At the ballpark, foul balls can hurt. But no one goes to baseball expecting to have to watch the balls fly.
Yet on Friday at Garanti Rate Field, that’s what happened to two female supporters midway through the fourth inning. Two bullets reportedly hit one woman’s leg and grazed the other’s abdomen. As of this writing, that’s about all we know for sure. Mayor Brandon Johnson said no more.
So little is known, and there are so many things wrong, about what happened on Friday that we don’t know where to begin.
But we’ll start with this. When gun violence is a constant, it’s easy to get used to its consequences, both in terms of the safety of Chicagoans and its impact on the city’s reputation. Especially in the latter case, Friday was a disaster for the White Sox and Chicago. It is remarkable how little outrage was expressed or how little explanation of what happened was demanded by the media.
This is because there was a direct interest in saying as little as possible. The Sox want it all gone. The police don’t want to say much until they think they have all the facts. And the Johnson administration’s favorite rhetoric of minimizing crime and punishment and promoting social programs doesn’t sit easily with balls flying around a baseball diamond. From dollars to donuts, someone at city hall pointed out that bullets fly around Chicago neighborhoods all the time and the media only cares when it’s a ballpark that attracts people from the suburbs. It is true and irrelevant at the same time; everyone deserves to feel safe, and ballparks are iconic symbols of urban entertainment. Pull one out, and it has great symbolic significance. Period.
Then we had the absurdity of balls being able to magically land in the left field bleachers from a distant location, potentially a favorite narrative for the White Sox, who surely didn’t want the scrutiny for their safety arrangements for fans and employees. We struggled to understand how this could have happened, without a high-powered weapon pointed from a tall building at the onlookers, which is as horrifying a prospect as we could imagine. On Monday, the police seemed to have dismissed this explanation, although it was hardly certain. It didn’t help anyone feel better.
Then there is the question of why the game was allowed to continue: a very debatable decision, when you think about it, regardless of the lack of continued threat. Two people were shot and yet the game continued, apparently to protect against “panic”, although this same logic did not apply to the after-show concert, canceled to facilitate the police investigation, we it was said – an investigation that surely could have benefited. a faster start.
According to some reports, the police first asked for the game to be called off, but that was not the case, and then, if we understood it correctly, the police accepted this decision.
This raises another question: who exactly was in charge Friday at Garantie Rate Field? Have the cops been turned down? Here is what Acting Police Commissioner Fred Waller said:
“At one point it was requested as a precaution, but we had no information on an active shooter, no thrust, as I said, of a weapon, so we didn’t have all the information. We made this request initially because we didn’t know what was going on. We have had reports of people being shot at Sox Park, but this has not been confirmed and so we have allowed the game to continue (and) not create panic.
Waller should have said something more like this: When the Chicago police demand that a game be stopped because two people were shot in the stands, they should stop it until the police say otherwise. . Why didn’t this happen?
The obvious place to go for answers to all these troubling questions is the mayor of Chicago.
The only problem was that Johnson wasn’t answering questions.
Take this exchange, as reported by the Tribune: “Mayor Brandon Johnson said he was made aware of the shooting shortly after it took place on Friday, but declined to say if he was a part of it. of the decision to allow the match to continue or if in hindsight. it was the right choice.
You refused to say it? It’s ridiculous. Johnson, who has said he believes in transparency, is expected to reveal to Chicagoans not only his own role, but also who exactly was in charge of security at the Sox game. And right now, it should reflect on the lessons that could be learned by everyone involved and make the necessary procedural changes. Those bullets could easily have killed someone.
Here is a better response from the mayor: “The authorities did our best in difficult and confusing circumstances, and I now undertake to write a full report and account of everything that happened at the baseball park on Friday. , including my own role and the provision of this accounting. is my responsibility as mayor.
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