Brave Sir Brandon Ran Away
-
That was NBC,..
-
Kass - a story of politics and mayors and funerals:
Years ago, when I was just starting out writing news columns, Chicago Police Officer Michael Ceriale was assassinated by a Gangster Disciple lookout during a drug deal at the Robert Taylor Homes projects. The young rookie officer was hit in the stomach. It took him a long week to die. It was horrible and the city was horrified.
Chicago’s Mayor Richard M. Daley wanted to go to the funeral. But he knew that police officers and some close to Ceriale’s family did not want him there. He went anyway. Because leadership demanded it. He delivered a stunningly emotional address in the beautiful and old Ukrainian Catholic Church
I remember there were thousands of people in the street, and the church was full.
The only sound was that of the church bell tolling. That bell tolled every 10 seconds. It tolled for hours. When it tolled the finality of it all cut through your heart.
“The death of a young person is heartbreaking for a mother and father,” the mayor began, challenging everyone never to forget the young officer. Then his face changed and he tried to rush through his short speech before he was overcome. He didn’t succeed.
Daley looked at the mother, then turned away. Daley understood the Ceriale family’s hideous and unremitting pain that is carried by parents who bury a child. In 1981, Daley’s own son Kevin, then not yet 3, died from spina bifida.
“Less than two years ago, he stood at Navy Pier,” Daley said about Ceriale, tears coming, his voice breaking, remembering the ceremony of the young officer being sworn in. “He raised his right hand, he stood by that motto: We Serve and Protect. He was taken from us. “Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called sons of God.”
I’m not lionizing him. Daley wasn’t stand up. He was weak in many ways. He backed down when it came to standing up to the Outfit’s unofficial Chicago chief of police, the late Chief of Detectives Bill Hanhardt, or acknowledging his administration’s role in the Hired Truck scandal that enriched Bridgeport trucking bosses he knew.
But Daley was not a de-funder of police like the current mayor BLM Johnson. He didn’t hate cops or suck up to the cop haters. And he was not a proponent of pro-criminal legislation like Gov. J.B Pritzker’s “Safe-T Act.”
Daley, for all his many faults, was law-and-order just like his father, the real Mayor Daley. And both men would have been horrified over what Pritzker, Johnson and Toni Preckwinkle have done to Chicago and Illinois with their so-called criminal injustice policies. These are Democrat policies that benefit repeat violent offenders like Octavious Crocket and Bruce Diamond. These are the policies that kill cities by first removing their will to live.
When Daley was mayor, the newspapers would chase crime stories and put heat on prosecutors who failed the public. But now the papers don’t even bother, and they fear runing mug shots so readers and taxpayers (victims) can see for themselves.
Read it all,
