Brickbat: The Chicago Code

The Chicago City Council unanimously approved a $90 million settlement to resolve 176 lawsuits brought by 180 people who were wrongfully convicted and collectively spent nearly 200 years behind bars. The misconduct stemmed from former police Sgt. Ronald Watts. For nearly a decade, Watts ran a special unit within the Chicago Police Department accused of planting drugs, falsifying police reports, and coercing residents of public housing to pay bribes to avoid false drug charges.

Comments

[Uncle Jay]

"For nearly a decade, Watts ran a special unit within the Chicago Police Department accused of planting drugs, falsifying police reports, and coercing residents of public housing to pay bribes to avoid false drug charges."

It's the "Chicago way" of fighting crime.
No wonder the Windy City has such a high murder rate.

[mad.casual]

"We have a rogue, reckless group of heavily armed, masked individuals roaming throughout our city that are not accountable to the people of Chicago. Their actions put all Chicagoans at risk," - Mayor Brandon Johnson

[AT]

Get rid of the drugs. Cops can't plant drugs when they've been taken off the streets and all their peddlers and distributors have been thrown in jail for life.

[mad.casual]

I'm certainly no advocate, but drugs have got nothing to do with it.

"We flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book." - Barack Obama

"This isn't about safety. This is about control." J.B. Pritzker

[AT]

They have something to do with it, and nothing beneficial.

I get that ridding America - let alone the world - of drugs (or prostitution, or crime, or bad people who just want to do bad things all the dang time) is a pipe-dream.

But if nothing else, I don't think it unreasonable to say things like, "The world would be a whole lot better place if there were no recreational drug use."

If only for the reason that it would keep dirty cops from weaponizing it. If the ONLY reason a libertarian might be persuaded against recreational drug proliferation/use is that it would hamstring the cops in setting up innocent people - isn't that ENOUGH of a reason to be against recreational drugs proliferation/use?

[Get To Da Chippah]

The only reason cops can weaponize recreational drug use is because the activity is illegal. Cops can't weaponize legal activity.

[KiwiDude]

Somewhere a cop has read this and said “hold my beer”

[KiwiDude]

tell us again how alcohol is not a problem please

[AT]

Everything in moderation.

Americans learned to moderate their alcohol intake. And we still hold those who fail to both socially, and if necessary criminally, liable for it.

People are physically incapable of doing the same with recreational drugs. Smoking a bowl or shooting up or snorting a line isn't - at all - like having a beer after work or a glass of wine with dinner. You go from zero to stoned the second you do it.

It's why the whole "BUH DRINKING" comparison is BS and always has been.

[Get To Da Chippah]

Humans have been tossing different plants into the campfire and inhaling the smoke for literally tens of thousands of years. People who do that a lot build up a tolerance and tend to need more to get the same high, which is exactly the same as with alcohol.

[AT]

You were that dork who pretended to be drunk after having the neck of a beer at a tailgate party, weren't you.

[Get To Da Chippah]

Your surrender is duly noted.

[AT]

Bruh, your only "argument" thus far has been to disparage injuns.

You tripped over your own shoelaces the moment you started running in this discussion.

[Get To Da Chippah]

You don't need to keep waving the white flag.

[Get To Da Chippah]

We've had drug Prohibition for well over fifty years and it's worked exactly as well as alcohol Prohibition did in the 1920s.

Which is to say, it's created more crimes and problems than it's prevented.

[AT]

Really. Because once upon a time I used to walk the streets of Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, New York, Boston, DC, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Miami, New Orleans, etc and I don't recall stepping over so many addicts as I do today.

It's like one day all those sorts of cities got real lax on drug crimes, both usage and dealing (and the vagrancy that comes with addiction), and soon enough they were all ghettos. Weird, right?

[Get To Da Chippah]

All those addicts are hooked on drugs that are illegal everywhere, so drug prohibition hasn't stopped people from wanting drugs, nor from getting them. Just like with booze in the 1920s.

You also used to be able to walk around in those cities without needing to keep your head on a swivel to look out for drive-by shootings or gang-related violence having to do with the best turf to sell drugs. All the rum-runners, moonshiners and bootleggers didn't go away at the end of Prohibition; the government kindly created a new black market for them to exploit.

[AT]

All those addicts are hooked on drugs that are illegal everywhere, so drug prohibition hasn't stopped people from wanting drugs, nor from getting them.

And all those murderers hooked on murder which is illegal everywhere hasn't stopped people from wanting to murder nor murdering.

And yet, we rightly proscribe murder. If not to prevent it, but to at least hold the scumbags who do it accountable. For the simple and desirable effect of getting murderers off the street.

Why don't you want druggies off the street, Chip? Like literally off the street where we're now all regularly stepping over them.

You also used to be able to walk around in those cities without needing to keep your head on a swivel to look out for drive-by shootings or gang-related violence

Let me guess - you want to legalize drive-bys and gang violence too. Laws aren't gon' stop 'em, so I guess let's just do anarchy!

Right Chip?

[Get To Da Chippah]

And all those murderers hooked on murder which is illegal everywhere hasn't stopped people from wanting to murder nor murdering.

And yet, we rightly proscribe murder. If not to prevent it, but to at least hold the scumbags who do it accountable. For the simple and desirable effect of getting murderers off the street.

The difference here is that murder has a victim. Drive-by shootings have victims. Gang violence has victims. Robberies have victims. I'm all for prosecuting those crimes. If someone wants to snort cocaine, who is the victim? Have they victimized themselves and so we toss the victim in prison?

[AT]

Tell him, Rachel.

Drug abuse is not a victimless crime.

[Get To Da Chippah]

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/appeal-to-emotion

Now that Rachel's tantrum is over, who is the victim? If the victim of drug abuse is the abuser, then your solution is to punish the victim with jail time and a criminal record, right?

[Fist of Etiquette]

LESSON LEARNED

[Chumby]

Hopefully WindyCityBarista is ok.

[mad.casual]

180 people wrongly convicted and $90M settlement from a city notoriously inept at protecting its own citizens from crime and civil unrest, as part of a nationwide policy of overspending on remunerations while failing to police violent civil disruption to the tune of billions, but the real crime, the real collapse of civil society, the real earnest descent into crony, police state, socialism, is The President investing $35M in a mining company (after cancelling billions in spending on high-speed rail, green energy, healthcare spending, and dropping the continued fight to throw money at student loans unconstitutionally)

[TangoDelta]

How is the city supposed to protect its own when the police is, one of, if not the biggest organized crime rings in the city? It doesn't say how big the Sgt.'s special unit was but I'm guessing it takes a bunch to get more than 1.5 convictions per month and who knows how many bribes.

[MatthewSlyfield]

And yet the Chicago government insists on complaining about what ICE is doing.

[Liberty_Belle]

How much money could be saved by cities actually punishing police, prosecutorial, and judicial malfeasance instead of setting aside bigger and bigger slush funds for payouts ? Imagine, fixing a problem instead of setting aside funds for blissfully ignoring it.