Showing posts with label William Crawford -Pulitzer Prize Recipient. Show all posts
Showing posts with label William Crawford -Pulitzer Prize Recipient. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 02, 2016

"Wow,' In Deed! Cui Bono? Jaimie Kalven's Invisible Institute

Jamie Kalven, who led the way on disclosures in the police shooting of Laquan McDonald. (Screenshot via YouTube)

In that ( a Twitter Chat with a Drug Dealer) conversation, which took place July 1, the gang member showed Gowin a video of a plainclothes officer frisking men in front of an unmarked police SUV. The gang member accused the officer of extorting “crack and cash” from the group “at least three times a week.”
“Wow,” Gowin replied. “Get his name and star number, and let me know. I will have him fired.”
When the gang member signaled that the officer’s life could be in danger, Gowin had a suggestion: “How about we work together to make this stop quick, because nobody benefits from a dead cop or a life sentence.” ( parentetical my own)   Chip Matthews WBEZ

The societal trend 2016 is persecute, prosecute and punish police officers in a very public way.  Trends shift. Bungee chord jumping has seemed to have gone from fashion.

I have never been a slave to trends, or fashion.  I wear Oxfords (shirts and shoes), well pressed comfortable slacks, good durable wool and gabardine habiliments and a healthy regard for the law and those who enforce it.

To my ironic sense of delight and well-earned layers of cynicism, I read Chip Mitchell's WBEZ report that an investigator for the Independent Police Review Authority ( Mayor Rahm's spanking new IPRA -meant to shiled him from the eyes of Obama's Justice Department) has been cashiered from the Autority to the muffled drum rolls of the Rouge's March!

A Chicago agency that looks into police misconduct has booted one of its staff attorneys over social-media use, WBEZ has learned.
The Independent Police Review Authority forced chief investigative law officer Lindsay Wilson Gowin to resign after she exchanged dozens of private Twitter messages with a user of that network who claimed to be part of a drug-dealing gang on the city’s South Side.

Chicago's Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson gets valuable police misconduct advice from arrested but-somehow- never- charged "activists with close ties to the dubious Black Lives Matter Soros network - You know 'Stare Boy ' Lamon Q. Reccord et al.; now, it appears that the Authority charged with "looking into police misconduct" looks to dope slinging thugs and their Twitter apps. - Most 2016.

This story is Irony writ large! Likewise,  In the interest of Irony - WBEZ's invitation to " Raed all of our Coverage on Commader Evans" has been withdrawn.

You see a man who happens to be a highly respected, pro-active, African American Chicago Police Commander is suing not only the IPRA and the City of Chicago ( no longer seated next to President Clinton at the DNC), but WBEZ's Chip Mitchell author of the above linked report.

This is ironic, because Commander Glenn Evans is taking all three agencies and agents to court because all three agencies and their agents formed "a civil conspiracy that led to his wrongful prosecution on criminal charges, according to court papers."

What is going on, one might ask?

One does.

Chip Mitchell makes no mention of the fact that WBEZ and his own bad self are subject to a legal butt whuppin' in a   . . .;now, get this . . . FEDERAL court of justice.

Yet, he quotes, ironically enough, the cashiered IPRA Investigator Lindsey Wilson Gowin's Twitter chat with a south side dope dealer ending with two little Latin words that sums up the War on Cops - CUI BONO! Who benefits?

“Wow,” Gowin replied. “Get his name and star number, and let me know. I will have him fired. . . . “How about we work together to make this stop quick, because nobody benefits from a dead cop or a life sentence.”

WOW!

When cops get railroaded,  you know, not investigated by Internal Affairs and their Commanders, but by preachers, politicians, pettifogging Marxist lawyers, academics and judges, agenda-bound media types and mobs of street activists, Peoples Law Office, Loevy & Loevy, Richard M. Daley, Rahm Emanuel, Toni Preckwinkle, Public Television, Public Radio, Eric Zorn, Carol Marin and the Editorial Boards of both papers, but most of all the Invisible Institute of Jaimie Kalven, a whole oligarchic food chain eats steak and lobster.

Jamie Kalven has been a career "activist' and real-estate novelist.  Yep, he's wired and bullet proof.

Kalven shepherds layers of street activists and tags them journalists petted and published by Chicago's lazy lap-dog media.

Glenn Evans was pilloried by Kalven's Invisible Institute on the pages of DNAinfo after having been acquit ed of all charges and reinstated to his life's work.  The author of the article is invisible - kind of.

I learned that it was Darryl Holliday, who works for Kalven.  Read the piece. It seems, what one might say, libelous?  Mr. Holliday runs City Bureau and here is how it works:

City Bureau is structured into tiers, with reporters at all levels contributing to the journalism. The Tier 1 reporters are high school–aged students who have come to City Bureau through Free Spirit Media, a youth media group in Chicago. Tier 2 journalists are college-aged students who have a little more experience. The third tier of City Bureau is made up of early-career journalists who lead groups of reporters from the other tiers and mentor students.
City Bureau hopes that, eventually, Tier 1 participants will graduate into Tiers 2 and 3 and mentor the younger students.

