Tag: chicago police
Chicago Cop Charged In Capitol Riot, Accused Of Entering Senator’s Office

Chicago Cop Charged In Capitol Riot, Accused Of Entering Senator’s Office

CHICAGO — A Chicago police officer was arrested Friday on federal charges of breaching the U.S. Capitol on January 6 and entering a Democratic senator's office with the violent mob, later texting to a friend that he'd “knocked out a commie." Officer Karol Chwiesiuk, 29, was charged in a criminal complaint in U.S. District Court in Washington with five misdemeanor counts, including entering a restricted building, disrupting government business, and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds with intent to impede congressional proceeding. The 19-page complaint alleges Chwiesiuk broke into Oregon Sen. Jef...

Drive-By Journalism Obscures Truth About Police Shootings And Black Lives

Drive-By Journalism Obscures Truth About Police Shootings And Black Lives

Cable news programming suggestion: Instead of filling every broadcast with the latest presumptive police outrage, try covering the latest drive-by killings too. Show us more of what's really happening on the streets where we live. Newspapers and local TV are already on it.

For example, the lead headline in the Chicago Sun-Times on the morning after police released video of the fatal shooting of 13 year-old Adam Toledo by a Chicago cop read "Girl, 7, fatally shot at McDonald's drive-thru."

Witnesses told reporters they were astonished by the brazenness of the gang-bangers who opened fire on a rival in front of many onlookers and several security cameras. The little girl seemingly got in the way.

Young Adam Toledo, of course, was involved in a similar shooting episode immediately before his deadly confrontation with police.

Heaven knows, Chicagoans have reason to be leery of their city's police department, but context is crucial.

This morning's headline in the Little Rock newspaper was "Peace urged after man killed, toddlers hurt by park gunfire." The toddlers were aged three and four. More collateral damage, as it's called when soldiers shoot civilians. Two young men playing basketball were the intended target; one survived. The little ones are expected to recover. Last month, however, a ten year-old girl was killed in a similar incident in another city park.

In Miami last weekend, three year-old Elijah LaFrance was killed when a gun battle erupted at a children's birthday party — the third little kid murdered there in recent months. The others were girls, aged 7 and 6.

Gang-bangers, however, don't wear body cams, so TV footage is harder to come by. Also, because filing wrongful death lawsuits against street thugs is futile, CNN's roving cast of pundits and personal injury lawyers aren't primed to respond with appropriate indignation.

"When a suspect is a person of color, there is no attempt to de-escalate the situation," civil rights lawyer and ubiquitous talking head Ben Crump said regarding a recent incident in Knoxville, Tennessee. "Police shoot first and ask questions later, time after time, because Black lives are afforded less value."

Regarding the value of Black lives, here's some important information: According to an extraordinary piece of reporting by Rick Rojas in The New York Times, Anthony J. Thompson, age 17, killed by Knoxville police in an armed confrontation in a cramped bathroom at Austin-East Magnet High School, was the fifth student from that campus to die of gun violence during this school year.

Five kids, all African-American, all shot dead at one school in one year.

"It makes it harder to get out of the house every day knowing another child has lost their life," one victim's older sister said.

So far, however, this ongoing tragedy has drawn little commentary on CNN or MSNBC. "Among our elites," my friend Bob Somerby writes, "no one cares about the gun violence which takes so many other lives. It doesn't matter if Black people get shot and killed unless it's done by police."

At his website The Daily Howler, Somerby has been writing acid commentaries about the melodramatic coverage given police/civilian shootings. In the wake of the Derek Chauvin murder trial, the sad and dangerous truth is that on anything regarding cops and race, you pretty much can't expect anything like accurate, dispassionate journalism from too much of the news media. Particularly not the cable networks.

Uncomfortable facts are routinely ignored or suppressed to preserve the good versus evil story line. Pundits appear on national TV to opine about complex life and death situations without having the first idea what they're talking about. Once the basic storyline gets laid down, it rarely changes.

Consider, for example, the tragic killing of Daunte Wright in a Minneapolis suburb by a veteran officer who says she mistakenly fired her handgun instead of a Taser—a story so improbable it almost has to be true, and will almost certainly result in a felony conviction. Wright apparently told his mother that he was stopped for having an air freshener hanging from his rear-view mirror.

Pundits on PBS, MSNBC, the New York Times, and Washington Post have given the air-freshener angle a workout. Al Sharpton mentioned it during an emotional eulogy at Wright's funeral. So why were Brooklyn Center police arresting Wright, and why did he flee?

Well, it turns out that Wright had been charged with aggravated armed robbery in 2019, released on bail, subsequently picked up for carrying a pistol and fleeing police, released again, and then blew off a court hearing on the gun charge. He had to figure they'd keep him locked up this time.

So he tried to run. Terrible decision.

Not a capital crime, no. And still a tragedy.

But if you're one of those posting indignant Facebook screeds about cops stopping drivers for minor infractions, now you know why.

Danziger: Nobody’s Business

Danziger: Nobody’s Business

Jeff Danziger’s award-winning drawings are published by more than 600 newspapers and websites. He has been a cartoonist for the Rutland Herald, the New York Daily News and the Christian Science Monitor; his work has appeared in newspapers from theWall Street Journal to Le Monde and Izvestia. Represented by the Washington Post Writers Group, he is a recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army as a linguist and intelligence officer in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. Danziger has published ten books of cartoons and a novel about the Vietnam War. He was born in New York City, and now lives in Manhattan and Vermont. A video of the artist at work can be viewed here.

Parolees Charged In Harvey Shooting, Hostage Standoff

Parolees Charged In Harvey Shooting, Hostage Standoff

By Peter Nickeas, Chicago Tribune

Two parolees in their 40s were charged in connection with the shooting of a Harvey, Ill., police officer earlier this week that led to a hostage standoff in the Chicago South Suburb.

David Jordan, of Dixmoor and Peter Williams, of Chicago, were each charged with attempted murder of a police officer, aggravated criminal sexual assault with a firearm, home invasion, and aggravated kidnapping.

Both are expected in bond court in Markham, Ill., at 9 a.m.

Police said the two are responsible “for the shooting of Harvey Police Officer Darnel Keel and the hostage standoff within the 147000 block of Seeley on Aug. 19.”

Jordan is a convicted murderer and armed robber, according to the Illinois Department of Corrections. He was sentenced to 47 years in prison in 1990 and also charged with possessing a weapon in prison. He served exactly half that amount of time, according to a IDOC spokesman.

Williams was convicted three times of being a felon in possession of a firearm, in addition to convictions for concealing a homicide, aggravated vehicular hijacking, lacking a firearm owner’s ID card, and defacing a firearm’s identifying markings, according to DOC records.

The two are accused of breaking into a house, shooting two police officers, and then taking six kids and two women hostage for 21 hours.

The ordeal started about 1 p.m. Tuesday in a house at 147th Street and Robey Avenue, where police responded to a call of a break-in.

The first arriving officers exchanged gunfire with people inside, according to police, and the two men inside took everyone else hostage.

Photo: David D’Agastino via Flickr

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