I had heard a similar story before I ever made it to Chicago. In preparation for the trip, I had reached out to Dimitri Roberts, a CNN contributor. Roberts had also been a police officer in Chicago. We’d never met or appeared together, but I thought I’d touch base with him to get some advice on who to talk with and what to look for while I was in his hometown. Roberts told me a story about what forced him out of Chicago.
“As you know, being a cop can be dangerous, but you get used to certain things. You’re around a lot of things—poverty, drugs, people who are mad and depressed and confused. You learn how to calm yourself in the middle of craziness. Anyway, I was in my apartment one night washing dishes after dinner. My daughter was helping Daddy; she was about 8 then. We lived in the Bronzeville neighborhood. We’re washing dishes and talking and suddenly I hear gunshots in the distance. Pop… pop, pop, pop, pop. I turned and my daughter was on the floor. Her friends had told her to hit the floor when she heard gunshots. It was at that moment that I decided to move out of Chicago.”
Saletta was right. The Rink was unique. It was adult skate night, and hundreds of black men and women in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and even in their 70s, bounced and danced on roller skates to R&B and funk from across the ages—James Brown, New Jack Swing, Little Anthony and the Imperials, Michael Jackson, and Diana Ross and the Supremes. The manager of the rink said it’s not unusual to see 300 people there at 10 a.m. on a weekday, showing off their skating moves as they glide across the expansive wooden floor. They may be third- and fourth-shift postal workers; Chicago Transit drivers; schoolteachers; college professors; hospital workers, from the nurses to the nutritionists to the janitors; Drug Enforcement Administration agents.
Tim is an aircraft mechanic for a major airline. He has achieved it all—nice car, family, and house. He earns twice the annual salary of most people in Chicago. As a kid, he and his friends spent most weekends at this roller rink. It was their weekend refuge. It kept them safe from the pitfalls that awaited black boys and teenagers in Chicago’s streets. Skating has since become a tradition—recreation and exercise. The problems on the street that he was trying to avoid as a youth still exist, he said, and, in some ways, he is still running from them. Tim and his girlfriend had recently sent their 13-year-old daughter to live with relatives in Florida. Tim told me he didn’t want her to become another Hadiya Pendleton.
Hadiya Pendleton was an honors student at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. College Preparatory High School. She played on the school volleyball team and was a majorette in the marching band.
On January 29, 2013, she and her friends, all honors students, gathered in a nearby park after school exams. Hadiya had returned to Chicago from Washington, D.C., just a week earlier, after performing in the second presidential inaugural parade for one of her heroes, Barack Obama. Smart, driven, and talented, Hadiya appeared headed for a life of promise.
When it began to rain, she and her friends huddled under a shelter. As they stood there laughing, joking, and gossiping, a teenager jumped a fence and ran toward the group, firing. The shooter then jumped into a car and sped off. Police later arrested Michael Ward, 18, and Kenneth Williams, 20, as they were heading to a strip club. They told officers it was a mistake. They thought Pendleton and her friends were members of a rival gang. Pendleton was struck in the back and died on the scene. She was 15 years old. Tim said he didn’t want his daughter to go out like that.
It was seriously cold, maybe 18 degrees, when I stepped outside of the rink for my ride back to the hotel. Carlos was waiting for me. I confirmed that I was his passenger, and eased into the back seat. The warmth washed over me. Carlos and I were silent for a while. No banter, no music, no sound, except for the whir of the wheels along the highway as we sped north.
“You don’t look like a skater,” he said, though in truth, I could have fit right into the crowd.
“No, I’m here working on a book and talking to people about crime and police in Chicago,” I said.
He didn’t say anything. I was relieved. It was nearly midnight, the end of a long day, and I was talked out. The car got quiet again. Neither of us spoke for miles.
Then, for some reason, Carlos kind of blurted out, “It’s bad out here, real bad.” I could see a pensive look in the mirror. “I have been in neighborhoods to pick up people or to drop them off and I can hear people shooting. You can hear the gunfire, but you don’t know where it’s coming from. Everybody is a little scared. That’s why some drivers won’t go into certain neighborhoods. I go to them, but some guys won’t.”
