Body cams? Not good enough

It sounds like an intriguing idea – officers with the Chicago Police Department will start early next year wearing miniature cameras clipped to the front of their uniform shirts to allegedly provide greater awareness of what police officers do on the job.

Audio and video recorded by the cameras is meant to show the interactions that police officers have with the public. It is meant to reduce the feeling that police aren’t accountable for their behavior on the job.

AND YES, ANY activity captured on camera can, and will, be admissible in a court of law. In theory, it could provide indisputable evidence of what exactly a suspect did wrong to warrant police attention.

Groups such as the ACLU and the NAACP are among the supporters of such cameras, and I don’t hate the idea in theory. It’s just that I’m skeptical of the way these cameras will work.

Because they’re going to try to give us the police view of an incident, when I think we’d be better off getting the outside view.

Give me a camera shot that shows a police officer in action, instead of the officer’s view. I can envision instances where we’d be better off seeing what the officer did to provoke an outburst, rather than seeing an outburst in and of itself.

IF WE’RE GOING to use technology to try to make police more accountable, then let’s do it properly. Let’s train the cameras on the cops. Which is something that any legitimately-behaving police officer ought to welcome.

If they’re really doing nothing wrong, then they shouldn’t fear having a camera trained on them for the bulk of their eight-hour shift (no, I don’t want to see an officer in the process of taking a bathroom break during his shift).

If anything, we’d probably see the tedium of being a law enforcement officer, dealing with the hours of boredom intertwined with the seconds of sheer terror in which someone can get killed if anybody screws up!

Considering that the police are all too eager to have the ability to watch any of us in detail at a moment’s notice, we ought to support the idea of turning the tables. Not just because it’s totally proper to expect police officers to live up to a higher standard than the general public.

PERHAPS IF WE had such video out of Ferguson, Mo., we’d be more willing to accept the officer in question and his account that Michael Brown tried to hit him, thereby causing him to reach for his weapon and fire the shots that killed the 18-year-old.

Without it, there will always be those who are unwilling to accept the account (just as there are those who will always want to believe that certain people “get what they deserve” from police).

It will be interesting to see how this idea gets tested in Chicago. Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said Monday that local officers would begin wearing the recording devices in about 60 days, according to the Chicago Tribune.

But if we start getting too many incidents of officers whose portable cameras “just happen to malfunction” at key moments while on duty, it is going to create a level of distrust amongst the public.

THIS COULD BE a way of bolstering the level of trust we ought to place in our police department. We have a right to know more about what they do; they are city employees who work for a significant share of our local tax dollars.

But if this comes across as focusing too much on giving police another way to watch the public, it’s going to come across as a massive waste of those municipal funds.

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Rahm wants your vote come Feb. 27! He’ll do what’s necessary to get it!

It will be interesting to see the activity of the next few days as city officials scramble to try to impose a significant boost in the minimum wage; as Mayor Rahm Emanuel wants to have an accomplishment that can be used to appeal to the voters of Chicago who right now are inclined to want to dump him from office.

That accomplishment is an increase in the minimum wage paid by Chicago-based companies to up to $13 per hour by 2019. It would be a gradual increase implemented in coming years.

IT WOULD BE far more than the measures being pondered by the General Assembly in Springfield, which has hinted it might consider an increase from the current $8.25 per hour to $10. then to $11 by 2017. Which would make Chicago companies better paying for those who have to rely on minimum wage work to earn a living.

That has some political people concerned that the differential will harm business interests. It is why some are pondering that a state minimum wage increase ought to include provisions preventing any community in the state from imposing its own pay rate.

Yet Emanuel, in his struggle to try to appeal to less-than-wealthy Chicagoans living in places outside of the neighborhoods of the north lakefront, wants that $13 per hour increase -- even if it won't take effect until the very end of the upcoming mayoral term.

He wants to be able to boast about that as an accomplishment as he tries to undercut the appeal of mayoral challengers Jesus “Chuy” Garcia and Robert Fioretti to those working stiffs.

HE CERTAINLY DOESN’T want the political “yahoos” in Springfield to steal away that option from him. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if, should the General Assembly were to pass such a bill, outgoing Gov. Pat Quinn would sign it into law as a way of tweaking the egos of both Emanuel and Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner simultaneously!

