by Miles Harvey
But a lot of people consider the Chicago Police to be a gang. And the truth is that you’re going to always have some gang members or former gang members that are on the police department. Some join because they quit the gang and they want to try and stop other people from joining the gang. But some gangs actually encourage their members to join the police department. They want you to go to school. They want you to get into a high-ranking position on the force. Even if they don’t exploit you, now they have an “in,” so that other gang members can join.
I do know some police officers that were gang members, and some of them actually became very good cops because they knew the ins and outs of the particular gangs they patrolled around. One of the best ways to catch a dope dealer is to get somebody that used to be a dope dealer to tell you how this guy operates.
Now, the negative aspect of the police department having gang members is ‘cause now you don’t know who to trust. You don’t know who to talk to. You don’t know what high-ranking members are either current or former gang members. So you don’t know who has your back out there on the streets. For instance, you could go into a situation where there’s a man with a gun, and you jump out of the car, and it’s a gang member, and you don’t know if your partner is a member of that gang. You draw down and get ready to take this guy out and your partner might pop you. And that is very scary. But just being a police officer is scary.
These younger gangbangers are quick to pick up a gun and they’re
more apt to shoot you and try to kill you. I can remember one instance where there was a shooting on 75th at about Evans, and, after my partner and I arrived, a gangbanger drove down Cottage Grove and opened up
with a TEC-9 semi-automatic pistol towards the police. Fortunately, nobody was injured. The police all ran to their cars in order to chase this idiot that was driving down the street. Unfortunately, he got away from us, but police are the type of persons that, instead of running from gunfire, they run to it.
But I don’t believe tighter gun-control legislation would help. For instance, there’s a law that states that a guy that has been convicted of a felony cannot own a gun. But you have convicted felons that keep getting guns. Now, if you cannot buy a gun, how are you getting a gun? Somebody else is either buying the guns for you or you’re stealing the guns. My opinion is that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. And when you take guns out of the hands of the citizens that need them to protect their own selves, then what you’re doing is outfitting the criminal element to take advantage of the citizen.
In order to stop the violence, there needs to be more funding for the police. And until the police and the community and the school system all get together and decide we’re going to work together to provide programs, to try and provide jobs and to provide ways for these students to have some hope for the future, we will never get anywhere.
Someone once asked me if I would be a cop again. My answer to that question would be, “No way in the world, because you’re going to have more police officers getting shot and more police officers getting killed.”
Right before I retired in 2010, you had three police officers get killed. One police officer was leaving his father’s house to get on his new motorcycle and some gangbangers—who didn’t even live on the South Side of Chicago—wanted to relieve him of his motorcycle. And they killed the young man over there on King Drive—right off of 84th or 85th and King Drive.
Another black police officer got shot wiping his car off in front of his house. He bought the car, a Buick, as a retirement present to himself and was going to retire a month later and got shot in an apparent stickup. Last night, I talked to one of my friends that’s a police officer in the 22nd District now, where I was a police officer at one time. He told me a police officer got shot last night. Did it make the news? I watched the 6 o’clock news and it wasn’t on there. You know, there are so many instances where police officers get assaulted, get shot at or get shot that never make the news. So no, not in the city of Chicago.
—Interviewed by Adrienne Moss
Endnotes
5 Fran Spielman, “Police Shortage a Growing Problem,” Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 29, 2009.
6 Quoted in Fran Spielman, “Hiring 500 Cops in 2013 Not Enough, Aldermen Say,” Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 10, 2012.
7 Garry F. McCarthy has been the police superintendent since 2011. He was
formerly the police director in Newark, New Jersey.
8 The 6th District covers the Gresham neighborhood on the Far South Side.
9 The 22nd District covers the Morgan Park community on the Far South Side.
10 Weis served as Chicago’s top cop from 2008 to early 2011.
11 The 7th District covers the Englewood neighborhood on the South Side.
FOUR BULLETS
JOHN McCULLOUGH
In 2012, Chicago’s homicide rate rose for the first time in four years—an increase that experts attribute in part to the breakdown of larger street gangs into feuding factions. According to a Chicago Tribune investigation,12 roughly one in four of the city’s 506 slaying victims in 2012 was affiliated with the Gangster Disciples (GDs), a powerful South Side gang that, in recent years, has splintered into at least 250 smaller, younger groups—sometimes referred to as “cliques” or “sects”—which now battle over turf older gang members once shared.
One person who has experienced this bloody infighting firsthand is John McCullough. Born and raised in the Englewood neighborhood, he has been shot and incarcerated on numerous occasions. At age 25, McCullough says he is no longer involved in gang activity and is attempting to stay out
of trouble.
In my neighborhood, it’s shootings everywhere. There are a lot of vacant lots, abandoned cribs boarded up. Some kids aren’t going to school or anything. Six guys got killed between 2009 and the end of 2010. Terrible as usual.
