Keeping ‘em covered; will we have more hot, sweaty cops during summer?

Why do I suspect we’re going to see a lot more police officers in long-sleeved shirts while on duty, regardless of how hot the temperatures become.

This is my reaction to learning of the fact that the Chicago Police Department is implementing a new policy this week concerning tattoos.

SPECIALLY, OFFICERS ON duty aren’t allowed to show off any tattoos they might have.

They’re not going to be forced to have them removed. But they’re going to have to cover them up. Either with their uniforms, or with matching skin tone adhesive bandages or tattoo cover-up tape.

The order, according to the Chicago Tribune, was issued Monday, and takes effect Friday. No official explanation was given, but considering that it also makes mention of “conservative business attire” I suspect that someone in the higher ranks thinks of tattoos as being unprofessional in appearance.

Perhaps they’re considered a bit thuggish. Almost as though tattoos ought to be on the people who get arrested by police, rather than by the law enforcement officers themselves.

I’LL HAVE TO admit that I find it a bit off-putting to see police officers with tattoos poking below their short-sleeve uniform shirts. It seems to go against the image that police try to create for themselves of a unified force of people.

Which may be why the top brass with the Chicago P.D. would want such a policy. Either that, or require all officers to have identical tattoos. That would probably create a bigger rebellion than the notion of having to cover up one’s tattoos.

Although I’ll also admit that the most heavily-tattooed police officers I have ever seen have been with certain suburban police departments.

And those officers won’t be impacted by this new policy. Perhaps it means that the Chicago officers who have a problem covering up their tattoos can go get jobs in those surrounding municipalities, where the need for qualified cops overrides a concern about appearance.
 

Let's hope Mayor Rahm never feels compelled

SO WHAT SHOULD we think about this new policy? Which also has a provision for headgear – no stocking caps or ball caps, even if they bear the Chicago Police Department logo. Be honest, a ball cap on anything other than a ballplayer during a game does look ridiculous. Think New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in that recent photo from a charity ballgame in New York photo.

I’m sure some people are going to rant and rage about how this policy hits at what little individuality an officer might try to express. They also will complain about how monitoring an officer’s cap or tattoos does nothing to make them behave more professionally while on the job.

In fact, there already is (anonymous, of course) Internet commentary saying that officials ought to be more concerned about police brutality than about officer tattoos.

Although I’m not convinced about the latter. There are some people who manage to make it through the police hiring process even though they have character flaws that make it likely they will use their law enforcement authority poorly. Some of society’s bullies wind up becoming cops – just like some wind up becoming crooks.

WHILE OTHERS WHO get into law enforcement are those who have some noble aspects of their character and use police powers to benefit our society. I’m sure that some of those people, particularly amongst the younger types who now are of age to apply for police positions, are tattooed.

So perhaps this is an issue that needs to be addressed, even though some people who want to complain about everything will now choose to rant and rage about this.

Such a policy may be needed because of the prevalence of younger people who felt compelled to get something drawn on their bodies in their youth (or the youth-like years that they’re refusing to give up on).

And as for those people who managed to get something put on their face? Perhaps those cops will have to go around with cover-up bandages, forevermore telling people that they “cut myself shaving” that morning.

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How many more mayoral “lasts” will Daley do during following two months?

When Chicago threw its official St. Patrick’s Day celebration (the one along Columbus Drive, not any of the neighborhood- or suburban-based festivals that will occur in upcoming days), we got the sight of Richard M. Daley serving as the parade’s grand marshal.

RICHARD M.: His last (fill in the blank).



In theory, that’s not a big deal. Daley has done the honors many times during his mayoral stint, as did his father, Richard J. The idea of a Daley presiding over the “Irish pride” parade ought to be as routine a happening as could occur.

IT OUGHT TO be evidence that city officials couldn’t find anyone better to do the honors I still remember the parade from a few years ago when then-President George W. Bush was grand marshal, and a few years before that when a film crew took images from the parade along Dearborn Street and worked them into the story line of the Harrison Ford film “The Fugitive.”

Yet one of the results of Rahm Emanuel decisively winning last month’s mayoral election and sparing us a runoff on April 5 is that we can now focus a significant part of our attention to the departure of Daley – who just a couple of months ago surpassed his father in terms of time spent in the position of mayor.

We got to see on Saturday Daley’s last St. Patrick’s Day parade as mayor. How many more “lasts” are we going to have to endure in the coming weeks before Emanuel is sworn in as mayor in early May?

He already presented his final budget proposal to the City Council, so as far as official business is concerned, Daley is merely treading water until the arrival of Emanuel on the Fifth Floor. Digging the city’s way out of the financial chaos it faces is Rahm’s problem.

