CHICAGO POLICE OFFICER SAYS SHE FEARED USING GUN WHILE BEING BEATEN.

Jack Dunphy has been writing about this sort of thing for some time now. “Murder rates are soaring in Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Baltimore and elsewhere,” he noted back in March, “as the police in those cities, acutely aware of the politics of the moment, attune their behavior so as to minimize risk – not the risk to life and limb, which they accept and prepare for as part of the job, but the risk to their livelihood that arises when the tactical decisions they make in the blink of an eye are viewed through a political prism for months or even years.  There is no amount of training that can prepare a cop for that risk; there is only the choice to avoid it… Crime is up and will go higher.  Don’t expect this to change any time soon.”

Incidentally, Chicago’s last Republican mayor left office the same year that The Maltese Falcon was a box office smash. No, not the Humphrey Bogart movie, the original version released in 1931.