The Fight for East Chicago [PHOTO ESSAY]

ALL PHOTOS BY ALYSSA SCHUKAR

The West Calumet Housing Complex is home to nearly 1,200 people, located on a seventy nine-acre site in East Chicago, Indiana, which the Environmental Protection Agency has declared hazardous to human health. Up until 1985 a lead refinery, a copper smelter, and a secondary lead smelter were also in the area, and as early as 1987, federal and state agencies investigated the site as a potential cleanup priority. But due to limited resources and an abundance of red tape, the site has remained contaminated for decades.

This July, the residents of West Calumet Housing Complex were told they had a year to move somewhere else. Many say that local officials waited too long before telling them about environmental hazards, and they fear uprooting their families and struggling to find affordable housing nearby. On December 10, the EPA planned a meeting so residents could ask questions about the lead cleanup, but it was canceled at the last minute due to a “possible lapse in funding.”

“This is not really an explanation,” says Roy Morgan, who attends church in East Chicago and is worried about the elderly and young members of his congregation. “I understand about the lapse in funding. But…it’s the EPA, aren’t they supposed to protect the environment? We really need some answers.”

In this photo essay Alyssa Schukar takes a look at the people of East Indiana and an environmental legacy that will affect generations to come.

Photos were taken in summer and fall 2016 and captions reflect the subjects’ ages at the time the photos were shot. Additional reporting by Alex V. Hernandez.

Lamont Anderson embraces his son Lamont Anderson Jr., 8, at the West Calumet Housing Complex. Anderson Jr.’s blood lead levels test results were above the CDC’s 5 mg/d threshold for action. After living in the complex for more than a decade, the family moved to Gary, Indiana earlier this summer.

This article was published in collaboration with the South Side Weekly.

Keeping Kids On Track

BY: NISSA RHEE

When Saeri Geller’s son was fifteen months old, she caught him eating paint chips in their home in Grand Crossing. A visit to the doctor confirmed her fears: Ian had dangerously high blood lead levels.

For the last five months, Geller and her son have been shuttling between doctors’ appointments and friends’ homes as Ian undergoes chelation drug therapy and their house is renovated to remove the lead threats. She hopes that they will be done with his therapy and back at home in time for the holidays. But she knows that even then, her family’s struggles with lead will not be over.

“This isn’t really something that you put behind you,” says Geller. While their doctor found no problems with his development so far, Geller knows that the damage lead did to her son’s brain might not be evident until he’s older.

“Every little issue or problem that comes up, is it just because how he is or is it because of lead?” she says. “He’s a pretty chill baby for the most part, but any tantrums that happen, or out-of-the-ordinary behaviors, is it because he’s a toddler or is it because of the lead? How do we recognize what’s lead-based and what’s not? It’s almost impossible.”

While doctors have long understood the link between childhood lead poisoning and developmental delays, parents in Illinois, like Geller, have been locked in a waiting game. Until their child has substantial developmental difficulties, they are not eligible for the state’s Early Intervention program, which provides free or low-cost therapy to children ages zero to three with delays or disabilities. But by the time a child begins exhibiting these delays, which may take years, it’s often too late to make a real difference.    

Soon parents may be getting some extra help, however. The Illinois Department of Human Services is considering allowing all young children with elevated blood lead levels to be automatically eligible for Early Intervention. If adopted, Illinois would join twenty-one other states that currently provide such services to lead-affected children.

Underpinning the move are advances in modern brain science, which suggest that the human brain is most elastic in young children. Because of this, infants and toddlers are especially vulnerable to lead. Even low levels of lead in a child’s body has been shown to damage their central nervous system, decrease academic achievement and IQ and impact their ability pay attention, learn language and read.

While lead abatement and chelation drug therapy can help reduce the amount of lead in a child’s body, this neurological damage cannot be overcome by a trip to the doctor’s office alone.

“There’s no drug that I can give that will eliminate the effects of lead on the developing brain,” explains pediatrician Dr. Nicole Hamp of the University of Chicago Comer Children’s Hospital. “But the developing brain, particularly between birth and five years old, is so plastic that while we can’t reverse the effects of lead, we can compensate for the effects of lead. So early intervention is really key for these kids, because we’re catching them at an age when they are really going to benefit from it.”

Hamp says that services offered by the IDHS’s Early Intervention program can help families maximize their child’s development, with services ranging from speech therapy to occupational therapy to nutrition services. Once approved for the program, a child would receive an Individualized Family Service Plan that lays out what sort of treatment the child needs and over what time period. Service providers, who are generally therapists or nurses, then come to the family’s house regularly for sessions with the child and his or her caretaker.

While the IDHS does allow pediatricians to recommend children to the program if they believe there is “substantial risk of significant delays,” few doctors currently steer lead-poisoned children into the Early Intervention program, says Amy Zimmerman of the Legal Council for Health Justice. That’s a problem, she says, because nearly half of the developmentally delayed children who go through the Early Intervention program in Illinois don’t need special education when they reach kindergarten, a benefit that saves taxpayers seven dollars for every dollar spent on Early Intervention.

This month, two working groups from a state advisory board are meeting to determine the blood lead level necessary to qualify a child for Early Intervention and the types of services that will be offered.

“Our hope with getting these kids who have been poisoned in there early is that they will be on target at age five when they enter school, because they were able to get the services and the tools they need to be able to compensate for what will be coming down the pipe,” says Zimmerman, who sits on that advisory board.

The effort has garnered support both locally and in Springfield, where Governor Bruce Rauner’s Cabinet on Children and Youth is “discussing a number of potential interventions to develop a comprehensive prevention and response strategy to reduce the impact of lead exposure on children,” according to Illinois Department of Public Health spokesperson Melaney Arnold.

In October, Julie Morita, head of the Chicago Department of Public Health, also voiced support for the Early Intervention push, but cautioned that the benefits and costs of such a move must be weighed.

“If we had unlimited resources, I think we could just do it without looking at the evidence,” says Morita. “But I think we have to look at the evidence to see if studies show if this is beneficial or worthwhile. If we find that it’s effective and it works and it’s also costly, I think we need to look at all those factors before we make a decision.”

Less than half of the funds for Early Intervention in Illinois come from state general revenue. Medicaid, private insurance, and family fees cover the rest of the cost. The program currently serves over 20,000 infants and toddlers each year.

While automatically allowing lead-poisoned children into the Early Intervention program may increase the cost of the program, the extra money would be well spent on her patients, says Hamp.

“Already children on the South Side have to face so much adversity and throwing lead into the mix is just one more hoop that they have to jump through,” she says. “I think with having a patient population that’s so disproportionately affected by lead, this seems like something that we can really get out in front of and do something about.” 

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5 Ways to Prevent Lead Poisoning

 1. Protect your home

Was your house built before 1978? Keep an eye out for peeling paint: at least eighty-three percent of houses built before that year contain lead-based paint, and paint chips are one of the most common ways for a child to accidentally consume lead. Call the city’s lead hotline at 312-747-5323 to request an inspection or to learn how to get financial assistance for removing lead-based paint in your home.

2. Protect your water

About eighty percent of water lines connecting homes to Chicago water mains contain lead. Filtering your water can greatly reduce your risk of exposure, but not all filters on the store shelf can prevent lead contamination, so make sure to look for the “NSF” mark that means it meets National Science Foundation standards. The product’s label should explicitly state that it will reduce lead levels in water. You can also get your home water quality tested by calling 311 or going to www.chicagowaterquality.org.

3. Get tested

Go to your primary care doctor or pediatrician and get a blood lead level test. If you don’t have one, call the lead hotline number, where an operator can connect you with a doctor who will see you for free or at a sliding-scale rate based on your income.

4. Eat well

A balanced diet can help the body resist the absorption of lead. The EPA lists calcium, iron, and vitamin C as essential nutrients that will help anyone, especially children, fight potential lead poisoning. They even put together a guide with lead-fighting recipes like grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches and French toast.

5. Stay informed

Check to see how prevalent lead may be in your area by texting the word LEAD to 312-697-1791.

Want more information? We have a list of links to resources mentioned above at www.citybureau.org/lead.

This article was published in collaboration with the South Side Weekly.

Staying Ahead of the Curve

BY: DARRYL HOLLIDAY

We will spend whatever it takes. Whatever that cost is, we will pay it.”

Those were the words of Chicago Public Schools CEO Forrest Claypool at a community event in June, just as CPS began testing its more than 6,000 sinks and faucets for lead-contaminated water.

Anna Espinosa, 38, was in the audience that night. School officials had planned for a crowd at the Back of the Yards high school gym, fully expanding the orange bleachers toward the middle of the basketball court where a table was reserved for CPS, Department of Water Management, and Department of Public Health officials. But only a handful of parents, teachers, experts, and reporters showed up, so the attendees were relocated to a dozen chairs around the table.

Darryl Holliday

Claypool was soon peppered with questions.

”Why weren’t the meetings publicized widely?” one attendee asked.

“They were,” Claypool replied.

“Why did you wait to test until the media started investigating?” another asked.

“CPS launched this program, not the press,” Claypool said, bristling slightly at the insinuation.

And the exposure risks for CPS students from school fixtures? “Basically non-detectable,” Claypool assured those gathered on the court.

But the newly launched water testing was only one reason Espinosa attended the meeting that day. At the age of four, her autistic seventeen-year-old son had already been poisoned by lead in the family’s last home, she said, later telling reporters that the CPS officials she had just listened to were “full of it.”

Instead, Espinosa wanted to know what CPS would do for her son in his last years at Thomas Kelly High School. In other words, how does Chicago’s public school system plan to help students who were poisoned by lead as children and are now suffering the effects as young adults?

Darryl Holliday

While CPS works to find and eliminate lead-contaminated fixtures in its buildings, students who arrive at school already exposed to lead still have limited options for treatment. Though the city imposes mandatory lead screenings on children before they turn six years old, a review of departmental policy shows that CPS has no official or comprehensive policy on how to assess and assist lead-affected children. Considering the symptoms and their effects—ranging from low grades to violent behavior—and compounded by budget cuts, the public health crisis of lead poisoning extends beyond today’s water fountains. What schools do and do not provide to children affected by lead will shape the futures of thousands of young Chicagoans.

An Invisible Legacy

The symptoms of lead poisoning include a range of seemingly unrelated ailments like abdominal pain, constipation, sleep problems, headaches, loss of appetite, and memory loss. Many are relatively mild and can be individually overlooked, but, in the case of lead poisoning, could pave the way for a myriad of lifelong effects including irreversible brain damage, aggressive behavior, lowered IQ, growth delays, and poor grades. Recent reports even link childhood lead exposure with trends in violent crime.

“Those [effects] happen even at low levels of lead poisoning. So these kids get poisoned before [age] 5, and they get to school already with learning disabilities,” says Howard Ehrman, an environmental advocate, University of Illinois at Chicago professor and former top official at the Chicago Department of Public Health. “One of the problems we have, not only with lead poisoning but all possible learning disabilities, is the fact that CPS and most public schools have never funded or made it a priority for enough people to do proper testing and then put the children, based on the Americans with Disabilities Act, into the right programs to treat their learning disability.”

Symptoms of lead poisoning often do not become apparent until a child has difficulty in school. And while those effects are often translated as bad behavior and underperformance, in a time of citywide cuts and changes to school budgets, which critics say could shrink special education funds, the impact of untreated lead poisoning raises tough questions for communities already facing disastrous levels of unemployment, incarceration, and public school closures.

In 1999, Fuller Park was the community area with the highest incidence of elevated blood lead levels among children tested, with nearly two in five kids testing positive. By 2013, only 2.8 percent of kids tested there had elevated levels. The dramatic decrease can be tied to a number of factors including disuse of leaded gasoline, an increase in lead screenings, and cleanup of lead paint in homes. But lead is an “absolute neurotoxin,” according to Ehrman, meaning that babies affected in 1999—now high school students—are likely impacted by the exposure even today.