“Why? They worried about being robbed?” I asked. “You guys don’t carry cash. What are they going to steal?”
“It’s not that so much,” he said. “You don’t want to get hit by a stray bullet, and people are so desperate—you just don’t know.”
I had had enough talk of fear and violence for one day. I didn’t want to be callous, but I really didn’t want to hear any more. I got quiet. He didn’t speak. The silence returned. I leaned back and closed my eyes.
Few American cities exemplify the paradox of the strained yet interdependent relationship between police and communities of color as Chicago does. In Chicago, and other cities, police and their poorer black and brown communities maintain an anxious relationship in which residents most in need of police assistance request help, while simultaneously fearing which officers will show up and what kind of “help” they will receive.
Will they get the Chicago police officers who saved the life of a 9-year-old girl by performing the Heimlich maneuver after her grandmother called to report that the child was choking on a toy truck she had swallowed? Or will they get the officers who shot and killed a 19-year-old, mentally ill Northern Illinois University student and, as police declared, “accidentally” shot the 55-year-old grandmother who lived next door after the student’s father dialed 911 for help? Will they get the two Chicago officers who rescued eight people in response to shots fired in the notorious West Englewood neighborhood? Or will they get Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke, who murdered Laquan McDonald?
The two entities—police and people of color—are distrustful of one another, defensive, and insular, yet remain uneasy partners in a struggle against the same problem—the assorted violence that plagues and confounds them.
Chicago has been awash in violent crime for years. A series of highly public mass gang shootings in one neighborhood led to the area being dubbed “Terror Town.” In 2016, however, the city’s rate of violence hit a 19-year high. That year, there were 762 murders, a 50 percent increase over the previous year, and 3,550 shooting incidents in which 4,331 people were shot.
Gang-related shootings account for just over half those shootings, but everybody knows the true culprits behind those frightening numbers are the grinding poverty and lack of opportunities that sap souls, suck the life out of already weary bones, and ultimately trigger crime. The police, public officials, and residents told me the real bad guys are high unemployment and low-wage jobs, broken families whose children drift into gangs for lack of other companionship and guidance, an educational system that doesn’t educate and leaves high school dropouts and near-illiterates in its wake.
The combination has fueled an alternative economy of drug deals, robbery, and a pervasive gang culture—so broad that it can reach out and touch anybody and so vicious that members marched a 9-year-old into an alley and murdered him in retaliation against a rival gang member. It has given rise to boarded-up and abandoned buildings and economically barren neighborhoods, where residents shop at tiny corner markets where the merchandise and the merchants are secure behind Plexiglas walls for fear desperate shoppers will walk away with the chips or the dishwashing liquid or a jar of peanut butter.
In Chicago, the correlation between crime and poverty is clear and dramatic. In some cities, like Atlanta, quiet desperation and the associated criminality can be obscured by seemingly calm, tree-filled neighborhoods, divided by gently sloping streets. In Los Angeles, the n
ear-constant warm weather and ubiquitous palm trees blur the reality of security bars on doors and windows, and neighbors fearful that someone may walk away with all they own while they’re away at a low-paying job. It says vacation, not crime.
Not Chicago.
Take the neighborhoods of Washington Park and Hyde Park. Each is adjacent to Washington Park on the city’s South Side. They are separated east and west by the park’s eight-block width. To the east is the Hyde Park community, an economically vibrant, racially mixed neighborhood. It is home to the University of Chicago and the Museum of Science and Industry. Stores and shops abound. Over on 53rd Street, there are fashionable eateries like Nando’s, Chipotle, and Roti. A Starbucks, a microbrewery, and a Baskin-Robbins also line the street, which is anchored by a Target. Atop Target is a new, 20-story apartment building. Another new high-rise stands a block away on 51st Street. A Hyatt Hotel is close by. A short walk away you’ll come upon a movie theater and an LA Fitness franchise. On nearby Hyde Park Boulevard you’ll find a Whole Foods market, a Michaels store, and a Marshall’s. On 55th Street are Medici and other boutique restaurants. On 57th Street is another Starbucks.