Ain’t no activities, I mean positive activities. They got playgrounds, but then in the playgrounds you see the teenagers. The teenagers, they gangbang and all that, and the kids in the park see this. They’re just gonna copy that. So they need some recreational centers or something. In the ’70s and ’80s, they had game rooms. As times went by, everything that was around our area got burned down or abandoned. The government could put a little recreational center up for these kids so they could see something different, besides being out there in the streets.
The key thing is, kids gotta have things to do besides sitting around on the block. The kids that are growing up right now, they’re paying attention to us. They’re following our footsteps.
See, I had a beautiful childhood in my eyes. I stayed around my family and didn’t need for anything. I remember playing with cousins, climbing trees, playing cops and robbers and making guns out of wood, just doing what kids usually do.
I went to Harper High School.13 Freshman, sophomore, junior year, I was an A, B and C student. I stayed busy, stayed working. I loved high school. I got kicked out my senior year, acting a fool. The guys who I hung out with, man, we just wanted to run the whole school. We was just having a ball in school. We just got super reckless and started pulling fire alarms, like eight times a day, just to get outside. They kicked us out. They kicked us all out.
My senior year, I think I had like 20 ½ credits when they kicked me out. I could have enrolled in another school, but I wanted to have fun and hang around in the streets. I could have put a stop to it. I could have just singled myself out and did the right thing, but instead I wanted to be bad. I wanted to have fun.
I remember it was the summertime that my dad got shot and killed. I don’t really know the reason. He was in Michigan. I don’t know why he was out there. I think it was one of them white girls he was messing with that stayed out there.
My mama told me to come into the crib. I was, like, 13. She told me and my sister that my dad had just got killed. Everything went blank. I remember that day like yesterday. Everything went blank and I couldn’t cry. I didn’t know what to d
o. It was hard to take it all in. I just remember thinking, like, “He’s gone.”
I think my mama took it worse than me. Even though they weren’t together for a while, she took it harder. While she was telling me, she was crying. My grandma was crying. My sister started crying and I’m just sitting there, the only one not crying. Just sitting there, like I’m retarded, puzzled. The day of the funeral, my little brothers see my daddy in the casket. They was saying, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” They was crying for their daddy. That’s all I could hear.
My Uncle Delvin, he took care of us when my father got killed. He made sure I was straight and didn’t need nothing. He would go to my football games and all that. He took care of his family; he took care of everybody. He was about the only male influence that I was getting. He was a Chicago police officer. He was there for me, so I’ll say he was my biggest role model.
He killed himself.14 I don’t know why, but he killed himself. I think he shot his wife, like, seven times, then killed himself. Somehow he snapped, because that wasn’t him. He wasn’t a killer and wasn’t the type of person to harm a female. He just lost it.
When he was alive, I was on football teams, basketball teams and softball teams. I stayed in school. All that went down the drain when he left. I was 15, and I wasn’t getting that extra push or that guidance anymore. So, it went from kicking it with family to kicking it with the guys.
I’m soft. People who know me know that I am a sweetheart. But people who don’t know me, just based on how I look, they would think I’m a hard-ass, super tough. I’m hard on the outside and mushy on the inside. I’m the type of person that’s not gonna bother anybody, you feel me? But if somebody bothers me, I step up and give them what they’re looking for. Other than that, I’m a good person.
As a whole, it’s just me and my guys. We ain’t no big gang, not like how it was back in the day, like a big nation and all that. When you go to high school, you link with a lot of guys. So we started meeting with other guys in the neighborhood, which made us bigger and bigger. These are my close guys. We don’t hang in the area where all this gangbanging is happening. I mean, when we go out, we have fun, we party and we get out of the neighborhood so we don’t have to look over our shoulder and stuff. We’ll probably go downtown to restaurants or something, like to Dave and Buster’s or the Cheesecake Factory. We don’t go looking for trouble.
The most recent time I was shot, it was gang affiliation. Over the years, we never liked each other. The guys that shot me, we went to high school together. Ever since then, it just escalated, bigger and bigger. I got locked up and everything came right back and haunted me. It beat me in the ass. It built up over the years. The beefing, all that, and not liking each other. We all Gangster Disciples, but they call they self something else, and we call ourselves something else. It’s not a big organization. So when people say gangs, it’s not no gangs out here. It’s just individuals who claiming something. We’re Creep Town Gangstas. I don’t know what they call themselves. Everybody got their own little cliques and their own little names, but at the end of the day, they all Gangstas, GDs.
Nov. 4, 2008. That’s the day I got locked up for selling drugs. I was 20, locked in Pinckneyville Correctional Center.15 At the time, I was working, but I didn’t have a high school diploma, so I didn’t have a decent job. There’s a lot of stuff I like, and there’s a lot of stuff I be needing, and my people and my family be needing. It’s not going to come to us, you know. So I was working in a furniture store, delivering furniture, and selling drugs at the same time. I ain’t going to say I had to, but I wanted that little extra money. That’s one thing I hate, is to struggle. I hate struggling.
Jail is what you make it. I mean, it’s going to have some challenges, and there’s going to be some guys that are going to try and test you. But at the same time, to me, jail is like college, like going away to college somewhere. The only thing on your mind is your people, or what’s going on outside of the jail walls.