The state Legislature comes back to Springfield Tuesday through Thursday for the remainder of its fall veto session, and state Sen. Kimberly Lightford, D-Maywood, has said the Legislature may act this week on the issue.

Which is why city officials last week scheduled a committee session to review a proposed minimum wage hike for Chicago come Monday. Then, on Tuesday, the full City Council will hold a special meeting – the sole purpose of which is to approve whatever gets recommended by the committee the day before.

Is it possible for the city to pass something before the General Assembly convenes Tuesday afternoon? Would the state try to pass something that they would claim circumvents Chicago’s ability to address the issue on its own?

WILL WE GET a lengthy legal fight over whose bill/ordinance will be allowed to prevail? Will there be bruised political egos, no matter what the outcome of the issue?

How much will Emanuel be willing to expend to ensure he prevails? Because while he can count on the same north lakefront support of people who in last month’s gubernatorial election were willing to vote for Rauner or not vote for governor at all, that isn’t enough to win a municipal election.

He wants to have credit for providing a higher minimum wage!

Just as he used his first campaign ads of the mayoral election cycle to take credit for the closings in recent years of coal-burning power plants in the Pilsen and Little Village neighborhoods.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL AND Latino activists who were involved with those efforts to reduce air pollution caused by those plants think that Emanuel was actually an obstacle to their efforts, which were ongoing long before Rahm became mayor in 2011.

But Emanuel wants to be on the side of “the people” and is willing to give himself a bit of praise; hoping that most of us weren’t paying much attention to know who did what.

He wants these “accomplishments,” just like he’s bound to seek many more in coming months as he tries to persuade a majority to believe that “Rahm II” won’t be a complete mistake for Chicago.

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Will pot replace numbers racket as source to fund public schools?

It was the early 1970s when our state created an official lottery game, and one of the selling points to encourage political people to vote for legalization of what was essentially the numbers racket of old was the notion that money raised by the lottery would be used to help fund public education programs across the state.

What wound up happening was that state officials wound up thinking they could take other sources of funding away from public school programs, on account of “all that lottery money” that allegedly was going to fund our kids’ education.

THESE DAYS, PEOPLE complain more than ever about the lack of support the state provides for education, which in reality has to rely on local property tax revenues to fund school operations.

Meaning people in wealthier communities with better schools complain they’re overtaxed. People in lower-income communities say they don’t get enough for their children to have the same opportunities as those in the previously-mentioned communities.

And many rural school districts complain that their isolation harms them all the way around.

All of this rhetoric is what came to my mind when I read a Chicago Sun-Times report quoting a Chicago attorney who is part of a group that wants to operate a cultivation center in a downstate Illinois community where marijuana would be grown.

THE POT GROWN on the property in Edgewood would be the product sold at distribution centers licensed by the state where people with a legitimate medical need would be able to purchase their marijuana.

Of course, there are those people who want to view the whole issue of “medical marijuana” skeptically – as some sort of ruse by which people will legalize a product that too many ideologues have desired to criminalize for decades.

Which is what leads attorney Jon Loevy to his current tactic; he told the Sun-Times that his business group – if they are given a license to operate a farm – would give at least half of its earnings to programs that benefit education.

So grandpa needing his marijuana-laced brownies to deal with his glaucoma? People can supposedly “get over” their mistrust by saying, “We’re looking out for the children.”

THE TRICK TO considering the procedure now is that the business entities that want to get into the medicinal marijuana business are far from actually opening their doors.

The state law that legitimized the concept says there will be 22 cultivation centers and 60 dispensary facilities across the entire state. More than 200 groups, including the one that Loevy is connected to, have applied for those licenses.

We’re now going through a process by which local governments are reviewing any proposals intended for their communities. A whole lot of City Councils and village boards are studying the talk, and deciding whether they want any such facility.

Then, the state has final say. And as assorted news reports have indicated, the state isn’t exactly coming forth with what their guidelines will be for deciding who actually gets to make money from production and distribution of marijuana without risking arrest by the local police.

SO I’M SURE a promise like the one made by Loevy could make his group stand out. For all I know, there could be other groups that follow the same lead.

It’s almost as though I can hear many dozens of Helen Lovejoys cropping up across Illinois, telling us in her Simpsons-like cry, “Won’t somebody please think of the children?!?”