The median individual income for its 25,700 residents is $39,243, about $12,000 more than for the average city resident. Ninety-five percent of its residents have a high school diploma, unemployment is 7 percent, and about 15 percent of residents live below the poverty line, just a tick above the national average. Over the past 10 years, there have been 16 murders in Hyde Park.
Just to the west is the Washington Park neighborhood, a high-crime community stretched over 1.57 barren miles of abandoned buildings and little industry. There is the Grand Boulevard Plaza. Inside are Lim’s Beauty Supply, bordered by MK Jewelry. Not far away are Wayne’s Bar-B-Q and Cajun, Hair Experts, Boost, JJ Fish, and City Nails. Al’s Italian Beef, the New Grand Chinese Kitchen, a check-cashing facility called Check Changers, Payless Shoes, Family Dollar, Liberty Tax Service, and Cricket. Hardly high-end.
The median income for Washington Park’s 11,717 residents is $13,087, less than half of what the average Chicagoan earns. Unemployment is 23 percent; two of every five people officially live in poverty and nearly one in three residents does not have a high school diploma. Washington Park has racked up 71 murders over a decade, even though it has less than half the residents of Hyde Park.
The relationship between crime and poverty is obvious in all the city’s tough neighborhoods. To the south is the troubled Englewood neighborhood, formerly home to NBA star Anthony Davis, superstar singer and actress Jennifer Hudson, renowned sculptor Richard Hunt, and magazine publisher Jamie Foster Brown and her journalist sister Stella Foster. Clearly, some people make it out. Most people, however, do not.
The average individual income in Englewood is $11,993. Forty-two percent of residents live in poverty; 21 percent are unemployed. There have been over 190 murders there in the past 10 years. In Fuller Park, the average individual income is $9,016. Fifty-six percent of residents live in poverty; 40 percent are unemployed, 34 percent have earned no high school diploma. Englewood has one of the highest murder rates in the nation.
Chicago’s municipal leaders know the statistics. They recognize the correlation between poverty and crime. Like heads of police departments across the nation, Chicago Police Department Superintendent Eddie Johnson will tell you those disparities fuel the city’s crime and violence. Society’s failure to address core issues of education and unemployment makes his job that much more difficult.
“We can’t just police our way out of this,” Johnson told me. “In these impoverished neighborhoods, we have to invest in them and show them hope and give them a path to take care of themselves and their families. We have a program within the police department in which we identify would-be perpetrators of murders or the victims. We find them partners who can offer them resources. We get them training, housing, resources. Three out of five of these individuals take us up on the offer. When we are able to provide a guy who has been on the wrong side of the law a real opportunity, so they can find employment and get a paycheck, you talk about pride? I’ve seen it. It’s a beautiful thing. I know, the majority of these guys want to get out. They take us up on it, so they can get out of that lifestyle.”
Father Michael Pfleger, a Catholic priest, echoes this concern. Known among the people in his South Side neighborhood as “Father Mike,” Pfleger is the spiritual leader of St. Sabina Church and a longtime community activist. His church is in the heart of a low-income black neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. A Chicago native, he has been working on issues of violence, economic and educational opportunities, health, crime, a faulty criminal justice system, and homelessness for over 40 years. He has led campaigns against the sale of drug paraphernalia, against billboards for alcohol and tobacco use that targeted children in black and brown neighborhoods, against music that glorified violence and disrespected women, against easy access to guns and their unrelenting violence.
Father Mike is unorthodox. He and his congregants once went out onto the streets and paid prostitutes for their time, so they could talk about how they could turn their lives around. He adopted and raised two black boys to give them a better life. He took in a third black boy, Jarvis Franklin, as a foster child. Franklin was killed by gang crossfire in 1998 just a few blocks from Pfleger’s church. Pfleger had just finished performing a wedding when people ran and told him about Jarvis. Pfleger held the boy’s bloody head and prayed. Jarvis died a few days later.
