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Another front-page headline, again quoting police superintendent Phil Cline: “‘He’s tarnished our image worse than anybody else in the history of the department.’” That about Anthony Abbate, next to a still from the video that has him allegedly knocking a bartender at Jesse’s Short Stop Inn to the floor and beating her. And across the bottom of page one: “Carol Marin: What city needs to do to clean up this mess.” Everything on page one of the Sun-Times referred to Chicago’s rotten cops. Even the weather word was “solemn.”
In the commentary section, part-timer Marin deepened my impression of her as one smart, tough cookie by refusing to be placated by Cline’s indignation. “Cline declared that Abbate’s beating of the barmaid ‘tarnished our image worse than anybody else in the history of the department,’” she wrote. “He’s dead wrong. If Jon Burge or Joe Miedzianowski [the first a police commander and torturer, the second a gang-crimes officer convicted of drug running] had ever been caught on tape, Chicago might have qualified for the International Court at the Hague by now.”
(The Sun-Times’s front page today? “The verdict is in: / TRIB GUILTY / Convicted of Crimes Against Cubdom.”)
