Murder City Mayor “Let’s Go Brandon” Johnson may be on the verge of cementing a new nickname for himself: Birdbrain. A couple of weeks ago, Birdbrain unilaterally announced that he was ending the city’s use of Shot Spotter in September.
He called the system which identified gunfire and allows a fast response time from police (when they’re available) to actually catch the perps “racist.” As if identifying the (often black) gang members discharging their guns within America’s largest open-air shooting gallery is “racist.”
BUT… but Shot Spotter wasn’t so racist that Johnson didn’t want to keep them around through the summer murder season and the Democratic National Convention.
The only problem with Bird Brain’s announcement?
The contract ended at midnight on February 16th.
Given the disparaging remarks, Shot Spotter’s parent company told the city they weren’t up for a short term contract extension.
Bird Brain’s people went to the company with the city checkbook in hand and they hammered out a super premium-priced extension through the middle of November for $8.6M. Or about a million bucks a month.
A good leader wouldn’t have publicly disparaged the company and would have inked a deal for the extension behind the scenes. But Bird Brain Johnson is no leader.
He’s a putz.
From the Sun-Times:
Mayor Brandon Johnson is spending $8.6 million to extend the city’s controversial deal with ShotSpotter for nine final months — shelling out significantly more than the city paid for the entire past year of service.
Johnson announced last week the city planned to shut down the gunshot detection system after the historically violent summer months and the Democratic National Convention, making good on a key campaign promise.
But the announcement caught ShotSpotter’s parent company, SoundThinking, off guard, sparking frantic negotiations resulting in a last-minute deal announced Feb. 16 — just hours before the contract was set to expire and the system could have gone offline.
That $$ could have repaired a lot of the inoperable CFD fire equipment (SCC: 8 of 10 aerial/ladder/tower units that are unable to be used for their designed purpose).
It’s not the Democratic National Convention, it’s the Democrat National Convention.
There is nothing democratic about them.
The Democratic Party isn’t.