I CAN’T HELP but wonder if Daley will find some excuse to make a public announcement for some municipal program that will benefit the Bridgeport neighborhood, which likes to claim Richard M. as one of their own – even though he and wife Maggie moved out of there over a decade ago.

The neighborhood that likes to claim to be the home of more mayors than any other neighborhood would like to have one last mayoral visit from Daley before he becomes ex-mayor and can officially forget he ever lived any further south of downtown than the South Loop neighborhood.

Let the denizens of the businesses along Halsted Street near 35^th Street have one last sighting of a “Mayor Daley” walking in their midst – even though the reality of the neighborhood today is a heavy presence of Chinese and Mexican ethnics, making the Irish ethnics of old a minority.

Or perhaps Daley could give us a more culturally sophisticated finale. How about an appearance at an event of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra? One last public appearance of “Maredaley, the younger,” putting on a tuxedo and trying to look sophisticated, with wife Maggie giving him a nudge if he happens to start snoring in mid-concerto.

IT’S NOT EVEN all classical music with the orchestra, which has an event scheduled for March 25 with jazz musicians Branford Marsalis and Terrence Blanchard.



WILLIAM: Still a Daley in D.C.



I can’t help but think that Richard M. Daley can concoct a reason to make one more out-of-town trip as mayor. If he’s really adventurous, he’ll find a reason to travel out of the country to try to expand Chicago’s international horizons – trying to convince the world that despite our Midwestern U.S. location, we’re not just a larger take on Indianapolis or a more well-scrubbed version of Detroit.



More likely, it will be one last mayoral trip within the United States. Possibly even Washington, where the “Daley” name will live on politically through brother William serving as chief of staff to President Barack Obama.

We’ll also have to have some sort of Daley sightings about town – giving him one last time to be seen there as mayor. Perhaps Millennium Park, that over-grandiose location downtown that never would have been done had Daley not had the ambition himself?

OR, IF DALEY really has some gumption, he’ll venture just a few blocks south and make one final trip as mayor to Northerly Island – the one-time site of Meigs Field. Will he have the nerve to remind people of the airstrip that was a political battleground in the 1990s – a fight that state officials won in the political process, but which Daley ultimately won through the power of the bull-dozer.

There is just so much potential everywhere we look for us to see opportunities for a last “Mayor Daley” sighting. The St. Patrick’s Day Parade will merely be the first “last sighting” that we will endure. The only real question will be how ludicrous and gaudy will the whole "last" thing become?

The one I’m most anxious to see involves baseball. Because while any potential Chicago Bulls basketball championship this season will come on Emanuel’s watch, Daley will still be mayor on Opening Day.

Will we get to see Richard M. marching to the pitchers mound at U.S. Cellular Field to throw out the “first pitch” of the season on April 7, when the Chicago White Sox play their first home game of 2011 against the Tampa Bay Rays. That would be a sight I’m sure many Sout’ Side Sox fans would enjoy.

ALTHOUGH PERSONALLY, I’D get a kick out of seeing Daley venture up to the Lakeview neighborhood for the Chicago Cubs season opener against the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Daley at a Cubs’ game may sound ludicrous to some. But when one considers that the Cubs open their season at home on April 1, I’d say April Fool’s Day is the perfect date for Daley to feign interest in what happens at the humble abode of one Elwood J. Blues.

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EXTRA: It’s all about appearances

During a criminal trial, prosecutors are going to toss out so many factual tidbits meant to make the defendant look like so much of a monster that the jury will feel it is their obligation to reach a “guilty” verdict.



YANG: With "jailhouse" hair?

Which is why defense attorneys often go to great lengths to make their client look like someone so unlike the person being described by prosecutors that perhaps the jury will think it is a case of mistaken identity – NO way that guy/girl could have done those heinous acts!

I GOT A first-hand reminder of such tactics during a trial I recently covered in Will County Circuit Court. The defendant, a 23-year-old barely-more-than-a-kid himself who faced aggravated DUI charges for an auto accident that killed a 5-year-old boy, was dressed up every day in a dark grey with blue pinstripe suit and high-collared dress shirts that covered up as much as possible the tattoos he had on his neck.

That outfit was complimented with a different tie every day of the two-week-long legal proceedings of varied colors and patterns that the jokes among the trial observers was that the defense attorney (who himself is a sharp dresser) was getting a chance to show off his whole collection of $200 ties.

Of course, the defendant had to dress in the courtroom, since he was being held at the county jail and was literally brought to the courthouse each day in his prison “blues” (if this were Cook County, it would be khaki) in chains.

But letting the jury see the defendant in chains and jailhouse garb would have been inappropriate. It would have created a prejudicial image against a man who is to be presumed innocent unless prosecutors can prove otherwise.

BUT IT SEEMS there are limits as to how far the courts will go to let a criminal defendant clean him/herself up to try to look like a “typical” human being.

