Chicago’s 47th annual gay pride parade was disrupted several times by the usual city disruptions — gang activity, gunshots, and drunks — but the event was also disrupted by a car driving into a group of bystanders. Then there was an even larger interruption by “black lives matter” protesters.
Just about every Chicago parade these days features gunfire in the perimeters as gangs clash with police and drunks have probably been a parade disruption since forever. But this year a man tried to drive into the parade route, ramming his car into some bystanders — but not hurting anyone seriously.
Police swarmed the vehicle, smashed in the rear window and yanked out the driver, a middle-aged white man, and arrested him. Chicago police have released no details on the man’s identity nor his motivations for ramming the barricades for the parade.
But by far the biggest disruption was from a large group of “black lives matter” protesters. The group was joined by members of the black queer community of Chicago who announced the disruption on their website.
After noting that they had “purposefully disrupted the Chicago Pride Parade,” the queer group explained their reasoning.
“We do so,” the group said, “because our people are dying at the hands of police, military and state-funded militias around the globe. We do so because we refuse to be tokenized by the same corporations that sponsor state violence, refuse a living wage and profit off our poverty. We do so because young queer people need a better outlet to celebrate themselves than a mire of consumption and sexual violence.”
The queer group was also attacked by the “black lives matter” protesters who held signs and walked as a group to push their own message.
Hundreds, mostly white people have gathered around the US Embassy in London, condemning the grand jury verdict not to charge US white police officer who killed African-American teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, BBC reported Thursday.
The Stand Up To Racism and London Black Revolutionaries Group organized protests around the US Embassy in London, condemning the grand jury verdict over Darren Wilson, a police officer who shot an African-American teenager in Ferguson.
According to the news agency, the protest campaign was organized by Stand Up To Racism and London Black Revolutionaries Group.
The vigil is intended to raise protest against non-indictment verdict for the US police officer Darren Wilson, which was delivered by the grand jury in Ferguson on Monday, the statement on the Stand Up For Racism official website says. The statement adds that the US jury’s decision comes on the day of similar incident in Cleveland, where a policeman shot dead 12-year-old African-American Tamir Rice, who was carrying a toy gun.
The court decision not to charge Wilson over the August 9 shooting has led to a wave of protests across the United States, raising issues of race discrimination and police brutality within the US law enforcement system. Demonstrations took place in 38 US states, Washington DC and over 170 other US cities on Tuesday.
While the events down in Ferguson play out, back in Chicagoland the same old killing fields continue day in and day out with nary a peep. In the 107 days since officer Darren Wilson shot and killed 18 year old Michael Brown – 12:03pm, Saturday, August 9th – the following stupidity has taken place in Chicago:
155 homicides (74% black males)
725 shot & wounded
Six (6) 18 year olds killed: Kawantis Montgomery, Kamaal Burton, Tony McIntos, Alexandra Burgos, Rayvon Little, Johnathan Cartwright
59 18 year olds shot & wounded
29 teenagers (13-19) killed
244 teenagers (13-19) shot and wounded
10 shot (5 killed) by the CPD
2 teens – 17yo Laquan McDonald & 19yo Roshad McIntosh – shot & killed by the CPD
9yo Antonio Smith was executed.
3yo Donnell Coakley killed by his mother
Brutal, yet incredibly asinine and absurd to say the least.
So what is it about these stats that hasn’t caused people to lose their collective shirts?
After all, there have been plenty of opportunities to march, chant, throw brics, break stuff, come up with a hashtag, etc… in the past few months, not only in Chicago, but all over the nation. So where is the US national media? The cable news talking heads? The race pimpin’ super duo of Jesse [Jackson] and Al [Sharpton]? The professional agitators and social justice warriors? The exploiting politicians? Almost 900 shootings and homicides in the past three months and not one is worthy of their attention.
Someone once said “never let a crisis go to waste”. Apparently these stats aren’t scary enough.