Let's see, now? Dave Protess is disgraced.  So, are qualified reporters to be the New Tweedy Fagins?

Now, I wonder if Chip Mitchell is a THIRD TIER early-career journalist?

That would be ironic.

Irony!  That's what I calls it. A Bonanza!  Gold!  501(c)3 Gold all poured through the Kalven pipeline right down to WBEZ, DNAinfo, the Sun Times, The Chicago Tribune and WTTW!  With hearty hat tip to Glenn Greenwald's UK-based Guardian which has stoking the fires at Homan Square for more than year.  Lookee here.


“Nobody could have foreseen what was coming up around issues of policing in the city,” he said. “It just so happens that the city is in absolute turmoil right now. We struck at a very relevant time.”
City Bureau has also run stories with outlets, including The Guardian, DNAinfo, The Chicago Reporter, and the Chicago Reader. Those connections help set City Bureau apart from other youth media initiatives, said City Bureau education director Andrea Hart, who also runs Real Chi Youth.
The biggest initial difference is this pipeline that we have in terms of allowing young people to have direct access to resources [like The Guardian]. That’s unusual in the youth media landscape in Chicago,” she said. “We’ve had several things published, and it looks as if we’ll have several more.”
The Illinois Humanities Council has worked with City Bureau. It helped facilitate the partnership with the Invisible Institute and the community meetings that were held in neighborhoods on the South and West Sides.
City Bureau has also received a $25,000 planning grant from the McCormick Foundation to help it continue to grow and expand its offerings.
Holliday said City Bureau plans to do three sessions annually. The first launched in October and is set to finish up this month. The second runs from February to June, and there will be another, shorter session over the summer.
The next session will likely also focus on policing, but Holliday said that future sessions might tackle topics like education and housing. City Bureau also hopes to expand its selection pool to offer more students the chance to participate.  ( emphases my own)

Cui Bono?  Who benefits from the War on Cops.  Certainly not people living in Lawndale, Englewood, Austin, Gresham, Brainerd, Grand Crossing and Back of the Yards.  Certainly not the Blue Shirted heroes who never can be sure of going home at the end of the watch.

Certainly not Commander Glenn Evans.   Oh, wait a minute.  Cui bono, how ironic. 

Again, Chip Mitchell

Wednesday, May 06, 2015

Burge Mythology Victory -Chicago City Council Set to Approve - It Will Be Unanimousn



G. Flint Taylor* and arsonist/murderer Madison Hobley**

Very good people are appalled by the idea of torture. The idea of torture in Chicago by homicide detectives committed to systemtic racism has been carefully crafted and marketed over the last thirty years.

Some very bad people created the Burge Mythology and will make hundreds of thousands of more dollars, when Chicago's aldermen vote for the Burge Reparations ordinance.  It will be unanimous. Not one Alderman has the guts to ask for a true analysis of the Burge Myth.

Academics, Activists and Advocacy Agendanistas have parlayed the idea of torture into a mythology that permeates what passes for Chicago's corporate news media.

Carol Marin, Mark Brown, Eric Zorn and other iconic columnists have not tucked their snouts into the story of Area 2, but have relied completely on the work of John Conroy and the propaganda machine of G. Flint Taylor. Code of Silence, Black Box, House of Screams, Vietnam 101 Torture are part of the Burge Industries glossary developed by Sasha Abramsky, Bernardine Dohrn, G. Flint Taylor, Northwestern Law, and especially John Conroy, who can not seem to be given the contract by the corporate media that laps up his every nuanced participle. Why is he not the editor of some great metropolitan newspaper? They all redact his texts and themes.

Twelve citizens should decide for or against Jon Burge, who has been fabricated into the face of torture, by G. Flint Taylor, The MacArthur Center for Justice, Jon Loevy, Locke Bowman, Jean McLean Snyder, Berardine Dohrn, WTTW, WBEZ, NPR, and the lazy and compliant editorial boards. As it is, Jon Burge has been tripped up, convicted of perjury, sent to prison, released and now waits for the next bundle of legal barbed wire.

I have followed this story as a citizen and as an educator who spends seven days a week in Area 2 - I live here and live with the fall-out that has evolved as the result of the erosion in faith for Law Enforcement at the hands of lawyers, louts and loudmouths. A rainforest of crime has rooted up in Chicago- not in Lakeview, Highland Park, Winnteka, or Wilmette, but in Gresham, Englewood, Brainerd, Morgan Park, Beverly and Roseland.

I have witnessed the savagery of street thuggery and attended the funerals of too many sweet and hard working young black men slaughtered in the Thug Comfort Zone created by Burge Industries - Eric Ersery, Jason Riley, Steven Lyons,Antonio Collins, Eric and Steve Lee to name but a few. I have witnessed the police officers and detectives of Gresham District (6th) and Area 2.

I don't buy the systemic racist torture at all. Am I intellectually dishonest? I don't think so.

I have followed this story very religiously since Officers Fahey and O'Brien were tortured and murdered. I know that I have found the endless chorus of charges and the endless failures to make the case for torture a compelling case for doubt. What happened? I do not know, but I do not buy for one second the charges howled by G. Flint Taylor and the murdering savages that he represents. I suspect that G. Flint Taylor and others in his cottage industry including Chicago's news media want the Burge Saga to continue.