Although I don’t have a clue as to how much money would wind up going for schools. Or what, exactly, they would be able to use it for. I’d only hope that before such talk of using medical pot funds for school kids goes too far, we give serious thought.

Otherwise, you just know a couple of decades from now, we’re going to hear protesters complaining, “What about all that drug money that’s supposed to help our schools?”

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What do we think about Obama’s efforts to force-feed immigration reform to infant-minded in our nation?

Watching the debate taking place these days concerning immigration reform brings to my mind the image of a whining, screaming baby, with Barack Obama reduced to the level of someone making “choo choo” train noises with a spoon to get the stubborn infant to eat their baby food.

I don’t doubt the sincerity of those people who are engaging in the loudest rants. But I can’t take too seriously their complaints that their food is “yucky” and “gross.”

BECAUSE THAT’S ABOUT the level of discourse the opposition to serious reform of the nation’s immigration policy has taken.

Perhaps that is why assorted polls don’t show overwhelming backing for the ideologue types who wish they could seriously impeach Obama, then convict and remove the president from office for daring to refuse to view the roughly 11 million undocumented residents of this nation as a scourge in need of eradication!

There is the poll conducted by Hart Research, which found some 67 percent of those questioned were supportive of Obama using his executive order powers to implement limited reforms without first getting Congressional approval.

Yes, much of that two-thirds support comes from those who identify themselves as Democrats, but 57 percent of those who call themselves independent and 41 percent of Republicans were backing Obama’s actions.

FOR WHAT IT’S worth, 47 percent of GOPers who don’t identify with the Tea Party activist movement think the president got it right. It’s mostly those hard-core ideological critics who are the whiners (64 percent in opposition) on this issue.

That particular poll was done for the Americans United for Change group, which may have its own agenda in wishing to show strong support for Obama’s response to the fact that Republicans in Congress have used all their efforts to thwart any reform efforts on the issue.

But others also show support for the action itself.

Take the poll done by CNN/ORC that showed 50 percent of those questioned thought Obama’s actions were “about right,” compared to 22 percent who thought Obama’s actions weren’t wide-ranging enough (some six million undocumented individuals will not be impacted).

ONLY 25 PERCENT were interested in condemning Obama for his actions; not that far off from the 28 percent who were critical of the president in the Hart Research poll.

Although the CNN/ORC poll also asked for what people thought of Obama’s tactic to get this issue past the Congressional opposition – which will intensify once Republican interests concerned with catering to the ideologue opposition.

Forty-one percent of the public were supportive, compared to 57 percent opposed – although only 16 percent said they were “angered” by the act. Most of the so-called opposition described their level of displeasure as being closer to apathetic than anything else.

In fact, some 60 percent of those questioned said they do not want a legal challenge in the courts by Republican interests to the immigration policy change. And 76 percent wish Congress would get off its collective duff and pass some sort of binding policy change.

IT ALSO IS interesting to see the poll by Latino Decisions that shows 95 percent of Latinos who identify as Democrat and 76 of Latinos who call themselves Republican view Obama’s actions favorably.

Yet Obama seems so fearful of triggering ethnically-motivated opposition that his strategy for touting his plan is to emphasize all the non-Latinos who also will be impacted.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported this week how Obama doesn’t want this to be perceived as a Latino benefit – even though the bulk of those who will be impacted have Latin American ethnic origins in their family trees.

I understand the concept of compromise in government as much as anyone else. But the point of immigration reform is to bring people out of society’s shadows – not to tell some people that they have to stay tucked away in the closet because of where they originate!

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Will Thanksgiving meal someday come at shopping mall food court?

My brother, Chris, and I plan to spend this holiday Thursday visiting our father and step-mother, who plan to visit her sister who lives in the Beverly neighborhood.


There will be assorted family and friends present – a typical-enough Thanksgiving holiday experience, I suppose.

YET THE PART that may make it the typical experience is the fact that I have been told my step-brother won’t be on hand to share in a turkey dinner. His absence is due to the newest trend of this day – he’s going to be shopping.

He wants to take advantage of all those sales specially scheduled for Thursday – the day before Black Friday.

Before anyone presumes I’m about to bad-mouth a family member, I’m not. For it seems that what really is happening is that all this holiday shopping is becoming more and more the norm for our society.

I’m wondering how long it will be before it is the people who insist on gathering together for a meal who will be considered the aberration on “Thanksgiving” day.