Think about that for a moment. More than 500 murders in 2012, and approximately 150 so far this year. 75% of the victims are Black. And most of it is Black on Black violence. Gang violence. Drug related violence. Crimes of passion. Crimes of opportunity.
While Chicago may not have the highest murder rate in the nation, it has the highest gross number of murders.
Strangely the black community expresses neither outrage nor angst over the level of violence in Chicago, home to Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey.
Especially since so many of the victims are people of colour. But just try to talk about slavery from hundreds of years back and see the wild response.
Is the victim’s race less important than the race of the perp?
It’s always dangerous to put too much value into government statistics. Even when it comes to murders, which you would think would be difficult to hide, the numbers can be manipulated.
Matthew Yglesias writes:
The big problem with making murders disappear (apart from it being illegal and immoral) is that, compared to other crimes, it’s much more likely that you’ll be caught. For example, Patrick Walker was found injured and unresponsive in a crashed automobile, taken to a hospital where he died, then during an autopsy they found a gunshot wound in his head and a bullet casing in the back seat of the car. Owing to the fact that he was clearly shot and killed, this was filed on his death certificate as a murder. But the Chicago Police Department has classified the case as a death investigation, making it disappear from their stats.
Chicago Magazine reports:
On October 28, a pathologist ruled the death of Tiara Groves a homicide by “unspecified means.” This rare ruling means yes, somebody had killed Groves, but the pathologist couldn’t pinpoint the exact cause of death.
Given the finding of homicide—and the corroborating evidence at the crime scene—the Chicago Police Department should have counted Groves’s death as a murder. And it did. Until December 18. On that day, the police report indicates, a lieutenant overseeing the Groves case reclassified the homicide investigation as a noncriminal death investigation. In his writeup, he cited the medical examiner’s “inability to determine a cause of death.”
That lieutenant was Denis Walsh—the same cop who had played a crucial role in the alleged cover-up in the 2004 killing of David Koschman, the 21-year-old who died after being punched by a nephew of former mayor Richard M. Daley. Walsh allegedly took the Koschman file home. For years, police officials said that it was lost. After theSun-Times reported it missing, the file mysteriously reappeared.
But back to Tiara Groves. With the stroke of a computer key, she was airbrushed out of Chicago’s homicide statistics.
The change stunned officers. Current and former veteran detectives who reviewed the Groves case at Chicago’s request were just as incredulous. Says a retired high-level detective, “How can you be tied to a chair and gagged, with no clothes on, and that’s a [noncriminal] death investigation?” (He, like most of the nearly 40 police sources interviewed for this story, declined to be identified by name, citing fears of disciplinary action or other retribution.)
Was it just a coincidence, some wondered, that the reclassification occurred less than two weeks before the end of the year, when the city of Chicago’s final homicide numbers for 2013 would be tallied? “They essentially wiped away one of the murders in the city, which is crazy,” says a police insider. “But that’s the kind of shit that’s going on.”
For the case of Tiara Groves is not an isolated one. Chicago conducted a 12-month examination of the Chicago Police Department’s crime statistics going back several years, poring through public and internal police records and interviewing crime victims, criminologists, and police sources of various ranks. We identified 10 people, including Groves, who were beaten, burned, suffocated, or shot to death in 2013 and whose cases were reclassified as death investigations, downgraded to more minor crimes, or even closed as noncriminal incidents—all for illogical or, at best, unclear reasons.
Watch the white middle class of Chicago vanish before your eyes.
It shows the demise of the foundation of an American city.
Watch as the grey squares, which illustrate the middle class that dominated the most of the city’s neighborhoods in 1970s, quickly vanish over 40 years.
The poor, represented by the orange and red colors, explode across the map.
And watch what happens in the green areas representing the upper middle class and wealthy. Not surprisingly, it spreads from downtown to the north side, but not with the same ferocity as the reds and oranges.
Especially in 2000, the greens-the color of money–grow much darker. It seems the rich simply got richer. In later years, the wealthy pushed the poor out of the near West Side. It appears that area bypassed the middle.
