“Definitely go after the criminals. I mean, the criminals are doing the crime,” Bud, a Virginia resident, said. The Chicago mayor’s office wants “to push things off and not take the blame for themselves, for their crappy politics and policies.”

As the single largest department in the City of Chicago, the CPD budget makes up 13% of the total $13.3 billion dollar local funds budget (excluding grants).

At first, waiting at a police station for a shelter space was a temporary solution, only meant to take a few hours. But soon hours turned into days, which turned into weeks. What was once a stopgap became a de-facto city procedure.

“Who are you really caring about? Seems like you cared more about him than you care about this community because you let him off scot-free,” said Community activist Andrew Holmes.

“The idiocy beyond comprehension is that this de-funder (or re-imaginer) of police who looks ridiculously like Lenin was elected during a crime wave. The chin beards bear striking similarity…Johnson should blame the idiots at Chicago Teachers Union Local 1 for CTU shutting down schools for two years. The CTU grew thousands of young criminals in those classrooms shuttered by fear.”

A national republication of our Wirepoints column.

By Thursday night, the Chicago Police Department had counted 420 murders during the year’s first eight months. That tally is 7.9% less than during the first eight months of 2022 and 21.3% less than during those months of 2021, when Chicago had its worst gun violence in a quarter century. But the murder tally remains far higher than it was just a few years ago. From 2004 to 2015, the first eight months of each year averaged 310 murders,

The company cited a “protracted post-pandemic economic recovery” and “the rising cost of inflation” in explaining the “difficult” decision. Executive director Brooke Flanagan said the theater’s subscriber base has cratered from about 10,000 subscribers in pre-pandemic 2019 to about 6,000 today and that single-ticket sales have plummeted 31 percent.

Among the complaints in the airport shelter: lack of access to health care, showers and laundry; inadequate bedding; and no support for placing children in schools. “We’re not doing well here,” one father who has been at O’Hare for two weeks, admitted. “We’ve got to leave to find help, see if we can find some food.”

After filing a lawsuit blaming car thefts on Kia and Hyundai, “Will the mayor now begin filing lawsuits against media outlets for allowing reporters to venture out into the city he is supposed to be governing?”