WHEN PERCEPTION PRE-EMPTS THE SIMPLEST EXPLANATION.

We've occasionally picked up stories identified at Second City Cop.  That weblog is a group complaint that, shall we say, presents a different perspective on life behind the badge than Chicago P.D. (and the rest of the NBC Chicago procedurals) offer.  The weblog went registered just after the Bears demonstrated they didn't want to face the Packers again, and, with the way internet providers are enforcing their property rights, suspicious minds have material.

A long-running blog about Chicago policing is no longer visible to the public, and many people want to know what’s going on. We know this is true because our inboxes started filling with questions about Second City Cop’s status when their site became restricted Sunday.

You can take this fact to the bank: We have absolutely no idea what’s going on. None. Zilch. But that’s not going to stop us from posting a 618 word article rife with speculation.

SCC, as it’s sometimes called, has been a daily must-read for anyone who reports on police and crime issues in Chicago or who has an interest in reading about policing — warts and all —from the perspective of authors who claimed to be current and former Chicago police officers.

Best case scenario: it's an oopsie.  Worst case: Google are patrolling content.

The possibilities range from innocuous to whatever the opposite of innocuous is.

Most basically, somebody might have screwed up, clicked the wrong settings option, and sent their whole site private.

If that’s not it, we turn to the assumption that the site operators intentionally made their content “invite only.”

Why? Couldn’t tell ya.

Starting at the low end of the Wild Speculation Spectrum: maybe they got tired of writing. The author(s) have been posting for 15 years without any known source of compensation whatsoever. There are no ads or subscriptions. They’re not even getting beer money out of it. In recent years at least, only one or two days have passed with no new content.

And they actually moderate hundreds of internet comments every day. Can you imagine the toll that takes on the human brain? We can. We used to have a comments section.

Maybe they’re burnt out.

Then, there’s this: SCC has mentioned that their site might go away. Those references have been tied to the authors’ concerns about changing political tides, censorship, and complaints people filed with Google about their content.

In September, the bloggers wrote that they “have received a number of warnings from Blogger and had a couple of posts taken down from earlier this summer due to a concerted effort by the [Chicago Teacher’s Union] for merely pointing out what their members have posted on their social media accounts.”

“We’re expecting more of the same after this weekend, so we’re warning the readers that it is very possible…you will wake up one day and find the blog severely curtailed…or missing entirely.”

As of right now, there are no updates at CWB, and Second City Cop still requires registration.

By way of history, in the early days of weblogging, there used to be a genre I called "anonymous neurotic humanities women with cats," and many of those required registration to post comments, even though the kind of nasty comments they got were orders of magnitude more polite than what gets through moderation at Second City Cop.

As they say, developing.