. Photograph by Gregory Tejeda

Perhaps my sense of smell is deteriorating as I age.

For whenever I drove along the Bishop Ford Freeway in recent months and sensed an “off” aroma, I presumed it was from the nearby trash landfills.

THEY MAY BE capped and covered and the stench isn’t anywhere near as bad as it was when I was a child back in the 1970s, but there’s still a bit of a funk in the air in the land between Pullman and the East Side neighborhoods.

But the “big” story Wednesday morning was the fact that the Chicago Police Department have discovered a big, huge field of marijuana plants – the size of two football fields – in the area around 106^th Street and Stony Island Avenue.

That’s near the Harborside International Golf Center (the attempt to turn polluted landfill into luxury golf courses) and has the traffic of the Bishop Ford (which a part of me still thinks of as the Calumet Expressway) whizzing by.

Which sounds like a pretty public place for somebody to be doing something that can warrant criminal charges. Yet all those people seem to have served as the perfect cover for the pot fields.

THE MOTORISTS DRIVE by, doing their best to avoid paying attention to the surroundings. People using the golf course do their best to pretend that the surroundings (which include Lake Calumet and its shipping) don’t really exist.

Most people passing through the Southeast Side notice nothing more than landfills such as this one by the Land & Lakes Co. near the Chicago-Dolton border. Photograph by Gregory Tejeda

And because much of this former industrial area is heavily polluted, much of the area is fenced off with signs telling people that wandering around has the potential to be regarded as a criminal offense.

So it’s not an area that people pay close attention to. Which motivated the people who want to earn their living by satisfying the public’s “desire” for marijuana to use the land for their growing fields.

Both the Chicago Sun-Times and WGN-TV quoted Chicago police as saying some of the plants on the huge fields were the size of “Christmas trees.” It almost sounds like a fantasy sequence from a “Cheech and Chong” film!

THE POLICE ADMITTED on Wednesday that they didn’t truly appreciate the size of the operation until they got a helicopter in the air and saw the fields from the sky.

Not that anybody has been arrested. When police arrived at the pot fields to confiscate the crop, nobody was around. Police are asking us to keep their eyes open for anybody who comes back to the area trying to salvage something from this operation.

Then again, we’re the same people who had a huge pot field growing in our midst and didn’t have a clue.

So the individuals may have to “write off” this particular operation, and turn their attention to what I’m sure is another open field of marijuana growing somewhere in an equally-public place.

THE ODD THING is that this is not the first time I have heard of such pot plants growing in the open.

About a month ago, police in suburban Lynwood (just a bit further south where the Bishop Ford turns into Illinois Route 394) found a smaller-scale operation – but one that was equally huge in the public eye.

A two-acre field of marijuana plants in various stages of growth – with a nearby house with rooms set up for various stages of the processing, packaging and marketing (so to speak) of marijuana. Two tons of the crop were confiscated.

To the best of my knowledge, no arrests were ever made in that case. And it took the Cook County sheriff’s police helicopter task force to let the Lynwood police comprehend the scale of that site.

ARE WE GOING to start finding more of these fields out in the open, counting on peoples’ willingness to not look too closely as their cover. And how do police destroy a crop that large – without creating the potential for jokes about a city-wide pot party sponsored by “da Law!”

It reminds me of a viewpoint I once heard expressed about the best way to hide a piece of information – create an obscure website on the Internet and post every graphic detail.

Then count on the fact that there is so much clutter on the Internet that your site likely will get lost in the shuffle and never be looked at.

  -30-

The significance of tax returns, or lack thereof, in the campaign cycle

I recall the first government official who ever showed me his income tax return – it was then-Gov. Jim Edgar.

EDGAR: Not Romney or Plummer



He wasn’t running for anything specifically that year. It was just his habit to let us see the return he filed by mid-April, and it was meant to reinforce the idea that he wasn’t all that different from the rest of us.

SERIOUSLY! I RECALL his returns as showing that while the Edgars had some miniscule financial investments, they weren’t wealthy. For all practical purposes, Edgar supported his family financially on the government salaries he was paid for the various electoral offices he held during his political career.

They weren’t bad salaries. So they lived well. But no more so than many other people.

