CARBONDALE, Ill. - The city of Carbondale is never a place where they're at a loss for controversial situations going on.
Things are somewhat nonsensical in Carbondale (and indeed, in Jackson County overall), what with the libwhack Southern Illinois University-Carbondale devouring normal peoples' minds, the cops enduring nonstop issues, and murders continuing to go unsolved/ignored.
Did we mention cops enduring nonstop issues...?
In the more than 15 years we've been doing this, we've been incorrectly called "cop haters" (we don't hate cops; but we absolutely detest bad ones), mainly because we actually speak out against them, as opposed to mainstream media, which pussyfoots around any public official when they go wrong.
In light of all of this, we're going to do it again...doesn't matter what the haters want to spew.
This is going on in the innerwebs hovering in and around C-dale right now:
Here's the story as we've received it, from both sides of the matter: There's an as-yet-unnamed Carbondale cop who has apparently made some mugs featuring scenes around Carbondale. The above mug shows a guy by the last name of Tanner, who is homeless, scruffy, smelly, largely obnoxious (but a "GRAYT GAH" according to those who know him personally) and, well...homeless. This has offended the lil butthurt snowflakes populating C-dale, and they are up in arms over it. So up in arms that the C-dale police department has been forced to take action:
The message on CPD's site reads: "On June 6, 2018, the City of Carbondale Police Department became aware of a social media post which was alleged to have been published by a City of Carbondale Police Officer. The Department immediately initiated a formal personnel investigation into the incident to determine the source and validity of the social media post. The City and its (corrected) Police Department takes these matters extremely seriously and wants to assure the public this issue is being addressed swiftly and, if found to be valid, may lead to disciplinary measures in accordance with the City and Department Policies and Procedures. An officer has been placed on administrative leave with pay, pending the outcome of the investigation."
Since no one else will do it, we'll toss out both names we've heard, since cops are public people and don't have any 'protections' regarding 'privacy' - the names we've heard are Pawel Sawiki and Adam Fitts - but of course there's no way to determine whether these two are even cops currently or have been in the past because the CPD's own website doesn't identify who they have working for them (which displays in part what the problem is: The cops can't expect to be treated well there if they engage in the type of depersonalization that comes with trying to keep control of the cops' doings.) I might take this moment to note that if these are not accurate, DO NOT come to our social networking pages screeching about it; we're passing along what we hear in an effort to cut through the crap. We're not interested in taking on additional crap. We're just trying to get to the bottom of this.
Frankly, we're wondering if it even matters.
On one hand, if this really is a cop who's done such a thing, apparently there's a market for it. And why not? Carbondale is on a steep downhill slide. There are MUCH worse situations going on in C-dale than a cop purportedly selling a mug with a homeless guy featured on it. One of them is in a jury trial this week. So a guy who is homeless by choice being featured on a mug is really kind of mild by comparison. That a cop supposedly did it then becomes something of a side issue. Did the cop shop not know he sold mugs? Or maybe they didn't know he had alleged disdain for a homeless guy? Are they engaging in sensitivity training right now? Don't they already do such a thing in snowflake land aka SIU-C? Or are local cops just peripheral to SIU-C, since they have campus cops who tend to things there as the city cops aren't allowed to, effectively?
Not sure where this is going, but we're pretty sure we won't get to know how it ends...for real, anyway. We'll get some surface story and then it'll all fade into oblivion, just like all the other BS subjects raised regarding C-dale cops. In the meantime, this situation with the homeless guy and the mug is shaping up to be one of those ongoing internet things that would be a "thing" at all if it weren't for the internet (yes, that is what's known as a "circular argument," but that'd be because it IS a circular thing). So until the cop is identified and the full story is heard (which it likely never will be), let's be concerned about real things, shall we? Like the ongoing invasion of this country by illegals, like the ongoing rampant rise of opioid deaths and the behaviors that lead to it, like the fact that people are getting out on Bond Reform and committing so much crime it's insane and nothing's being done about it, like the fact that abused children are being tossed to the wolves due to DCFS' latest BS about "keeping the families intact," like the fact that people keep calling for troops to descend on Chicago to restore order, like the fact that the state of Illinois is considering raising property taxes statewide to cover pensions and we're going to have a Democrat governor come January 2019 who's probably going to do worse than that to us. I mean, seriously...priorities, people. Let's get some.