Among those students is Espinosa’s seventeen-year-old son, Moises, who was tested in 2005 and had a lead count of 4.9 micrograms per deciliter, Espinosa says, adding that she believes it was higher in the years before. She says he was likely exposed to lead-based paint in their home, which is how most children accidentally consume lead. But small amounts of lead can accumulate in the body from many different sources.

The family’s Back of the Yards neighborhood, where the CPS community meeting took place in June, is part of the New City community area. In 2013, 1.4 percent of children (ages zero to six) tested in New City had elevated blood lead levels, putting the neighborhood fifteenth among Chicago’s seventy-seven community areas. Espinosa’s son attended schools in McKinley Park, Brighton Park, and Pilsen during that same time frame, some of which had sinks or water fountains with lead-contaminated water during this year’s tests.

“I couldn’t believe there was lead in my school [Perez Elementary], where I had grown up, and that there was lead in Pilsen Academy where [my children] went also,” she says.

Moises was diagnosed with autism at fifteen years old, and though scientists have not found a causal link between the toxin and autism, childhood lead poisoning has many of the same symptoms as Autistic Spectrum Disorder—and it has been found to contribute to autism severity in lead-poisoned children.

Espinosa’s message for parents today: “Keep insisting on getting the resources.

“There’s more resources out there to know where the lead is coming from, how they’re getting it, where you could go get more info, [and] how you could get more help,” she says.

CPS is scheduled to complete testing of 526 schools by the end of 2016, according to district spokesperson Emily Bittner, who noted that final results from all tested schools will be complete in early 2017. As of December 5, ninety-five school drinking fountains and eighty-nine sinks—thirty-two of which were in kitchens—tested above the EPA “action level” of fifteen parts per billion. Of the 184 fixtures above that level, all were shut down and more than 120 have been returned to service after pipes were flushed, repaired, capped, or replaced, according to school officials. The Chicago Park District went through a similar process this summer.

For many parents and city officials, the full array of park and school tests was worth applauding.

“I have to commend the Park District and CPS for being so aggressive and testing the faucets and the sinks within their buildings and outside,” says Chicago Department of Public Health commissioner Julie Morita. “I think it’s an extra step to ensure the safety of the water.” She added that CPDH is currently working with CPS to mail letters, informational packets, and the results of tests in their schools to parents.

“What we’ve said is that the risk is low and yet if people want to be tested, they should reach out to their health care providers,” she says.

As of December, CPS has spent $1.9 million and anticipates spending about $2.3 million total for the first-ever system-wide lead testing of school water fixtures, but when it comes to the root cause of lead, Ehrman says the city will continue to see cases of exposure until it removes the lead service pipes and fixtures that bring water into schools and homes around Chicago.

Leading the Way

Cuffe Academy kindergarten teacher Jeanine Saflarski says she’s happy with how the lead-affected water fixture in her kindergarten classroom was capped and fixed by CPS.

Of the 141 of fixtures tested at Cuffe in August, three tested positive for lead. Two sink faucets, both in pre-K classrooms, tested between twenty-six and twenty-nine parts per billion, significantly higher than the EPA’s “action level” of fifteen parts per billion. According to Bittner, the third fixture tested below that level and was flushed along with all other water fixtures in the district.

But zoom out further and a more concerning picture emerges. In 2013, 7.6 percent of children tested from the Auburn Gresham neighborhood, where Cuffe is located, had elevated blood lead levels, ranking ninth out of Chicago’s seventy-seven community areas. Though experts say Saflarski is unlikely to encounter a severely lead-affected child in her kindergarten classroom today, many of the thirteen-year-olds graduating from Cuffe’s eighth grade this year were born during a time when nearly twenty-one percent—more than one in five—of Auburn Gresham children under the age of six who were tested had elevated blood lead levels.

Saflarski says a teacher is trained to notice the smallest, earliest signs of a learning disability. “You do everything you can in the classroom to try to meet modifications and needs,” she says, adding that teachers have protocols in place for kids in need of special assistance such as speech and occupational therapy. The school system even gives teachers lists of children with medical needs like food allergies, she says, which is not the case for lead.

But even if parents were to disclose their children’s lead poisoning, there is no official protocol for what teachers should do. Younger children may be eligible for the state’s Early Intervention Program, but according to a 2012 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “lead exerts long-lasting effects and the effect of lead on a child may not be demonstrable until the child is well into the elementary school years.” The CDC report lists research-backed recommendations for lead-affected people from infancy to the age of twenty-one, including specialized counseling to help with aggressive behavior, nutritional programs, chelation therapy in severe cases to decrease lead content in the blood, and individualized plans that identify, monitor, and assist children who have learning disabilities.

“I think it’s terribly concerning that CPS doesn’t have a policy,” Ehrman says. “The policy should include, number one, a memorandum of understanding, a formal agreement, between CDPH and CPS signed off by the mayor of the city of Chicago saying there will be integration of databases,” so that city agencies can share information to identify and help children affected by lead.

Many lead-safe schools recommendations are agreed upon by lead experts, and while CPS does not formally address any of these recommendations in its policies, the district “uses a process called MTSS (Multi-Tiered System of Supports) to identify any students with potential special needs,” according to Bittner.

But a comprehensive school policy on lead is not unheard of. The Connecticut State Department of Education, for example, has published policies designed “to clarify the role of schools in meeting the needs of children and families affected by lead.”

In fact, “developing school district policy and procedures regarding children who may be affected by lead” is first on a list of ten distinct ways schools can better serve lead-poisoned youth, according to the department’s website. Other points include educating school personnel, maintaining special-education resources, development of monitoring plans, and referral of lead-poisoned students to enrichment and eligible disability programs.

Likewise, school districts in Boston; Rochester, NY; and Columbus, OH all have posted, or are in the process of creating, policies for school-based lead safety. According to the University of California’s Lead-Safe Schools Guide, benefits of a policy include avoidance of unnecessary costs, open communication with parents, better-trained school employees, and evaluation of what works on a local level.

In Flint, MI, a class-action legal battle is currently underway alleging the local public school system is not providing services and interventions that could make a difference in the ability of lead poisoned youth to succeed.

“Since the full magnitude of this crisis became public in 2015, there have been federal and state inquiries, investigations, task forces, declarations, and appropriations. Yet there has been no effective response to address the needs of the thousands of children who attend Flint’s public schools,” the lawsuit alleges on behalf of fifteen children who were exposed to lead in Flint.

Espinosa, along with many other CPS parents, is worried about the same thing. If no cost is too high for the district to find and repair lead-contaminated sinks and drinking fountains in the schools, what about the costs of ensuring lead-poisoned children get the care they need?

This article was published in collaboration with the South Side Weekly. Additional reporting by Timna Axel and Enrique Perez. 

Paths to Contamination

BY: TIMNA AXEL AND ENRIQUE PEREZ

Lead, a soft and naturally occurring metal, is one of the best-studied toxic substances known to humans—it is especially harmful to the brain, kidneys, bone marrow, and other body systems of young children. Childhood lead poisoning has been dramatically reduced over the past few decades, as lead has been phased out from gasoline, food and beverage cans, house paint, and other common sources. In 1978, there were about 14.8 million poisoned children in the United States; by the early 1990s, that number had declined to 890,000 children. In Chicago, the rates of elevated blood levels in children have decreased from one in four to fewer than one in one hundred children tested.

Still, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2015 found close to 1,000 children in Cook County with elevated blood levels. Many more children likely go uncounted because their results fall under the CDC’s “reference level” of five micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood, but the reality is that any lead in the body can be dangerous.

Read on to follow two different paths to lead exposure that have been identified in the city, and how families and children are affected by the poison.

Paint in Homes

In 1978, the federal government banned the consumer use of lead-based paint, but more than 75 percent of houses and apartments in Chicago were built before 1970, according to the Metropolitan Agency for Planning, and the city itself estimates that a third of its housing stock has lead hazards in its paint or soil. Four to five times more children in Chicago are affected by lead poisoning in houses built before 1950 than in other cities, according to civil and environmental engineer Marc Edwards, who presented the information to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2010.

In most Chicago homes, deteriorating lead-based paint is the main issue as it chips and becomes dust, prominently gathering in areas like windows, porches, doors, and doorframes that are easily accessible to children. Paint dust was likely the culprit when Yasmine McCray was diagnosed with lead poisoning at two-and-a-half years old, says her mother Mary McCray. Yasmine had a blood lead level of eleven micrograms per deciliter, just above the level at which the Chicago Department of Public Health must be notified so that it can investigate possible lead hazards in the home.

Provisions are in place to make sure residents know about lead hazards when they move in: A lead disclosure form, which should be given whenever a residence is leased out or sold, should detail the location of the lead-based paint and the condition of the painted surfaces. Home buyers are also allowed ten days to conduct a paint inspection or risk assessment for lead-based paint hazards before they buy. But those regulations are hard to enforce, and often require buyers and renters to be discerning in a situation where they might not have much choice.

In the McCrays’ case, after Yasmine’s blood results came back, a CPDH inspector was sent to their home in Hyde Park. The inspector found old paint peeling on the walls, which were then scraped and repainted. Even so, the McCray family soon moved to Auburn Gresham. But the damage was already done: when McCray noticed that her daughter’s behavior had become overly hyper, a doctor drew the connection to lead exposure, she says.

Critics say that the city’s lead policies are reactive, not proactive. Inspections only take place if the owner or tenant requests them or if a child has high blood-lead levels and CPDH is alerted, as in the McCrays’ case. And children don’t get tested regularly for lead.

“The only two mandates for getting tested that I know of are: [Medicaid] has a mandate—I’m not sure how strictly it’s followed—and for entering the Chicago Public Schools system you’re supposed to have a blood lead test on file,” says Eric Potash, a lecturer at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. “But I also don’t know how rigorous that testing is. The big caveat with the CPS mandate is that most people don’t enter CPS until they’re five or six [years old] and then it’s way too late.”

The city has limited resources when it comes to lead inspection, says David Jacobs, an adjunct associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health.

“The Chicago Department of Public Health has ten [lead] inspectors, which is ridiculously low considering the number of units. It is estimated that there are 5,000 to 10,000 units with lead hazards in Chicago,” he says. A department spokesperson says it conducts between 800 and 1,000 home inspections every year.

Another factor is an ongoing change in public housing. As cities like Chicago have torn down housing projects and moved toward Section 8 vouchers over the past twenty-five years, low-income families have become more at risk. Public housing units were inspected regularly for lead due to federal oversight, but Section 8 housing is not held to the same standards, says Howard Ehrman, a doctor and environmental activist who was a former top official in the Department of Public Health.

With limited city resources, researchers are looking for ways to predict when and where children are at risk for lead poisoning, in order to concentrate efforts on the hardest-hit communities. Potash is working with graduate students to build a predictive model based on data, such as building inspections for lead hazards, locations where children have been poisoned by lead in the last twenty years, rates of renting and homeownership, and whether or not people in a neighborhood have health insurance.

Potash says his model can predict households that likely contain lead hazards and have children younger than one year old. They are now running a pilot outreach program, partnering with the CDPH, landlords, and other agencies (including integrating with electronic medical record systems) to alert at-risk households and provide inspection information and remediation services.

“The CDPH only has resources to help a couple thousand kids each year,” says Potash. “By using the model to target the resources, you dramatically improve the efficiency and effectiveness by something like three times that much. You could potentially help three times as many kids.”

