Chicago should be celebrating a whistleblower cop, not fighting him in court

12-8-2022 (issue No. 65)

Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above.

Once again, I’m reminding charter paid subscribers to this newsletter that Friday marks the one-year anniversary of the Picayune Plus program ,and so your subscriptions will automatically renew. Substack, which handles all the business matters related to its newsletters, sends out a reminder letter to this effect,but in the interest of transparency I want to make sure you’re aware. Given the time I’ve spent harping on the deceptive to downright sleazy subscription practices of certain major local publications, I feel I should go the extra distance for supporters.

That said, I hope you’ll not only renew but also purchase a few gift subscriptions as holiday gifts for all those in your life who could benefit from a twice-weekly jolt of wisdom and wit delivered to their email inbox.

Reader support makes this enterprise sustainable, and I’m really grateful for it.

In this week’s issue: (links to come)

• The Chicago Police Department is still trying sweep an appalling cop shooting under the rug

• Last week’s winning tweet

• News and Views — on the proposed assault weapons ban, Ye’s honorary degree and more

• Land of Linkin’ — Where I tell readers where to go

• Funny or not funny? — Help settle a dispute between me and a friend

• Knock it off! — A plea for people to stop posting defacto chain letters to Facebook

• The very last Songs of Good Cheer update

• Mary Schmich — on how she learned to fake it on the piano.

• “The Mincing Rascals” teaser

• Re:Tweets — featuring the winner of the visual tweets poll and this week’s finalists

• Tune of the Week — “Long Way Around the Sea,” a gorgeous, haunting song of the season

The Chicago Police Department is still trying sweep an appalling cop shooting under the rug

In May 2020 I wrote a column for the Tribune about how Chicago police Sgt. Khalil Muhammad shot and wounded 18-year-old Ricardo Hayes in an act that Video surveillance from a porch nearby showed clearly was rash, unnecessary and unprovoked.

Hayes, 18, was unarmed and calm as he took four tentative steps toward Muhammad, who was about 20 feet away in the driver’s seat of an SUV on an otherwise deserted street in the Morgan Park neighborhood. Hayes made no sudden or threatening movements to suggest he was about to withdraw a weapon.

Muhammad fired anyway — two shots, one of which went through Hayes’s left armpit, the other of which grazed his arm. Hayes, who has autism and schizophrenia, fled and later was treated at a hospital and released. The incident didn’t make much if any news at the time, in large part because no one was gravely hurt in what the Chicago Police Department’s initial statement blandly referred to as “an armed confrontation.”

In fact, Sgt. Isaac Lambert, a supervisor who investigated the shooting, says he was directed to list Muhammad as the victim of an aggravated assault by Hayes. He is claiming in an ongoing civil trial that the department demoted him because he refused, busting him to a patrol officer just five days after he declined to OK a report that would have vindicated Muhammad’s decision to fire on Hayes.

Muhammad was suspended for six months without pay after the Chicago Police Board concluded last December that he acted in an “objectively unreasonable” manner and “without lawful justification” in shooting Hayes, who had committed no crime and posed no immediate threat to Muhammad. The key video, not released until October 2018, revealed that Muhammad’s contention to investigators from the Civilian Office of Police Accountability that he fired in fear of his life because Hayes had reached back and withdrawn a dark object from his waistband in a fashion “consistent with someone pulling a weapon” was false.

Similarly, Muhammad’s version of events to a 911 operator shortly after the shooting — "The guy pulled like he was about to pull a gun on me, walked up to the car, and I had to shoot” — was a lie.

Further, the city paid $2.25 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Hayes’ family.

“Lambert’s removal from the detective division was because he refused to participate in an effort to cover up the illegal conduct of Muhammad toward Hayes," his lawsuit alleges. "And because he refused (to) falsify police reports in order to mischaracterize a police shooting. … The removal of Lambert from the detective division was an act of retaliation.”

Sadly, it’s a very plausible allegation. We’ve seen how police officers close ranks around one another in such circumstances.

One example is how his fellow officers attempted to close ranks behind Officer Jason Van Dyke after the infamous 2014 incident in which he emptied his gun into Laquan McDonald, killing him. They falsely and repeatedly claimed that McDonald was advancing on Van Dyke in a threatening manner when he was shot, though the dashcam video convincingly showed McDonald angling away from police.

