Excuse me, officer, don’t you have more pressing business than writing me that speeding ticket? According to John Sullivan in the Chicago Reporter (September), “The Illinois State Police is breaking the law by failing to count hate crimes. …State police have been unable to solve the maddening computer glitches that have left [their aggressive new crime reporting] system useless, said spokesman Mark McDonald. But instead of returning to the previous method of recording hate crimes, the state inexplicably stopped counting them at all.”
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“Women need to decide who has the primary responsibility for the health and safety of their bodies,” writes Leslie Marmon Silko in Hungry Mind Review (Fall), making a feminist argument for gun ownership and usage. “We don’t trust the State to manage our reproductive organs, yet most of us blindly trust that the State will protect us (and our reproductive organs) from predatory strangers….Those who object to firearms need trained companion dogs or collectives of six or more women to escort one another day and night. We must destroy the myth that women are born to be easy targets.”
The two best law schools for women in the Chicago area, according to National Jurist (October/November), are Chicago-Kent College of Law and DePaul, based on a student poll, on percentages of women students and faculty, and women in leadership roles. Out of 168 schools, Chicago-Kent ranked 18th, DePaul 19th–and the University of Chicago 166th.
Racism takes a holiday. Result of a survey by the U.S. General Accounting Office (June 1995): “GAO did not find that minorities or low-income people were overrepresented near a majority of the nonhazardous municipal landfills. According to GAO’s nationwide sample of municipal landfills, less than half of such landfills had a percentage of minorities or low-income people living within 1 mile of the facility that was higher than the percentage in the rest of the county.”
