Despite clown show at the top, local FBI still ‘very good at what they do’

The graduation ceremony for the FBI Citizens Academy takes place at the bureau’s North Chicago Regional Firearms Training Facility, a fun outing where we saw bomb disposal demonstration and the boys got to fire a Thompson submachine gun. 

     When the FBI called, I hesitated.
     Their request was simple enough. They wanted to bring me into headquarters, for briefings, once a week, for a couple months. Something called the FBI Citizens Academy.
     Why me? Agents in the Chicago office were readers. Flattering, though, the way my mind works, I instantly saw that this wasn’t necessarily a compliment — it was entirely possible that my perspective was seen as so woefully ignorant of the world of law enforcement, they felt duty bound to help me get a clue.
     Or maybe they just wanted to get me in their clutches. I’d end up handcuffed to a metal chair in a basement, a bright light shining in my face.
     One evening a week, for a couple hours, at their Roosevelt Road field office, learning the ins and outs of the department, the problems they face. Battling international terrorism, tracking cybercriminals and bank robbers.
     “It sounds like traffic school,” I told my wife.
     But I have a personal rule: if you don’t go, you never find out. Plus they would feed us — dinner from a different restaurant each week. Being fed always helps. I signed up.
     This was in 2010, so the specific program details do not pop out in mind. There were guest lecturers, short films, tours of their facility. I knew several of the attendees, and the academy was pretty much the entirety of my social life for a while.
      What’s strongest is the sense I took away about the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They were good people, working hard, battling bad guys. I’m sure that was the point. Not that the bureau’s often checkered history was whitewashed. Anyone who read Jonathan Eig’s recent Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Martin Luther King knows how the FBI bugged King’s hotel rooms, using the transcripts to try to blackmail him into silence, to urge him to kill himself, generating dirt they fed to his enemies. Knows that the FBI often strayed from protecting America to protecting a narrow right wing racist image of America.

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