Chicago's New Policy Is Follow The Law

At the Agitator, Radley Balko writes about how Chicago city spokespeople recorded interviews with journalists without their knowledge or consent.  While that alone wouldn't likely cause anyone to lose sleep, the point is that this is a crime under Illinois law for which Chicago police have shown no reluctance to arrest and prosecute people when it comes to recording their antics.  When done by government workers, not so much.

If you work for the government and you violate a the law in order to record journalists who cover the government, you get a gentle “reminder.” If you’re someone like Michael Allison, Tiawanda Moore, or Christopher Drew and you violate a bad law in order to expose government abuse, you get arrested, cuffed, jailed, and charged with felonies.

But what's a double standard among friends, right?  In the course of the city's attempt to rationalize away the "mistake" made by their people, however, this came out:

While City Hall acknowledged the two improper September recordings, it insisted they were mistakes.

“What we have told city employees is that our position is that you follow the law,” City Law Department spokesman Roderick Drew said Friday. “And when this issue was brought to the city’s attention, we reminded employees to continue following the law.”

Follow the law? Continue to follow the law?  Rahm Emanuel's got some 'splainin' to do.

In order to "continue" to follow the law, one would have to follow it in the first place.  That anyone in government would utter the words that their position is to follow the law raises a shocking question: was this really in doubt?

The issue raised by the need for such an admonition is fundamentally disturbing. What could possibly give rise to a belief by anyone serving in a governmental capacity that they are entitled to ignore the law? 

Obviously, police understand as a practical matter that they can largely do as they please, since who will arrest them for blowing through a red light to get to the donut shop?  But even the dopiest flatfoot knows he's not supposed to do it. It's just a perk of the job, like free coffee and tossing black youths.

But the mayor's spokesmen are supposed to appreciate that they don't get to violate the law at will, even if the law is asinine.  And yet, a Law Department spokesman had to tell them otherwise? 

Radley's point, that the same conduct that resulted in citizens being arrested, cuffed and prosecuted is trivialized as a mere "mistake" when conducted by people who enjoy a Chicago paycheck, feeds anger and cynicism.  And it should.  This is what distinguishes public servants from overlords, and a government that openly shrugs off crime by its own people while prosecuting its citizens forfeits its legitimacy.

At the very least, however, the City of Chicago should demonstrate sufficient shame to admit that its people deliberately broke the law rather than merely were confused as to its official policy of whether they had to follow the law at all.

The only thing that would make this worse is acknowledgement by the citizenry of Chicago that they can understand this "mistake," as if public employees following the law was a toss-up question.  It's not. It never was. It can never be.  And yet, it was necessary to make this clear, because city employees maybe thought they didn't have to follow the law.

If anybody wonders why there are a lot of people who aren't as trusting of government as the platitudes suggest they should be, this might give them a clue.  Or maybe nothing will give them a clue.

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Source: http://blog.simplejustice.us/2012/11/13/20121113.aspx?ref=rss

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