I saw the pics from facebook page that were put up on some of the police blogs. Nothing to help this kids case for innocence.

City Clerk yanks stickers over gang sign flap despite mom’s plea

BY KIM JANSSEN AND FRAN SPIELMAN Staff Reporters February 8, 2012 2:06PM

Chicago City Clerk Susana Mendoza is axing the controversial winning design for the 2012-13 city sticker, saying it could be “misconstrued” as including gang signs.

Speaking at a news conference Wednesday afternoon, Mendoza said the move was necessary.

“I cannot ask drivers to put a sticker on their cars that may be misconstrued as containing gang symbols,” Mendoza said.“Communities suffer as a result of gang violence.”

Chicago Crime Commission President Jody Weis, a former police superintendent, stood before an over-sized copy of the sticker designed by a Chicago teenager and showed reporters the similarities to the gang symbol. He called it a “sad day.”

“You’re fighting a battle of perception — not so much intent. We’ll never know what was in this young man’s heart. But with the challenges we face, we can’t have a sticker that’s gonna be on police cars that could be interpreted” as supporting gangs.

Mendoza and Weis spoke just a couple of hours after the mother of the 15-year-old boy at the center of the controversy mounted an emotional defense of her son, saying the teen wasn’t in a gang and that he didn’t hide gang symbols in his winning design.

“The sticker has nothing wrong with it. ... It has no gang affiliation at all,” Jessica Loor said at a news conference at Lawrence Hall Youth Services, where the boy goes to high school.

Loor’s lawyer, Blake Horwitz, said “Jody Weis should apologize” to the boy, Herbert Pulgar, for comments Weis made saying that elements of Pulgar’s design were similar to gang signs.

Loor denied Pulgar was in any gang, including the Maniac Latin Disciples, and said she’d given him the idea for the heart in the design. The Maniac Latin Disciples also use a heart as a symbol.

Pulgar’s art teacher Janice Gould said the hands in Pulgar’s design — which some believe mimic the MLD’s “pitchfork” sign — were actually copied directly from a handout she’d provided the teen. She provided a copy of the handout, which showed hands almost identical to the ones Pulgar drew.

Gould said she had worked with troubled inner city youth for decades and that she was trained to recognize gang symbols. There are none in Pulgar’s work, she said.

The fallout from the controversy has devastated Pulgar, and he is suffering from anxiety attacks and did not sleep last night, his mother said.

“ ‘I tried to do something positive to turn my life around’ ” she said her son had told her. “ ‘it’s like everybody’s knocking me down.’ ”

A photo on Pulgar’s Facebook Tuesday showed youths allegedly throwing the MLD’s “pitchfork” sign. A long section of comments underneath the photo included one from another Facebook user stating “what r u doing throwing up the fork ha what are u a gangbanger.”

Declining to discuss the boy’s past, Horwitz said Pulgar has special needs and should be protected from the media storm.

Meanwhile, Mendoza, who oversaw the contest, called a news conference to announce plans to deep six the sticker.

She said Tuesday she was investigating the claims that the city sticker design — which includes the city’s skyline inside a heart, with hands pointing up towards a police hat, fire department helmet and paramedic symbol — contained gang symbols.

Weis, now the president of the Chicago Crime Commission, said Tuesday that he initially thought the controversy was much ado about nothing — but then changed his mind.

“However, I blew it up on an iPad, and the finger configuration on each hand were consistent with a gang sign,” Weis said. “Coincidence? Not on all four and that [they] were both left and right hands.”

The MLDs were singled out for police attention by current Supt. Garry McCarthy last summer, when he vowed to “obliterate” the gang for its alleged role in the non-fatal shootings of two little girls.

About 18,000 Chicagoans voted for a city sticker design late last year. Pulgar’s was one of several potential sticker designs by Chicago students supplied to the Sun-Times by the city. The Sun-Times published the designs, encouraging people to vote for a winner on the city clerk’s website or in person at the city clerk’s office.

When he won the sticker contest last month, Pulgar praised first-responders. “Those people did a lot of things for me and my family,” a thrilled Pulgar said last month.

He “nearly died” as a boy after he was severely burned when a candle set fire to his clothes, he said at the time. “They’re Chicago’s heroes.”

Pulgar said last month that his mom came up with the idea for the heart and he decided to incorporate the hands after noticing that they were featured in several previous winners. When he found out he won, “I started screaming — I was so happy!” he said. He also won a $1,000 savings bond.