Edgar always issued the returns so routinely that they ultimately became a non-story. Yet more evidence that Edgar wasn’t the most exciting man on Planet Earth. Or even to walk the halls of the Statehouse in Springfield.

Which is why it always amazes me when would-be government officials make a big deal out of refusing to disclose their incomes. They wind up making an issue out of what should be nothing.

WHEN THE INFORMATION comes out, it gets treated as though it is a major disclosure. If it never comes out, then we wind up thinking that there is some major secret being kept from the public.

It may turn out that the information amounts to a whole lot of nothing. But the candidates treat it as though it is a major something.

Yet every campaign cycle, we get some nitwit who is determined to think that he (or she, I suppose) is special, and that we shouldn’t have some interest in their personal connections.

ROMNEY: Returns becoming an issue



Which is what we gain from getting a look at those returns. Who do they have financial connections to? How do they live? Is this a person who gives a lot to charitable causes?

IF SO, WHICH causes?

It is personal information that we can relate to, because we all ultimately have to fill out those forms.

And while I don’t expect to see anyone running for office who files the 1040EZ, we do learn something from such information.

Mitt Romney’s presidential aspirations are being attacked on this ground. He has only released limited details, and claims he doesn’t want more information about himself out there because he thinks opponent Barack Obama will merely have his staff pick through the information for details that can be used against him.

HE WENT SO far as to tell the National Review, “I’m simply not enthusiastic about giving them hundreds or thousands of more pages to pick through, distort and lie about.”

My guess is that the Romney campaign wants all the distortion and lies to be told by themselves about Obama. Which when thought of that way makes Romney sound like a bully and a wimp!

Locally, we have someone else taking the same attitude. Remember Jason Plummer, the St. Louis-area guy who ran for lieutenant governor paired up with Republican William Brady?

He’s running for a seat in Congress from that part of Illinois that borders St. Louis, and he’s refusing to give up his returns. He claims they’re personal, although he released a statement that says he earns a $55,289 salary as vice president of the family-owned lumber company.

WHICH IF THAT’S all there is would be so much like many other people.

PLUMMER: Really none of our business?



Except that for people like Romney and Plummer, that isn’t all there is. They have business interests that allow them to use various exemptions.

The tales told about Romney are that he has used exemptions and tax breaks so effectively that he literally didn’t owe any federal income tax. Which is something that would make him very unusual, and reduce to rubble any claims he might try to make that he’s just a common guy, compared to “elitist” Obama.

It’s probably the same situation with regard to Plummer. The family business that he has ties to likely make him independently wealthy aside from his actual salary that he reports to the IRS. It’s a shame that he, and Romney for that matter, feels compelled to treat it as a dirty little secret.

  -30-

Would we in Illinois regard the meme-d pepper-spray cop as the victim?

It’s the Chicagoan in me that caused a certain reaction to a CNN report I saw Sunday morning – one about how people are taking the image of  a police officer using pepper spray on students at a University of California campus and spreading it all across the Internet.

Who thinks cop is the victim? Image provided by Smosh.com



How many people here believe that the police officer (since identified as Lt. John Pike) is the victim in all of this, and that the people who are creating such images are somehow doing him wrong?

BECAUSE THAT CERTAINLY is the attitude that is spawned by Illinois law. I’m referring to the law that says that people who take video of police officers in action without their advance knowledge and consent are committing a crime.

If this had happened in Illinois, I’m fairly sure that someone would want to believe that the person who took the original images that are now being doctored-up into everything from a police officer spraying Bambi to Jesus Christ himself at the Last Supper would be worthy of prosecution.

Personally, I have always thought the Illinois law against such images was some sort of gross overreaction by conservative ideologues who don’t want anything done by their police to be used against him.

Even, and perhaps in particular, images of a police lieutenant using pepper spray to knock the sense out of Occupy Wall Street-type protesters who were peacefully sitting.

MY REACTION TO the Sunday morning news report was to wonder how quickly the state’s attorney’s office in Cook County would have sought to prosecute somebody for taking the image – had it involved the Chicago versions of the “Occupy” protesters and had it occurred in our fair city?

Which to me is such a gross over-reaction. Yet it is in character with the way that similar cases have been handled by police in Chicago. And I’m wondering how many people will want to believe that this is somehow disrespectful toward law enforcement personnel in general.

