Going through some files last week, I came across a column I’d written in 1993 about Chicago’s police. My topic was a then new book, The Cop Shop: True Crime on the Streets of Chicago, written by Robert Blau, a young reporter who’d covered police headquarters for the Tribune. He’d asked for the beat; he wanted to taste the life.
As we’ve just seen again with the matter of Laquan McDonald, Chicago finds it much easier to shell out millions of dollars to compensate families that seek justice in civil courts than it does to hold cops who kill criminally responsible. Chicago is, to borrow language from couples therapy, nonconfrontational. That’s a term often employed to describe a dependent relationship with a powder keg.
