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| EMANUEL: Legacy??!? |
It’s
not that I think Emanuel is above blame. It’s just that I think it a bit
simple-minded to believe that removing Rahm in any way resolves the situation
or fixes the problem that our society has with regards to the police and the
way they perceive many non-white people.
MY
OWN ATTENTION is focusing more on the legal battle that will take place in the
courts concerning Jason Van Dyke, the police officer who last week learned he
was indicted by a grand jury on six counts of murder for the death of Laquan
McDonald.
You
can fire all the police officers and remove all the political people you want.
But if Van Dyke winds up being acquitted of those criminal charges, that will
be the ultimate blow to the activists. They want to dump the status quo – where
the problem lies within the very culture we have created for our law
enforcement.
To
me, the people who are now shouting the loudest to dump Rahm Emanuel seem like
the same people who were screaming during the election cycle earlier this year –
but weren’t numerous enough to actually defeat him at the ballot.
They
come across like sore losers who could never defeat Emanuel when he ran for
those Northwest Side congressional seats or mayor in the past. By having people
disrupting Rahm appearances with screams of “16 shots” (the number of bullets
supposedly fired into McDonald’s corpse), they come across as ghoulish sorts
who are trying to take advantage of a teenager’s tragic death for their own
purposes.
THAT
IS SOMETHING I just can’t get into. It has pushed me into appearing to be in
the Emanuel camp – even though I can appreciate the degree to which the police
department’s management is under the control of the mayor.
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| WASHINGTON: Does he also draw blame? |
But
if we’re going to blame Rahm, we also have to blame both Daleys, Byrne,
Bilandic, Kennelly and probably every single person who has ever held the post
of Chicago mayor.
For
that matter, the list also should include Washington and Sawyer. For although
those African-American men picked African-American officials to head the police
department during their eras, they obviously were unable to rid our law enforcement
of the idea that they serve to protect us FROM the African-American segment of
our society.
Which
if we’re to be honest, is an attitude that we will see in police departments
across our country – although more pronounced in some communities than in
others. Thinking that picking a black man to be the new police superintendent
in Chicago isn’t enough to resolve the situation.
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| DALEY: Has Rahm matched 'shoot to kill' |
NOT
THAT I don’t doubt this will influence the legacy of Emanuel as our mayor. This
is going to be one of the issues for which his time as mayor will be
remembered.
Heck,
some people will want to go out of their way to think of it as the dominant
issue – just as their grandfathers likely are the people who think of Richard
J. Daley as nothing more than the mayor who gave the “shoot to kill” order to
police back in 1968 or enjoy hearing over and over Dick Daley’s verbal gaffe
that the police exist to “preserve disorder.”
It
may well be that the tension remains enough that Emanuel never does advance to
a higher-level political post.
Although
in all honesty, that is just the nature of the mayoral post. There is a reason
why Chicago mayors never go higher – and not just because most of them lack a
certain level of ambition for other levels of government that they believe
being Chicago mayor IS the ultimate post!
IT
AMUSES ME back to remembering when Emanuel tried to avoid taking the White
House chief of staff post because he enjoyed being a Congressman and had dreams
of someday becoming House speaker.
That
dream is so long dead and buried that I wonder if Emanuel himself ever wonders
if he should have been more stubborn and held out, rather than give in to Obama
and put himself on the track that led him to City Hall.
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