Feud?

Channel 5 catches up with what we pointed out yesterday (that Sneed is all wet on this story) and ties it into a general lack of empathy toward J-Fed:

• Chicago Police Superintendent Jody Weis is again catching flack from officers, this time from a cop blogger after Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed went with a story about Weis accepting a month of unpaid furlough time in solidarity with his officers.
  
  As SecondCityCop points out, most Chicago officers are not taking unpaid furlough days, and if they had to, there’d likely be a small coup d’état in their union. And Weis, the highest paid city official, is not required to take the days because he’s under contract.
  
  Weis and the cops he oversees have had a friendly, combative relationship since he took over -- without the friendly part -- as evidenced by the union’s stinging vote of no confidence in Weis earlier this year. Many officers see the former FBI special agent, dubbed "J-Fed" by SecondCityCop, as an outsider who doesn’t understand the complexities of policing Chicago’s streets. SecondCityCop thinks he’s worried about his political skin and not looking out for the rank-and-file, whose numbers are dwindling due to cuts in police hiring.

Again, we didn't give Weis his nickname - an anonymous reader did. We simply popularized it. But the author of the article (Zach Christman) does point out a truism that our readers have been pointing out for a year-and-a-half now and really ought to be explored more closely by the media:

• J-Fed is an outsider to the nth degree who understands nothing about street level policing.

He is exactly the wrong person at the wrong time. What the Department needed, and still needs, is a cop in charge. For far too long, we've had politicians in charge. And unfortunately, it has led to the biggest leadership vacuum we've seen or heard about in decades. Daley has created an entire generation of "meri-clout-orious" who cannot, will not and are incapable of leading.

In another time, maybe in another universe, J-Fed might have been necessary. Today, he is merely the culmination of decades of gross mismanagement.