Kass Connects Cost of Corruption

Phil Cline puts it into words:

• Chicago's political class can't admit to losing control. They dare not even hint at it, particularly the mayor, what with his election coming up and his poll numbers tanking.

  But just about every cop in the city must feel it, with the murder Sunday of veteran Chicago police Officer Michael Bailey outside his home.
  

• "This has just been a terrible year, and I don't remember anything this bad, maybe if you go back to the early '70s when we came on and we were losing, what, maybe 10 guys a year? And that was before bulletproof vests," former Chicago police Superintendent Phil Cline said.

• "I think what you're seeing is that the gangbangers have lost their fear of the police — and that's not a good thing," Cline said. "The balance we always wanted was that the good citizens in the neighborhood to like the police, the gangbangers to fear us. Evidently, we've lost that.

  "And that's something the department is going to have to work on, to take back the street from these gangs. The city is going to have to bite the bullet and hire more police."

We're coming to the realization that no matter what happens in the next few weeks, months or years, the streets will never be ours again. Not like it was 30, 20, even 10 years ago. We can't do it. Even if we had the ability to project that amount of force (which we don't), we wouldn't be permitted to exercise it.

We've given Phil a pile of shit over the past years for promoting incompetent and unqualified hacks into positions where they could do a lot of damage to this department, and we still believe it to be deserved. But J-Fled has torn the heart out of this place, albeit at the direction of the demented dwarf, but it's his name on the door.

We are so screwed. It isn't going to take years to fix this place - it'll be decades. And it will never be the same.