Newt Gingrich appeared on Candy Crowley’s State of the Union with Democratic Congressman Bobby Rush.
Throughout the 1960s, Rush was involved in the civil-rights movement and worked in civil-disobedience campaigns in the Southern United States. After co-founding the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers in 1968, he served as its “defense minister”. Rush has made statements saying “We needed to arm ourselves” and referring to the police as “pigs”.
He is U.S. Representative for Illinois’s 1st congressional district, serving since 1993. The district is located principally on the South Side of Chicago with its population percentage being 65% African-American, higher than any other congressional district in the nation.
A member of the Democratic Party, he holds the distinction of being the only person to defeat President Barack Obama in an election, as he did in the 2000 Democratic primaries.
NEWT GINGRICH: This fits perfectly with what I was going to say earlier. You have a congressman — and I respect Bobby Rush. You have a congressman who represents the most violent city in America. You have a congressman who represents the city in which over 500 people were killed last year, 74 percent of them African-American. You have a congressman who represents the city which is 80 percent of the killings, according to police, are by gangs. Gangs have increased — let me finish. Gangs have increased by 40 percent since this president was elected. There is no federal program to stop it. No one wants to have an honest conversation about it. And so you have a congressman whose own district is bleeding, who puts on a hoodie as a symbolic act, but he doesn’t do anything about the gangs in his own district.
REP. BOBBY RUSH (D-IL): Wait a minute.
CROWLEY: Hang on. First of all, congressman, let me let you —
RUSH: That’s a charge, Newt, that is not going to hold, doesn’t hold water. I have been working relentlessly since I’ve been in Congress, even when you were the speaker of the House and didn’t want to hear any of these matters. I have been working on trying to deal with this violence. I’m astounded and ashamed about this violence. But this is also systemic to an overall problem. Chicago will take care of this violence. That’s one of the reasons why on a Friday, the 26th, we’re having this National Summit on Urban Violence. This was before the verdict we had planned this. The congressional black caucus is coming into Chicago so that we can work on solutions to this problem.
Now, what I challenge you to, Newt, especially today, I want to challenge you and your Republican cohorts. Today is a Sunday. Today is a day of worship. We serve and worship the same God. In Michael 6:3 and 8, the words tell us that we should love justice, do mercy, and walk humbly with our God. Now, for those folks who are cheering the George Zimmerman verdict, I would challenge you and the rest of the, let us honor, and let us lift up the spirit of the words of Micah 6:8 to work together to have the conversation, but not just have the conversation. Let us deal with the disenfranchisement, and let us deal with the distortions as it relates to our nation.- Real Clear Politics
In the 20-day period of the George Zimmerman trial, four black minors – three teens and a five-year-old boy – were gunned down in Chicago, according to Homicide Watch Chicago, a Chicago Sun-Times publication, which details every murder that takes place in the city.
On June 28, five-year-old Sterling Sims was killed in a double murder that also claimed the life of his mother, 31-year-old Chavonne Brown. Both were shot in their apartment, and police believe the motive was robbery.
On July 1, 16-year-old Antonio Fenner was gunned down on the sidewalk next to the body of a 32-year-old man who had gang ties. No arrests were made, and no suspects have been named. Fenner’s mother believes her son was in the wrong place at the wrong time, because no one in her family knew the other victim or what Fenner’s association was to him.
On July 3, 14-year-old Damani Henard was murdered outside a high school. His body was found next a bicycle.
On July 9, 15-year-old Ed Cooper was shot and killed while spending time with friends at the park. A gunman got out of a black van and began firing as the boys ran away. Cooper was shot in the street and continued running to a vacant lot where he died.
Zimmerman was charged with killing Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager in Sanford, Fla., who was walking through a gated community on his way home from the convenience store. Zimmerman argued that he acted in self-defense.
The trial began on June 24 and ended on July 13 with Zimmerman’s acquittal. See more
Gun violence in the black city of Chicago is so severe that a state lawmaker wants state police and the National Guard to assist the local cops.
State Rep. Monique Davis (D-Chicago) is making the request.
