Seriously? Indoor Outdoor?

OK, who's been giving J-Fled the dumb ideas again? Did the policy group find the keys to the liquor cabinet?

• Police Supt. Jody Weis knows that he will ultimately find himself on the hotseat for the surge. But, he’s got a new defense.

  He's creating a new category of "indoor" homicides — and downplaying what police can do about them..

  “Those homicides that are outdoors — the ones that I do believe we have a good possibility of preventing — we’re around 98 homicides for Chicago outdoors. That’s as low as it’s ever been, except for 2007, when I believe we had 97 homicides outdoors as of this date,” he said.

We're amazed he's already got the last few years of homicides divided into "indoor" and "outdoor" so he can readily rattle off the statistics for the media. How many man-hours were wasted dividing this info into categories? And how many of these "indoor/outdoor" homicides were actually domestics that spilled out into the streets after starting inside and ending up outside? We couldn't have prevented those either.

This reeks of desperate statistical manipulation and at least one aldercreature calls it as such:

• Ald. Freddrenna Lyle (6th) has her hands full combating a surge of homicides in the South Side’s Gresham District.

  [..] Not surprisingly, Lyle draws no such distinction between indoor and outdoor homicides.

  “I understand the logic — that police would have no way to know about what goes on inside peoples’ homes. But, I don’t necessarily believe that becomes a separate category when you’re talking about the number of people murdered in a city. The average citizen doesn’t make that distinction,” she said.

And J-Fled is losing the reverends, too:

• Rev. Marshall Hatch, chairman of the Leaders Network, said it’s “not helpful” for Weis to “make those kinds of distinctions” between indoor and outdoor homicides.

  “Whether the murders happen inside or outside, we expect the police to take responsibility for solving and preventing crime,” Hatch said, pastor of the New Mount Pilgrim Baptist Church in West Garfield Park.

  “I don’t think that’s a useful distinction for the superintendent to make. I don’t think it sends the right kind of signal about the sense of responsibility we want the police to have.”

How about the sense of responsibility your community ought to have there "reverend"? In any event, this is one for the books.