I came home Jan. 4, 2010. I was supposed to have come home earlier, but I messed up in jail. I was fighting my cellmate and I put him in the hospital. They took three months from me, so I had to stay. Finally, I came home. When I was in jail, I said I was going to change. I said I was going to do everything different. But I mean, that’s just jail, period. It’s going to change your mind state, because you’re not going to like what you’re seeing in there.
I was shot on two different occasions. The first time, I was on 79th and just got off the bus. I’m walking to my grandma’s crib and, as soon as I get up the alleyway, two guys come up. I had a pocketful of money and these guys tried to rob me. All I could do was run, because they weren’t about to take my money. So that was probably why they shot at me.
I got shot in the back of my leg. I didn’t know I was shot at first until I got like two blocks away, and my leg went out. I couldn’t even walk no more. I was scared. I went to the hospital the next day. It wasn’t internal bleeding or none of that. I could see the bullet in my leg. It was throbbing, but that’s about it. When I got to the hospital, the nurse told me that it would come out on its own. So, I just signed myself out and left. I took that one out myself.
That was in November 2007, and then I got out of jail in 2010. The summer of 2010, I got shot again, three times. I had just come from my grandma’s house. The guys who I was into it with, they were close by, on 69th and Ashland. Me being me, I get off the bus at 69th and Ashland. I always look around. You know, just the neighborhood that we stay in, you gotta look around and pay attention to your surroundings. That’s what I was doing, and at the same time, somebody was sitting there watching me. As soon as I get to my grandma’s crib, somebody popped up from behind and shot me.
Man, I was scared that time. When he shot me in my chest, I seen my blood splash in my face. I turned around and I ran and he kept on shooting. He shot me in my back; that’s when I felt everything get numb. My back, my side and my chest, everything got numb. I jumped my grandma’s gate, then I went in my neighbor’s backyard. I was scared, super scared, because I didn’t know how many times I got shot. I couldn’t breathe, so that really made me panic. The bullet that went in my chest came out my back. The bullet that went in my back got stuck in my lungs; it messed my lungs up. When I got shot in my butt, it came out my hip. So two of them came in and went out, but one of them was stuck.
The first week, I don’t remember nothing. I don’t remember talking to nobody because I was so drugged up. When everything started calming down, though, I couldn’t think about nothing. My mind was just going everywhere. I didn’t know who shot me; I didn’t know what was coming up next. I was just glad I was here, though. That first shot was supposed to kill me. It was like literally two inches away from my heart. I just gave thanks every morning. I did that anyway, every morning I wake up. I made it my business to acknowledge God. He was most definitely with me that whole time. It slowed me down, gave me an eye-opener.
The police tried to find the guys that shot me, but they couldn’t, as usual. There was a police camera right there where I got shot and the police
say they don’t know who shot me. Basically, I say them cameras up there are for nothing, because there was no footage of what happened to me. So, we take all that up in our own actions. We protect ourselves instead of being quick to call the police. They come on their time; they gonna do the job on their time.
It’s a lot of police out here that’s dirty. I’ll say they’re the biggest gang out here, the Chicago police officers. They can do whatever they want to do. If you don’t have nothing on you and they don’t like you, they’re going to put something on you and send you to jail. They can beat you and leave you right there. Or they can beat you, and then take you to jail and say you swung on them.
You got some that do their job. Some police officers got a lot of respect out here, because they respect the guys on these streets. We got a lot of people out here, like myself, that don’t be looking for no trouble, but we try t
o get some money to try and better ourselves and our family. Some of these police out here see that and won’t bother us, and some of them out here just want to make our lives miserable. Make our lives worse than what it already is.
My proudest achievement: I’ve been out of jail for a whole year! And, I mean, it’s shocking. Since I was 17, I’ve been going back and forth to jail every year; every year, I was in jail at least once. But I just broke my record. I went a whole year without getting locked up. I’m proud of myself. Mainly, I’m just sitting back right now. I ain’t got to sell drugs because my people don’t want me to go back to jail, so they’re going to make sure I don’t need for nothing.
What motivates me? Today? To get up? My family motivates me—my Granny Bertha, my mom, my sisters and brothers. I just want to do something better for them. Because, since I turned 17, everything started going downhill. I want to show them that I ain’t just a bad person.
I wouldn’t want to be in a new environment because I would have to start all over again. This is where I feel comfortable. I know everybody around here. I can’t go nowhere yet anyway, until I get off parole.
Violence has affected me mentally, though. You gonna always have to look over your shoulder. Violence, that’s every day. We see that every day. It’s gonna be something petty, and it’s gonna end in violence. But we adapt to our environments, we’re just so used to it. You’ll hear some gunshots, but all you gonna do is look around and see if they coming towards you. Unless it’s right there, and you’re in harm’s way, you don’t go in no house. It’s just normal. It’s normal. A lot of young males don’t have any type of guidance, so we go by what we see every day and that’s all we know. That’s all we know.