BROKEN: Chicago’s criminal justice system flaws enable violent crime in Chicago.

Chicago seems unable to confront its violent crime problem.

The State’s Attorney’s office won’t charge or under-charges violent crimes dramatically.

Want an example?  From just last week, charging a gang-banging thug who stabbed a good Samaritan (puncturing a lung) with a misdemeanor.

Need another example?  How about the off-duty cop beaten unconscious.  Cops nabbed his attacker and guess what happened?

Charges dropped against man accused of attacking off-duty cop in Wrigleyville

(CWB) – Charges have been dropped against a man accused of battering an off-duty police officer who intervened in a Wrigleyville street disturbance on June 22. The officer was rendered unconscious in the attack.

One count of felony aggravated battery to a police officer against 29-year-old Tremaine Wilson was tossed out with a finding of no probable cause by Cook County Judge Marvin Luckman. The state then dropped a lesser charge of reckless conduct, according to court records.

Need another example?  A convicted dope seller out on parole is spotted by cops in what they believe was a drug sale.  Cops swoop in, thug resists arrest and a cop gets suspended for a well-timed, well-placed kick to the head as the suspect had his hands on another cop’s throat trying to strangle him.  The dope seller gets charges dropped and the cop that saved his fellow officer from death or great bodily injury is suspended.

It’s long, but it’s a great read on how nobody has street cops’ backs:  Not the inner city neighborhoods’ residents, not police administrators and not the State’s Attorney’s office.

That’s the Chicago Way: Drug Suspect Violently Resists Arrest, Released from Jail Without Charges

(PJ Media) – Years from now, it might be seen as the moment Chicago might have been saved but wasn’t. “They could have changed things,” people will say. “They could have stood up to the people bringing the city down.” But as it happened, there is little to do but wait to see how far into the deeper and darker abysses of Hell Chicago will descend.

The Chicago Tribune reports that 304 people have been murdered in the city so far this year, most of them by gunfire.  It also tells us that 1,784 people have been shot, revealing a deaths-per-shooting ratio that speaks well of the state of Chicago’s emergency medical care. (The figures are current as of Monday evening; both will surely be higher by the time you read this.) Large swaths of the city, mostly on the south and west sides, are dominated by street gangs that make the neighborhoods all but unlivable. The Tribune’s crime map of the Austin neighborhood, for example, has so many dots it resembles nothing so much as a petri dish blooming with poisonous spores. From April 30 to May 30 this year, Austin saw 193 violent crimes, including eight homicides and 78 robberies. A total of 35 people have been killed in Austin this year, more than one per week, putting it on track to surpass 2015’s already grim figure of 48.

Not far away is North Lawndale, where 12 people have been murdered so far this year, making it a nightmare when compared to most places but positively Edenic when compared to Austin. It was in North Lawndale last week that Chicago’s critical opportunity came, only to be squandered by the ignoramuses that run the city and its police department.

Playing the pivotal role in our sad tale is one Shaquille O’Neal. No, not the former NBA star; the Shaquille O’Neal of our story is 23 years old and a recent parolee from prison. On June 13, plainclothes police officers saw O’Neal engaged in what they took to be a drug transaction. When they tried to stop him, he ran, only to be caught in the 3900 block of West Grenshaw Street. Several people sympathetic to O’Neal were there, some of whom filmed the altercation on their cell phones. One of those videos was soon posted to Facebook. (Warning: coarse language.) What happened next followed the same tiresome script we have come to expect: Neighborhood thug gets caught breaking the law, resists arrest, gets roughed up on video, then is hoisted onto the martyr’s pedestal to be hailed as a hero and a symbol of the continuing black struggle against institutional racism and on and on and on.

Do not be fooled. There was nothing illegal or even remotely improper in the way O’Neal was subdued at the end of the foot pursuit. Let’s examine the video. As it begins, a lone officer is atop O’Neal in the middle of the street. As the two struggle, several people can be heard shouting their encouragement to O’Neal and their condemnation of the officer. (And it’s interesting to note that the video, like so many others like it, shows only the most inflammatory portion of the incident.) A second officer then arrives in an unmarked SUV. As he exits the car he can see that the fight is at an apparent stalemate and that the greater threat is posed by the approaching crowd. He orders the crowd to get back and calls for backup, but when he turns around he can now see that the fight has suddenly shifted in O’Neal’s favor. O’Neal, who seconds earlier appeared to be under control or nearly so, now has his arm locked out with a firm grip on the officer’s neck. The second officer then delivers a single kick to O’Neal’s head, essentially ending the fight – and beginning the circus we’ve come to expect.