Lawyers for the city are contending that “Lambert was demoted because of lengthy delay in finishing the investigation,” according to trial coverage by the Sun-Times’ Andy Grimm, “though one report entered into evidence (on November 30) stated the CPD probe had been put on hold while the shooting was reviewed by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability.”

In at times testy exchanges on cross examination, city attorney J.T. Wilson III repeatedly asked Lambert why he didn’t go to the state’s attorney, COPA or federal agencies if he was concerned the department was covering up an illegal shooting.

Gee. Anyone want to try to answer that one?

The message behind Lambert’s demotion was pretty clear to all the honest cops out there who want to do the right thing. A verdict in Lambert’s favor will send a different message to the brass.

See also “Former police commander testifies in CPD whistleblower trial,” by Andy Grimm

Last week’s winning tweet

I often get racially profiled. Servers in Asian restaurants automatically bring me a fork. — various sources

I must also report the results of the click poll that pitted my list of 10 nominees for Tweet of the Week last week against a competing slate of tweets submitted by reader Jay Gerak.

This shellacking inspires me to invite other readers to send in a slate of 10 nominees for Tweet of the Week to be pitted against mine. Twitter is (still) a big site, and my ability to curate is limited, so I’m open to challenges from those who feel their eye for comedy is keener than mine.

Here are this week’s nominees and the winner of the Tuesday visual-tweets poll. Here is the direct link to the new poll.

News & Views

News: Illinois House Democrats unveil proposal to ban assault weapons, high-capacity magazines

View: I have some hope for incremental changes in the legislation that might make us a bit safer. The proposal includes—

Barring gun permits for those younger than 21, banning large-capacity magazines and strengthening the state’s red flag law. … (It) would allow people under 21 to obtain a FOID card only if they are active-duty members of the U.S. military or the Illinois National Guard. The measure also seeks to strengthen the state’s firearm restraining order law by extending the period someone can be barred from possessing a gun from six months to a year and by giving local prosecutors a greater role in the process.

But as far as banning “assault” weapons, the problem will be definitional as well as legal. Many of these rifles tricked out to look like actual military guns are marketed with such names as Streetsweeper and such useless macho accessories as grenade launchers and bayonet mounts to appeal to the inner Rambo. But cosmetics aside, they have little to no unique potential for mayhem, and there is no reason to believe bad guys won't move on to different firearms to elude the technical prohibitions should a ban that passes court muster be enacted.

House Bill 5855 is likely to pass the heavily Democratic General Assembly and then be whittled down in the course of extensive and expensive court challenges.

News: A restaurant in Richmond, Virginia., canceled a private event by a conservative Christian organization, citing the group’s opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion rights, positions that made restaurant staffers feel “uncomfortable or unsafe.”

View: Touché. Though I can’t tell if this is a sincere expression of sensitivity by the restaurant staff or a “two-can-play-at-the-discrimination-game” gambit meant to illustrate the toxic absurdity of allowing businesses that serve the public the right to refuse to serve those with whom they have ideological differences.

Judging from what the conservative justices said during this week’s arguments in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to grant fairly wide latitude to businesses to exercise discrimination on religious grounds. This is what my father would call the thin end of a bad wedge. Think of all the prejudices that over time have been draped upon the scaffolding of “faith.”

News: In a sweeping legislative overhaul, Indonesia has outlawed sex outside of marriage and criminalized criticism of the government.

View: This power play by religious conservatives in the nation of 276 million ought to alarm the American left. If it can happen in a country that until recently “prided itself as a thriving democracy,” as the Times reports, it can most certainly happen anywhere. “Critics warned that the new rules, which also apply to foreigners, will make Indonesia less appealing to investors, tourists and students,” said The New York Times. Let’s hope for a major, punishing backlash.

News: An online petition calls for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to rescind an honorary doctorate awarded to Ye (formerly Kanye West) in 2015.

View: I have a better idea. How about all institutions everywhere rescind all honorary “doctorates” ever issued to anyone? Pretend degrees of higher learning cheapen the accomplishments of those who have actually earned them and allow such poseurs as mayoral candidate Willie Wilson to go around calling themselves “Doctor” as though they hold Ph.Ds.

