Wednesday, June 2: Today in a press conference on crime-fighting in Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley gathered his top brass around him -- including department heads and police chief Phil Cline -- and opined on a couple of interesting points.

Among his many mandates to his people, da mare asserted that the public needed to be more 'nice' - presumably a commentary on the lack of civility in the urban landscape. He also launched into one of his famous spittin' tirades about parents who fail to adequately keep their children under lock and key, thereby forcing the police to do the same. Presumably this was a reference to the running imperative that Chicago police feel to jack up every Black and Latino youth they find on the street and harass the living bejesus out of them -- or worse.

Curiously, da mare made no mention of the obvious parallel observation that parents might have more time to sit shotgun on their kids if they weren't working two and three jobs to keep body and soul together, a reality for many working families in a city that has seen the exodus of more than 50,000 jobs in recent years - under Daley's watch.

In his condemnations of gangs and crime, da mare also failed to mention one of the largest and most active criminal gangs in the city -- the Chicago police department, whose recent heinous acts include the 'hit and lie' vehicular homicide of eight-year-old Gregory Jones in Humboldt Park two weeks ago. This week, attorneys for Gregory and the eleven-year old girl who was also hit with him charged the cops with fabricating the existence of a 'man with a gun' to cover up their naked recklessness.

Da mare also failed to mention the recent death of two people in police custody under at best murky circumstances. Thirty-nine year old Christopher Hicks died during an arrest on May 26 as police jacked him for moving between el cars in the south loop. Observers think Hicks' death sounds suspiciously like a case of positional asphyxiation -- a not uncommon fate for those collared by the cops. Hicks died less than 12 hours after 55-year-old May Molina died in a police cell at Belmont and Western after repeated appeals from family members and her attorney for medical treatment for the wheel-chair-bound community activist. The cops say her family, her lawyer, and the dead woman herself did no such thing. Molina's supporters say the cops are liars.

While exhorting 'each of us' to take responsibility for fighting crime, da mare also forgot to chastise his own track record as an involved parent, particularly in the case of his son, who as a teenager allegedly helped beat a non-white youth with a baseball bat some years back near the family's out-of-state vacation home.

Da mare's memory problems extend well beyond the conduct of his own son and his own parenting. To date, Daley has refused to accept even a shred of accountability for the prosecution under his watch of at least dozens -- and possibly hundreds -- of people whose 'confessions' were extorted from them by a gang of cop torturers and crooked flatfoots while Daley was State's Attorney. His approach to this abiding travesty of justice, many of whose victims remain in jail? A blank stare and a refusal to remember anything about any of these cases ever.

Today, family and friends of May Molina buried her -- and then went to the offices of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald to appeal to him to undertake an independent investigation into May's death in police custody. Fitzgerald's office declined to allow anyone besides the receptionist to take the letter, or even to date-stamp it and provide them with a written record that they'd delivered it, so they've vowed to send it to the region's lead prosecutor by registered mail. They also blasted the police and the city, saying it was impossible to expect an honest investigation from the people on whose watch she died.

Their skepticism is well-founded. No Chicago police officer has been criminally prosecuted for a crime of violence against a civilian in recent memory. On the contrary, the cops commonly charge the victims of their violence with fabricated crimes to cover their own misconduct. And their misconduct can be lethal. Just ask the families of Gregory Jones, May Molina, Christopher Hicks, Jorge Guillen, LaTanya Haggerty, Robert Russ, and dozens of others who've died at the hands of the Chicago cops in recent years.

Often the police paint their murder victims as deserving of the fate they meet. Cops say Robert Russ grabbed the gun of the cop who shot him dead. LaTanya Haggerty threatened her cop shooter with a cell phone, police say. May Molina must have ingested some of the heroin police charge she had in her possession -- but just a little of it, lodged in her esophagus, which she presumably kept there by not swallowing for over 28 hours in police custody.

Each year, city taxpayers dole out millions of dollars in settlements to the victims of police crimes or their survivors. The city says it settles these cases because they just can't trust crafty lawyers not to sway gullible juries into even larger settlements -- and at every opportunity city lawyers fight to keep the facts in these cases sealed from the public. But the city has no qualms about putting complete faith in another class of attorneys -- the prosecutors who work in lock-step with lying cops to push forward criminal charges in cases of dubious quality. Most of the 'criminals' charged in these cases are poor non-white people with no money to hire hotshot private attorneys, thrown into a public defender system that is overburdened and underfunded -- and whose attorneys often push defendents to 'plea bargain', even if that means taking a conviction on a bogus charge rather than facing a stacked court system populated by many judges who are former prosecutors themselves -- and disinclined to view with skepticism the assertions of cops. These cops, after all, are part of a system that helped some of these judges make their bones as prosecutors and climb the career ladder that won them those precious judicial slots in the first place.

Our criminal justice system is irrevocably stacked -- structured at its very heart to favor the cops' version of events and for all intents and purposes suspend the capacity for critical thought that would otherwise view with grave skepticism the assertions of so many of the police who feed its gravy train. Our system of police 'accountability' -- the Office of Professional Standards -- is widely regarded as a joke, and in some cases even a menace to the thousands of people who turn to it for some recourse, however modest, in cases of police abuse. The Police Board -- populated by mayoral appointees who are also city contractors or city employees -- almost never sustains the handful of OPS cases in which discipline against brutal cops is actually recommended. And in those very very rare cases in which the Police Board recommends discipline, the most a brutal cop can expect to face for his or her crimes is a suspension of a day or two -- and these are often reversed on appeal.

To whom do the victims of police violence appeal for justice? In this city, no-one in a capacity of power, for all of our powerbrokers have turned a blind eye to the relentless lack of police accountability in this town. That is little surprise to Chicago's majority 'minorities', because their common experience of the police wavers between two desolate poles -- rank indifference to their needs at one extreme, and on the opposite pole the brutal realities of their treatment at the hands of a paramilitary force that effectively serves as an occupying army in their communities.

The rot begins at the top, with thug police commissioner Phil Cline -- who embraces his officers' brutality -- and the man who hired Cline as top cop: Daley.

May Molina's supporters left the offices of the U.S. attorney this afternoon disgusted but undaunted. Their struggle is much larger than the effort to find out why Molina entered police custody alive and left dead a day and a half later. Their struggle is the struggle of every person in this city who has been disrespected, disavowed or destroyed by the police. They want answers. Honest answers. They have vowed not to let the cops' efforts to defame Molina and divide and rule police critics derail their efforts to win justice for their friend, who devoted her life to the struggle for justice for the city's dispossessed. They have vowed to dog the case and da mare until they get justice not just for May, but for all who confront the monstrous inequity that permeates this city's system of policing.

And they have a message for Daley: be principled for a change, or face the consequences.