I know that some people are going to claim that this type of commentary is, in and of itself, somehow disrespectful or anti-law enforcement. Even though I do not believe it to be.

It is just that I have always thought that law enforcement personnel of all types should be held to a higher standard than the masses of our society. We do, after all, give these people considerable power to make judgment calls in cases that can result in the arrest and detention of individuals.

IF ANYTHING, A part of me wishes that it were possible for every single moment of a police officer’s on-duty activity to be video-taped. Perhaps if police realized that we were watching and that their professional conduct would be assessed in a blow-by-blow nature, there would be fewer incidents of official misconduct.

Actually, such an attitude could go to the benefit of the police, since if we could see them in action we might well gain respect for those incidents where they manage to show professional restraint in the handling of an individual whose own conduct crosses the line into “despicable.”

It also would serve as further evidence in their own cases – since I have seen in court proceedings how much credibility video gets from people where they can see what, and how, something actually happened.

But for that credibility to be maintained, we really can’t have a situation where police control the cameras and can keep us from seeing the screw-ups that occur all too often.

SO WHAT DO I think of the CNN report that was one of the first images I woke up to on Sunday morning?

I thought it was a bit trivial – and little more than an excuse to put on the air some image of Spongebob Squarepants getting blasted in the face with pepper spray.

But sometimes, it is the trivial details that, when put together, can illustrate a larger point of some seriousness. And the idea that our laws somehow would elevate triviality to criminal status makes me wonder how long it will be until the people put pressure on such laws to change.

Because the current law on such videotaping (particularly at a time when our society has become one where real people have less and less privacy) is one that only the 1 percent of society could truly support because they think it will be unleashed on the other 99 percent of us.

  -30-

When is a recording an intrusion?

I’m not sure what to think of all these devices people carry that are more than capable of recording those innocent and trivial moments that, if excepted in a certain way, can come across as incriminating – or embarrassing.

I was pleased to learn that a jury in Cook County on Wednesday rejected the idea that a woman who recorded the activity of police officers trying to intimidate her was the one who actually committed a crime – one that could have gotten her up to a 15-year prison sentence.

BUT THERE’S ALSO this commercial that is popping up on television a lot these days – for the HTC Status phone. That’s the device that comes with special buttons and functions that make it easy for people to take pictures with their mobile phone, then instantly post them to their Facebook accounts more easily than they already can do with their current portable phones.

In my mind, I have dubbed this device the “phone for idiots” and would definitely not want to buy one – because the commercial shows a couple of snickering morons who seem to have nothing better to do than to take pictures of their so-called friend while he sleeps; then post them onto Facebook for public consumption so they can embarrass him.

Somewhere along the line, we’re going to have to figure out some sort of legal standard for what is appropriate behavior for those people who feel compelled to whip out their phone and make recordings of what everybody around them is doing.

What’s the matter? Aren’t these people the least bit interesting, in and of themselves?

APPARENTLY NOT!

But then we run into the other extreme, which is what came up in that case against Tiawanda Moore. She’s the Indiana resident who thought that a Chicago police officer treated her in a way that constituted sexual harassment.

She did what any person is supposed to do if they believe that a police officer in Chicago has misbehaved professionally – she took it to Internal Affairs, the division that investigates such complaints and decides if the bad conduct rises to the level of criminal charges, or just professional punishment.

Of course, Internal Affairs has developed a reputation (not always justified) for being more interested in covering up complaints, rather than finding police wrong-doing. In Moore’s case, she believes the two officers were more interested in intimidating her into dropping her complaint.

THAT IS WHEN she grabbed her BlackBerry, pushed the buttons that allow for audio recording, and managed to capture a few minutes of their questioning of her for posterity.

That is what got her in legal trouble, since Illinois law not only makes it wrong for people to record the words of others without their knowledge, it makes it a  criminal act to record the police.

Law enforcement officials say their concern is that people will record the police either on audio or in moving pictures, then will selectively edit the audio and/or video in ways that would support whatever complaints they would want to file against the Police Department.

Which probably does fit into the mentality of those people who believe that the real “crime” when it comes to Rodney King being beaten by the Los Angeles police back in the early 1990s was that someone who lived nearby pulled out his video camera and recorded the beating without the police knowledge.

GROUPS SUCH AS the American Civil Liberties Union say they think the law is meant to cover up anyone who might catch the police behaving improperly, and they have a lawsuit pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago to challenge it.