HowStuffWorks has a good explainer on the topic, saying that, in the United States, only the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Virginia, Stanford and Cornell “explicitly ban the practice of awarding honorary degrees” For many other schools, though it is a savvy marketing opportunity. … Most of the time honorees are required to collect their "doctorates" in person and perhaps deliver a few remarks to the graduating students. These often get reported in the press.”

News: Vacationing Chicago cop charged with urinating in an ice machine at Florida beach bar

View: I include this only because it appeared in the controversial police-blotter blog CWBChicago, which is often accused of being pro-cop. CWBChicago got it from The Smoking Gun, which ran the story under the headline, “Vacationing Cop Puts The ‘Pee’ In Chicago P.D.”

Land of Linkin’

• In “So Much #Losing,” Charlie Sykes of the Bulwark chronicles the season of former President Donald Trump’s discontent, including and especially Herschel Walker’s loss in Tuesday’s special U.S. Senate election in Georgia. Sykes passes along this quote about Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign that appeared in a CNN report: “‘So far, he has gone down from his bedroom, made an announcement, gone back up to his bedroom and hasn’t been seen since except to have dinner with a white supremacist,’ said a 2020 Trump campaign adviser.”

• Author/mortician Caitlin Doughty penned a lengthy guest essay in the New York Times Monday on human composting. “If You Want to Give Something Back to Nature, Give Your Body” makes the compelling case for permitting this form of handling human remains.

• For the latest info on who’s in, who’s out and who’s hoping to survive a petition challenge in the race for Chicago mayor, bookmark the PS’s 2023 Chicago mayoral scoreboard. My best guess is that seven candidates will make it all the way to the ballot, half the number we saw in 2019.

• “You didn't listen to me, and now Kyle Rittenhouse looks like he's never going away” was the lead item in the Picayune Plus this week. You will also find there a lengthy dissent to my critique of the course title, “The Problem of Whiteness.”

• The Picayune Sentinel on the air: On Thursdays at 4:30 p.m., WCPT-AM 820 host Joan Esposito and I chat about ideas raised in the new issue. The listen-live link is here.

• The Picayune Sentinel preview: Tuesday at 11:30 a.m. I talk with WGN-AM 720 host John Williams about what’s making news and likely to be grist for the PS mill. The WGN listen-live link is here.

Funny or not funny?

A friend and I have a disagreement. One of us thinks that @LeHarrumph’s Twitter name “For Sale: Baby shoes. Never worn. (Baby is dead)” is funny. The other one of us does not. Both of us are aware of the likely apocryphal legend that Ernest Hemingway won a bet or contest with other writers to compose a sad story in just six words. One of us thinks the additional, parenthetical explanation is unnecessary and sees no humor in it. The other thinks it is so darkly blunt as to be amusing.

I would note that there are non-sad reasons why baby shoes might never have been worn. Maybe the shoes were the wrong size. Maybe they were a gift to parents who, like my wife and me, didn’t believe in baby shoes. Maybe they were spares. Maybe the baby pitched such a fit at attempts to slip on the shoes that the parents just gave up.

My friend and I have agreed to put the matter to the discerning judgment of readers of the Picayune Sentinel:

Knock it off!

Variations of the annoying, needy, chain-letter-like post excerpted in the image below have been polluting Facebook for years.

I’m begging all of you to stop spreading this idea. If I’m seeing your posts, then we’re "friends" and the algorithm thinks I’m interested. If I am interested, you’ll show up my timeline every so often, and I’ll occasionally leave little reactions. If I’m not interested, over the course of time, I’ll unfriend you. That’s how the site works.

The final Songs of Good Cheer update

… at least for this year. Shows for the 24th annual holiday singalong are Friday and Saturday night and Saturday and Sunday afternoon at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Lincoln Square. Lyrics will be included in the songbook, with cover art, above, by our pal Scott Stantis.

Only scattered tickets are available, but if the past is any guide, some will become available in the run-up to the weekend as people turn their tickets back to the box office when life events intervene. Check here for updates.

