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Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Rahm ecstatic. Nobody killed on Day 1

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Rahm ecstatic. Nobody killed on Day 1:

Rahm ecstatic. Nobody killed on Day 1

"This is true community policing." -- Chief Garry McCarthy

The Mayor's troops held the line on Immoral Monday.

Nobody was killed, at least between the hours of 7-8 a.m. and 3-4 p.m. when thousands of cops, fire fighters, Streets & San crews, yellow-vested $10/hr. new hires, and $85K/yr. business-suited CPS staffers manned the 92 Safe Passage routes at an estimated cost of $15.7 million.

However, a 28-year-old man was shot along one of the routes and a 14-year-old boy was shot to death near another one, the day before school started.

Actually, in all the years I've been in Chicago, sending all three of my kids to CPS schools, I can't recall any student ever being shot or killed on their way to the first day of school, even without the full-scale mobilization of troops to guard against the invisible army of "jaw-jacking"shooters supposedly poised waiting behind abandoned buildings to strike at dawn.

But that's probably because we've never had a mayor (and we've had some doozies) willing to put thousands of children in harm's way with such a disruptive, ill-thought-out, and arbitrary school closing strategy.

Rahm skipped the triathlon to prepare for Day 1.
Lost in all the high-fiving was the fact that 400,000 students were returning to a grossly underfunded, racially-segregated school system with over-crowded