Trump resurrects Chicago Mystery Cop
CHICAGO— There are 11,944 cops in the Chicago Police Department.
U.S. President Donald Trump claims to be chummy with one of them, a “mystery biker” who has allegedly boasted that he can solve the city’s horrific crime problem in “a couple of days.”
A silver-bullet officer, it would seem. Although the Windy City has had a bellyful of bullets — on pace to top 700 homicides for a second consecutive year, the vast majority of murders, more than 90 per cent through the first six months of 2017 attributable to gunfire, according to police department records.
So any purported saviour, a law and order genius, would be hugely appreciated, even if, you know, this uncaped crusader might have to knock some heads together, an approach to urban violence this whack-job president apparently favours. As commander-in-chief (eight months on from the election, that still makes me want to smack my own head in disbelief ), Trump seems to have no issue with thugs-in-blue despite national angst about civilians mistreated and slain by law enforcement, 492 killed from January to July 1, as tracked by the Washington Post, a paper Trump likely despises even more than the New York Times.
But that particular bloodshed — the spectre of hooligan cops — doesn’t distress this prez. Not a shred of restraint (a word not in his vocabulary) from Trump during a speech in Long Island on Friday, where he segued from discussing gang violence and illegal immigration to offering personal advice on how suspects should be treated. “When you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over?’’ That sentence doesn’t even make any sense, but you get the drift. “Like, don’t hit their head, and they just killed somebody — don’t hit their head,” Trump continued. “I said, you can take the hand away, OK?”
Like, bang a gangbanger getting into the squad car, understand?
Which got a whole lot of dismayed pushback from civil rights groups and even police chiefs across the country, the latter appalled by a president fanning these flames while local police departments are (they insist) trying to mend relationships with their communities.
Too many suspects have died in police custody, both in America and in Canada. But the dyspeptic Trump is out there promoting police misconduct.
That’s all by way of an aside to this column, though. Every day Trump feeds the media beast a generous portion of scandal, controversy and unprecedented White House craziness. Trump is a subject I generally try to avoid. He’s not my president, if a lazy pundit’s wet dream.
But I do happen to be in Chicago, a great metropolis torn asunder by mostly gangland violence — same as it always was, except the current crew of killers are related only distantly to rogue gallery mobsters of yesteryear.
And yet again Trump has evoked what many believe to be a phantom cop character, sprung out of his own mendacious imagination. A big fat lie, in other words.
Brought up Mystery Cop in that same Friday speech to an audience of police officers, revisiting a claim first propagated a year ago whilst on the campaign trail — about how he’d encountered this paragon of policing who was part of a volunteer brigade of motorcyclists who’d escorted Nominee Trump when he blew through Chi-town, a city in Blue State Illinois he mostly avoided and has never once visited since taking residence in 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Trump described the unidentified Chicago badge-holder, among a group of off-duty fuzz he’d posed with for a photo, as a “rough cookie,” a tough dude who brought him up to speed on the crime problems bedevilling the city and how the scourge could be “straightened out.”
“And I said, ‘How long would it take you to straighten out this problem?’ ” Trump said.
“And he said, ‘If you gave me the authority — couple of days. I really mean it.’ ”
Maybe by deploying death squad platoons to the South Side?
Trump continued on Friday: “I said, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding . . . Give me your card.’ And he gave me a card. And I sent it to the mayor. I said, ‘You ought to try using this guy.’ Guess what happened? Never heard. And last week they had another record.” Homicide record. “It’s horrible.”
Same incident Trump spun for then-Fox News host Bill O’Reilly last August.
A Chicago police spokesperson told the Chicago Tribune on the weekend that the department has been “unable to identify (the) department member who had a conversation with then-candidate Trump.”
Local media report that the White House has not responded to requests to identify the Mystery Cop or if Trump kept the name that he allegedly passed on to Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Of course, this could all have happened on the dark side of the moon inside Trump’s head.
Chicago keeps getting kicked in the teeth by Trump for its deplorable homicide stats, but he has yet to nominate a new U.S. attorney for the northern district of Illinois, which at least nominally falls within his purview. He dislikes Gov. Bruce Rauner and flat-out loathes Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who in his former life was president Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff.
Emanuel was actually in Washington last week, but his spokesperson, Adam Collins, bluntly rejected Trump’s assertion that he’d sent the mayor Mystery Cop’s business card. (Cops have business cards?) “It never happened. It’s absolutely not true.”
Collins issued this statement: “We can only hope the president is as interested in attacking crime as he is in attacking his attorney general, transgender members of the military and the three largest cities in the country.”
Hours before Trump’s Friday speech, near a public-housing project on the North Side, a man was shot repeatedly in the face.
It was Chicago’s 400th homicide this year. Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.