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This was a big money saving issue for her "Let someone design the sticker instead of us paying someone to do it"

How about just a picture? and make the damn sticker smaller.

http://www.wbez.org/story/chicago-city-clerk-yanks-vehicle-sticker-due-alleged-gang-signs-96218

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"That's what the internet is for. Slandering others anonymously." Banky
“Been that way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey ‘He said for you to give me your fuckin’ share.’”

Really didn't see anything wrong with it.

Stupid outrage by stupid people.

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If I were this kid, I would immediately paint 4-5 more pictures and have a show...

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@audioidkid

And make sure to include one of Rahm wearing a girdle.

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Freedom is our Strength.

what you and JORR fail to understand is most of the general public do not want a sticker on our cars designed by someone that is a gang member or hangs out with gang members. is it really that hard to comprehend?

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Frank Coztansa wrote:
Please die in a fire.

Bullshit. You arbitrarily pick which gangs and gang members are socially acceptable to you.

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Freedom is our Strength.

what you and JORR fail to understand is most of the general public do not want a sticker on our cars designed by someone that is a gang member or hangs out with gang members. is it really that hard to comprehend?[/quote]

Bullshit. You arbitrarily pick which gangs and gang members are socially acceptable to you.[/quote]

No gangs are socially acceptable to me you moron. where do I point out the gangs I find socially acceptable? really man how do you get thru life with that tiny brain?

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Frank Coztansa wrote:
Please die in a fire.

Then everyone better be checked out before they are allowed to do business with the city.

Hopefully there aren't any people with connections to the Chicago Outfit.

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"Then everyone better be checked out before they are allowed to do business with the city.

Hopefully there aren't any people with connections to the Chicago Outfit."


You said something intelligent. there might be hope, you might be convinced that gangs are bad. as for JORR, not much hope.

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Frank Coztansa wrote:
Please die in a fire.

Why the fuck is the City of Chicago allowing a couple of disgruntled cops with blogs to define this issue?

Mark Brown's column:

Perception is a funny thing.

My perception at this very moment is that City Clerk Susana Mendoza showed herself Wednesday to be one of the more chicken-hearted public officials I’ve seen around here in quite some time.

I could be wrong, of course.

Others will certainly have the perception that it was quite brave of Mendoza to admit her mistake and throw out the winning design for this year’s city vehicle sticker on the basis of concerns that it could be perceived as depicting gang symbols.

Just to be clear, though, she didn’t say she had made a mistake, just as she didn’t say the sticker depicted gang symbols.

It’s the perception, you see. Mendoza said gang experts told her that aspects of the sticker might be “misconstrued” or “mischaracterized” as gang symbols.

Once that perception was out there, the reality no longer mattered, Mendoza explained, even if others — like me — have a totally different perception.

Therefore, I can’t say how much credence you should give my perception that it was easier for Mendoza to throw overboard the 15-year-old special-needs kid who drew the perfectly innocent winning artwork than to go toe-to-toe with those who drummed up the controversy, led by an anonymous blogger whose often vile site is popular with police — or my perception that Mendoza should have called “b.s.” on the paranoia and stood firm.

That’s how it looks to me, but maybe you should check with a better expert, like Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who certainly must have wanted the controversy to go away as fast as possible — with his name set to appear on the sticker.

For the record, this blog, the name of which can’t be printed in a family newspaper (although for those familiar with the terrain, it’s the one authored by an individual who claims to shave in obscure places), makes a habit of using hate words to slur Latinos and African Americans.

But I don’t want to be accused of playing the race card.

No, let’s keep this on gangs and artwork.

Much of the controversy surrounds two aspects of the original winning design by Herbert Pulgar, a Lawrence Hall Youth Services student with an admittedly troubled past. (I guess we’ll have to start running background checks on art contestants, so that we can better interpret their work.)

The portions of Pulgar’s design that roused suspicion are a large heart framing the Chicago skyline and city flag, along with four hands reaching from the top. The heart, we are told, is the favorite symbol of a certain street gang with which Pulgar may have more than a passing knowledge.

Gasp! Let’s not forget it’s also a symbol of love — and will appear in abundance during the next week on all manner of communications in connection with Valentine’s Day. That gang must love Valentine’s Day.