Water in Parks

This October, Chicago Park District officials announced that all of its drinking fountains and sinks had been tested for lead. The results: at least one fixture in forty-four percent of the District’s parks had lead levels that matched or exceeded fifteen parts per billion, the action level set by the Environmental Protection Agency at which water systems are required to step up their corrosion control or replace pipes. Specifically, fourteen of 544 indoor fixtures and 445 of 1,891 outdoor fountains tested above this level and were immediately turned off.

While contaminated fountains were found in parks throughout the city, certain neighborhoods like Auburn Gresham, where every park contained fixtures with elevated lead levels, were especially hard-hit.

This was news to McCray, who moved away from her lead-contaminated Hyde Park home to Auburn Gresham, and whose kids had been playing on the jungle gym at Foster Park. Three of the park’s outdoor fountains had elevated lead levels, testing showed. At Mahalia Jackson Park, about 1.5 miles away, both drinking fountains had elevated levels of lead, with one testing at 361 parts per billion. Two other Auburn Gresham parks, Dawes Park and O’Hallaren Park, also had contaminated fixtures.

Yasmine’s pediatrician didn’t recommend any medical treatment for the lead in her blood, but she has been tested every year since her diagnosis. McCray says her lead level has decreased over time, and she is now ahead of her class at school. Still, she worries about her kids drinking lead-contaminated water at the parks: “What if they get lead from the sprinklers?” she says.

While most studies show that exposure to lead-contaminated water is not likely by itself to elevate blood lead levels in most adults, there is a danger to infants and pregnant women who may be using the water. Pregnant women especially are at “the most sensitive time” for lead poisoning from water, says Helen Binns, a pediatrician who directs the lead evaluation program at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.

Fountains that the Park District did not shut off may be dangerous even if they didn’t exceed the EPA’s “action level,” Binns says. She and other lead experts agree that the EPA level is meant to be an engineering marker, and that no level of lead is safe inside the human body. “The fifteen parts per billion of lead in water is not a health-based standard. We would prefer that it be two, or something really low,” Binns says.

There is no federal regulation requiring water testing for park facilities. Nevertheless, a few U.S. cities have conducted similar tests of parks and other public facilities, including Portland, OR, and Ithaca, NY, both announced around the same time this summer.

The Park District has not yet identified why so many of its water fixtures have elevated lead levels, and the situation could get worse in the winter when all fixtures are turned off—unused fixtures are more likely to have contaminated water, which is why health departments recommend people regularly flush their pipes. Still, city officials emphasize that the results show no system-wide contamination.

“If it were because of the water that was coming through the pipes themselves, we would expect all of the faucets within a school or a park to be affected,” says Dr. Julie Morita, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health.

As of late November, Jessica Maxey-Faulkner, spokeswoman for the Park District, could not provide details about whether the district is working with Department of Public Health or Water Management officials to determine how to prevent future lead contamination at the water fountains. The Chicago Park District is still investigating the cause of the contaminated fountains, Maxey-Faulkner says.

Ground Zero

BY: TIMNA AXEL

Wearing glasses and a heavy green sweater, Patrick MacRoy kneels down in the sweltering basement of his yellow brick Andersonville condominium and presses a key against the metal pipe. As he begins scratching it, silver filings shave off the pipe and fall onto the floor. That’s how MacRoy, the former director of the city’s Lead Poison Prevention Program, knows that the pipe (known as a service line) that brings drinking water from the city’s water main into his twenty-four-unit building is made out of lead, a toxic metal long known to cause cognitive and physical impairments in children.

Experts say Chicago has more lead service lines than any other American city, yet MacRoy never thought to check his own service line because of the size of his building. Larger buildings require bigger pipes, and lead is a soft metal typically used for narrower lines. Then his condo association installed a sprinkler system in the courtyard, and MacRoy spotted a note that the plumber had written on his estimate: “Water main – 2 inch lead.”

“I looked at that and went, ‘Really?’” MacRoy says. He ordered a water testing kit from the city, but it did not detect elevated lead levels. Still, MacRoy wasn’t convinced, since he knows all too well that contaminated pipes sometimes have clean water readings.

“If the pipe is disturbed, whether through construction or some sort of shaking, it releases particles of lead that come through in an unpredictable way,” he says.

Jean Cochrane

In fact, national evidence is mounting that the chemical treatment of lead pipes—a common method used by cities like Chicago—is inadequate to keep the toxin out of drinking water, particularly when there is any street disturbance due to construction, large trucks on the road, or even changes in temperature. Yet as other cities such as Milwaukee and Cincinnati begin to address the problem by systematically replacing their lead service lines, and the Environmental Protection Agency considers requiring cities to do so, Chicago is leaving residents and property owners to deal with the problem. In fact, the city is in the middle of ramping up its 900-mile water main infrastructure project without taking inventory of lead service lines and with no plan to replace them.

Service lines are the pipes that connect iron water mains running under the streets into buildings to provide drinking and cooking water. To prevent lead from leaching directly into the water, the pipes are chemically treated with orthophosphate, which coats the lead pipes and prevents corrosion. This coating comes off when the pipes are disturbed. Without that protective orthophosphate coating, water can quickly become contaminated by lead—as it did in Flint, MI, where one sample had astronomical lead levels of 13,200 parts per billion, and tens of thousands of children were exposed to the poisonous substance.

In Chicago the use of lead in pipes was required by plumbing codes until Congress banned it in 1986, despite the fact that most major cities stopped using it in the 1950s. Estimates show that eighty percent of Chicago’s properties have a lead pipe, an unusually high number that prompted Tom Neltner, chemicals policy director at the Environmental Defense Fund, to call the city “ground zero for lead service lines.”

To compound the problem, in Chicago, the entirety of the service line stretching from the public water main to the home is considered private property. (Elsewhere, lead service lines are owned partially by the water utility and partially by property owners.) That’s why the city claims it is not taking action to inventory or replace any lead service lines—it doesn’t own them. The city will only perform spot repairs when there is a leak in a service line that’s in the public way, according to Gary Litherland, a spokesman for the Department of Water Management, “because it’s in the public way [and] we feel the responsibility to the public to keep that public way safe.”

But experts on lead say that as a matter of public health, the city should take action. They argue that the most cost-effective way of dealing with the lead pipe problem in Chicago is to replace them when the city opens the street to replace water mains. Since the pipes would be exposed, residents would not need to do any additional digging to reach the pipes. In places like Milwaukee and Green Bay, WI, the city is sharing the replacement cost with homeowners. Other towns have applied for federal funding—just this weekend, the U.S. Senate passed a bill that would provide $170 million to Flint to replace its 29,000 lead service lines. Some began their pipe replacement programs as early as the 1950s.

Jean Cochrane

Since 2009, Chicago has conducted more than 1,600 water main and sewer replacement projects, a necessity given that many of the city’s water mains are more than one hundred years old. Not only is each project an opportunity to take stock of the lead hazard underground, but the construction could agitate the connected service lines and cause lead to leach into the drinking water.

MacRoy says he thinks it’s a “disservice, from a public health standpoint,” for public officials to not take action to fix lead service lines. “For the city to just kind of wash their hands of it and say, ‘Oh well, it’s the property owner’s responsibility,’ denies the fact that they were the ones who mandated this connection, particularly so long after everyone else stopped,” he says.

Recently, Humboldt Park and West Ridge residents joined together in a class-action lawsuit contending that city officials knew about the risk of toxic lead levels entering tap water from construction projects and did not adequately warn residents or do anything to mitigate the problem. The lawsuit seeks to have the city pay to replace all lead service lines with copper and to establish a trust fund to pay for lead-related medical monitoring. In October, a judge granted the city’s motion to dismiss the suit without prejudice, but the plaintiffs say they will re-submit the case next month.

Meanwhile, the Department of Water Management announced in August that it would conduct a study to determine the possible impacts of water main construction on water quality for homes with lead service lines.

It’s a move that Mark Vazquez, an attorney representing the residents in the class action suit, says, “is focused on disproving the conclusion that water quality experts have come to around the country … Now is the time to be focusing on a solution. And it seems like the city is still intent on determining whether or not there is a problem.”

This article was published in collaboration with the South Side Weekly.

Looking for Economic Revival in Chatham

BY: ADESHINA EMMANUEL

This summer, Nedra Fears moved from Atlanta to Chicago’s South Side at a time when affluent blacks are more likely to do the opposite. Sixty-year-old Fears is living at her mom’s house in Chatham and looking for a home to buy in the historic black community, whose fortunes have declined in the past several decades.

The serene street lined with bungalows and tidy lawns where Fears grew up alludes to Chatham’s reputation since the 1950s as a bastion of black middle-class excellence. Black-owned mom-and-pop shops dominated nearby South Cottage Grove Avenue and West 79th Street. But economic decline set in about a decade after the area’s 1970s heyday, and today those business corridors are marred by empty storefronts and fading facades. These retail strips are critical to a revitalization effort Fears has returned to lead.

Nedra Fears at home. (Photo by Vidura Jang Bahadur)

“We need to be the change we want to see, but how do you do that?” said Fears, executive director of the Greater Chatham Initiative, a collaboration between elected officials, the private sector, and community residents meant to reverse Chatham’s economic decline. “How do you self-invest and make that change happen, and how do you galvanize others to make that change?”

The Greater Chatham Initiative (GCI), when it rolls out this fall, will aim to revive the old heart of Chicago’s black middle class by focusing on wooing more businesses to Chatham and nearby communities, bolstering existing establishments and improving retail strips, Fears said. Part of the problem is excess retail capacity—vacancy rates commonly top out at twenty to thirty percent—and Fears said some of the buildings could become co-working spaces or be rezoned for apartments. A GCI collaboration with the Chatham Business Association, the office of 6th Ward Alderman Roderick Sawyer, and other community development groups will look to rebrand the 79th St. retail corridor from Cottage Grove to King Drive, Fears said.

But even now, before the revitalization effort kicks in, business still operate each day on Cottage Grove and 79th. Their experience shows there is opportunity in the neighborhood—despite years of neglect and stigma—as well as major hurdles that the community and Fears’s GCI programs must confront before bringing about a true renaissance.

On a sweltering summer afternoon in a South Side martial arts gym, a tween dutifully strikes a punching bag with his wooden staff. Watching from the sideline is Steven Kinison, a cheerful but stern personal trainer with a clean-shaven head and mustache who co-owns Combatzone, on 82nd and Cottage Grove.

The Edgewater resident admits the loitering and news of shootings on Cottage Grove gave him pause two years ago when he and his business partner opened the gym. But Kinison says he saw more businesses than he anticipated in the area, and that there was a lack of businesses like his focused on fitness. He knew he’d have an edge.

“I was kind of skeptical at first but now I can see it,” Kinison said, touting the gym’s 200 members as proof he made the right call. “I have faith that we will continue to grow.”

Businesses like Combatzone, local favorites like the famous Dat Donut, and community staples like the sixty-year-old, family-owned Tailorite Cleaners are all bright spots on Cottage Grove. On the 79th Street corridor, Captain’s Hard Time restaurant and Mather LifeWays café are other popular destinations. But this diverse variety of establishments is an outlier on the two retail strips.

Of the 208 licensed businesses between both the Cottage and 79th commercial stretches, six types of businesses account for more than half, according to a City Bureau analysis of city data.  About one in five businesses either do or sell hair and haircare products, including barber shops and beauty supply stores. Nearly twenty stores are fashion apparel retailers, and fourteen are fast food joints. These three categories encompass the goods and services people tend to buy locally, rather than look outside the community for, according to Lauren Nolan, an economic development planner at the Voorhees Center for Neighborhood & Community Improvement.

Business owners said public safety is one of the biggest challenges to economic growth on the corridors, and that creating an environment where shoppers, including local professionals, feel comfortable walking the stretch would help their bottom lines. This summer, Kinison said he saw how a visible police presence discourages bad behavior on the street, even if that hasn’t been a panacea.

