It’s starting to become surreal here in Chicago. Today the police shot a suspect dead on a Metra train in Deerfield. The Tribune reports:
Police shot and killed a murder suspect during a shootout aboard an outbound Metra train late Friday night in north suburban Deerfield, according to authorities.
No officers or passengers were wounded in the gunbattle aboard the Milwaukee District North Line, though several officers did suffer minor injuries dodging gunfire from the suspect, officials said.
And take a gander at this footage, courtesy of Fox Chicago, of a fight at Cook County that sent five to the hospital:
Here’s how the Sun-Times reported it:
Five Cook County Jail inmates suffered injuries – including multiple stab wounds – in a fight Friday afternoon in the jail’s maximum-security division.
The fight broke out about 1:30 p.m. among detainees in Division 9, Cook County sheriff’s department spokeswoman Sophia Ansari said. Jail staff brought the fight under control and recovered several weapons.
Five detainees were taken to hospitals to be treated for their injuries, which included multiple “puncture wounds,†Ansari said. Four of those hurt were in custody for murder charges while the fifth was charged with armed robbery.
I don’t know what to say.
Looks like they needed a little mentoring.
If you watch the tape you see some interesting things. For a start, the violence was pretty limited at the beginning. Those were not serious fights, and you can see a number of inmates clearly trying to keep the peace. Then the bulls show up and all hell breaks loose. I see nothing that suggests there were any serious injuries prior to the – slow – arrival of the guards.
Jails are very tense places. No one in there is in a happy frame of mind. But jails are not prisons and most people in jail are still hoping to get out. They are in many cases nowhere near an actual trial yet, still innocent men in the eyes of the law. So typically jails are not where the worst things happen.
Competent, well-trained guards should have been able to defuse the situation. In fact, it was already defusing before they came along and started a free-for-all.
Yeah, that was what it looked like to me, too. I wondered where the guards were?
I also was wryly amused by the reporting emphasizing that no guards were injured in the fracas. How could they have been? They weren’t there.
Isn’t there a guard watching through the window within 10 seconds of the first attack? It looks to me like they called for backup. They weren’t going into that room without numbers.
It looks to me like there are two gangs sharing the same space, which seems unwise and reflects abject indifference to what happens to the prisoners. (There appear to be bystanders hugging the wall, but they sort of scoot beneath the camera and out-of-sight, which might be innocent, but it might be to allow makeshift weapons to be handed to the players)
That was my impression, too.