Robert Bakker

In June 1993, director Steven Spielberg released a film that unleashed a wave of technological change in film-making and simultaneously helped to revive popular interest in dinosaurs.

The next mayor and his police superintendent must make it a priority to get rid of officers whose ties to far-right groups make it harder to build trust with the commu

Today’s update is a five-minute read that will brief you on the day’s biggest stories.

This marks at least the third time Chicago’s inspector general has pressed the police department to take a closer look at an officer’s far-right links.

Chicago City Council members repeatedly expressed frustration Wednesday as police officials gave conflicting, sometimes puzzling reasons why they have not moved more aggressively against officers tied to far-right groups implicated in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

It’s not illegal to belong to these groups, which federal authorities have identified as plotting the Jan. 6 insurrection. But it is certainly not an “accomplishment” either, as one officer apparently bragged.

The city’s inspector general on Friday questioned the thoroughness of an internal investigation into the officer after it was reported that he was a member of the Oath Keepers.

“We have fired officers in the past with less transgressions in their associations,” Ald. Chris Taliaferro (29th) said of an officer with ties to the group Proud Boys.

“Any individual who is tasked with protecting the public cannot be trusted to do so equitably when they associate with an openly racist, bigoted, and misogynistic organization,” wrote Jeff Tischauser of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The department’s handling of the probe “points out a much bigger problem about how internal affairs — and how, in general, the police department — is accountable to the public,” the alderperson said.