Some business owners, including Dat Donut co-owner Darryl Townson, said that addressing unemployment in the area could make a difference by deterring people from using crime to support themselves.

Fears said she wants to focus on reintegrating people whose criminal records make finding work tough. To that end, GCI is partnering with the Chicago Cook Workforce Partnership to open a new workforce center, at a location to be announced by the end of the year. CCWP will spearhead running and staffing the new center, which will have more than a dozen staff, a computer lab, classes in digital and financial literacy, and space for other organizations focused on workforce development; CEO Karin Norington-Reaves said her agency’s responsibility “is to make sure we have access to a wide array of services so we meet people exactly where they are.”

Earlier this year the Walmart Foundation gave CCWP, one of the biggest workforce agencies in the country, a $10.9 million grant to offer free education and employment services for retail workers looking to advance their careers within the industry in Chicago and ten other sites around the country. Norington-Reaves said that there are also plans for a satellite location in Chatham targeting locals with similar efforts.

Fears also said that she is working with Skills for Chicagoland’s Future to link more Chatham-area residents to corporate employers over the next two years. She is currently identifying “high-impact, high-growth business owners” in sectors like transportation, logistics and distribution, food processing and packaging, and fabricated metals, to connect them with partners NextStreet and Case “so they can take their firms to the next level, employ more residents, and create more wealth.”

Nedra Fears. Photo by Vidura Jang Bahadur

Other business owners said that the city should spend money-improving infrastructure to make the area more attractive to potential businesses, something Mayor Rahm Emanuel named as a goal of a $4.7 million streetscape project underway from 77th to 83rd Streets on Cottage Grove.

Chatham does boast a Target, Nike Factory Store, Payless, Walgreens, and Garrett’s Popcorn that are clustered on the southern end of the Cottage Grove retail strip near 85th and 87th Streets. Businesses like McDonald’s and Family Dollar have footprints in the area. Yet the backbone of Chatham’s local economy is small business, and the neighborhood has a proud history of black-owned establishments. However, the latter sentiment conflicts with the current reality, where many shopkeepers are immigrants from countries like Jordan, Korea, and Pakistan.

Fears said she welcomes any business owner who invests in the community, provides quality services, and is a good steward of their space. She suggested that increasing black business ownership is one way to combat people’s discomfort.

“What we need to be able to do,” she said, “is make people believe that they can start their own businesses, and support them.”

Listen to City Bureau reporters Adeshina Emmanuel and Latricia Polk discuss the changes Chatham is going through on Vocalo’s Barbershop Show:

But black-owned businesses face serious challenges, not least among them the structural obstacles and racial discrimination that have made it difficult for black entrepreneurs acquire sufficient startup capital or credit to open, grow, and sustain businesses. Despite Chicago’s long history of institutional racism, which Fears acknowledged, she and the GCI report still lean toward more race-neutral explanations of Chatham’s woes. She points to deindustrialization, the difficulty posed by living far away from jobs, and how many Chatham residents didn’t update their skills and education to ride the wave into the “new economy.”

Diversifying the types of stores in the area remains a challenge. Businesses of similar type and quality tend to cluster, in what urban development researcher Molly Gallagher calls the “snowball effect” of retail. This makes it difficult to both quickly change the mix of small businesses or attract businesses to serve as catalysts for change, she said.

For that catalyst, Fears said “you typically need to have a big anchor institution, and that anchor institution drives that development, [or] you have someone with outside influence and capital who decides to put money in an area.”

At the neighborhood level, experts prescribe several solutions, including individuals banding together to establish business cooperatives to reap tax benefits, utilizing public funding opportunities, and cutting costs by pooling funds to cover overhead expenses like rent and product costs.

Some of these options already exist. The city’s microlending program helps business owners overcome capital hurdles; tax increment finance districts offer business improvement grants to help entrepreneurs renovate their spaces; and credit unions and community banks are key alternatives to big lenders, but not everybody has access to or education about these options.

Photo by Vidura Jang Bahadur

In addition to her plans to bring in new businesses, Fears says the initiative will include training and connecting residents to jobs to boost their social mobility, thawing a frozen housing market, and rehabbing distressed apartment buildings. Details are still scarce for these initiatives, but business development can be a vehicle for driving broader improvements, she said.

Gallagher agrees, adding that changing the tone of an area has to be a holistic effort. The test will come when the plans begin rolling out this fall, when Chatham residents will hopefully begin to see the effects of the ambitious project.

Among other factors, Fears touts the mayor’s commitment as one reason why the GCI has the potential to succeed where other revitalization efforts have fallen short.

“We have accomplished great things with far fewer resources than we have now,” Fears said. “We can do this. And I think people need a vehicle in order to get it done. This is the vehicle. And I’m not doing it alone. This is a collective effort.”

This article was published in collaboration with the South Side Weekly.

911 Decoded (COMIC)

BY ALEX V. HERNANDEZ, ART BY JAVIER SUÁREZ

Chicago's 911 system has seen drastic changes over the past 100 years. City Bureau, in partnership with South Side Weekly, sketched the key points in emergency history.

The Rise and Fall of Community Policing in Chicago

BY NISSA RHEE, MANNY RAMOS AND ANDREA SALCEDO

On a mild morning in early May, two teenage boys sat on the porch of a house in West Humboldt Park on busy Chicago Avenue. From there, they could see a string of abandoned stores, boarded up and painted in bright colors. Occasionally, a CTA bus would pass in front of them, carrying commuters from the distant edges of the city to the Magnificent Mile shopping district eight miles to the east. A heavy breeze shook the blooming tree in front of the house.

At 10:30 AM, someone walked up to the porch and started shooting at them. The 16-year-old, Eddy Brooks, was shot in the head and later died in the hospital, according to Chicago Tribune reports. The 17-year-old was hit in the calf and thigh but survived the encounter.

Neighbors say they had long known the house to be a drug den. In the months leading up to the shooting, they had repeatedly complained about the building to the police and attended meetings of CAPS, the city's community policing unit, to demand that officers do something about the young men who congregated there.

CAPS community organizer John Campos was on his way to one of these public gatherings on the afternoon of May 6, when he saw yellow tape around the house. Two uniformed officers were taking pictures of the blood-splattered porch stairs. Despite a decades-long community policing system in place for reporting and preventing crime, violence had prevailed that day at the house on Chicago Avenue.

Community policing has long been a matter of life and death in Chicago. When it's worked, researchers have found that communities of color report less fear of crime and better relations with the police, which can translate into improved crime prevention and fewer shootings. And in a year when shootings have skyrocketed and community trust of the police has been severely damaged by the release of a series of videos capturing police shootings, it's been touted by politicians as a powerful crime-fighting strategy.

"Chicago is where the whole idea of community policing began," Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in a speech on police accountability on December 9, 2015, just two weeks after the release of the Laquan McDonald video rocked the city and sparked a crisis in police-community relations. "It remains the best and most comprehensive approach we have in changing the everyday conditions that breed crime and violence and then breed mistrust."

But nine months after that speech, an analysis by City Bureau and theReader finds CAPS in crisis. Chicago's once-trailblazing community policing program has been hollowed out by years of budget cuts and restructuring. Stretched thin, the police department no longer has the money necessary to reach out to the community and quickly follow up on citizen complaints such as the ones made about the house on Chicago Avenue. Neighborhoods like those on the city's west side struggle with far fewer resources and institutional knowledge than in previous years. CAPS today is an uneven patchwork of programs around the city. The result has been the destruction of the trust and goodwill the police department had built in the early years of CAPS.

Arguably, neighborhoods such as West Humboldt Park need strong police-community relations more than ever. An open-air drug market plagues the area, and residents live in constant fear of violence. District 11, where the May shooting occurred, has had twice as many murders so far this year as it had in the same period last year. As of September 15, CPD reports that there have been 65 murders in District 11 this year. That accounts for around one-tenth of the 519 homicides the city has had, as of September 19, so far this year. But while residents are eager to tackle crime, with CAPS a shell of its former self, they no longer have the support from the community policing program that they once did.

"It comes down to a question," Campos says. "Are our voices being heard on the west side?"

Asked for comment, Emanuel's office deferred to CPD. Meanwhile, the head of CAPS, deputy chief of community policing Eric Washington, has dismissed the idea that the program is in crisis, arguing that "Chicago has always been at the forefront of community policing."

"Community policing started in Chicago in 1993," Washington said in an interview at CPD headquarters. "We were at the forefront then and I believe we are at the forefront now."

CAPS community organizer John Campos, pictured here in 2012. (Jim Newberry/File)

Community policing got its start in the 80s and 90s as an innovative approach to reducing crime. Cities from New York to Seattle to Cleveland tried establishing community policing strategies during this time but failed to create strong stand-alone programs because of a lack of government funding or support.

In Chicago, however, Mayor Richard M. Daley was a staunch advocate of community policing and fueled the growth of CAPS.

The city established the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy in April 1993 during a period of high crime and poor public relations with the police. Chicago logged 940 murders in 1992 and 850 in 1993.

In a "Strategic plan for reinventing the Chicago Police Department," released in October 1993, Daley praised community policing as a "new, proactive approach to preventing crimes before they occur." He wrote that a "historic change was taking place in Chicago" with the adoption of CAPS, and that while "community policing means reinventing the way the Chicago Police Department works, it also means reinventing the way all City agencies, community members, and the police work with each other."

The strategy was rooted in a belief that communities can and should play a role in preventing crime and maintaining a safe environment. Through regular neighborhood beat meetings and district advisory councils, CAPS allowed police officers to work directly with community members to solve persistent problems like drugs and graffiti. Strategies ranged from playing basketball with neighborhood kids to holding regular community meetings and improving transparency in police operations and crime data. At the root of these strategies was relationship building, with police officers taking the time to engage with youth, business owners, and community residents.

After a brief experimental phase, CAPS was rolled out to all police districts in 1994. Between January and May 1995, more than 9,000 officers completed a three-day training on community policing's approach to problem solving.

In 1996 and 1997, CPD expanded its civilian staff in order to improve community outreach and increase participation in beat meetings. More staff members were also brought on for additional CAPS programs like court advocacy and projects targeting gang and drug hot spots.

By 1999, CAPS had a budget of $12.5 million, about 1.4 percent of CPD's total budget of $907 million—a small but significant slice. Each district was assigned a sergeant focused solely on community policing. The program was no longer dependent on the goodwill of the mayor's office, and had an established bureaucracy that could address the needs of each district. The response from the community was by and large positive, but some communities found CAPS more useful than others.

Researchers at Northwestern University's Institute for Policy Research studied CAPS between 1994 and 2003 and in 2004 published a report that found that the program had had a substantial impact on crime levels and police-community relations during its first decade. They found that African-Americans reported a 10 percent decrease in what they saw as crime problems after CAPS was created. African-Americans also experienced a 22 percent decrease in fear of crime in their neighborhood. Whites also saw decreases in these measures during this time, though Latinos didn't. (Researchers speculated that Latinos didn't respond as well due to a combination of factors including language barriers, fear of deportation, and a young, mobile population that wasn't interested in attending beat meetings.)

Northwestern researchers also found an improvement in how communities saw social order and physical decay in the first decade of the CAPS program. African-Americans reported a 60 percent decrease in perceived social disorder and a 30 percent decrease in physical decay problems in their neighborhoods.

Even more significant was the change in police favorability ratings among these communities during this time. African-­Americans, Latinos, and whites all felt that officers were more responsive after the establishment of CAPS than before its creation.

"From 1993 or so well into the 2000s, Chicago had the largest and most impressive community policing program in the world," says Northwestern University's Wesley Skogan, who led the CAPS study.