If you’re tempted or curious, this video montage by Ken Davis, shot from the balcony in 2015 in portrait mode and in brazen violation of the concert hall rules, gives a nice flavor of the event:

Mary Schmich: Thanking Mr. Fine or How I Learned to Fake It on the Piano

My former colleague Mary Schmich posts occasional column-like entries on Facebook. Here, reprinted with permission, is a piece she posted a year ago but reposted this week:

A few minutes ago, I was about to go practice piano for our upcoming Songs of Good Cheer shows when Art Fine popped into my mind. Without him I wouldn’t be playing piano in a holiday band at the Old Town School of Folk Music. So today I wanted to take a moment to do what I’ve never done publicly—thank Mr. Fine.

First, though, I have to thank my mother.

My mother was a wonderful pianist who learned to play as a child and studied piano seriously in college. Classical, gospel, boogie-woogie, Broadway. She could do it all. But for most of my itinerant childhood we didn’t have a piano in the house and my mother, Mary Ellen, rarely had the chance to play. Still, she sensed I had some instinct for the instrument so she signed me up for group lessons with one of the nuns at St. James School in Savannah, Ga., where students learned to “play” on a folding, cardboard keyboard.

“Learn to play the piano,” Mama once told me, “and it will be your friend for life.”

For a while, that cardboard keyboard was all I knew of the piano. But when I was in fifth grade, my father rented us a spinet, with the option to buy. I took a few more lessons, again from a nun, this time at Sts. Peter & Paul in Decatur, Ga. Alas, my father couldn’t afford the payments, so the spinet soon went to the home of an aunt who paid it off. If I learned to play anything during that period, I’m not sure what.

By the time I was in eighth grade, when my father could no longer support us, my mother and my siblings and I were living in my grandfather’s house in Macon, Ga. At the end of that school year, Granddaddy died--and my mother inherited the Baldwin baby grand her parents had given her when she was 16. Shortly after his death, just before I entered high school, my family moved to Arizona, hauling that big baby grand.

During my four years of high school in Phoenix, my family lived in four different places. Every time but the last one, the big old Baldwin came with us. My mother didn’t play as much as she wished to—eight kids, money crises, domestic chaos cramp an artist's style--but whenever she did, I felt a stirring. I wanted to do that.

Enter Art Fine. Mr. Fine, as he was known.

One night when I was in high school, my parents were in a bar where a balding man with big glasses, wearing a tux, was tinkling the keys. My father enjoyed listening while sipping his third or fourth highball. My mother knew enough to know the piano player was really good. They went to talk to him. Did he give lessons?

And that was how it came to pass that before long Mr. Fine was sitting on the piano bench in our home once a week teaching a teenager who never found time to practice—i.e. me—and whose parents didn’t reliably have money to pay him.

I still have the “Music Writing Book” (pictured here) in which the hopeful Mr. Fine wrote down all the mysteries of how music works. How to do fill-ins and substitute chords, the relationship of major and minor keys, timing.

I was a frustrating student to him, I’m sure, because I was more interested in my pom-pon rehearsals than in practicing piano. And yet a small but vital fraction of what he noted in that music writing book penetrated my teenage brain.

He managed to give me the basic tools of “faking,” meaning I learned how to take a set of chords and a melody line and play a song even without a full set of sheet music. I learned to play “Love is Blue” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and “Lara’s Theme.” I was thrilled when he suggested I learn "Yesterday" and told me that although a lot of adults thought The Beatles were just long-haired noisemakers, “Yesterday” was one of the most musically sophisticated songs of the era.

Eventually Mr. Fine stopped coming by for lessons. We couldn’t afford it and couldn’t fake that anymore.

But I carried what he taught me to college, where I played Laura Nyro and Carole King and Joni Mitchell on the dorm pianos. When I got my first newspaper job, I bought a little piano and moved it into my third-floor attic apartment in a ramshackle house in Palo Alto. I’ve had a piano ever since. For my 50th birthday I bought a Steinway baby grand.

And for the past 23 years, a bunch of great musicians have let me play piano with them as we put on the Songs of Good Cheer holiday singalong at the Old Town School. The shows begin this week, so I’m going to go practice now, with thanks to Art Fine for helping to make the piano my lifetime friend.

