Dan Hinkel's Consolation Prize

Failing to net big catch in police shooting, Dan Hinkel’s fishing expedition targets other cops.

Chicago Tribune journalist Dan Hinkel seemed to try his very best to push a police misconduct narrative in a 2014 fatal shooting of an armed man, but came up empty.

After all, two investigations by the city’s civilian oversight agencies concluded that Officer Robert Slechter was justified in fatally shooting 19-year-old Roshad McIntosh on the west side after McIntosh pointed a gun at Slechter.

Those decisions came despite Hinkel’s coverage of an incident that bore all the anti-police mania and tactics that pulsates throughout his coverage of any Chicago police story, particularly those involving use of force.

The reason is that Hinkel is a “journalist” who has essentially told only one story in his career at the Tribune: Police bad, offenders victims. The names, circumstances and locations change, but the tired and often false plot line remains the same.

To do so, Hinkel has, in the minds of many prosecutors and cops in Chicago, demonstrated a willingness to ignore, obfuscate, or flat out distort the facts in a quest to attack an officer. His grinding, one-sided anti-police narratives have chugged along for many years at the Tribune, where he was joined by a mob of like-minded activists who have also purchased journalism degrees, all of them cranking out one conspiracy theory after another, from police framing innocent killers to cover-ups of police shootings.

But people don’t buy newspapers to hear the daily witless rants of a mediocre writer with an axe to grind against legitimate authority figures. They buy newspapers to be informed and learn a good story. Journalism is, after all, the first foray into writing for so many great American writers interested in understanding and describing the American experience. Journalism is, at its core, a literary undertaking that differs from other forms of writing in large part because of its relationship and respect to facts.

This crucial relationship is currently in a crisis at the Tribune with reporters like Hinkel. For Hinkel, journalism appears to be little more than public relations for a political faction. Perhaps Hinkel lacks the talent, vision, or both, to tap into the rich resources and possibilities that journalism provides in a place like Chicago, where corruption is so entrenched that a primary challenge for a writer is to address it without becoming a part of it.

Hinkel penned one of his more depraved articles in 2017 about the McIntosch shooting, in strict obedience to his anti-police overlords. In it, he utilized his entire arsenal of anti-police imagery, no matter how disconnected that imagery was to the McIntosh shooting itself. There was the Laquan McDonald shooting, a recent protest of the Laquan McDonald shooting, the consent decree created under the President Obama’s Department of Justice (DOJ), the report by the DOJ that gave rise to the consent decree, President Trump’s decision not to intervene in local police departments. Then this Hinkel gem, the kind of pure editorializing Tribune nonsense in a news article that generates a deep loathing by first responders:

“Emanuel's allies have cited changes he has already made as evidence of his dedication to true reform. But Obama-era Justice Department lawyers, reform advocates and some local officials have blasted him for backing off his vow, saying the department's problems are too broad and deep to fix without a judge's oversight.”

“Along with the Police Department, the city's police disciplinary authorities have been criticized as too tolerant of misconduct and excessive force. Tribune investigations have shown IPRA long conducted lax, drawn-out investigations that rarely resulted in discipline.”

“Before the McDonald controversy, IPRA had ruled that only two out of more than 400 shootings by police violated policy.”

In other words, evidence of police misconduct in our articles is our own previous articles. “Obama-era Justice Department lawyers?” Would these lawyers include DOJ personnel currently accused of attempting to illegally undermine the fair election of President Trump? You know, a coup?

One wonders, was Hinkel drooling as he wrote this, knowing that his editors would similarly abandon the dictates of good, fair journalism in publishing it?

But alas, even with Hinkel’s unrelenting attacks, no case could be made against Officer Robert Slechter despite not one, but two investigations by city oversight agencies. Officer Slechter’s courageous actions that night were dismissed this way by Hinkel:

“…the [civilian oversight] agency ruled in October 2015 that the shooting was within department policy.”

In other words, Slechter’s preservation of law and order, his protection of the innocent from violent offenders, the protection of his life, those of his fellow officers and countless civilians in the area was deemed “within department policy,” not heroic? What a seemingly painful admission that seems to be for Hinkel. The truth is that Slechter that night displayed a courage in doing one’s job not too many police officers, prosecutors, judges and public servants would likely describe in Hinkel’s slimy hit pieces. So many police officers in Chicago know that, no matter how justified their actions were, they must endure potentially years of hit pieces by the likes of Hinkel in Chicago.

So despite Hinkel’s attempts to tie other incidents and condemnation about the Chicago police, the civilian oversight agencies grudgingly admitted the shooting was justified. Why, one wonders, did Hinkel in his 2017 tie all these other events, claims, and arguments to a shooting that was ruled justified?

Journalists in Chicago never have to explain their actions, unlike the first responders.

The end, right?

No, never count out the resources or resolve of a truly committed activist. After Officer Slechter was twice cleared of any wrongdoing, Hinkel trained his sights on other officers at the scene. After all, who wants to go away empty-handed? One officer was Saharat Sampim, who testified that he observed the shooting and saw McIntosh point his gun at Slechter.

Using the body camera footage, COPA, with Hinkel’s articles giving support to the oversight agencies’ bizarre claims, dutifully argued the officer could not have possibly seen what Sampim claimed he saw. In other words, Officer Sampim’s account echoed the findings of COPA in that the shooting was justified, but the officer was lying about what he saw? And then it goes deeper, assigning a motive to the lies alleged by COPA:  Sampim lied because he was trying to bolster Slechter’s story.

So now COPA and their media allies can pour through body cameras, ascertain with certainty what those cameras can determine about what an officer could or couldn’t see and then can draw wild conclusions about why?

Welcome to the Orwellian world of policing in Chicago. A fair journalist would be investigating COPA for making such claims. But despite being caught red-handed time and again in making highly suspicious claims in their investigations, and possibly even false ones, Hinkel has never turned his penetrating investigative eye against the city’s oversight agencies.

COPA recommended that Officer Sampim be terminated. Hinkel breathlessly reported it; his misconduct narrative in the shooting resurrected by COPA investigators who can see so deeply into the human heart. Per Dan Hinkel, he once again stacked as much condemning imagery as possible, no matter how unrelated and unproven.

In a February article on the matter, Hinkel wrote:

“COPA’s findings mark the latest accusation of untruthfulness by a Chicago officer. In 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice wrote that officers lied about matters large and small because they did “not believe there is much to lose by lying.”

Hmmm…The latest accusation of untruthfulness? Does Hinkel not see the irony of aTribune writer penning such a sentence? The Department of Justice under Obama claimed police lied about matters large and small? Like a coup against President Trump?

One wonders: Why do journalists like Hinkel and his Tribune claim so much corruption in the Chicago Police Department, but never perceive it in Obama’s federal law enforcement agencies?

Things are changing. The financial woes of Hinkel’s Tribune are an almost daily subject in social media, reporters there pointing to industry decline and greedy owners. But Hinkel won’t admit that another key factor is that people generally don’t like one story told over and over in what increasingly seems little more than spite.

No, the landscape Hinkel has lingered in like a stubborn bacteria has changed not only in Chicago but throughout the country. President Obama is a Chicago progressive whose conduct is now under fire, particularly as evidence mounts of corruption in his DOJ. The phrase prosecutorial misconduct amid claims of frame-ups against political enemies reverberates throughout Washington, as well as a colluding media that gave it all life.

The scandal seems to grow every day. Perhaps those trying to get to the bottom of it and see how it all works should ask some Chicago cops, all of whom are just trying to do their jobs in the most Crooked City.

[Chicago Tribune] [justice.gov]

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