The early 2000s would prove to be CAPS's high point, however. While other cities invested heavily in community policing programs, Chicago began to pull back from its once-powerful tool.

"The energy went out of it after that time," Skogan says. "There was a new chief of police [Phil Cline] who wasn't interested in it. . . . And the mayor got sidetracked by a crime wave that was on the cover of the Chicago Tribune." Violence spiked again in 2001 with 667 homicides, breaking a six-year trend of a decrease in murders.

Following the rise in violence, Daley took a hard line on crime and focused the police department's efforts on guns, gangs, and homicides. Money was pulled away from CAPS and never returned. This past April, the Police Accountability Task Force convened by Emanuel gave its assessment of the state of policing in Chicago. The task force noted in its final report that "attendance [at CAPS events] dropped off significantly after 2000." (Cline declined to comment for this story. Daley didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.)

In 2010, Daley moved 111 officers from CAPS to street patrol in order to address what he described in a press release as "the most immediate and pressing problem facing many of our neighborhoods—violence in our streets and in our homes." Daley promised that the move would increase efficiency while at the same time ensuring "that the original goals and objectives of CAPS are met."

A Chicago News Cooperative/New York Times story from early January 2011 noted that because of budget cuts and shrinking staff, fewer community meetings were being held.

"The program has pretty much been eviscerated, which is tragic," 49th Ward alderman Joe Moore said at the time. "There's no substitute for an engaged citizenry and police officers taking an active role in preventing crime."

By the time Emanuel took office in May 2011, the budget for CAPS had fallen to $4.7 million, a little more than a third of what it had been in 1999. Meanwhile, CPD's total budget had jumped to $1.3 billion from $907 million in '99.

But in January 2012, Emanuel announced the "revitalization" of CAPS in order to restore "an effective community policing structure to the Department while providing the best possible services to the residents of Chicago."

"Community policing is a philosophy, and the strength of that philosophy within the Chicago Police Department and in our communities is more critical now than ever before," Emanuel said in a statement at the time. "CAPS is an important partnership between residents and police, and it's time to revitalize the program by giving District Commanders responsibility and authority to tailor programs for individual communities."

Under the new CAPS structure, community policing resources once controlled by police headquarters were moved to individual districts. Each district's CAPS program was to be handled by the commander, a CAPS sergeant, two officers, a community organizer, and a youth services provider. District commanders were given the responsibility of choosing which CAPS programs they would fund and which they would stop supporting, a strategy that the department hoped would make CAPS more responsive to local needs.

(Garry McCarthy, who served as Emanuel's police superintendent from 2011 to late 2015, didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.)

While the "revitalization" changed the structure of CAPS, it didn't alter the downward trend in funding for community policing. In 2012, the year after Emanuel took office, the budget for CAPS was slashed by $178,497 from the year before. In 2016, CAPS has a budget of $3.9 million, less than a third of the funding it had in 1999 and 17 percent less than when Emanuel took office. The police department's overall budget has ballooned to $1.45 billion today; CAPS funding represents just 0.3 percent of CPD's overall budget.

"Emanuel kept CAPS in place, but there's no money there," says Jimmy Simmons, who has volunteered as a CAPS beat meeting facilitator in District 11 for 22 years. "They don't put any money into it. They continue to do these [beat] meetings, but that's it."

Emanuel's 2012 changes to CAPS also resulted in a patchwork of programming spread unevenly across districts that inadvertently isolated CAPS volunteers and staff from their colleagues in other parts of town.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, CPD said that each CAPS district received between $7,000 and $9,500 in 2016 to "support local community policing activities." Funding levels are dependent on "the size of the district, levels of crime, particularly violent crime, previous spending patterns and other factors."

But in analyzing CAPS programs for the first seven months of 2016, City Bureau and the Reader found striking variations in the activity level across districts. Several districts had more than 100 public events in the first seven months of this year, while others had fewer than 40. Our analysis showed that the number of events a district held didn't correlate with the amount of money it received from CPD; some districts that received less funding had many events, while other districts that received more funding held fewer. Nor did programming levels in a district correlate with crime rates. Instead, interviews with CAPS volunteers and staff suggest that programming levels are determined more by the interests of district commanders.

Plus, CAPS teams now work in what one facilitator described as "silos" in each district, rarely collaborating with their colleagues. Campos recalls going out on "wolf pack" missions with organizers from other districts before 2013 to address problematic areas together. Now, however, he rarely talks to CAPS employees outside of his own district.

"We don't even have the opportunity to learn from each other," Campos says. "Like, 'Hey John, what are you guys doing in [District] 11 to do this?' We used to get together monthly and have meetings. We don't do that [anymore]."

In the first seven months of this year, several police districts had more than 100 public CAPS events, while others had fewer than 40. (Maria Cardona/City Bureau)

On a Wednesday afternoon in July, two police officers roll a dusty portable chalkboard with SWAT printed on it to the front of a meeting room in the basement of District 11's west-side headquarters.

"How many chairs and rows do you think we need?" asks one of the officers.

"Ain't going to be that many people here anyways," says the other, as he arranges 36 blue chairs in the middle of the room. Indeed, when the meeting begins a few minutes later, only a dozen chairs are occupied.

District 11's Expanded Anti-Violence Initiative meeting wasn't always so poorly attended. Campos says that as recently as seven years ago, between 40 and 50 people would regularly attend the meeting. At that time a five- or six-person panel of community policing experts would help facilitate the initiative. Now it's led by Campos, beat facilitator Simmons, and the district's CAPS sergeant, who is out of the office on this particular day.

In the past, every district held monthly antiviolence meetings. That changed with the decreasing budget and recent restructuring, which allowed district commanders to choose whether or not to hold them. District 11 is now one of the few places that still does, but it's only the "skeletal remains" of the program, Campos says. A previous commander got rid of the program altogether; it was only reinstated when a new commander came in.

EAVI was originally envisioned as an ideal venue for community policing, a "beat meeting on steroids," as Campos puts it. Neighborhood leaders would meet regularly with police officers and CAPS staff and delineate problems in the neighborhood. People would break into groups around topics like public safety, community outreach, and problem buildings, and come up with solutions. Both community members and police officers were responsible for thinking up solutions and taking on "homework" that contributed to the solution. This could be as simple as finding out who a resident needed to speak to in order to get a stop sign installed on a certain corner, or talking to the principal of a school where young men loitered and caused trouble. When the group met again the following month, its members would be graded on how well they'd completed their homework and how close they were to resolving the issue.

Campos says that while those early violence-prevention meetings were "pretty successful" at addressing problems and holding people accountable, the low turnout in recent years has made the program less effective. Someone assigned an important piece of homework in one meeting could easily not show up to the next meeting, making accountability difficult.

Leticia Segura makes a point of attending the meetings, despite the fact that they fall in the middle of a workday. She walks into this one a little late, but is immediately recognized. The 44-year-old has lived in the area for more than a decade, and got involved in CAPS a year ago when she started having trouble with drug dealers near her house.

The dealers were hiding drugs in the alley, she says, and preventing her from backing her car out of the garage. When they began concealing drugs in her yard, she says, she feared for her family's safety, and began attending every CAPS meeting she could find. She called 911 frequently, determined to get the police department's attention.

Her persistence paid off. After more than three months, during which she asked the department for help, police raided the drug dealers and cleared the area.

Segura says the experience made her appreciate the power of community policing. Then, seeing that her local CAPS office was short-staffed, she started volunteering there, answering phones and doing administrative work.

CAPS "is spread very thin," Segura says. "You have only so many officers who can do so much. If we had more police help and more money, I think we could do way more things."

CAPS did indeed do more things in the past, Simmons says—when they had a bigger budget.

"CAPS was high on the list [back then]," he recalls of the 90s. "Oh, you had your little drug dealers and shootings, but nothing like this because the people were committed."

CAPS had turned his neighborhood around then, Simmons says. People weren't afraid to leave their houses, and they felt respected by the police. Thanks to the good relationship with the police, he says, the community was the "eyes and ears" of the department and helped officers solve and prevent crimes.

But when funding for community policing started decreasing, Simmons says that CAPS stopped being the cornerstone of policing in his district. The number of public meetings between officers and community members decreased, and their relationship suffered for it. Districts had to rely on donations to support bonding events like barbecues, and began enlisting volunteers like Segura to answer phones and do paperwork in their CAPS offices.

Looking at the cold and half-empty room, Simmons knits his brows.

"I think [CAPS] can do a much better job than what is being done," he says.

“It’s like building a better mousetrap.” We don’t need new or fancy methods for improving public safety, because the mousetrap “has already been invented.”click to tweet

—CAPS COMMUNITY ORGANIZER JOHN CAMPOS

Now, facing pressure over rising homicide numbers and poor community relations, CPD is once again looking to community policing to alleviate its problems. Superintendent Eddie Johnson said in April that CPD had made a mistake by downsizing CAPS and that the department is working on "reinvigorating" the program.

"While CAPS has been successful for decades, enhancements are being implemented to forge better relationships between police and the community," CPD told City Bureau and the Reader in a statement this week. "Over the next several months, you can expect to see more on this as the department will develop a specific community affairs platform that tackles some of the very challenging obstacles and tensions that exist between communities and the officers as well as implement better programs to work with young people and minority communities."

Still, just what the "new CAPS" will look like is unclear. So far the department has been vague and sometimes contradictory about the scale of the changes in store. In an interview at a CAPS event in August, Johnson had said his department was working on revamping CAPS, though he was "not really ready to roll out the actual details" of the change. In its statement to City Bureau and the Reader, CPD said that the formal strategy that will guide CAPS in the future is "still a work in progress."

Yet in an interview after a community meeting in July, CAPS deputy chief Eric Washington said, "We are not changing anything." In a second interview held at CPD headquarters in August, Washington hesitated to even use the acronym "CAPS" to describe Chicago's community policing program, and hinted that the letters would soon stand for something besides the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy.

"Because that 'alternative' is still there, I don't say 'CAPS' right now," Washington said. Both Washington and Johnson have said that going forward, community policing will no longer be an "alternative" strategy for CPD, but rather the guiding philosophy of the department.

"Every officer that works for CPD should be engaging in some type of CAPS activity," Johnson said. He didn't elaborate on what that work should entail, or how it would be paid for, however.

The talk of making CAPS a department­wide doctrine and not just an "alternative strategy" may stem in part from the Police Accountability Task Force's review of CAPS in its final report, in which it asserted that community policing should be "treated as a core philosophy throughout CPD."

"Community policing cannot be relegated to a small, underfunded program," the report stated.

Since the CAPS "brand is significantly damaged" and its "civilian staff has dwindled to the point of ineffectiveness," the task force recommended getting rid of the program altogether. (The task force is not the first to call for the death of CAPS. Last year, District 14 commander Marc Buslik said of the program, "We need to drive a stake right through its heart.")

The task force recommended replacing CAPS with what it called "Community Empowerment and Engagement Districts." These CEEDs, one for each of Chicago's 22 police districts, would be more responsive to community needs, the task force argued. But there has been no indication that the police department or the mayor's office is considering such a change.

Meanwhile, as CAPS withers, police departments across the country are bolstering their community policing offices with the support of the U.S. Department of Justice. Last year, President Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing included community policing as one of its six pillars for police reform and recommended that community policing be "infused throughout the culture and organizational structure of law enforcement agencies."

Johnson and other CPD officials have said that going forward, community policing will no longer be an “alternative” strategy, but rather the department’s guiding philosophy. (Maria Cardona/City Bureau)

On a hot afternoon in August, Superintendent Johnson grills hamburgers and sausages in a park set up for the 11th District's National Night Out. Nearby, Campos applies temporary tattoos of the CAPS logo to children's arms, and seniors take refuge from the sun under white tents. The event, which is held by police departments across the country, aims to create stronger community-police bonds.