Meanwhile, an attorney for another defendant facing charges similar to Moore told the Chicago Tribune that laws restricting personal video or audio recordings are “antiquated” in an age when so many people carry miniature devices that are capable of making such recordings.

Which is a statement that I have some personal qualms about.

I’d hate to think that the idea of respecting someone’s privacy is “antiquated.” Then again, I’d hate to think that the police-desired standard is truly acceptable.

WHICH IS WHY I was pleased to learn that it took a jury just about one hour to make their ruling in favor of Moore, with one juror telling the Chicago Tribune that they listened to the audio and actually agreed with Moore’s perception that the Internal Affairs investigators were “intimidating and insensitive” and that charges against Moore were, “a waste of time.”

Of course, I’m sure those people who support such a law think that the jury overstepped their boundaries in making  such a judgment call – and should have accepted the existence of a four-minute audio snippet of police officers without their knowledge as being improper, in-and-of itself.

But the fact that some people would try to defend this law with a “Letter of the Law” defense instead of claiming that the merits of the law are proper ought to be evidence enough that we in Illinois have a flawed law in need of revamping.

Because somehow, we in Illinois need to find that middle ground between thinking that some people being recorded is a felony offense and thinking that everybody being recorded (with silly pictures all over Facebook) is somehow proper.

  -30-

How much access is too much access?

Actually, I have no problem believing it can happen.

The “it” in this case is police officers using their computers that give them access to reports of many criminal cases getting bored enough to look up the reports about a pending case involving a pair of patrol officers who allegedly had sex with an intoxicated woman while they were on duty.

IT SEEMS THAT the reports of that case have been accessed on internal computers by more than 1,000 officers – far more than are actually involved with the case in any way.

That is what has the Internal Affairs division of Chicago police trying to figure out every single person who used their computer to read the report – and why they felt compelled to do so.

They also want to know if any detailed information from those reports wound up getting disseminated to sources that the police would have preferred not to see such reports.

There’s no word at this point how many police could be disciplined, or what such discipline would be. In fact, the Fraternal Order of Police lodge that represents Chicago Police is defending the cops by saying there’s nothing wrong with using one’s work computer to look up work-related records.

WHAT I FIND “believable” about this incident is the idea of a bored police officer passing the time away by looking up stray information – just for mental kicks.

Just think of how many times you have sat in front of a computer screen and wasted away time looking up stray bits of information or trivia that you really didn’t need to know in order to get on with your life. For all I know, that is what you are doing right now while stumbling onto this weblog.

Maybe you typed in a search for “police” or “investigation.” Or maybe your mind delved into the gutter and you worked the word “sex” into your phrasing for a search engine.

If you did that, I would guess that you are very disappointed right now, because this particular commentary is not going to give you titillating details about anything.

THE PROBLEM IS that police officers using the department’s computers have access to more detailed information than we’re going to be able to get on our own personal computers. There’s always the risk of some crucial detail somehow getting out – even inadvertently.

FOP officials may think it wrong to restrict what one is able to access on a department computer. But perhaps we have bigger problems to consider.

This is a particular situation to consider when it comes to police because law enforcement is so much more computerized these days. Just about every squad car these days has a lap top computer installed with proper hookups so that officers can get tons of personal information that could be of use to them while also being able to take a lot of physical abuse (as I once heard a computer salesman tell a suburban police department, his system was designed to operate even while riding over railroad tracks and pothole-filled roads AND with multiple cups of coffee being spilled onto the keyboard).

In this case, it seems we have some bored police officers who wanted to know “the skinny” on the case that cropped up in the news about a month ago – where a 22-year-old woman says she was stopped by two Town Hall District (near Wrigley Field) officers riding around in a marked SUV (making it clear that it was a Chicago Police Department vehicle), was forced to play “strip” poker in her home, and also coerced into having sex with the police both in the vehicle and in her residence.

CRIMINAL CHARGES HAVE not been filed against the officers, but both have been suspended while that incident is being investigated.

Now, Internal Affairs has to do another investigation on top of that – one to determine if this is just a case of cops who wanted to read a titillating detail or two, perhaps about an officer they knew or maybe just because there was nothing else to do at that moment.