The Chicago Tribune reported about the case of Marni Yang, who is on trial in Lake County Circuit Court. Prosecutors say she shot and killed a pregnant woman who was seeing the man whom she thought was her boyfriend – former Chicago Bears cornerback/safety Shaun Gayle.

According to the Tribune account, Yang on Monday showed up in court in a blue blouse and grey slacks with her hair worn on a pony-tail.

Prosecutors think they are ready to pick a jury of Yang’s “peers” to decide her legal fate. Yang’s attorneys wanted a day’s delay.

FOR THEY WANTED her to have her hair done properly – maybe something more reminiscent of her days as an aspiring fashion model. I guess jailhouse life in Waukegan is just so unconducive to maintaining style and fashion.

But a judge wouldn’t allow the delay. Which now has attorneys talking about legal appeal.

This case could wind up centering around whether or not prosecutors were unfair in allowing her to be seen in a courthouse setting (about as un-fashionable a place as one will ever see) with “jailhouse hair.”

Don’t laugh.

IT MAY SOUND trivial. But it can be these trivial points upon which a court case can collapse. As though a dead woman and an unborn baby are of less importance than what color her hair was at the time of trial.

Now I have covered court proceedings off-and-on for some two decades. I often have wondered just how significant all this staging of a defendant’s appearance truly was. Does it come across as too phony – as in, the jury sees through the act and realizes this person never dressed like that before in his life? Does it actually sway? I have never served on a jury, so I can’t say first-hand.

CONNER: Tattoo cover-up?

All I know is that in the most-recent trial I covered, the defendant, Cecil Conner, Jr., wore that sharp suit (that was starting to get rumpled from two week’s worth of daily wear) with a peach-colored paisley tie the day he took the witness stand on his own behalf, and wore a blue-ish, purple tie with orange trim on the trial’s final day.

Somehow, I don’t think it softened the blow for him when the judge twice said the word “guilty” in announcing his verdict to the courtroom, with sentencing scheduled in May.

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“Hicks in suits?” Blagojevich may be proof

I remember one of my former reporter-type counterparts who, when in one of his pissy, denigrative moods, decided to bad-mouth Chicago by saying the Second City was nothing more than a batch of “hicks in suits.”

“They dress a little nicer, but aren’t any different from the rest of the Midwest,” this person told me.

AT THE TIME, I wrote off his comment, based in part on the fact that he was a native of the St. Louis metropolitan area, which I figured put him too close to people of a Southern mentality to know any better.

But now, I hear all about now-impeached Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s wardrobe and the money he spent on fine clothes for himself and for first lady Patti Blagojevich, and I can’t help but think if my “pal” (whom I haven’t seen in over a decade) may have been on to something.

Personally, I always took Blagojevich’s very vocal love of Elvis Presley as evidence that his tastes didn’t exactly make him the most sophisticated of people. I would have thought with that hair that he was a “Beatles person” at heart.

But it did come as a shock to me to learn that the Blagojevich wardrobe had so much thought put into it.

BECAUSE MY DEALINGS with Blagojevich never gave me the impression of someone who considered himself a “beau brummel.” If anything, his physical appearance made me think more of someone who had moved up from wanting to be clad in denim and sweatshirts all the time to someone who didn’t completely mind wearing a tie.

Not that the ties I remember seeing him in appeared to be all that special. I wouldn’t have figured them for something bought at a gas station. But I truly was shocked by recent news reports that told of just how much money had been spent on them.

If anything, the Blagojevich I remember had the same appearance as many other local politicos – trying to dress a part that their personalities never were truly cut out for.

I realize that part of the key to being truly fashionable is not to be gaudy – which is a mistake that many people working their way up the economic ladder make. Flash is not synonymous with good taste.

TRUE FASHION OUGHT to be more along the line of clean and presentable, rather than garish. Illinois’ former governor always looked more nondescript, other than his hair – which was garish.

Blagojevich, in appearance, always struck me as someone who had moved up one step from the type of person who looked like an unmade bed, no matter what he wore. I would think that for the kind of money he was spending on his wardrobe, he would have moved several notches above that level.

Then again, perhaps some people just have their innate sensibility come through regardless of what they wear.

What brought up all this wardrobe speculation was the fact that federal prosecutors looking to put Blagojevich away in prison managed to bring it out during testimony in his government corruption trial about the nearly $400,000 (about half of his take-home pay for the six-year period he was governor) that was spent on clothes for Illinois’ one-time first couple.

IT WAS MEANT to make Blagojevich appear to be out of control, and out of touch with people who have to work for a living for incomes that would never allow them to afford certain brands of clothing, particularly the Oxxford suits that appear to have been Milorod’s preference. (A personal disclosure: my suits and jackets came from either “The Mens Warehouse” or “Burlington Coat Factory”).