"We are celebrating the community for being our right hand and helping us solve crimes," explains Daniel Allen, District 11 CAPS sergeant and an organizer of the event.
 For some, like a 13-year-old named Xavier, the event marks the first time residents will meet a police officer. For others, it's a chance to learn about ways they can help prevent crime and become involved in CAPS.

Campos says he remains optimistic about the power of community policing to make neighborhoods like his more safe. He says that community policing can "absolutely" help reduce the homicide rate and that he saw its power at the peak of CAPS, when the program "had the resources [and] ways of pulling in the community."

"It's like building a better mousetrap," Campos says. "We don't need new or fancy methods for improving public safety, he argues, because the mousetrap "has already been invented."

"The philosophy of community policing should work," he says, "if that philosophy translates into action like it's supposed to do." 

This story was produced in partnership with the Chicago Reader.

The Most Dangerous Neighborhood, the Most Inexperienced Cops

BY: ANDREW FAN

The officers who patrol the Chicago’s 11th Police District face a daunting challenge. The district, which is centered around Garfield Park on the city’s West Side, has the highest murder rate in the city, and it’s rising fast. By late August the district already had more murders than in all of 2015, when it led the city with 48 homicides.

The officers of the 11th District stand out in another way. They are the youngest and least experienced police officers of any district in Chicago.

The average officer in the 11th joined the force 10 years ago; over a third of the district’s officers have less than five years on the force. Meanwhile, most veteran officers with patrol experience in the late 1990s — the last time Chicago’s murder rate was as high as today — work far from Garfield Park. Half a dozen miles to the north one of the city’s safest districts, Jefferson Park, has only three officers with under 10 years of experience. Over half the patrol officers are 20-year veterans.

The divide between the police officers who patrol Garfield Park and Jefferson Park reflect divisions that hold true across Chicago and in police departments across the country, where high-crime areas are frequently staffed with rookies while the veterans flock to safer districts. Policing experts say that the practice is commonplace, since senior officers usually get priority when they ask to transfer, though Chicago’s union-mandated transfer process exacerbates the situation, tying the hands of commanders in deciding how to staff their districts. And while some say that the divide has its benefits, citing younger officers’ energy and ability to connect with at-risk youth, there are also significant risks—to the safety of citizens and officers, and to police departments that already struggle to forge lasting connections in many communities.

“You’re putting your least experienced officers in the situations that really call for the most experience and best judgement,” says Sam Walker, a professor and policing expert at the University of Nebraska. According to Walker, younger officers are more likely to engage in overly aggressive policing, particularly if not given proper training.

A lack of experience can also have deadly consequences. Last year, a Buzzfeed News analysis found that younger officers are more likely to use force — a finding also backed by a 2008 study of 186 officer-involved shootings. In Chicago, a database of police shootings compiled by the  showed that the average officer who opened fire had about nine years of experience, compared to 15 for the department as a whole.

Three young Chicago officers recently came under scrutiny for their use of force in the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Paul O’Neal. Body camera and patrol car footage released by the city showed two officers firing at O’Neal as he plowed past the officers while driving a stolen car. Moments later, after a short foot chase, a third officer fatally shot O’Neal - who was unarmed - in the back.

WARNING: Graphic content/language. The Independent Police Review Authority released video Aug. 5, 2016, from the fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Paul O'Neal. This clip shows footage from a Chicago police officer's body camera. (Chicago Tribune/Youtube)

Body camera footage showed the moments before and after the fatal shooting of Paul O'Neal by the police in Chicago on July 28, 2016. INDEPENDENT POLICE REVIEW AUTHORITY

Joseph Giacalone, a retired New York police sergeant who teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and has watched the videos, criticized the decision to fire on the car, pointing out that the suspect had not displayed a weapon. Superintendent Eddie Johnson quickly suspended the police powers of the officers who opened fire. All three had less than four years of experience at the time of the shooting.

The district where O’Neal was shot — the 3rd district — has the highest percentage of officers with under five years of experience in the city. Nearly 40 percent of the officers are recent hires. The three suspended officers were assigned to the nearby 4th district, where over 30 percent of officers have under five years of experience.

As Chicago grapples with its most violent year in over a decade, the burden of bringing down the city’s rising murder rate falls disproportionately on its newest officers. Among Chicago’s 22 police districts, the five with the highest murder rates in 2016 are also the five where officers have the least experience, averaging ten years on the force. By comparison, the five safest districts are staffed by some of the most experienced officers, with an average of 18 years of experience.

Experience of Patrol Officers by District and 2016 Homicide Rate

SOURCE: CHICAGO POLICE DEPARTMENT

Data obtained from the CPD through a Freedom of Information Act request show 7,300 officers in the Bureau of Patrol (not counting sergeants and other supervisors), accounting for over 60 percent of the entire CPD. Patrol officers are the backbone of CPD, responding to citizen calls as well as walking and driving through their assigned beats.

In the five districts with the highest murder rates this year over 50 percent of the officers have less than 10 years of experience, though those officers make up just 30 percent of all Patrol and only 12 percent of the officers in the five safest districts. Out of the nearly 400 patrol officers under the age of 30, more than half serve in the five districts with the highest murder rates, while just 22 serve in the five safest.

Meanwhile, veteran officers are clustered in safer districts. Officers with over 20 years of experience make up just 10 percent of patrol officers in the five districts with the highest murder rates, but 30 percent of the city’s safest districts.

Younger officers policing high-crime districts have been asked to play a central role in reducing Chicago’s rapidly rising murder rate. Under former superintendent Garry McCarthy, the CPD flooded high-crime areas with officers on overtime shifts in an effort to tamp down crime. Superintendent Eddie Johnson reconfigured the program in July, emphasizing the role of officers who serve full-time in high-crime districts and have greater opportunity to develop strong community ties.

The movement of veteran officers out of districts on Chicago’s South and West Sides exposes a challenge for Johnson’s efforts to encourage better community ties. Jeffrey Booker, a retired CPD officer who served for more than 21 years on the force, says “the police see themselves as separate from the community” in many South and West Side neighborhoods.

But the concentration of younger officers in higher-crime districts can have some advantages. Giacalone, the retired New York police sergeant, argues that “policing is a young person’s job” and that younger officers are often better able to connect with troubled young people than officers in their 40s and 50s.

Though the rookie/veteran divide is present in many police departments, Chicago does have policies that may leave its force even more skewed. The Chicago Police Department’s union contract allows officers to regularly bid for open positions in other districts. Bids for patrol officer positions are decided primarily by comparing the seniority of the officers, and officers can transfer using a bid once every 12 months.

That makes it relatively easy for officers to move and ties the hands of the department in terms of determining which officers serve in which districts. Giacalone notes that when he served in the NYPD, “it can take years for people to get transfers.” He remembers that NYPD officers sometimes jokingly called the official transfer form a “black hole.”

Walker notes that “the one virtue of the seniority system is fairness” since it reduces the power of favoritism, a longstanding concern in Chicago. He also points out that in some cities the introduction of a seniority system helped end practices where the worst officers were purposely assigned to minority neighborhoods.

Walker and Giacalone both argue that the risks of large numbers of younger officers can be offset by a strong contingent of sergeants and field training officers. These figures play a major role in shaping rookies after they’re assigned to a district.

The CPD’s training programs have been subject to serious criticism. The Police Accountability Task Force, which convened in the wake of the Laquan McDonald video release that led to months of protests on the streets of Chicago, declared in its report that the “CPD has consistently failed to devote adequate resources to training officers once they leave the Academy.” The report highlighted the need for increased in-service training and a robust field training officer (FTO) system - programs that policing experts like Walker have pointed to as vital for preparing young officers entering stressful environments.

Nationally, training reforms have been cited as a major component of broader police reform. The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, convened by President Obama in 2014 following several high profile incidents where police officers shot and killed black men, emphasized training and education as one of six crucial areas for improvement in policing. The Task Force’s final report highlighted the importance of programs like fielding training officers, encouraging improvements to the existing model based on San Jose’s well-regarded FTO program. San Jose’s police department is less than one-tenth the size of Chicago’s, but it boasts nearly the same number of designated field training officers.

The police seniority system is deeply embedded in Chicago, but Walker notes that the seniority rules — alongside in-service training and supervision — “are the little details that really make a difference in policing.” Still, Booker, the retired Chicago patrolman, is more pessimistic about change: “there’s no formula that’s going to answer this — it has to do with the culture — the formal and informal culture of the police department.”

This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

Immigrant-owned Stores Face Tension in Wary Chatham

BY LATRICIA POLK

CHATHAM — The once-thriving 79th Street retail corridor in Chatham is dotted with vacant storefronts, but of the shopkeepers who remain, some feel more welcome than others.

Immigrant business owners are common on Chatham’s main strip. Though the shopkeepers bring economic activity and jobs to the area, black customers and black-owned businesses complain the newcomers are taking money out of the community. The racial tension is fueled by economic gaps, cultural differences and language barriers, among other issues, residents said.

“They come to our neighborhoods and take advantage of a business opportunity,” said Michael Muhammad, a 39-year-old African-American who owns the Uniform Store, a small storefront at 79th Street and Eberhart Avenue.

“They come to a place [where] they know the fabric of the economic cloth is dead. They know we are not producing the way we should. They are unified and benefit from our disunity,” he said of immigrant store owners.

In June, U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) announced the Greater Chatham Initiative, a public-private partnership to rebuild the business corridor and surrounding neighborhoods. The leader of that initiative, Chatham-raised Nedra Fears, acknowledged the tension, and said that bringing more black-owned businesses to the area could alleviate the problem.

“Criticism can be valid, but if you want to see change collectively, what are you doing to make that change?” she said. “What do we need to do to be able to make people believe that they can start their own businesses?”

Fears said the initiative will include programs that train and support entrepreneurs. Self-employment can “be a ladder for wealth,” she said, adding that there also should be programs for ex-cons.

Misconceptions abound

Interviews with shoppers and on the business strip reveal some deep-seated misconceptions.

For instance, some residents believe that immigrant business owners get tax breaks and have used them to buy up  commercial property, which prevents African-Americans from buying or renting in their own community.

“Black owners very rarely get business in our own communities,” said Randy Davis, who co-owns DGI Inc Help Center at 7910 S. Cottage Grove Ave. The business helps consumers expunge criminal records, repair their credit and deal with bankruptcy.

Chatham resident Raymond Noble, 41, said, "When you come over from foreign countries, you are able to get a lot of different amenities that the average person here cannot get in terms of loans.” 

But Omar Hamdan, a business owner from Jerusalem, refuted Noble's claim.

“People think because I’m from the Middle East, the government gives me [my merchandise] for free," he said. "They think I don’t pay taxes, and [so] I showed them the tax bills.”

Hamdan added, “I work hard. I pay $2,000 a month in rent for business here.”

Hamdan, 50, opened his first small business in Chatham in 1994. He now owns three small business along the strip, a dollar store and two cellular phone stores.

“It was a good opportunity. Because it was a good business, I don’t care which area [I opened my shop],” Hamdan said.

The father of five lives in southwest suburban Burbank and came to the U.S. in 1992. He says he was advised to open his business in a black community.

“I knew the history of black people. In our religion [Islam], we respect all humans,” said Hamdan.

Immigrant business owners in predominantly black communities are not uncommon, says C.N. Le, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

“Most of it is due to the fact that, quite simply, rents are lower in neighborhoods that are predominantly black,” he said. “Because of the legacy of racism, much of the black population has been segregated into low-income, disadvantaged areas. It just so happens that the rent and property prices for these areas are lower compared to other areas, so it basically comes down to a financial decision.”