“I am requesting with this press conference that Gov. Patrick Quinn order the Illinois National Guard (and) the Illinois State Police (to) come to Chicago and work with our mayor Ron (sic) Emanuel to provide safety for the children, especially,” she said at a news conference in Springfield.
Other state lawmakers accompanied Davis to recognize the severity of the problem, and the extent to which it carries beyond Chicago’s troubled neighborhoods to the entire city and other parts of the state, but not necessarily to concur with her solution.
Over the holiday weekend, 74 people were shot and 12 killed in Chicago, and Davis says the police don’t have the manpower to make arrests.
However, she said that if these state personnel are called in, a special commission must be set up to make sure they have clear orders on what to do each day.
“We don’t want them to have us fearing them also,” she said. – CBS
Karen Lewis of the Chicago Teacher's Union during a protest against the closure
CHICAGO (AP) — Tens of thousands of Chicago students, parents and teachers learned Thursday their schools were on a long-feared list of 54 the city plans to close in an effort to stabilize an educational system facing a huge budget shortfall.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel says the closures are necessary because too many Chicago Public School buildings are half-empty, with 403,000 students in a system that has seats for more than 500,000. But opponents say the closures will further erode troubled neighborhoods and endanger students who may have to cross gang boundaries to attend school. The schools slated for closure are all elementary schools and are overwhelmingly black and in low-income neighborhoods.
CPS officials say money being spent to keep underutilized schools open could be better used to educate students elsewhere as the district deals with a $1 billion budget deficit. About 30,000 students will be affected by the plan, with about half that number moving into new schools.
“Every child in every neighborhood in Chicago deserves access to a high quality education that prepares them to succeed in life, but for too long children in certain parts of Chicago have been cheated out of the resources they need to succeed because they are in underutilized, under-resourced schools,” said district CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett. “As a former teacher and a principal, I’ve lived through school closings and I know that this will not be easy, but I also know that in the end this will benefit our children.”
As word of the closures trickled out, parents and teachers reacted with anger and shock, some even crying. Sandra Leon said she got a tearful call from her grandchildren’s kindergarten teacher saying the school was on the list to be closed. Her two grown children also attended the school, and Leon wiped her eyes as she waited outside for her grandchildren.
“It’s been so good for our kids,” Leon said. “This school is everything.”
Chicago officials have moved to close schools in the past, but never anywhere near the number designated at one time by the Emanuel administration. Former Mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration spread school closings over a number of years. CPS, the nation’s third-largest school district, now has 681 schools.
Chicago is among several major U.S. cities, including Philadelphia, Washington and Detroit to use mass school closures to reduce costs and offset declining enrollment. Detroit has closed more than 130 schools since 2005, including more than 40 in 2010 alone.
The issue has again pitted Emanuel against the Chicago Teachers Union, whose 26,000 members went on strike early in the school year, idling students for seven days. It has also put Emanuel and Byrd-Bennett at odds with parents, civic leaders and lawmakers, who have blasted the pair during highly charged community meetings throughout the city and at a legislative hearing earlier this week.
Union President Karen Lewis criticized Emanuel, who is out of town with his family, for being on vacation on the day of the announcement. She called the closings “an abomination.”
“This is cowardly and it is the ultimate bullying job,” Lewis said. “Our mayor should be ashamed of himself.”
The vast majority of the 54 schools are in overwhelmingly black neighborhoods that have lost residents in recent years. Chicago’s black population dropped 17 percent in the last census as African-Americans moved out to the suburbs and elsewhere. The other few schools are majority Hispanic or mixed black and Hispanic. Overall, 91 percent of Chicago public school students are minorities.
Many of the schools identified for closure are in high-crime areas where gang violence contributed to a marked increase in Chicago’s homicide rate last year. The district plans to have community groups help students get to their new locations safely.
Among the critics is Eular Hatchett, who lives in the violence-plagued neighborhood of North Lawndale and walks her 13-year-old nephew DaVontay Horace to school.