Or do we have a more serious abuse of authority here? Is the “misuse of department equipment” so bad that discipline is going to have to be handed down?

Not that such discipline is going to be that severe. News accounts of the Internal Affairs memo sent out last week to everybody in the police department indicates that officers could receive a written reprimand that would stay in their records for one year. After which, it would be removed and forgotten.

WHICH MEANS THAT police officers might well have to learn the lesson that many of us have learned the hard way about using computers – don’t go looking up anything that you wouldn’t want someone else to know you’re seeing.

Because, inevitably, they WILL find out. They always do.

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Should police get to shoot so much video? Does it really make us more secure?

Illinois has some of the toughest laws in the nation when it comes to taking pictures or shooting video of police in action. Depending on the specifics and the mood of the officers at the scene, it can be construed as a felony offense to whip out that video camera to catch moving pictures of our police at work.

Which is why it comes off as hypocritical to listen to law enforcement types rant about how much they need to have those cameras installed on lamp-posts and buildings all over the city – creating the impression that “someone’s watching you” at all times.

THE AMERICAN CIVIL Liberties Union on Tuesday issued a report that asks city government to quit installing new cameras until such a time that rules concerning the use of video from the existing cameras are devised.

While they offer up no specifics of wrong-doing in Chicago, the ACLU cites problems in other cities that have occurred when police got carried away with the cameras and the resulting pictures. The invasions of privacy can be extreme, the ACLU argues.

The reaction from police and city officials in Chicago is all-too-predictable. It amounts to a big fat, “Drop Dead!” to the ACLU.

Fourteenth Ward Alderman Edward Burke went so far as to tell the Chicago Sun-Times that the police cameras are “one of the most effective tools in law enforcement today,” while also claiming that the cameras are “very popular” with Chicago residents.

I DOUBT THAT.

I suspect that many people think of the cameras the same way the police themselves seem to react every time they discover someone is shooting video of themselves.

The laws that make it a crime to take pictures of the police in action were a knee-jerk reaction to the proliferation of devices capable of taking pictures. Someone whipping out their cellular telephone to capture an image of a cop?

My primitive cellphone takes such dumpy looking pictures that I would never envision using them for anything. But I’m also aware the newest generation of devices are capable of coming up with clearer images.

THE PEOPLE WHO argue on behalf of such laws claim it amounts to police harassment, almost as though someone expects a law enforcement officer to behave at a higher standard than the rest of us.

Actually, they are. Or they ought to be. I can’t help but think the people who like such laws merely don’t want to be forced to look whenever a cop screws up on the job – which is something that ought to be public. The police are supposed to be there to protect, not to harass (yes, you can insert your favorite Richard J. Daley line about the police “preserving disorder”right here) the people.

It makes me wonder how many people think back to those images from the early 1990s of Rodney King being beaten by police officers in Los Angeles, believing that the only thing “wrong” with that situation is that those cops should then have turned on the person shooting the grainy video and beaten her senseless too.

Or, closer to home, that bartender who was beaten a few years ago by an off-duty Chicago cop, only to have a private security camera capture the whole incident.

YET PUT CONTROL of the cameras into the hands of the police, and they don’t seem to mind such video. Perhaps because attorneys for the city will engage in lengthy court battles to keep incriminating shots private, and let only the carefully chosen shots that make them look at their best to ever be seen publicly.

Aside from the whole idea of the cameras being an invasion of privacy, I actually have a bigger objection to them – the fact that they may well create the illusion that we’re somehow more safe with having all those cameras in place.

A camera doesn’t somehow magically come to life and make an arrest, or use the physical force that might be necessary (I do accept the premise that there are certain limited circumstances when a police officer is justified in using force) at a crime scene to restore order.

For that, you need actual people in uniform in the neighborhoods. All a video camera will do is capture grainy images of crime taking place while no police officers were on hand to stop it.

CITY OFFICIALS CLAIM that cameras provided images that resulted in more than 4,500 arrests during the past five years – which the ACLU rightfully says is less than 1 percent of the arrest total in Chicago.

Which makes me think the only thing those cameras might actually accomplish is creating the illusion throughout the neighborhoods that someone is watching, while in reality the chances of a person committing a criminal act being caught are about the same as they always were – largely dependent on the lack of intelligence of the would-be criminal themselves.

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