Studies show immigrant business is helpful

Whites used to own businesses in these predominantly black areas but began selling them to new immigrants such as Asians and Muslims in the 1980s, Le said. Scholars call this process “racial/ethnic succession,” because many of the white business owners move up the supply chain and become wholesalers who sell to the new immigrant business owners. In essence, these new Asian and Muslim business owners became a "buffer zone" that insulates whites from their former black customers, he said.

Some studies have found that immigrant business owners can help revitalize struggling neighborhoods by bringing commerce and much-needed investments to storefronts on depressed commercial strips. But research, news stories and years of documented clashes also reveal serious tensions between African-Americans and the immigrant business owners who find untapped opportunity in black neighborhoods.

A storefront on 79th Street in Chatham. (Maria Cardona/City Bureau)

Some Chatham residents feel that immigrant owners profile them.

“Everybody looks at you like you’re a gangbanger. They always look at the negative point of view of our race instead of looking at what we are doing positive,” said 25-year-old Erik Bentley, a Chatham resident.

The cultural differences and language barriers can also foster distrust and dislike.

For the last seven years, Don Williams has worked at Top Collection, a clothing store east of the 79th Street business strip. His Pakistani boss, known as “Pops,” speaks very little English, and Williams assists him with translations when interacting with black customers.

“I understand both of them, so I try to relay the message of what they are trying to say to each other,” said Williams.

Hiring local black residents as employees can ease the tension. Hamdan said he has two employees, but that his businesses can’t support more — an issue that Fears hopes the initiative can fix by bringing more economic activity to the area.

“I welcome people who want to do business in our community, because collectively we will thrive,” Fears said. “We want people to be good stewards: I don’t care who you are. If you invest in the community, we want you to step it up, we want you to do a high-quality investment, we want you to maintain your property, we want you to have high-quality goods and services, we want you to be a good neighbor.”

Either way, the process will require more understanding and empathy on both sides, Le said: “The business owners have been trying to become more involved and integrated into the communities that they serve,” and customers have to try to be more understanding of the cultural differences and not immediately conclude that some unpleasant interaction is because the business owner is racist.

“We're here because we’re after the American dream, and when you get here and start working, you realize the American dream is possible,” said Faye Ellis, an immigrant from Colombia, who owns Grab 'N Go.

Before Ellis opened her business at 7906 S. Cottage Grove Ave., the storefront sat abandoned for two years.

“I don’t think it’s fair to resent us, because a lot of us come here with nothing,” Ellis said.

This report was published in collaboration with DNAinfo Chicago. Additional reporting by Adeshina Emmanuel.

6 People We Met In Chatham Tell Us How The Historic Neighborhood Is Changing

BY: ADESHINA EMMANUEL, BEA MALSKY AND LATRICIA POLK

Neat lawns and tidy bungalows line quiet residential streets in Chatham, a South Side neighborhood that, in some areas, still looks the part of a black middle class utopia.

Chatham represents the old bastion of black economic mobility in Chicago, where working class folk, political movers and shakers, business people and other professionals have formed the foundation of the tight-knit community since the 1950s. Yet the signs of decline are impossible to ignore, especially on once-thriving business corridors like Cottage Grove and 79th Street that are rife with empty storefronts and the types of businesses you’d expect to see in troubled urban communities: liquor stores, dollar stores, fast food joints, hair salons and payday lenders.

But if Chatham is anything, it is resilient. Despite its ailing local economy and high crime rate, despite the scores of residents and businesses that fled the neighborhood in recent years, the community still has a way of keeping people there—even luring new residents and entrepreneurs who see opportunity where others only see neglect. Though Chatham experiences more crime than some Chicago neighborhoods, it is not one of the city's most-violent communities. Between July 19 and Aug. 18, Chatham saw reports of at least 61 violent crimes, including 2 homicides, and just over 220 property and quality-of-life crimes such as thefts and property damages, according to a Tribune analysis of the city's data portal, making Chatham the 13th-most violent community in Chicago, tied with Chicago Lawn, in the past month.

City Bureau visited Chatham this month to talk to area business owners about the challenges and triumphs of doing business in Chatham, the forces driving change in the community, what Chatham needs to thrive and more. The first part of City Bureau’s Chatham series can be found at Chicago Magazine.

Darryl Townson, illustration by Daniel Rowell/Chicagoist

Darryl Townson
Co-owner of Dat Donut and Uncle John’s Barbecue // 63 years old

On a blistering Thursday afternoon early in July, a slow but steady trickle of customers flock to Dat Donut, 8251 N. Cottage Grove, eyeing the glazed confections behind the counter— including the famous “Dat,” a frosted behemoth bigger than a baby’s head. It’s a diverse slice of the South Side: regal middle-aged women in business suits and heels, testy young parents pushing strollers and marshaling children along, unhurried elders sporting fanny packs and visors, dreadlocked young men whose pants hang just below the butt, burly bus drivers making a pit stop before continuing their route.

Co-owner Darryl Townson has spent most of the day sequestered in his office, cutting checks for his employees at the famous doughnut shop, which he owns with his wife Andrea, along with a rib joint in the same building.

Dat Donut opened about 22 years ago in the building that once housed the popular Leon’s Barbecue. Townson started working for Leon’s founder, Leon Finney Sr., when he was in high school. In 1994 Townson opened Dat Donut in the same space. Finney died in 2008, and Leon’s shuttered two years after that. But in 2010 Townson bought the building and later opened his own rib joint to compliment the doughnut shop.

“Chatham is what I know,” says Townson, who’s worked in Chatham since he was 15. “Chatham is one of your middle-class neighborhoods within the city of Chicago on the South Side that [had] people [with] very close-knit families, people took care of their homes, people tried to stay stable in business based on the economy that was here.”

But Townson says he noticed a change in the area during the 1990s as newcomers moved in after public housing projects like the Robert Taylor Homes were demolished and many of their residents dispersed around the city. The shift brought “a little bit of everything,” he notes, but some of it was bad, namely gang affiliations and crime.

“We do have an influx of young people that don’t seem to be going to school, don’t seem like they are looking for employment,” Townson says. “You do have the seniors that have stayed, but everybody now is getting… pretty scared to go out and do anything in the daytime because of what's going on in the streets.”

But that doesn’t mean Townson wants to take his business elsewhere.

“I have no reason to look anyplace else,” Townson said. “We definitely have the support of the community business-wise, and we don’t just serve the Chatham area, people come from all over for Dat Donut...I’m not looking to leave.”

Michael Muhammad, illustration by Dan Rowell/Chicagoist

 Michael Muhammad
Co-owner of the Uniform Store // 39 years old

Michael Muhammad is one of four owners of the Uniform store, a small store at the corner of 79th street and Eberhart Avenue. He says he has witnessed scores of Chatham small businesses fail in the past five years.

“It is a revolving door for a lot of businesses, because small business owners start off with a lot of hope," he says, but don't succeed due to a lack of support. “Many young women have been opening up boutiques. But once their boutique opens, they do not have a lot of people walking into their stores.”

In comparison, he says, “When Family Dollar opened, they had a lot of people standing outside waiting on them to open, and the same thing with Food-4-Less and many other commercial businesses. But for us small black businesses or independent businesses, we have to work for our customers.”

Muhammad wants black people to come together and pool resources to take advantage of business opportunities in the area, something he says “our Mexican, Vietnamese, and our Arab brothers and sisters” do when they start businesses.

“They leave their communities and come to a place that they know the fabric of the economic cloth is dead, they know we are not producing the way we should,” Muhammad says. “They’re unified and they benefit from our disunity. They come to our neighborhoods and take advantage of a business opportunity. We have to unify, that’s the only way.”

Artemus Gaye, illustration by Dan Rowell/Chicagoist

Artemus Gaye
President and founder of The Prince Ibrahima and Isabella Freedom Foundation // 40 years old

About five years ago, Liberian native Artemus Gaye moved from an apartment in Rogers Park on the Far North Side to Chatham.

“I came here on the South Side mainly because of space,” says Gaye, who runs a shipping business out of his home. “I thought, ‘Educated black folks, why should they go to the suburbs?’ ... Could I find an area within the South Side that I can be comfortable and build as a community?”

Gaye lives in a five-room bungalow with his parents and daughter just west of Cottage Grove, on a quiet block where signs at each corner command passersby to keep their voices down. For security he keeps a pair of pit bulls in his backyard, which also houses a chicken coop that provides his family with a daily serving of fresh eggs.

Gaye, a scholar who holds a Ph.D. in Christian ethics from Loyola University Chicago, is a descendant of a West African prince named Abdul Rahman Ibrahima who endured 40 years of slavery in the U.S. before he was freed. Gaye’s home-based shipping business, named after the prince and his wife Isabella, caters to West Africans in Chicago who want to send things—“food, medicine, clothes, cars, anything”—back home.

Gaye has seen Chatham residents forced to leave their childhood homes when they can’t afford to maintain the houses their parents bought. Gaye, on the other hand, says he wants to hang around to make the community a better place. He’s looking to work on neighborhood projects with community groups and churches. Among those ideas: transforming a vacant lot on King Drive given to him by the city into a multi-purpose space for indoor soccer, dance classes and gardening.

“Until there's ownership from the grassroots, we won't have a better sense of security,” Gaye says. “The security here is not just about policing, but about the economic and the social; it's for our cultural and spiritual benefit.”

Gaye says he has tried to encourage fellow Africans living on the North Side to see Chatham as an opportunity to establish an African immigrant community by buying property, homes and businesses in the area. He’s encountered resistance.

“Africans for the most part have this fear of the city—of the South Side,” Gaye says. “I'm trying to break that, that's why I'm encouraging them! We're all concentrated in the Rogers Park area, for the most part, and Uptown. So you have a large Nigerian population, Ghanaian population, there. And then we have most people who tend to get very successful move to the suburbs.”

Gaye is resolute that Africans should be congregating in Chicago’s black middle-class neighborhoods.

“This is historic, to be in this kind of area,” Gaye says. “To be educated and invest time in our community—we can do that.”

Ebony Mosley, illustration by Dan Rowell/Chicagoist

Ebony Mosley
Owner of The World Is Your's Childcare & Learning Center // 38 years old

The facade of Ebony Mosley’s daycare is a flash of color, a broad yellow awning with a red picket fence and several cheery painted cartoon animals. Mosley has operated the center at 8026 S. Cottage Grove Ave. for the last decade, teaching and tending kids ages two to twelve from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Mosley attends the nearby New Life Covenant Church on 78th Street, but lives in the suburbs and has no plans to move to Chatham. She notes families moving into the neighborhood and quickly deciding to leave, and hopes to see new programs to counteract a dearth of job opportunities for Chatham’s teenagers.

“We need activities,” she says. “There's too much hanging out on 79th, that's why there's always something happening. They need more youth programs or youth centers, somewhere that these children can go to keep them from being outside getting hurt.”

She adds, “If more businesses were opening, there'd be better opportunities for them to find employment and help them stay off the streets.”

Mosley has an intimate window into others’ family lives, a responsibility she takes seriously. Because life can be rough for kids at home, she says, “I make sure they feel like they have somewhere to go or some kind of safe environment that they can come to.”

“There's a lot that I've seen in the last ten years that I've been here,” Mosley says. “Different things with children and their families, parents, mothers, boyfriends, husbands. Domestic violence, all sorts of different things. I'm always here to listen to them, be an ear, comb some of the kids' hair, I cut the boys' [hair], I buy them coats and clothes and hats and gloves, scarves, shoes—whatever I can do to help them, I just do it.

