FBI officials informed police in Chicago and surroundings areas last Wednesday that gangs “have formed a pact to ‘shoot on-sight any cop that has a weapon drawn on any subject in public,'” WLS reported.
“[M]embers of these gang factions have been actively searching for, and filming, police officers in performance of their official duties” said the FBI’s report.
“The purpose … is to catch on film an officer drawing his/her weapon on any subject and the subsequent ‘shoot on-sight’ of said officer, in order to garner national media attention.”
It is common practice for the FBI to send alerts of this nature to police officers even when there are no specific threats against them.
The FBI did not disclose its source but said that the information comes from “a contact whose reporting is limited and whose reliability cannot be determined.”
The information could have come from an undercover police officer, a witness or an insider, or it could have come from surveillance of suspects.
Chicago Police Department Superintendent David Brown said police officers face a “sense of lawlessness” in their occupations that tracks with real increases in danger to them.
“I think it’s bigger than a suggestion,” Brown said. “I think 51 officers being shot at or shot in one year, I think that quadruples any previous year in Chicago’s history. So I think it’s more than a suggestion that people are seeking to do harm to cops.”
Two of Chicago’s officers were shot last weekend, though they will survive.
But not only officers are in danger: 52 civilians in the Windy City were shot last weekend, and 10 died.
“We need police officers, and as community members we need to push back fervently against lawlessness,” Brown said.