What follows is a great deal of cursing and death threats directed at the police, and the video ends with the arrival of additional officers who wade into the hostile crowd. We are left to imagine the scene as O’Neal is hauled off to jail while his friends challenge and taunt the officers who are trying to restore order. Police say they found three bags of heroin on O’Neal.

In short, a good arrest and a reasonable use of force – nothing that the brass of the Chicago Police Department couldn’t have justified to the media if they but had the courage to do so. What happened next provided a vivid example of the moral inversion that grips America, nowhere more egregiously than it does in Chicago. O’Neal was released from jail without charges, and the officer who kicked him was stripped of his police powers and placed on desk duty. A local rabble rouser known as Ja’Mal D. Green boasted on Facebook that he had called Chicago P.D. Superintendent Eddie Johnson, who informed him of the pending action against the officer.

Reaction among Chicago’s cops was swift and blistering. A post on the matter at the Second City Cop blog garnered nearly 300 comments, most from cops expressing their disgust and their diminishing desire to do the kind of police work required to lower Chicago’s appalling level of crime. Upon his release, O’Neal celebrated with his family and other supporters, all of whom must have had visions of the riches soon to be lavished upon O’Neal as compensation for his suffering. He has hired an attorney, of course, who surely must be dreaming of his own substantial payday.

But alas for O’Neal, et al, the celebration was short-lived. On June 16 he was arrested at home on a warrant based on the earlier charges, and once again he resisted arrest and ended up in a hospital. Outrage of course followed. O’Neal is a “political prisoner,” said Ja’Mal D. Green.

With support like that, it’s no wonder cops are reluctant to get out of their squad cars.

It’s not just the Cook County States Attorney’s office dropping the ball and releasing bad guys back to the streets.

Cook Count’y judges not following bail recommendations

(Sun-Times) – Cook County judges routinely make bail decisions for crime suspects contrary to what the judges’ new risk-assessment system calls for, according to a review of more than 1,500 cases this year obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.

A review by the Cook County sheriff’s office showed judges’ bail decisions differed from the guidelines about 85 percent of the time. The review tracked cases in 30 weekday sessions — between Feb. 10 and March 29 — in Central Bond Court at the main Leighton Criminal Courthouse at 26th and California.

And another by Jack Dunphy at PJ Media on the Ferguson Effect:

Fundamentally Transformed: City after City Seeing Rising Crime Rates

By Jack Dunphy

(PJ Media) –Gentle reader, you may be forgiven if you’ve come to think I write about nothing but the “Ferguson effect,” i.e., the current tendency among many police officers to refrain from proactive police work or else risk a life-altering confrontation while trying to make an arrest.  My previous four columns (find them here) have covered this topic, and now here I am again, banging on that same tired drum.  I don’t do this for lack of desire to write about other things.  Rather, this phenomenon is simply the most important development in police work since the advent of data-driven police work some 25 years ago.  In 1990 there were 2,245 murders in New York City; in 2014 there were 328.  In Los Angeles, there were 1,092 murders in 1992; in 2014 there were 260.

More than any other factor, it was data-driven police work, carried out by well-trained, well-informed, and well-motivated cops that brought these grim numbers to their currently more tolerable levels.  But now it’s all being undone, and in city after city the trend is once again pointing toward higher crime.  America’s police officers are today just as well trained and informed, but they are less motivated to do the proactive police work that keeps criminals in check.

And, as I’ve written before, over and over again, the Ferguson effect and the Black Lives Matter movement that gave rise to it are based on the poisonous lie that the greatest peril to young black men in America is that posed by racist, trigger-happy cops.  Put aside for the moment the fact that for every black man killed by a police officer there are dozens killed by other black men.  There is now evidence that police officers are less likely to shoot a black suspect than a white one.

Call it a corollary to the Ferguson effect.  The Washington Post reported last month on research conducted at Washington State University that attempted to measure racial bias in a group of police officers and how that bias affected the officers’ actions in simulated encounters.  The researchers used training simulators in which officers carry weapons that fire an infrared beam onto a screen, on which are projected various scenarios in which an officer may find himself.  The officers, 80 volunteers from the Spokane Police Department, were each put through six scenarios in which they encountered armed and unarmed suspects, some of them black, others white.  More than 1,500 scenarios were recorded and measured.

Whose side is the criminal justice system on in Chicago?

Is Chicago becoming Baltimore?