SO MUCH FOR the federal holiday that Abraham Lincoln approved as a day of thanks, based off the imagery of the pilgrims who settled in Massachusetts back in 1620.

Now, it’s a day to pay homage to the “god” that is Sam Walton, offering up all kinds of gadgets at his Wal-mart stores located everywhere in the country.

Now anybody who has read my commentary in the past knows I don’t think much of this trend. To me, the crowds that gather for the ritual big shopping days connected to the winter holidays are just too annoying to put up with.

I’ll be looking for the lulls in activity (as few and miniscule as they will be) to try to pick out gifts for the upcoming Hanukkah and Christmas holidays (I know people who celebrate each).

BUT NOT EVERYBODY feels the same. I have heard my sister-in-law go on and on about the joys of finding a special holiday price by being willing to put up with those same crowds that annoy me.

So the fact that many businesses are not waiting until early Friday to begin the holiday season (some stores literally are going to be open for the bulk of Thursday) made it so that I wasn’t surprised to learn my step-brother and his family will be amongst those shoppers.

My sympathy goes to the people who have to work at places like Best Buy, Target, Sears, Toys ‘r’ Us and other major chains who have decided to be open for business on Thursday. Any semblance of a ‘day off’ gets flushed away to help enhance the financial bottom line.

The shopping mentality even exists in Ferguson, Mo., the St. Louis suburb that has had some outbursts and vandalism in the wake of a local police officer being absolved of criminal responsibility in the shooting death of a black man.

THE ACTIVISTS WHO have been leading protests that have turned into some looting have threatened a more peaceful, but also more threatening to the financial bottom line, action – a boycott of any holiday shopping during the upcoming weekend.

Considering that retail operations go on about how this weekend is key to their level of profitability for the year, NOT shopping is harmful.

So maybe I can claim to be a revolutionary, of sorts, by not shopping Thursday or Friday. Although it would be an exaggeration of great significance. Maybe I’m just too lazy to trek out to the crowded stores and would rather gather with family for a communal meal.

As for my step-brother, I don’t know if he’ll ever read this. But since I likely won’t see him Thursday, I’ll just have to use this commentary to wish him a “Happy Thanksgiving,” and hope he found some special price that made the way worthwhile for him.

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Kelly to get more attention as observer than he would have got as candidate

One of the unofficial rules of reporting I have operated under is not to go about reporting on threats of lawsuits. If they’re serious, let them file the suit.

Perhaps we should have taken the same attitude toward William J. Kelly.

HE’S THE PUNDIT of a conservative ideological bent who during the summer went on and on about how he was going to run for mayor in the Feb. 24 elections. He went so far as to come up with $100,000 of his own money toward his campaign fund – which under state law blows the limits placed on the mayoral candidates to try to restrict campaign finances.

There’s just one thing. Kelly isn’t going to run for mayor after all.

Monday’s deadline for filing nominating petitions to get a place on the ballot came and went without Kelly being among the 10 candidates who plan to run for mayor.

He did issue a statement saying he plans to take the $100,000 in his “William J. Kelly for Mayor” fund and spend it to try to rebuild a Cook County Republican Party structure – which this year couldn’t even come up with token candidates to run for Cook County government positions in this month’s elections.

I DON’T KNOW how much $100,000 will help the party, which was so weak that it wasn’t able to do much of anything to bolster the recent election of Bruce Rauner as governor. The governor-elect had to rely on his own $27 million to get himself elected, without help from the political party whose label he used.

But it’s a start, I suppose. Perhaps it means Kelly can go about claiming he’s the head of the Chicago Republican Party, which reminds me of the old Mike Royko line about being the “tallest midget in the circus.”

He already was claiming that GOP leadership label, of sorts, on account of the fact that he would have been the only mayoral candidate willing to identify himself as a Republican.

Instead, we have 10 Democrats running for mayor – and the breakdown of candidates will be amongst those named “Emanuel,” those who hate the idea of an Emanuel mayorality, and those running because they wish to represent the interests of Chicago’s African-American population.

KELLY AS MAYORAL candidate would have got lost in the shuffle of candidates – particularly because the perception would be that he wouldn’t stand a chance of taking more than 1 percent of the Feb. 24 vote.