The perjury case against Jon Burge,it seems to me, was merely another legal sop paid to G.Flint Taylor, by judges and attorneys general. The City of Chicago and Cook County tried tossing millions of dollars at this public pest. They would have done well to stand in court and demanded a battle royal against the charges. They did not. Today, the City Council will 5.5 million more dollars to G. Flint Taylor and The Peoples Law Office.

A jury should decide one way or the other, but do not think for a minute that Burge Industries will ever be satisfied. If Jon Burge is ever convicted of the torture the mythology demands we accept, or is acquitted, G. Flint Taylor and his disciples will howl for more, more, more court time and greater fees.

Taylor is record for more legal battles no matter how much the City of Chicago gives away.  Not only legal battles, but political battles,” said Flint Taylor, who represents several men who accused Mr. Burge and others of torturing them while at Area 2 violent-crimes unit of the police department on the Far South Side in the 1970s and ’80s. “This is just one phase in the long struggle against police torture.”

Police officer and author Martin Preib has pulled apart the author of the Burge Mythology -John Conroy.

Conroy made The Chicago Reader the Norton Anthology of Burge Myths; however, John Conroy was discharged from the Chicago Reader, never found work on any news paper, magazine, or electronic media server, but landed a post at DePaul University after a very brief time with Andy Shaw's BGA.

Mr. Conroy never responded to Martin Preib's critique of his methodology.  Why is that?

Nevertheless, John Conroy will be kept busy and his story line will continue as Carol Marin and others play the Polyanna do-gooders.

Perhaps, William Crawford's new book on this cottage industry tied to police brutality mythology and duplicitous Wrongful Conviction Complex of journalists, criminals, lawyers and activists will wake some people up.  I hope so.



More kids will be slaughtered. If it bleeds it leads. If it gets in a column, G. Flint Taylor makes money.

The scent of easy money, like the taste for blood can not be sated.




* “…Former FBI agents have told Village Voice Media the basis for their belief that the Weather Underground was behind McDonnell's murder. The agents have revealed that two credible eyewitnesses — both former left-wing radicals tied to the Weathermen — gave detailed statements to investigators in the 1970s alleging that Dohrn and Howard Machtinger, another member of the group, were personally involved in organizing the deadly attack. Both witnesses claimed to have participated in meetings where the bombing was planned, and one confessed to having cased the police station for the Weathermen prior to the explosion,” wrote the River Front Times.  Martin Preib

**The centerpiece of the Conroy article are the claims of Hobley’s attorneys that a gas can found by detectives at the crime scene the day after the murders vindicated Hobley. This gas can was evidence of a police frame-up, according to the attorneys. The controversy over the gas can eventually led to a long evidentiary review. A judge eventually ruled that there was nothing about the gas can sufficient to overturn Hobley’s conviction. Martin Preib

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/us/27cncburge.html

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Chicago Police My Favorite Variety of Human Beings


This past Sunday was  the South Side Irish Parade.  I attend Mass at a cousin's house in Beverly before the step-off as has been the Hickey Family custom from earliest days of parade's history. Mass is always followed by a magnificent Irish Breakfast and a tribal jaw-fest.  This year I had an appointment in suburban Oak Park and pulled " a Murphy" at Communion.   I had parked my car strategically at 99th & Oakley for an easy egress to the Dan Ryan.  As is my custom, I gabbed with the people working to make the parade a success.  I met two young CPD Heroes on east side of Western Avenue. They said it was their first South Side Irish detail and wanted to know a good place to eat. I ponted out Fox's Beverly Pub and assured them of a fine feed and a most attentive staff of Friends of The Blue.
Down the street across from Tom Gibbons' Town Liquors. I had the pleasure of these three sons of Chicago's Northside One a Luther North Alum, another a St. Pat's graduate and third young guy the tallest of the three a CPS scion of Sullivan High School.  I toldthis trio of heroes that I get a store of great yarns and jokes from the Homicide Detectives who live near me and wanted to return the favor. 

Mike Houlihan, a guy named Brian and Pulitzer Prize winning Chicago Tribune writer Bill Crawford


I told them a yarn picked up from Chicago's Rennaissance Man - Film Maker, radio host, author and with Michael Houlihan

" A very troubled man went to his doctor and told him ' Doc, I think I am losing my mind.  My boss told me to get help.

The man with the caduceus gave him a look of genuine concern and asked, 'What's the problem, Sport?'

' Doc, for no good reason I blurt out WHAT"S NEW PUSSYCAT?'  I was in a meeting of mortgage brokers last week and while I reported on quartley home sales in Indiana . . .I  bluted out again WHAT"S NEW PUSSYCAT? My boss said I'm Losing my mind. Tell me, Doc, what is going on with me.'

The Son of Hermes, Mr. MD, smilked knowingly and replied 'You have what we in the medical profession call Tom Jones Syndrome.'

The worried man seemed assured somehow, ' Is that pretty common.'

The doctor shouted ' IT"S NOT UNUSUAL!'


The cops loved it.  I love cops.