“Our parents know about this area,” she said. “They don’t know about those other areas. If they send him way north or way south, I’m not going to do that. It’s too dangerous.”
Because some schools have more than one building, a total of 61 structures will be closed. In addition to the closures, students at 11 other schools will be “co-located” with existing schools. Six schools have been targeted for academic interventions known as “turnaround.”
CPS says the plan will save the district $560 million over 10 years in capital costs and an additional $43 million per year in operating costs.
The district plans to invest $233 million into what it calls the “welcoming” schools, or the buildings that students in closed schools will be moving to. Those funds will be used for air conditioning, upgraded technology and security and to ensure every school has a library.
District officials said they couldn’t calculate how many teachers will be laid off as a result of the cuts because school leaders will make decisions about their own budgets.
Many teachers and parents expressed anger and frustration at how the news of the closures trickled out, leaving some to agonize over rumor and conjecture.
“In a word, the approach was brutal. It’s certainly not deserved by these parents and these kids,” said Mary Visconti, the director of the Better Boys Foundation, a youth organization in the Lawndale neighborhood.
At Lafayette Elementary, where 95 percent of its 483 students come from low-income families, teacher Rosemary Maurello said the principal read teachers a letter from the district Thursday morning saying the school is among those it plans to close. The letter said a final decision would be made in May after more community meetings are held and budget plans are reviewed.
But Maurello said letters and information packets were already being sent to parents and the district’s message to teachers included a mention of specific plans to move the Lafayette students to another school about 10 blocks away.
“It sounds like a done deal to me,” Maurello said.
With still a few days to go until the new year, 40-year-old Nathaniel T. Jackson became the five-hundredth person killed in Chicago, Illinois since the start of 2012.
In 2011, the city saw only 435 homicides.
Superintendent Garry McCarthy confirmed to the Chicago Tribune late Thursday night that the passing of Mr. Jackson marked murder number 500 for the Windy City, and that no suspect had been identified by the police at that point. On Friday afternoon, though, the department issued a statement to the press reclassifying a death earlier in the week as being still under investigation. With that update, the slaying of Jackson makes him one murder shy of the 500 mark, but with a homicide rate of more than one per day, that milestone is expected to be met before 2012 comes to a close.
Discussing the grim news on Friday, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said it was “an unfortunate and tragic milestone, which not only marks a needless loss of life but serves as a reminder of the damage that illegal guns and conflicts between gangs cause in our neighborhoods.”
Emanuel, a former Obama administration staffer known like the president for his staunch pro-gun control stance, condemned the National Rifle Association earlier this month after the NRA’s vice president asked for armed guards in every school across America.
“That is not the right answer for our society, our schools and most importantly our children,” Emanuel said.
Even as adamantly opposed to guns on the streets as Emanuel is, however, the mayor has a seemingly impossible task of turning around a surge in violent crimes as murders have skyrocketed under his administration. According to the police statistics provided to the Tribune, “homicides were up 17 percent over last year in Chicago, and shootings had increased by 11 percent.”
All the way back in June, Roseanna Ander of the University of Chicago Crime Lab warned The Daily that Chicago was already on the path to having a particularly bloody year.
“Violence has always been most pronounced on summer weekends in Chicago,” Ander said, adding, “One likely factor is the warmer-than-usual weather and the early spring. Over 80 percent of shootings occur outdoors and in public places.”
Ander’s prediction proved right, and as the summer months progressed matters were only made worse. In late August, 19 people were shot in a single evening in Chicago. It may have been a big number at the time, but was only a few shots beyond what the city saw months earlier.
“Over the Memorial Day weekend, in a 72-hour period, we had 12 people killed and another 45 people shot.” WBEZ Chicago Public Radio host Robert Wildeboer told National Public Radio during a July 10 interview.
“Thirteen people were shot in one 90-minute stretch, and so that’s really focusing public attention on this issue right now,” Wildeboer added. “You know, just last night, eight people were shot in the city of Chicago. But some of the numbers were just so shocking, A, that murder’s up 40 percent over last year. B, there have been a number of really violent weekends in Chicago where the numbers are just so striking, everybody’s just, like, what in the world?”
