About a week ago we began hearing about the attack on a 48-year old Park Ridge resident at Hinkley Park on the evening of July 12.

After several viewings of the video of that incident it appears reasonably likely that, if not for the intervention of an unidentified young man, the victim might have suffered far more serious injuries than the bumps, bruises and concussion he reportedly incurred. That’s because the altercation was escalating and seemed on the verge of becoming a scene out of that 1963 movie version of William Golding’s “The Lord of the Flies” – complete with cinema verite feel compliments of herky-jerky cellphone camerawork.

As the attackers began kicking and stomping their collapsed victim, we half expected to hear the movie’s chants of “Kill the pig!” Instead we heard (around the 40 second mark) something so totally incongruous to the situation that, in a way, it may have been even more troubling than the movie’s chant, and far more offensive:

“U-S-A! U-S-A!”

That rallying cry, born during the miraculous gold medal run of this country’s 1980 Olympic hockey team and revived again just last month as American soccer fans cheered their team’s efforts during the World Cup, was seemingly being used by the mob of knuckleheaded Park Ridge “yutes” (yes, an homage) to encourage the attackers and/or mock their victim.

Almost two weeks later details of the incident remain sketchy, with more information available from the community at large than emanating from police headquarters.

But as best as we can tell from the available information, a sizable group of yutes had already gathered at Hinkley an hour or two before the incident. They reportedly had been shooting off fireworks and had kicked over one of those decorated Rainbow Hospice doors on the premises, which prompted two separate calls to the Park Ridge police.

The police arrived on the scene in response to each call, chatted up some of the yutes, and then departed – leaving the group intact.

Sometime around 9:30 p.m., Park Ridge police reportedly rousted another crowd of yutes from the Park Ridge Library grounds as that night’s Taste of Park Ridge events were winding down.  That crowd simply migrated a few blocks down the street to Hinkley, where they joined up with the yutes still there.

The rest, as they say, is history…captured on amateur video: a middle-aged guy with a concussion, scrapes and bruises; two local yutes in Cook County jail accused of aggravated battery and mob action; and one minor facing the same charges in juvenile court.

Before we go any further in this post, we want to make a couple of things perfectly clear.

First, we are supporters of the police, stemming in no small part from the editor of this blog’s uncle having been the chief of police of Joliet and a 3-term Will County Sheriff. And even though we have disagreed with the need for a new police station and on what is reasonable compensation for police personnel, our respect for them and the job they do has never wavered.

Second, we believe Chief Kaminski has generally done a fine job in leading the department.

Nevertheless, questions about how the Hinkley situation was handled and about the Chief’s Teflon-like comments reported in a July 22, 2014 Park Ridge Herald-Advocate story (“Park Ridge leaders call for dialogue after park beating”) deserve answers.

The Chief is quoted in that article as claiming that the Hinkley incident is “a community problem” related to parents not taking responsibility for what their kids do while out of their houses.

Sorry, Chief, but that dog don’t hunt.

When a couple hundred Park Ridge and/or neighboring community yutes congregate at night in a public park, shooting off fireworks and damaging property, that’s a POLICE PROBLEM.

When several of them attack a middle-aged guy looking for his kid while others urge them on with chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!”, that’s a POLICE PROBLEM.

And when the police disperse a group of yutes from one public site and then simply allow the group to migrate to another nearby public site where an attack takes place, that’s a POLICE PROBLEM.

Public safety and security is Job One, the main reason we have a police department.  That job wasn’t done at Hinkley Park the night of July 12.  Backhandedly laying the blame on parents, or deflecting responsibility for a solution to “the community,” is nothing less than a cop-out, pun intended.

Despite our community’s extremely low crime rate, Job One, done right, is tough enough. The taxpayers don’t need police officers moonlighting as social workers or psychologists, especially when those social service duties can be handled by folks who don’t carry guns and handcuffs but who already are part of the existing social services network.   And we already have an abundance of the latter to opine on how this incident was the product of undeveloped teen brains, or faulty impulse control, or herd mentality, or problematic parent-child dynamics, or impaired inter-generational empathy, or even the late Mike Royko’s favorite social ill: “Aggravated mopery with intent to gawk.”

Taxpayers and visitors alike need to be able to move about Park Ridge feeling, and being, reasonably safe and secure, whether it be from overly-aggressive panhandlers, purse snatchers, stick-up men, or even large groups of yutes acting stupid.

For quite some time now, Chief K has been putting “Complimentary Letters and Awards” into the public record by including them in the published City Council meeting materials. That kind of aggrandizement is all well and good so long as equal attention and publicity are given to the less-than-complimentary things involving the department.

Unfortunately, to our knowledge the police department has produced nothing that goes beyond the bare-bones description of the attack itself to address the department’s handling of the pre-incident complaints about the misbehaving yutes at Hinkley, what prompted the alleged rousting of those other yutes from the Library grounds, and how they were allowed to build to critical mass at Hinkley.

The people of this community deserve complete transparency and full accountability concerning this incident, including the lead-up to it.

And whether that explanation is good, bad, or ugly, it’s already overdue.

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