To Departing Chicago U.S. Attorney Zachary Fardon as He Leaves Office:

Farewell... And FUCK YOU!

March 20, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

The chief federal prosecutor for the Chicago area, U.S. Attorney Zachary Fardon, was told by Trump to resign. He took the sock out of his mouth to say what he really thinks needs to be done in Chicago. What words came tumbling out?

Oink, oink, oink, put some lipstick on the pig, oink, oink, oink.

Police union officials and cop blogs applauded, saying they thought maybe he was ‘against us’ but now they know he’s really ‘one of us.’ Trump didn’t realize what a loyal servant he had in this prosecutor. An Obama appointee, Fardon’s main purpose in speaking out on his way out the door seemed to be to counter the damning Department of Justice (DOJ) report on the Chicago Police Department and to launch an attack against instituting even the very tepid reforms that the CPD is supposed to be undertaking.

Fardon was a party to the DOJ report about the racist and brutal CPD. And while he claimed to support the report’s findings, his departing words heap praise on the police, attributing any problems to a few bad apples, an entrenched culture, and lack of training. How do people like Fardon think the racist and brutal culture got so entrenched over decades? Because this is what the police are trained  to do and it corresponds to their role to occupy and brutalize whole communities.

There have been many exposés in the last few years that show how any efforts to “change the culture” from within the department have been bulldozed over. The Code of Silence documents the intense threats to two cops and their families after they tried for years to get higher-ups in the department to stop a pig-led “shakedown racket” in a housing project in Chicago. Or there is the 25-year veteran cop who became a senior investigator at the “independent police review” agency, who was fired for refusing to change a report that said the Laquan McDonald shooting was not a “good” shooting. McDonald was killed by police n 2014.

The police are highly trained—trained to kill, to think of Black people as “vermin” (former police commander Jon Burge’s words), to frame, railroad, and testi-LIE. And they are backed up by courts, city attorneys, and the government at every level. Fardon says he spent hundreds of hours on the case of the eight or so other cops on the scene of Laquan McDonald’s murder—the pigs who covered up and tampered with evidence—yet he never managed to prosecute any of them. So fuck you, Fardon!

Fardon complains that the cops were using too light a touch on the streets after the video of the police murder of McDonald was released for fear of being the next cop caught on video. He whined about the fact that police can’t make street stops without filing a report! This was an attack on an ACLU settlement reached with the CPD to end rampant racial profiling occurring at a rate far higher than when the controversial stop-and-frisk practice was going on in New York City. The ACLU found that in 2014, for example, “CPD officers conducted more than 700,000 street stops that yielded no guns and resulted in not a single arrest.” [our emphasis] The ACLU responded to Fardon’s letter: “Mr. Fardon ignores the real impact and harm of these stops ... these stops were often invasive—with officers reaching inside someone’s clothing—and intrusive, happening repeatedly to the same person. These stops also were regularly conducted without a sufficient constitutional reason....” Fardon ignores that police do not have a legal right to stop someone without reasonable suspicion nor to force people to stop and talk to them. Now on top of all this, Fardon called for violating the First Amendment right of free speech, urging heavy spying on social media and using it to prosecute youth for what they say online. So, fuck you, Fardon!

One of the most chilling things that Fardon says while pretending to care about programs to help young people in the inner-city neighborhoods is that when kids as young as 10, 11, and 12 get affiliated with a gang, then “Once that’s happened, it’s too late; their fate is sealed.” Think about what type of stone-cold person says this about children. These children’s fate is not sealed by the streets, it is sealed before they are even born by a system that has absolutely no future for them and tells them so in a million ways. So again, fuck you, Fardon. (See BA on No More Generations of our Youth ...)

And one more thing. Fardon calls for combining all the efforts of federal agencies like the DEA, the FBI, ATF into one task force to go after the violence on the streets. If you want to see what this looks like, read about the ATF racist sting operation in the Chicago area where a Black former prisoner is worked on relentlessly to get him to agree to commit a take-down of a gang’s drug stash house. So once more, fuck you, Fardon!

And this guy was the appointee of the liberal Democrat, Obama! Fardon’s call for more police and prosecution and punishment is very hard to distinguish from what the Trump regime has in store for Black people. Fardon, on his way out of office, is launching a broadside attack on very mild reforms called for in the DOJ report and by the ACLU. The only difference between Fardon and a Trump appointee might be that Fardon says that calling in the National Guard to barricade whole neighborhoods is not a good idea because it will be seen as declaring war on the populace. Instead, he wants to flood the areas with police and federal agencies combining their resources and letting them terrorize the population with impunity. Oink, oink, oink.

So as you depart Chicago, Zachary Fardon, let us sincerely say FUCK YOU!

 

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