I agree with those who claim that it truly is irrelevant, and is little more than a cheap trick on the part of the prosecution. Make certain elements that already are petty enough to want to dump on Blagojevich for any reason possible get all envious of his clothes, and it makes them even more willing to suspect that he must have done something wrong.

It is not a crime to dress well, or spend excessive amounts of one’s on-hand cash on their wardrobe. I wish this were a fact that could be ignored, although some people are bound to be influenced by it.

What gets to me is the way Blagojevich is taking all this.

HE SEEMS TO be proud of the fact that the fancy status of his wardrobe is now public information. How else to explain his wisecracks to reporter-types covering his trial, asking them on Tuesday “how’s the suit?”

I guess he figures now we know he was a fashionable high-roller, even though many of us never would have guessed it merely by looking at him. The Blagojevich persona managed to overcome the appearance. We knew we weren’t in the presence of a true fashion palate.

If anything, we sensed that we were in the presence for a few years of the ultimate Elvis-loving “hick” in a suit.

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Are cornrows truly that subversive to athletic ideals? Or is it just hair?

All too often, I read and hear rhetoric from people who claim our society would be better off if we emphasized our so-called commonalities instead of our individuality – particularly when it comes to racial or ethnic differences among us.

Of course, what that usually means is that the person in question views themselves as the ideal, and thinks everybody else ought to conform to their way of thinking.

I SEE THAT as being part of the problem with an incident last month at a Rush Street nightclub where college kids from St. Louis were denied admission because the club’s officials did not approve of their attire (which might have been hip-hop inspired, but is often seen these days on youth of all races).

It also is, in my opinion, at the heart of an incident at a junior high school in Portage, Ind. A 13-year-old boy (who is black) wants to play basketball for the Willowbrook Middle School team, and has the ability to do so.

But The Times of Northwest Indiana (a newspaper based in nearby Munster) reported recently that he has been threatened with being cut from the team because of his hair.

The coach in question is one of those who has a dress code governing the appearance of his athletes. And one of the rules is that the athletes cannot wear their hair in braids.

IN THIS PARTICULAR case, the 13-year-old wears his hair in that style seen among some African-American people known as cornrows. His parents told the newspaper that they consider such a hairstyle to be a cultural issue. They say the boy’s grandfather and great-grandfather wore their hair in similar ways.

Hence, the boy does not plan to change his hair. His parents support his decision.

Now before those of you who are ideologically inclined to believe that black people usually make too much out of such incidents start sending me messages telling me of the importance of a coach instilling discipline among his athletes – even down to such small details as appearance – let me say I agree with you.

I can understand the idea of teaching young athletes that a neat appearance shows that one takes care of oneself. That is an appropriate lesson, particularly when dealing with kids as young as the ones on this team.

BUT I CAN’T help but think this particular coach has his cultural ideals too far in the past. I suspect his rule about “no braids” was set out of an idea that only girls would want to wear their hair in braids. It certainly isn’t from any realistic idea of not permitting sloppy hairstyles on his ballplayers.

For my own opinion of men who wear their hair in cornrows is that it must take a lot of time and effort to maintain that particular hairstyle.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this particular boy spends more time caring for his hair and keeping it neatly braided and clean than any of his other would-be teammates.

So the idea that this boy is somehow violating a dress and appearance coded by being sloppy in his appearance is nothing more than absurd.

IT IS MORE due to a coach who imposed these rules when he got the job at the middle school three years ago. He justifies them by saying he has had the same dress and appearance code in place everywhere else he has coached for the past 22 years.

It strikes me as a coach whose idea of appearance is Anglo in nature, even though it doesn’t prevent him from having black athletes (like most coaches he wants to win, so he wants the best ballplayers regardless of race) on his team. But his tolerance only goes so far as their willingness to comply with his Anglo-inspired image of an athlete.

So where do we go from here?

Willowcreek’s workouts are expected to start seriously this week, and school officials say they support their coach. Meanwhile, the boy’s parents have retained an attorney.

HE’S NOT THREATENING a lawsuit. Not yet, anyway. But he has told reporter-types that the school’s conduct is disrespectful of the boy’s heritage and culture.

So this situation has the potential to become incredibly ugly unless calmer heads prevail.

But whenever we as a society start making judgments about people based primarily on appearance, it means that calmer heads are being deliberately ignored.

It is what happened at Original Mother’s in Chicago (which at least issued an apology to the college kids in question) and it is happening again at Willowcreek. It likely will happen again very soon, possibly in your neighborhood. That is why it is wrong for people to want to downplay such incidents as somehow being freak occurrences. They’re really all too typical.

THAT, I’M AFRAID, brings to my mind an expression I haven’t used since my own junior high days some three decades ago, but one that seems all too appropriate to describe these incidents today.

“It reeks.”

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