CTA Crime Skyrockets - Top Cop Says "Stick Head in Sand"

Mayor Emanuel's top cop says just
pretend there's no crime on the CTA

In a rare show of journalistic competence, The Chicago Tribune  Saturday published statistics that show that crime aboard Chicago Transit Authority trains and buses has been skyrocketing over the past two years.

The Tribune had to laboriously compile the stats themselves since the Chicago Police Department doesn't collect CTA specific crime stats. That, you see, might make people think taking Chicago public transportation might be a bit on the perilous side.

According the the Tribune report, they'd be quite right.

According to the report, between 2009 and 2011 there were 10,759 crimes against passengers on CTA trains or platforms reported and 5,457 on CTA buses or at bus stops.

Over the period studied, forceful robberies of CTA riders increased 69% to more than 800 a year. Your run-of-the-mill, just plain theft was up 42%, to almost 2,000 a year and batteries on the CTA rose 15%.

Security videos of the black gang that attacked
 a young white family on the EL June 13th

As I said, the Tribune had to laboriously comb thru crime reports themselves to come up with this, so of course, they neglected to breakdown the assailants and the victims by race.

With the Libune, racial identities of perp and victim are reserved for the odd "hate crime" when, for instance, a white suburban woman said something nasty to a Moslem female and tugged on her facial scarf.

The question, however, is a fair one when you consider the June 14th report of the incident where a young white family was terrorized on a CTA train by a gang of black youths who took the wife's cell phone and beat the man senseless.

But the funniest part of the Tribune's CTA crime report was the response of Capt. Thomas Lemmer, chief of the Chicago Police's mass transit crime unit.

This jamoke actually said that it was good that more CTA riders were taking their expensive electronic devices onto trains and buses and openly using them there.

These, of course, are the items that are the targets of most CTA highwaymen and thieves.

Never a dull moment aboard the EL trains

"That (openly using your expensive device on the CTA) is a huge part of driving down the numbers of crimes," he said. "You want the community to be both safe in reality and to believe they are safe, because both feed off each other."

HUH?

Now I studied Aristotelian logic in Prep School and symbolic logic at the university level and this is a new one on me.

It seems to be something like: "I pretend I am safe, therefore I am safe."

That, of course, is sheer idiocy.

Reminds one of the famous malapropism of the late Chicago Mayor, Richard J. Daley, when he uttered: "The Chicago Police aren't here to create disorder. They're here to preserve disorder."

Woody Guthrie: Consummate Coward and Fraud

This year is the centennial marking 100 years since the birth of folk singer, Woody Guthrie. Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music is bringing in Guthrie's 62 year old daughter, Nora and a gaggle of other lefty folk musicians for a June 30th 100th Birthday celebration concert.

Other commemorations are taking place elsewhere in the country throughout the year.

Woody Guthrie did everthing he could
to avoid military service during WWII

In the popular American mind, the Oklahoma born guitar picker has something of a benign image. After all, he wrote nice tunes, some of which have been sung by generations of elementary student school chorales.

He wrote simple tunes extolling the simplicity of the American West like, On the Trail of the Buffalo and Oklahoma Hills, not to mention the ever popular folk classic, This Land is Your Land.

But the fact is, Woody Guthrie was a coward who did everything possible to shirk his military obligation during the perilous time of World War II.

And he was a fraud who while cowering in the face of an 1-A draft classification, went sashaying around with a guitar proclaiming "This machine kills fascists."

Some tough guy, that young Woody.

And while it was never definitively proven that he was a member of the Stalin-era Communist Party of the USA, he wrote a regular column for their newspaper, The Daily Worker, and played and partied with just about every card-carrying American communist in sight.

Guthrie wrote a regular column for the
American Communist Party's Daily Worker

In 1939 and 1940, while brave young men from England were actually off killing fascists and putting their young lives on the line, Guthrie was living in a Greenwich Village commune with the execrable Pete Seeger and a group of other lefties who called themselves the Almanac Singers.

Initially Guthrie helped write and sing what the Almanac Singers termed "peace" songs; while the Nazi-Soviet Pact was in effect. Until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, the Communist party line was that World War II was a capitalist fraud and Woody and Seeger dutifully echoed that sentiment in song.

But they changed their tune overnight, when in June 1941, Hitler pulled a fast one on his pal, ally and fellow mass murderer, Josef Stalin and invaded Communist Russia.

After Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, gone were Guthrie and Seeger's "peace" songs. These intellectually dishonest and dissembling frauds -- friends of International Communism all, turned on a dime, and then began churning out anti-fascist songs, beating the war drums for US military involvement.

And fearless young Woody Guthrie began parading around with a guitar emblazoned with the phrase, "This machine kills fascists."

After the December 7, 1941 Japanese attack on the US (funny Woody never geared up his fearsome guitar to kill Japanese imperialists) the call up of American young men to serve in the armed forces began in earnest.

And young able-bodied Guthrie did everything imaginable to avoid having to serve his country in the military where he actually might have had the opportunity to kill fascists. That, you see, might have been hazardous to young Woody's health.

Besides, in 1941, 29 year old Woody Guthrie was pulling down $180 dollars a week (the equivalent of $144k a year in today's dollars) hosting a radio show for the Model Tobacco Company. Anti-capitalism is one thing in theory, but that's a lot of scratch to pass up to go out killing fascists.

So fearless Woody tried to persuade the USO to take him on as an entertainer so that his fascist-killing guitar could do its deadly work.

Woody Guthrie (L) and Pete Seeger (R) wanted peace
with Hitler until he attacked Communist Russia

The USO and his draft board said nuts to that.

So faced with the scary prospect of having to don Army green, grab a rifle and actually go out where fascists might be shooting at him with live ammo, the fearless Woody signed on as a cook for the Merchant Marine.

To be sure, there was some marginal danger in slinging hash in a warm ship's galley. You could always slip on a greasy kitchen floor and break something. But it was a far cry from freezing in the foxholes of Bastogne while dodging Nazi bullets or wading ashore on a tropical beach into the face of torrid Japanese machine gun fire.

That is what other young men of Guthrie's generation were doing. They were the ones who honestly and often fearlessly fought fascists. And many of them did not come home.

It is quite amusing to read the comments posted on the YouTube videos of Woody Guthrie's songs. They seem to be home to mostly neo-Communists who extol Guthrie's fearless defense of the oppressed American worker. Some comments overtly extol the International Socialism with which com-symp Woody Guthrie was so enamoured.

Parroting the "Occupy Wall Street" line the comments invariably trash American corporations.

But in the early 1940s, it was the Chrysler corporation who made the tanks, GMC who made the tanks and the trucks, the the Ford Motor Company who made the aircraft, tanks and jeeps, Remington who made the guns and a variety of smaller American corporations who made everything from gloves for aviators to electronics for radar.

Those corporations, so maligned by Woody Guthrie's leftist idolaters, were the ones who made the machines which killed fascists.

Not the makers of Woody Guthrie's guitar.

Skokie's "SCompton" Section 8 Ghettos

The pious pontificators at the Skokie Human Relations Commission can drone on and on all they want about the wonders of Skokie's newfound "diversity." And they can wallow in denial over the relationship between Section 8 federally subsidized low-income housing and Skokie's new crime wave.

A scene from one of the areas, just South of
 Downtown Skokie, that the kids call "SCompton"

But the kids seem to know better.

In the wake of our last article on the 2 violent muggings in Skokie, we've received a lot of correspondence and among the things we've learned are:

The other "SCompton" area is just East
of Skokie Blvd. between Oakton and Main

--Skokie kids refer to the areas just South of the Downtown Oakton business district and just East of Skokie Blvd. between Oakton and Main Sts. as "SCompton." A play on the words Skokie and Compton -- referring to the crime ridden, gang infested California city of that name.

--A Morton Grove policeman who lives near the Skokie border tells us that it is common knowledge in police circles that Skokie has an inordinate amount of Section 8 housing and that it has been fueling increased criminal activity there.

--A Fairview resident tells us that there has been a flurry of home robberies there in recent months yet not a word about it in the Skokie newspapers or from the Skokie police or village government.

And yet a Skokie Human Relations sycophant writes us demanding statistics proving a direct correlation between Skokie's subsidized housing and Skokie's increased crime.

The fact is that you would be hard pressed to find any agency or academic entity -- most of which are dominated by liberals -- to compile statistics that might prove embarrassing to their pet diversity initiatives.

But the kids and the cops are close to the ground.

They have their eyes open.

And they're not demanding abstruse statistical studies on the correlation between Skokie's Section 8 housing and Skokie's crime wave.