The last time Chicago saw this many deaths in a single year was 2008, when 512 people were killed. Meanwhile in New York, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly says the murder rate in the Big Apple is down nearly 19 percent in 2012.
“I’m thankful for the fact that this year there will be the lowest number of murders that we’ve had since we started to record them in 50 years, even though the population is as high as it’s ever been,” Kelly tells reporters this week.
On Wednesday, hosts at MSNBC informed America that the words “golf” and “Chicago” are racist, especially if they are used while speaking of Barack Obama.
Newsbusters’ Rusty Weiss reported early Thursday morning that while covering the GOP convention, Chris Matthews “came to the conclusion that reminding people of the President’s roots in Chicago politics is racist.”
The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson set the tone of the exchange.
“It’s all part of this Barack Obama as ‘other’ sort of blanket campaign that has been waged by the Republican Party for some time now. It may be gaining some traction now, though I wonder why now as opposed to a bit closer to election,” he said.
“Yea, well let me ask you about that, gentleman,” Matthews responded. “What about now, is this constant barrage of assaults, saying the guy is basically playing an old game of demagoguery politics, where you take the money from the worker bees and give it to the poor people to buy votes. That’s basically what they’re charging him with. Old big-style, big-city machine of 50 years ago.”
“They keep saying Chicago, by the way, you noticed?” he asked.
“Well, there’s a lot of black people in Chicago,” said New York Magazine’s John Heileman.
The same day, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell claimed that a reference to Obama’s golf outings was also racial code.
“For four years, Barack Obama has been running from the nation’s problems, he hasn’t been working to earn re-election. He has been working to earn a spot on the PGA Tour,” Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said.
Naturally, O’Donnell saw racism in the remark.
“Well, we know exactly what he’s trying to do there. He is trying to align to Tiger Woods and surely, the — lifestyle of Tiger Woods with Barack Obama,” he said.
Martin Bashir, another MSNBC host, asked O’Donnell to clarify his remarks.
“Lawrence — don’t you think — don’t you think that what he’s really trying to do is to suggest that the president is not paying attention to the central issues that come with the responsibility he has?” Bashir asked.
“Martin, there are many, many, many rhetorical choices you can make at any point in any speech to make whatever point up want to make. If he wanted to make the point that you just suggested and I think he does want to make that point, they had a menu of a minimum of ten different kinds of images that they could have raised,” O’Donnell said.
“And I promise you, the speech writers went through, rejecting three or four before they land order that one. That’s the one they want for a very deliberate reason. That — there’s — these people reach for every single possible racial double entendre they can find in every one of these speeches,” he added.
“You really believe that about Mitch McConnell?” Bashir asked.
“I know these people are insensitive. I know the speechwriters are insensitive. I know the way they work. They do not have the same sensitivity level that other speechwriters do. But when you get to the Tiger Woods reference, there were people in the speech writing room, I know this, without a shadow of a doubt, who said wait a minute, do we really want to go there?” O’Donnell responded.
“The singular focus of MSNBC for the past six days has been racism. There’s one subject that they’re talking about: racism. The racism of Romney; the racism of Ryan; the racism of every speaker the convention; the racism of the Republican Party; the racism of every Republican and conservative. It’s all they’re talking about. It’s laughably hilarious, except to them,” he said.
Limbaugh went on to say the network is “nothing more than an arm” of the Obama campaign.
“Their charge they’ve been given is to run around on TV and to say that everything every Republican is saying is racist. Because they don’t have anything else. It really demonstrates the depths to which they have descended,” he added.
Townhall’s Katie Pavlich noted that Obama “refers to Chicago often in his own speeches.” By Matthews’ own “logic,” that would make him a racist.
Rep. Allen West (R-FL) said that perhaps Matthews has “gotten off of his medications.” West also wondered what other cities he was not allowed to speak of.
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