Little makes sense about the shooting at Sox game. Mayor Johnson could start by answering questions. – The Denver Post

At the ballpark, foul balls can hurt. But no one goes to baseball expecting to have to watch for flying bullets.

Yet on Friday at Guaranteed Rate Field, that’s what happened to two female fans in the middle of the fourth inning. A pair of bullets, or so it seems, hit the leg of one woman and grazed the abdomen of the other. As we write, that’s about all we know for sure. Mayor Brandon Johnson has said nothing more of note.

There is so little known, and so much wrong, with what happened Friday that we don’t know where to start.

But we’ll begin with this. When gun violence is a constant, it is easy to become inured to its consequences, both in terms of the safety of Chicagoans and its impact on the city’s reputation. In the latter case especially, Friday was a disaster for the White Sox and Chicago. It’s remarkable how little outrage has been expressed or how little explanation for what happened has been demanded by the news media.

That’s because there were vested interests in saying as little as possible. The Sox want it all to go away. The police don’t want to say much until they believe they have all the facts. And the Johnson administration’s preferred narrative of de-emphasizing crime and punishment and promoting social programs does not easily mesh with bullets flying around a baseball park. Dollars to doughnuts, somebody at City Hall pointed out that bullets fly in Chicago neighborhoods all the time and the media care only when it’s a ballpark attracting people from the suburbs. That’s true and irrelevant at the same time; everyone deserves to feel safe, and ballparks are iconic symbols of urban fun. Shoot one up, and it has big symbolic import. Period.

Then we had the absurdity of bullets potentially landing magically in the left field bleachers from some faraway location, potentially a preferred narrative for the White Sox, which surely didn’t want to face scrutiny for its security arrangements for fans and employees. We struggled to get our heads around how this could have happened, short of a high-powered weapon trained from some tall building on spectators, which is about as horrifying a prospect as we could imagine. By Monday, police appeared to have scotched that explanation, although hardly with any certainty. That didn’t make anyone feel better.

Then there is the question of why the game was allowed to continue: a very questionable decision, when you think about it, whatever the lack of a continuing threat. Two people were shot and yet the game continued, apparently to protect against “panic,” although that same logic was not applied to the post-show concert, nixed to aid the police investigation, we were told — an investigation that surely could have benefited from a quicker start.

According to reports, the police initially asked for the game to be canceled, but it wasn’t, and then, if we are piecing this together correctly, the police became OK with that decision.

That begs another question: Who exactly was in charge Friday at Guaranteed Rate Field? Did the cops get turned down? Here is what interim police Superintendent Fred Waller said:

“At one point in time it was requested as a precaution, but we had no active shooter information, no flare-up, as I said, from a weapon, so we didn’t have all of the information. We made that request initially because we did not know what was going on. We had reports of people being shot at Sox Park, but that wasn’t confirmed and so we allowed the game to continue (and) not to create a panic.”

Waller should have said something more like this: When the Chicago police ask for a game to be stopped because two people got shot in the bleachers, stopped it should be until the police say otherwise. Why didn’t that happen?

The obvious place to go for answers to all of these troubling matters is the mayor of Chicago.

Only problem was that Johnson was not answering questions.

Take this exchange, as reported by the Tribune: “Mayor Brandon Johnson said he was made aware of the shooting shortly after it occurred Friday, but he declined to say whether he was part of the decision to allow the game to continue or whether in hindsight that was the right choice.”

Declined to say? That’s ridiculous. Johnson, who has said he believes in transparency, should disclose to Chicagoans not just his own role but also who exactly was in charge of safety at the Sox game. And as of right now, he should be reflecting on what lessons could be learned by all involved and making whatever procedural changes are necessary. Those bullets easily could have killed someone.

Here’s a better mayoral answer: “The authorities did the best we could in difficult and confusing circumstances, and I now pledge a full report and accounting of everything that happened at the baseball park Friday, including my own role, and the provision of that accounting is my responsibility as your mayor.”

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