I was scheduled to meet Pfleger at his church later in the week, but I was inadvertently introduced to him earlier. On my first night in Chicago, I was invited to attend a panel discussion not far from downtown for some of the city’s business leaders. The question before the panel that night was how to turn the tide of Chicago’s murders. Pfleger and other panel members were trying to convince people in the business community to offer real training and jobs to folks from the toughest neighborhoods, most with criminal backgrounds.
“Help us open doors for these young brothers and sisters to get opportunities,” Pfleger pleaded before a crowd of about 100 men and women. “We need a job for them to go to. They feel like they are disposable, because they’ve been treated like they’re disposable. We have whole communities that are not in post-traumatic stress, they’re in present-traumatic stress. [They’re] in communities where people are in trauma every single day because of poverty, because of violence, because of abandonment. The common thread is always double-digit unemployment, underperforming schools, lack of economic investment….
“There is a tremendous lack of opportunities for youth. Our young men—people between the ages of 17 to 28—believe they are throwaways and have been treated like they’ve been thrown away. If you feel like nobody values you, then you believe you have no value and you act like your life has no value…. There was this African-American brother who had a summer job, and then the program ended, and I saw him on the corner selling drugs. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘You know what I’m doing. I’ve gotta take care of my baby and my grandmother. If I could find a job, I would walk away from all this today.’ If we could get 2,000 companies to just hire one of these guys, we could make a big difference.”
Cities and business leaders have long heard that plea from community activists and the men and women in those poor communities. The response has mostly been either minimal investment or the promise to fix the core problems sometime in the future. Crime, however, is right now.
The death of Laquan McDonald is a metaphor for Chicago’s and America’s neglect of its most vulnerable population and its refusal to prioritize its resources to help them. Like too many young black and Latino males, McDonald was born into a world of poverty, dysfunction, and neglect. He was shuttled among five homes in the first five years of his life. He was abused and neglected so much that, by the age of 11, he confessed, he turned to daily marijuana use, because it kept him calm, he told a juvenile court clinician. Smoking marijuana
helped him suppress the anger, the feelings of abandonment, and allowed him to “keep a smile on my face,” he’d said. By age 13, he had been placed in hospitals for psychiatric treatment three times and diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and other serious conditions. He admitted that he had no coping skills, so to hide from the real word, he used drugs, instead of the medication prescribed him. “I like how high I be,” he told one counselor. “Everything be funny.”
McDonald was born in September 1997, the child of an unwed 15-year-old mother and an absentee father. His mother had been taken into protective custody months earlier because of her guardian’s drug use. So, McDonald was born a second-generation ward of the state. He was taken from his mother at age 3 just before Christmas 2000 by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services because, agency reports said, his mother didn’t provide him with proper supervision. Officials noted burns on his 8-month-old sister that the agency said happened because his mother was high at the time. He and his sister were moved into the home of his great-grandmother, Goldie Hunter.
Hunter was a retired laborer and widow with a seventh-grade education. She lived on Chicago’s rough-and-tumble West Side in a six-bedroom, subsidized house in the 1100 block of North Laramie Street, in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood. Goldie Hunter was the matriarch of the family. She managed to care for and help raise at least 12 children, some of them her own and some the children of others, including McDonald’s mother, Tina Hunter. Two years later, McDonald was returned to his mother, but it was soon clear that something was wrong. According to a March 2003 day-care report, “Laquan was punching and hitting himself on the face.” Three months later, McDonald returned to protective custody after reports that his mother’s boyfriend was abusing him. The boy’s bruises showed that the boyfriend was punching him and hitting him with a belt. A report noted that McDonald also said, “The boyfriend abused his mother.” McDonald was returned to his great-grandmother, but before that, the state twice placed him in foster homes outside the family. McDonald said that during one of those placements he was beaten and sexually abused. He said he was whipped with an extension cord and barely fed in one foster home, according to one report. He returned to his great-grandmother at age 6 and remained with her until her death at age 78, on August 9, 2013.
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