He certainly wouldn’t be amongst the Top Two candidates who would be in an April 7 election run-off – presuming that Emanuel (or any other candidate) can’t take a majority in February.

Not that being a Republican would have mattered in the mayoral election.

We in Chicago have had non-partisan municipal elections ever since the mid-1990s when the then-Republican dominated General Assembly approved the change away from political parties to overstep their authority over local matters.

JUST THINK HOW different the 1983 elections would have been if Harold Washington’s 36 percent of the vote had not been enough to win the Democratic nomination, but had merely qualified him for a run-off against Jane Byrne?

Kelly this year would have been as irrelevant as Bernard Epton would have been in ’83 under a non-partisan electoral system.

Which is why it makes sense for him to take his campaign money and try to invest it into building up an alternative political party – which on the surface is a completely noble goal. People are better off if they have choices on Election Day.

And Kelly may actually get a phone call or two of press attention in coming months as a local Republican big-wig, instead of being ignored completely as a mayoral fringe candidate.

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Ferguson, Mo.: No real surprise, so why the outrage about outcome?

I wasn’t surprised to learn Thursday night that Missouri authorities chose not to indict a suburban St. Louis police officer in the shooting death of an 18-year-old who happened to be black.

In terms of legal issues, the key to remember in dealing with cases involving alleged police abuse is that the law gives police officers the authority to use force and realizes there are going to be times when they screw up.

THE BURDEN OF proof in this case was literally on those who wanted to regard the death of Michael Brown, who was shot to death by Ferguson, Mo. police officer Darren Wilson, as an offense worthy of a charge of murder to prove that the officer virtually set out to kill the young man without any justification.

Merely showing that the officer over-reacted, or acted ineptly, was not good enough.

Which is why county Prosecutor Robert McCullough could say with a straight face Thursday night on national television that no crime took place, and that the people who were screaming for Wilson’s head were acting on bad information.

“It was speculation,” he said. “There was little if any solid information.”

WHICH MAY WELL be true. It is not uncommon in the confusion of a crime scene for details to get twisted about, for accounts to change, and for some people to later be found to be full of it when reviewing the stories they initially tell.

Yet I don’t doubt the sincerity of those hundreds of people who felt compelled to show up in Ferguson Thursday night to picket outside the police station in that suburb; to let it be known they’re sick and tired of having black people singled out for abuse by the people who supposedly are there to protect them.

Although I think in most cases of this type of law enforcement misconduct, it’s more a case of police having an apathetic attitude toward incidents where black people are involved.

Police didn’t care enough to figure out what kind of threat Brown – who allegedly tried to steal cigars from a store – might really be. So a stupid assumption resulted in the man’s death.

PEOPLE SEEKING A sense of “justice” in this case are going to have to settle for the fact that Ferguson municipal government is as cowardly when it comes to perceived wrongdoing as many other governments.

It seems that Wilson will lose his job as a police officer. He’s out of work. For the near future, his name is going to crop up in ways that will make him virtually unemployable.

Yet compared to what some people wanted to see happen, it won’t seem significant enough.

After all, Wilson is the guy who got married on Sunday (to a fellow Ferguson police officer) and had his name cleared (in a legal sense) on Monday.

NO TRUE BILL returned against him for a charge of murder, either first or second degree. Not even for manslaughter, voluntary or involuntary.

I’m taking the same basic attitude about this case that I take toward many stories involving courts and legal issues. I wasn’t there in Ferguson, so I don’t know first-hand what that grand jury heard to make them reach the conclusion that criminal charges would not be justified.

McCullough harped on that point, saying that only the grand jurors heard all the evidence and would know why they came to the conclusion they did.

Yet there was also speculation in the hours and minutes leading up to the Thursday night announcement that prosecutors overwhelmed grand jury members with information during the months they were in session on this case that their primary feeling these days is probably relief that the case is now over.

IT REMINDS ME of that stupid old cliché about the courts, the one that goes “A grand jury would indict a ham sandwich.” Implying that grand juries will do what they are told, because their outcome merely means a case goes to trial – where actual “guilt” or “not guilt” is determined.

McCullough clearly did not want the stink of a delicatessen on his hands. No ham sandwiches were prepared for indictment here.

Instead, our society gets the “stink” of the perception that officials were too eager to clear a police officer, while other people will go out of their way to ignore any thought that such a sentiment could ever occur.

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