By Bob Walsh
A female Chicago cop, 43-years old with 17 years on the force, was damn near beaten to death this week because she didn’t pull her gun and shoot some asshole when she probably should have, for fear of the Ferguson Effect.
The unnamed officer responded to the scene of a traffic accident when she was physically attacked. Her head was smashed repeatedly against the pavement until she passed out. Her attacker was 28 years old and was dusted out of his mind. The attack went on for several minutes. Other officers finally arrived and two more were injured fighting with the asshole until the cops lit him up and pepper sprayed him.
The police superintendent visited the injured officer in the hospital. She told him that she knew she should have shot him and that she knew she would have been justified in doing so, but that she didn’t want her family and her department to be raked over the coals for it.
Here is an in-depth report from the Chicago Tribune:
CHICAGO COP IS THE FACE OF THE FERGUSON EFFECT
A Chicago police officer did not use her gun to defend herself for fear of backlash, Superintendent Eddie Johnson said
By John Kass | Chicago Tribune | October 6, 2016
The face of the Ferguson Effect now belongs to a longtime Chicago police officer.
She didn't want to use her gun in a physical confrontation with a violent man, Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said.
So she's in the hospital, in serious condition, her face repeatedly pounded into the concrete of the West Side in a beating that lasted several minutes as she fought with an assailant suspected by police of being high on PCP.
The 17-year Chicago police officer could have drawn her gun and stopped him. But she didn't.
Why?
She told Johnson that she was worried about being the next big story on national news.
Johnson talked about this after he participated in the Carter Harrison and Lambert Tree Awards honoring Chicago police and firefighters Thursday at City Hall.
"As I was at the hospital last night, visiting with her, she looked at me and said she thought she was gonna die and she knew that she should shoot this guy, but she chose not to, because she didn't want her family or the department to go through the scrutiny the next day on national news," Johnson said.
"This officer could have lost her life. … We have to change the narrative of the law enforcement across this country," Johnson said.
Johnson isn't the only one who wants to change the narrative. Police across the country are desperate to change it, as are mayors of large urban cities, especially Chicago, where cops are said by our own mayor to have gone fetal.
Nationally, this business of police withdrawal, of hesitating, of going fetal, has been called The Ferguson Effect, popularized by author Heather MacDonald and her book "The War on Cops."
It is the idea that increased scrutiny of law enforcement after the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., has led to cops declining to engage, contributing to a marked increase in the murder rate in large American cities.
In Ferguson there were riots, and looting, and the Black Lives Matter group began getting serious political traction. But Brown wasn't the innocent he was portrayed to be by political actors and NFL stars.
A grand jury was expected to hammer the white Ferguson police officer who shot Brown, but the grand jury did not bring an indictment. And Brown was understood to be a violent thug.
The Laquan McDonald case in Chicago is vastly different but has had an equally profound effect on cops.
The black teenager was shot 16 times by white Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke, who has been charged with murder. There was a police cover-up. There were protests but no riots. Several officers have been fired or allowed to resign.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel suppressed the police video, kept the black vote and won re-election. Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez was sacrificed. Rahm survived.
There's been a history of police cover-ups and misconduct in Chicago, which has included torture and wrongful convictions, with most of the victims being black and Hispanic. And all of it took place under Democratic mayors, who let it go on, decade after decade as they got fat and their families prospered.
So now, with cops under incredible scrutiny, it is not a good time to be a police officer.
Yet is that Chicago officer who was beaten almost to death — in Johnson's telling at least — responsible for the history that now makes it so difficult to be a cop?
No.
The 43-year-old officer didn't draw her gun. And she paid for it.
It happened the other day near Roosevelt Road and Cicero Avenue, in the midmorning in the West Side's Austin neighborhood. A 28-year-old man with multiple arrests, including a firearms conviction, was suspected of leaving the scene of an accident.
Police said he began fighting with the officer and her partner, beating her unconscious as her partner hit him repeatedly with a Taser and then pepper spray.
I called Dean Angelo, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, and talked to him Thursday afternoon.
"Rather than take action she believed was justified and could have taken, she chose not to," Angelo told me. "In Los Angeles, police have a saying: Save your life, lose your job."
She's alive, but what if she had pulled her gun and used it?
We'd be going through the old rituals we know by heart, angry activists, the dead re-created as the victim of state-sponsored racism, politicians cowering and turning their backs on her, the entire urban political liturgy we've seen so many times.
We don't know all the facts yet, only what Superintendent Johnson has related, and we know he wants that anti-police narrative changed.
But I can't help thinking about that face of the officer I've never seen, and the expressions that must travel along that unknown face in the confrontation:
First resolute, the way veteran police officers often are. Then that terrible uncertainty, as she must have thought of people on the street with their phones out, recording, and what it would have looked like on the news.
A few seconds later, her face was expressionless, beaten into the concrete, thunking again and again and again as she lost consciousness.
The person responsible for what happened is the man who beat her.
But we're told there was that hesitation, that fleeting thought of politics, of all that scrutiny to come.
Other hands were in this too, like those of boss politicians who allowed this history of violence, decade after decade, as long as they got the votes.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Those ‘experts’ that have been telling us there is no Ferguson Effect need to have their heads extracted from their asses.
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