Feds find failures in Cook Co. homeland security project. Chicago SunTimes

By Carol Marin and Don Moseley January 8 said:

Project Shield was supposed to make citizens safer. But in the end, the $45-million Homeland Security program more resembled a disaster, wasting taxpayers’ dollars and failing to make a single citizen more secure.

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Fixed cameras mounted on poles also were problematic, according to the report. “These camera often targeted police parking lots, streets and intersections with questionable homeland security benefits,” investigators found. Fixed cameras were even placed in police station lobbies.

Almost from the beginning, some of the 128 suburbs opted out after technical snafus. And in the end the IG found “32 never had equipment, 9 left the program” and at the end, just “71 have vehicle video systems.”

The FBI, according to sources, investigated, but no charges have been filed.

The report takes FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to task for lack of oversight.

Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI) grants were funneled from DHS to the State and on to Cook County.

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As a former Chicago police commander reported to federal prison Wednesday for lying about the torture of murder suspects decades ago, a man his detectives allegedly beat into confessing learned he was being freed after spending 25 years in prison.

Jon Burge, whose name in Chicago is synonymous with police brutality and racism, turned himself in Wednesday morning to begin a 4½-year sentence at Butner Federal Correctional Complex in North Carolina. Hours later in Chicago, a judge ordered 45-year-old Eric Caine released from Menard Correctional Center after prosecutors conceded that they didn't have enough evidence to convict Caine of murder again without the suspect confession he gave police in 1986.

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