Eighty-one Chicago police officers lost their badges over the past 20 years, but only after being investigated for 1,706 previous offenses – an average of 21 accusations per officer. One third (28) of these Chicago officers were investigated for domestic altercations or sexual misconduct. Two murdered their wives. That statistical picture emerges from records obtained…
For nearly a decade, an archived collection of photographs from the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper seemed lost forever, first to a convicted embezzler and then later to an eBay collector who put them in storage in the boyhood hometown of Ronald Reagan. The photographs, captured by Sun-Times photojournalists over six decades, include a 1991 photo of…
A few days ago I shared an op-ed on my personal Facebook page by a doctor in Los Angeles who wrote that she was running out of compassion for the people unwilling to get the COVID vaccine. “Last year, a case like this would have flattened me,” the doctor wrote of a man who had…
When their billionaire owner abruptly closed Chicago’s DNAInfo in 2017, three former editors decided to build a different kind of news source out of the remnants. Block Club Chicago launched seven months later, with a mission to combine neighborhood reporting with public service journalism and to do it under a nonprofit business model. It was…
CHICAGO – Back in the early ’70s, as a cub working off the overnight city desk at the Chicago Tribune, you learned fast that all murders were not equal. Sure, all were listed methodically on the deputy superintendent’s logbook at the old police headquarters at 11th and State streets. But while killings on the city’s predominantly white North Side were almost always pursued by our small band of nocturnal newsmen, the more numerous homicides in the black neighborhoods of the South and West Sides most often were ignored. There was even a winking code word for the latter category. They were “blue.” Blue, as in “cheap domestic,” where a drunken live-in boyfriend kills his common-law mate. Blue, as in someone shot in the face after a street-corner dice game gone awry. Judging by how the other four daily newspapers (yes, four!) covered and displayed their homicides, it’s safe to assume the same double standard applied.