Last week Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (he leaves office May 20), as part of his tour to rehabilitate his reputation after falling on his face in Chicago, had an op-ed in the New York Times. I didn’t post on it on the grounds that he (and we) have suffered enough already but the editors of the Chicago Tribune have taken the trouble of fisking it:
In case you missed it, Rahm Emanuel penned a commentary for Thursday’s New York Times hailing his police reform efforts. With no disrespect for our Times colleagues: Had the mayor submitted his piece to the Tribune for publication, we would have performed heavier editing.
Emanuel’s column, titled “Lessons for police reform,†was the latest pit stop on his farewell tour. He leaves office May 20. The column spins furiously to his favor as he touts his insistence that law enforcement be consulted along the way. He compares Chicago and Baltimore, two cities that grappled with volatile cases of police misconduct and subsequent efforts to overhaul police protocols. Here, the catalyst for change was Laquan McDonald. There, it was Freddie Gray.
Does anyone seriously doubt that his office did not take an active role in suppressing the tape that eventually revealed the police murder that became a national cause célèbre. Thanks, Rahm.
Emanuel praises his embrace of police reform and notes a drop in homicides since 2016; they’re down 27 percent.
Left unmentioned is that between the time that Mayor Emanuel took office and the present, the number of homicides increased 50% (it doubled between the time he took office and 2016). That’s not an isolated instance of cherry-picking by Mayor Emanuel. It’s one of the things his administration was known for. Thanks, Rahm.
Since the fisking focuses on Mayor Emanuel’s wrapping himself in the flag of police reform, it doesn’t mention his presiding over the first teacher’s strike since 1987 then caving and giving the CTU everything they wanted or the sharp spike in property taxes (they’ve risen 35% while property values have remained flat) under his tenure or any of his other failings.
