ACLU Whines "Not Our Fault"

Saw this comment in yesterday's post about the qualified immunity being gutted:

• They make it impossible for us to do anything and then when we don't they invent away to sue us

Then this article pops up in the Slum Times for Monday:

• Authorities last year suggested Chicago’s spike in gun violence in 2015 was due to the “Ferguson effect” — cops afraid to do their jobs because of the scrutiny following the shooting of a black teenager by a white officer in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri.
  
  But with Chicago now plagued with an even steeper rise in fatal shootings in January, compared with the same period of 2015, street cops are offering a new reason: the “ACLU effect.”
  
  They say the Chicago Police Department’s pact with the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois to monitor police stops in greater detail is prompting officers to stop policing, leaving the streets to the criminals and leading to the spike in gun violence.

Um, duh? Who wants to stop two or three jagoffs and end up with an hour or two worth of paperwork? An hour or two away from actively patrolling. An hour or two that will be scrutinized by an entire platoon of lawyers looking for any little error with which to make an example of you and cost you many many hours worth of suspension time?

It's far easier to only ride on real crime being committed rather than quality-of-life stops or street corner dope sales or any other of a dozen stops that might lead to something, but more-likely-than-not, only lead to paperwork.

The ACLU is already laying the blame on the police:

• But the ACLU rejects any correlation between declining street stops and rising violence, said Karen Sheley, director of police practices for the ACLU of Illinois. Other cities have scaled back their street stops without an explosion of shootings, she said.
  
  The reduction of “invasive” street stops is actually a good thing, Sheley said.

Remember, this is the woman who just a few weeks ago was applauding the reduction in stops. And she "rejects any correlation"? The ACLU is staffed by a special kind of stupid, aren't they? She's seems to have forgotten when the NYPD scaled back stop-and-frisk by something like 97%, shootings went through the roof. We imagine Chicago is experiencing the same upsurge...like St Louis did, and Ferguson, and Baltimore.

• The ACLU had pushed for the changes to allow for better monitoring of stop-and-frisk practices and their impact on minorities. The ACLU released a report in March that found blacks accounted for 72 percent of stops between May and August of 2014, but just 32 percent of the city’s population.

72% of stops...72% of stops... Where have we seen a statistic like that before? Oh yeah, at HeyJackass.com, where blacks accounted for 80% of the shooting victims and 70% of the identified assailants. Imagine that. And it's holding exactly true for 2016.

• The ACLU also reviewed 250 contact cards filled out after stops, and found that half didn’t list a lawful reason for them.

That's not what we're hearing from people who probably know. The ACLU is actively searching for "wrongdoing." The are contacting people who have been stopped and asking all manner of leading questions in an effort to jam someone up:

• Are you sure you weren't handcuffed;
• Didn't they go through your pockets;
• Did you get a receipt (even when not required);
• Can we get a copy of your receipt

We have one story where the ACLU contacted the subject of a stop and attempted to get him to lie about his receipt that he had already thrown away and to falsely accuse the officers of not giving him the receipt. The subject turned out to be a paid informant and called his handlers to see if the ACLU was about to burn him to the people he's been snitching on. True? We have no idea, but we'd believe many things about the ACLU before we'd believe in a fair Chicago Police Department promotional exam.

We are going to be damned one way or the other.