We’ll set aside the fact that Pulgar’s mom tearfully explained that she was the one who gave him the idea to use the heart in his sticker design and move to the hands.

Pulgar’s art teacher, Janice Gould, showed us quite clearly how she taught Pulgar to copy the hands straight from a manual of clip art she gave her students. (Pulgar was her third student to win the sticker contest.)

Ironically, Gould took the hands in question from the cover of a book titled, Teaching Children How to Succeed, written by a noted psychology professor at Ohio State University and published by the William Gladden Foundation. This subversive group “develops materials for at-risk youth, their families and the professionals that serve them.” They must have been duped by some gang-banger, too.

On that book cover, a child’s hands are shown reaching for the stars.

Mendoza, who never spoke with Pulgar after the controversy arose (of course, under her theory, once certain people had that perception, there was no point), wouldn’t say whether she’ll follow through on awarding Pulgar the $1,000 savings bond he was promised as the contest winner.

But she has already taught him a valuable lesson: Don’t bother reaching for those stars, Herbert. The perception is you’ll never make it.

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Freedom is our Strength.

I really think that we need better after school programs for these misunderstood kids.

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Maniac Latin Disciples Handbook

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Freedom is our Strength.

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This is the dumbest fucking thing I have heard in quite some time, and yet another reason why whitey is scared of the big, mean "criminals" in the City.

As Speeps said, stupid people getting upset over stupid things.

Conveniently ignore all the facebook posts, pics and his criminal record. Also, if the dumb fucks who let the picture through in the first place are not removed from the committee, that is just as bad.

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But why shouldn't they have let the picture through? It doesn't have any gang symbols. I posted the picture he used to copy the hands from. It's the same fucking hand. The teacher gave him that book to use as a model. There's nothing to argue about. There it is.

Now, if you're argument is that a fifteen year old special needs kid that is foolish enough to post a bunch of dumb stuff on Facebook is irredeemable and should be tossed to the margins of society, well, I'm going to disagree there too, but it's a different argument entirely and has nothing to do with the sticker that had no gang signs or anything that anyone found the slightest bit offensive until a couple of racist cops hiding behind phony names started whining like bitches on their filthy blogs.

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Freedom is our Strength.

They should have just used a picture of Maggie Daley to honor her and her work with kids.

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favrefan said:"Chris Coghlan isn't gonna pay your rent, Jimmy."

So its cool with you of all people that the police can read something into a sticker and make a big deal of it?

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What are you trying to say, Panther? It has nothing to do with a "nice check". I'm more concerned about the city bowing to some anonymous douchebag cop with a filthy racist blog.

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Freedom is our Strength.

Most of his facebook friends saw the symbolism.

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What were those Facebook posts?

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Freedom is our Strength.

The ones that he didn't post but his friends "tagged" him in.

The cops that are behind Second City Cop and Detective Shaved Long Cock are far more criminal than the kid that drew the sticker. If you don't agree, please go read the blogs. For fuck's sake, one of them offers a tutorial for officers to mask their identities so they can kick the shit out of citizens. The kid may be guilty of tracing the hand off the cover of the book. I'll admit that.

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Freedom is our Strength.

I guess these career criminals got tired of defending Jon Burge and Bill Cozzi so they had to invent some nonsense about a gang sign that wasn't there.

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Freedom is our Strength.

no you would rather bow down to a gangbanger that is part of a gang that murdered two innocent kids last year and have probably terrorized many others. so because the website you don't like revealed that the kid is associated with this gang that somehow makes it untrue in your simpleton brain. but then again you grew up in a tough neighborhood and have never been mugged which makes you an expert on gangs and crime statistics.

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Frank Coztansa wrote:
Please die in a fire.

You don't know that kid. You're just a douchebag hiding behind an anonymous name like Detective Shaved Long Cock.

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Freedom is our Strength.

I don't think so. But I can see how corrupt the police force is. And I know the way cops think. They are there own gang with their own code. They are supposed to serve and protect you, but they serve themselves and protect their fellow officers. When they say "The commissioner doesn't have our backs" that means the commissioner isn't sanctioning their crimes. I can't believe anyone could possibly be more offended by a fifteen year old kid designing a sticker- even if it were actually loaded with gang symbols- than they are with cops who are proudly criminal and lawless and bold enough to boast about it on the Internet.

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Freedom is our Strength.