Chicago Police Recruits Should Learn the Truth about Wrongful Convictions

The exoneration movement penetrates police training

A funny thing happened to an instructor charged with teaching police recruits throughout Illinois about “wrongful convictions.”

The instructor told a reporter for the Chicago City Wire he wasn’t aware that many of the most high-profile exoneration cases were being lambasted in federal court and attorneys for the detectives arguing the innocence of the convicted men was based on hyped up media coverage or gangs influencing witnesses to change their stories.

Expressing surprise that some exoneration cases were being contested in court, Michael Schlosser told Chicago City Wire “he was open to new information to include in the curriculum for the 'Wrongful Conviction Awareness and Avoidance' course, a curriculum developed by the Illinois Innocence Project at the University of Illinois -- Springfield.

"I can change it," Schlosser added.

According to the Illinois News Bureau, the curriculum was the culmination of work between Schlosser and colleagues at the Illinois Innocence Project.  

How it could possibly be that such an instructor would be “unaware” of such developments at the very time he was preparing to implement the curriculum for police officers statewide is a question that will never be asked by Chicago’s mainstream media. It also paints a dismal image of a state and city that is already run, top to bottom, by a radicalized Democratic Party.

A crucial boon for the anti-police movement, the curriculum “impresses upon new recruits the importance of carefully gathering and analyzing evidence in investigations and not jumping to conclusions about potential suspects. It offers real-world examples of the harm that accrues from wrongful convictions, including a presentation from an exoneree.”

The Chicago City Wire article cites three examples of cases in which it was exoneration advocates who defy the “real world” that may have let out bona-fide killers in cases where detectives may very well have conducted solid investigations but whose lives and reputations were nevertheless destroyed by exoneration mania. It also quotes two Chicago aldermen, Anthony Napolitano and Nicholas Sposato, who condemned a vote to pay out from the city on behalf of the Englewood Four, claiming they believed the men were guilty of a vicious rape and murder of a prostitute, whose body was found stuffed inside a dumpster.

A measure of just how far the anti-police movement has burrowed into Chicago and Illinois, the wholesale sell out of police officers throughout the state by the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board symbolizes a final dagger to public safety. This is particularly true for Chicago, which is sinking under the weight of violent crime and a prosecutor no doubt ecstatic over the new wrongful conviction curriculum to be imposed on cadets.

Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx has made dubious exonerations of convicted killers the focal point of her war on the police in Chicago, with predictable results.

A true "wokeness" of the curriculum could, however, benefit cadets throughout the state, for the tactics of the exoneration industry would provide police recruits with an important lesson in how they will be treated on the job and what is at risk, particularly recruits for whom policing is not just a career, but a kind of calling.

A legitimate wrongful conviction class would not simply have an exoneree come before the class and tell his story about how he had been framed by the police. It would include the many hundreds of detectives who describe how they investigated, captured and helped indict some maniac killer, only to find out 20 years later that some witness has changed their story after a bizarre meeting or phone call with a gang member. These former detectives can describe in detail how the Chicago media is deeply aligned with exoneration movement, a clear view of the degree to which the media has collapsed in Illinois.

Recruits would learn how the current scribblers and white-teethed broadcasters willfully ignore the evidence that most exonerations are laughable. They would then see how these contemporary media ninjas paint stories with a contrived social justice sympathy for the exoneree and an inhuman indifference to the family members of victims.

The recruits will also see how this media pressure is aimed not at finding the truth of the crime, but instead aimed at the judges and politicians who will review the case. Candidates for positions in law enforcement would then learn how the media delivers messages to judges failing to over turn the case or elected officials refusal to grant the obligatory settlement that makes former imprisoned killers mega rich. The messages sent in reporting tells judges and public officials disagreeing with exoneration cases that they, like the detectives who originally investigated the case and have had their careers destroyed, will be finished.

This point could not be stressed enough for the impressionable, well-intentioned youth who want to serve society by engaging in the dangerous, thankless task of policing: The central truth of the wrongful conviction movement is that it is a measure of the one-party takeover of the country by a faction that hates America, all it stands for and all the work required to make it function.

A legitimate class on the wrongful conviction movement would reveal to recruits that no matter how well they do their job, they can be set up to have their reputations destroyed, their finances wiped out, and their freedom taken away.

And at the end of this class, there would not be many recruits left.