Minced Words

Heather Cherone, Austin Berg and I joined host John Williams for this week’s episode of “The Mincing Rascals.” We spent quite a bit of time discussing nominating petitions, signature challenges and how they will shape the mayoral election in late February. Austin suggested the city take a look at electronic petitions that might avoid all the folderol we’re going to see in the coming week. As a folderolphobe, I’m quite interested.

Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener, you can now hear an edited version of the show at 8 p.m. most Saturday evenings on WGN-AM 720.

Re: Tweets

Just Bill @WilliamAder

We had Spotify years ago when I was a kid. It was called "Calling the Local DJ and Requesting a Song."

This tweet caused me to wonder: Do people still call in requests to radio stations? Most music radio has long been so formatted and programmed that requests are simply data points, and who needs a DJ to play a song you want to hear anymore when just about everything is on a streaming service or YouTube?

On Facebook, Kevin K. responded

Request were always data points. At least in the top 25 markets. Even in the 70s and 80s. The DJ or air personality would answer the phone and tally your request. But he wouldn't and couldn't deviate from the play list the music director or program director gave to him that list all the songs, spots and sweepers he was to play. So you might hear your request but likely it was going to be played anyway. I was on weekends at a radio station and I had no choice as to what I was going to play.

Barb G wrote:

WIIL-Rock 95.1 Chicago takes rush hour requests between 5 and 6pm weekdays. And you can call or text to vote “Puff” or “Pass” on the 4:20 Hit of the Day, Monday through Friday; Wednesday is always a local band or artist.

The artist is not revealed till 5pm when the verdict is in. It’s fun, comments are also read as the votes come in.

It has that community feeling I used to get from waiting to hear the song that was voted most popular on WCFL from 9-10pm, back when AM was still a big thing.

In Tuesday’s paid-subscriber editions, I present my favorite tweets that rely on visual humor and so can’t be included in the classic Tweet of the Week contest in which the template for the poll does not allow the use of images. Subscribers vote for their favorite, and I post the winner here every Thursday:

The new nominees for Tweet of the Week:

• Start every phone call with, “My phone is about to die.” That way you can hang up on them whenever you want to  — @cooliocueno

•  I was so poor growing up that we had to play Dungeons or Dragons. — @RickAaron

• Me, hearing about recency bias: That's my favorite bias. — @rajandelman

• If you’ve ever thought about becoming a concierge for people in superhero underwear, then parenting might be for you. — @daddygofish

• Our parents were right all along, the music is too loud.— @Social_Mime

• The enemy of my enemy isn't doing a very good job. — @FuturePopop

• Packing my lunch and including two fruits so they have each other to keep company when I don’t eat either of them. — @saltssaltgirl

• Confession: I frequently say “all things considered” when I’ve only considered a few of the things. — @RickAaron

• You swear you’re not going to become a crotchety old man until one day all the wrong birds are at the feeder. — @lloydrang

• Me: Actually, every date will never happen again. Her: *getting up* OK,  but this date is really never happening again. — @rebrafsim

Vote here in the poll. For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Tune of the Week

“Long Way Around the Sea” is a dark, spine-tingling Christmas song. I realize that sounds like a contradiction, but the mournful elegance of the tune and the lyrics will raise the hairs on the back of your neck as they tell the portion of the Nativity story in which God tells the Magi not to return to Herod after visiting young Jesus, but to take a different route home.

We turn to go
An angel shone
Said, "Don't go back
To Herod's throne"
Take the long way around the sea
Take the long way around the sea

Low, which wrote and recorded “Long Way Around the Sea,” was “one of the most original and accomplished names in indie rock,” said the Guardian in a recent obituary for founding band member Mimi Parker. “Crafting a softer alternative to the heavy, grunge-oriented sounds of the 90s, the band (was) associated with the rock subgenre ‘slowcore’ — although members have publicly disapproved of the term.”

Wikipedia adds: “During their early career, the band often faced unsympathetic and inattentive audiences in bars and clubs, to which they responded by bucking rock protocol and turning their volume down.”

Their best-known recording is probably their languorous take on “Little Drummer Boy,” which was featured in a Gap TV commercial in 2000.

Consult the complete Tune of the Week archive!

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