Stephen Kinison, illustration via Dan Rowell/Chicagoist

Stephen Kinison
Co-owner of CombatZone Fitness // 40 years old

Stephen Kinison is a personal trainer who lives in Edgewater and owns a martial arts studio in Chatham, right across the street from Dat Donut. He says the studio at has 200 members from 5-year-olds to people in their early 70s.

“We have an actual interaction and a relationship, and get a chance to see the children and the adults develop long term,” Kinison says, describing his relationship with the Chatham community. “You know, building a family and not just a consumer...I feel like I’m interacting and not just selling something; I’m giving something back.

He says he was aware of stigma the area faces, but given that there are businesses on Cottage Grove, he figured somebody was making money and maybe he could, too.

“I was kind of skeptical at first but now I can see it,” Kinison says. “It’s good people here and they love to see this [business]...You don’t have to go outside your community to find what you’re looking for. I have faith that we will continue to grow, and that’s pretty good for an area like this.

In an area rife with liquor stores, unhealthy food and crime, Kinison says a business like his is much-needed in Chatham.

“I feel like to be successful in martial art you have to have that balanced [way] of thinking right, eating right,” Kinison says.

Kinison says struggling property values and concerns over crime have convinced many homeowners that they should cash out “while they can and...move somewhere they feel is on the uprise.”

“I think this area is right on the fence,” Kinison says. “With a little bit more of community support it can be that middle-class area.”

Kinison emphasized that the fact that he's a black business owner matters to people in the area.

"I think it does, I think the neighborhood appreciated [that,]” Kinison says. “I got a lot of positive support from parents, children, and other business owners. I feel like they are surprised to see it.”

Anthony Hamdan, illustration by Dan Rowell/Chicagoist

Anthony Hamdan
Co-owner of ABC Cellular // 46 years old

Anthony Hamdan commutes from suburban Burbank to manage one of his brother Omar’s three stores, a dollar store and two cell phone stores in Chatham. He’s been working in neighborhood for 16 years. Hamdan manages ABC Cellular, at 804 E. 79th St., and he says Chatham is a good community that lacks safety.

“We hear it from customers: they stole my phone, and they stuck me up with a gun,” Hamdan says. “A lot of them come in because they got their phones stolen and you hear that almost every day.”

He remembers a time when there used to be more police in the area, but says their presence has decreased. “They used to walk [around] a lot and come in here, but lately they cut them down,” says Hamdan.

Hamdan’s store has not experienced any crime in Chatham, but he says that a few years ago his brother Omar’s dollar store’s air conditioner compressor was stolen and the same happened to the restaurant next door. “They took the whole compressor,” he says.

Hamdan says he’s not involved in local politics in Chatham, but two weeks ago his brother went to the community police meeting. As for his personal safety, he says he feels safe walking around in the community because he has been working in Chatham since 2000: “I’ve been here for a long time. I know everybody, almost.”

This piece was produced in collaboration with Chicagoist. 
About the illustrator: Daniel Rowell is a writer and illustrator based in Chicago. You can follow him @danieljrowell.

At Church on the 9, A Spotlight on Black Joy

BY: BEA MALSKY

As the sun sets on August 8, a crowd begins to gather outside on a corner in Chatham.

At first, it’s five people. Then some come in groups off the No. 79 bus; others wander up alone to ask what’s happening. Soon, there are 40 people standing in a circle, watching one man in the middle.

Charles Preston, 26, is a slender black man in a white button-up shirt and brightly patterned pants with a camera around his neck. He’s reading a poem about the exploitation of black suffering as a spectacle for mass consumption. 

It is traumatic
that our deaths become viral
we need black power
or in madness we spiral
but black joy
I’mma speak into existence
I’mma give it back to my niggas, I’ll replenish
Fuck all these people using our plight as a gimmick
that goes for rappers, movie stars, and politicians
I believe removing glass ceilings can be healing
I believe that showing love makes a huge difference
I believe nothing comes before black women
and I believe we gonna only make it if we’re willing

The crowd snaps and claps their appreciation, and Preston motions for the next artist to step up. As he rejoins the circle, he catches the eye of a few newcomers and points to a crate of fruit on the ground—a humble welcome to #ChurchOnThe9.

The biweekly outdoor open mic is named for its location on the southwest corner of 79th and Cottage Grove. People have rapped, danced, read poetry, and led teach-ins on this corner every other Monday since June 13. Preston, the founder and organizer, says he chose the location to bring attention to the lack of resources for South Side artists, who have few public assembly spots and meager access to economic opportunity.

“I’m frustrated with the segregation of resources in Chicago,” says Preston, who is active in the Save CSU campaign and a former communications chair for activist group BYP100. “It’s no secret that in American history, black deaths are public spectacles… But what’s not a spectacle is our joy. That’s why I love to amplify resistance.”

For Preston, “church” is as much a concept as a physical place. In the days of slavery, he says, slaves would convene in secret against their masters’ wishes. “They would ditch their plantations and go into a log cabin or a section in the woods, and they all would stand together and sing songs, talk, and read the Bible,” he says. “They were communing.”

But beyond performances, a big part of the open mic is reclaiming the corner.

“I wanted it to be outside, because there’s this narrative that people can’t go outside because of the violence,” Preston says. “There’s also this stigma against black people being on the corner.”

The need for such a space in Chatham, once a symbol of black middle-class prosperity and economic mobility, shows just how much the neighborhood has changed since its heyday in the ’50s and ’60s. Nowadays, the South Side neighborhood is getting more and more name recognition from its native son, Chance the Rapper, who raps about sunny memories of his childhood there as well as the violence that has crept onto its streets. (In “Summer Friends,” a track on his latest mixtape, he sings, “79, 79, 79 hey,” referencing the street that’s become synonymous with the neighborhood—that riff is sampled in Church on the 9 videos.) Much of the crime clusters around 79th Street and Cottage Grove, the two main aisles of commerce.

There have been six gatherings for Church on the 9 at that intersection this summer, and while the number of performers and audience members has been growing, it hasn’t been free of tense moments.

This month, Preston posted a video on Twitter with the caption: “What happens when you host a community open mic at one of the most policed intersections in Chicago.”

What happens when you host a community open mic at one of the most policed intersections in Chicago. #ChurchOnThe9 pic.twitter.com/CNMTFWMzvI

— Kwesi (@BellicoseGarvey) August 5, 2016

The video starts by focusing on a man, who calls himself Brother First, talking about “the sick” people he sees on the street, and how the audience has a “prescription” to help them.

An ambulance in the background sounds its horn—a blip, which Brother First ignores for a moment. Then another, and a voice on a bullhorn saying, “cut the black-on-black fight, now.”

Brother First and Preston exchange a wry glance. “Which is why I’m glad you’re bringing this out here, bro,” Brother First says.

Apparently, two men on the street had begun fighting.

“I guess black lives don’t matter, huh,” shouts someone on a bullhorn. The camera jumps off Brother First and onto the fight, and in a split second, police officers are pulling the men apart and forcing one to the ground.

“One woman was hollering out from across the street at the cops, ‘Don’t kill him!’” Preston recalls. The officers eventually let the men go without charges, and the open mic crowd reassembled, shaken by how quickly the situation had escalated. “Some people looked kind of flustered, because of witnessing the police do what they did,” Preston says later. “But I think it showed people why we need to be there. That’s what the corner sees, you know.”

What the corner sees is often the topic of performances at Church on the 9. On August 8, artists tackle prison abolition, police brutality, the water in Flint, gang violence, homophobia, racism, and depression. The words are heavy and the descriptions grim, but the dark mood is broken by frequent bursts of lightness.

Charles Preston (right) speaks to a group at Church on the 9 (Photo by Christopher ThoughtPoet Brown) 

The group sings “Happy Birthday” to a woman in a tiara who ends up rapping. Tweak the RBG—radical black girl—gets the crowd clapping for a chant: “One day / we will / be free.”

Also known as Jasamine Harris, the 22-year-old Tweak has been at Church on the 9 since the beginning. She grew up down the street and started rapping at six. “I used to be on 79th literally every day all day, rapping to the guys on the block,” she says. “Growing up, my platform was the block. There wasn’t resources in the hood where I was at—nothing to record music, write music, nothing of that nature. So all I had was beats and writing, and rapping for the people on the block. Rapping they ears off.”

Just as another performer, Benjamin Hart, begins a story about watching a Marlon Riggs film and learning to vogue (“Essex Hemphill was reading a poem. I did not know I had stopped myself from moving this way"), dancing as he speaks, a white-haired woman in a red blazer and pearls runs up to the group—afraid, frantic.

“Excuse me, excuse me,” she cries. “A man is following me and I’m scared of him.”

Once she has the circle’s attention she takes a moment to gather herself. She explains that a man wearing a red shirt had tried to push her against a wall, and that he’s attacked her before.

The crowd pauses for a beat, unsure of what to do. Some look at Preston, waiting for an indication of how to respond. Some step forward to try to see the attacker. Those closest to the woman move toward her, protectively enclosing her in the circle.

Then Brother First whispers with Preston for a moment and puts his hand on the woman’s shoulder. He assures her that he’ll talk to the man and make sure she’s safe. He walks her home as Church on the 9 reassembles itself.

“That’s real. Some of our elders can’t even walk home,” says Preston. Then, to Hart: “But you go ahead now, brother.”

Later, he reflects, “It’s crazy to me how that’s the reality black women live through, walking our blocks. But I do feel good that she called on us to come and stop it. It shows you the type of community we’re trying to build—that she felt enough confidence to come to us to do something.”

This report was published in collaboration with Chicago magazine.

Learning From Each Other

BY ANDREA SALCEDO

Leonard McGee is the civilian who runs the monthly Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy meetings in CPD Beat 211. The beat runs from 31st Street to 35th Street and from the Dan Ryan to Lake Michigan, serving the neighborhood within Douglas known as “the Gap.” At the most basic level, he acts as a liaison between the community and the police. The sixty-three-year-old has lived within the beat’s boundaries for the past thirty years; he first served as a beat facilitator for the 21st District and switched to the 2nd District after the district boundaries changed. At a meeting this month, McGee talked about why CAPS meetings in Beat 211 differ from other beats, why it’s best that civilians (and not police) run these meetings, and how residents can build a healthy relationship with beat officers.

(Maria Cardona/City Bureau)

Can you tell me a little bit about the history of the CAPS program in this particular beat?

We were meeting before there was a CAPS. The Gap Community Organization, which I’m also the president of, met with the police department at the 21st District station, and then the CAPS program came along. We have seen CAPS when it was most effective: years ago, when they used to have marches, we had drug houses in the neighborhood and [we] confronted people directly. In the last ten years CAPS has been more politicized. It has gotten away from its core mission of engaging people and engaging the community. Some of the funding was taken out of CAPS, where they used to give out gifts and little prizes in the community. That detracted from the program. It incentivizes people to come if they can win something in a raffle every month. [The program] gave out whistles, door knockers to keep you from breaking into somebody’s house. It had a sense of community.

The CAPS program on Beat 211 has been very successful. Last year we had a march and we must have had over 150 people come out to march on 31st Street, which is one of our hot spots. It has been effective. When we call the police, they come. Years ago we used to call and they did not come. We are training people in this beat on how to [call] 311, what do you look for, how do you talk to the police, how do you interact with the police. Our call rate has gone up. It is holding the police accountable but the residents as well. We are an anomaly [compared to other beats]. We are not the norm.

How would you describe the relationship between CAPS officers and the residents of Beat 211?

If you listen to the conversation [in our beat meeting], there’s no hostility. There was a calmness in the room, because they have faith and confidence in the person they talk to. The officer is very respectful. It’s like, you are just my mate and we are just going through the process and getting things done.

Is there something you would do to improve the CAPS program in your beat? If so, what would that be?

Figure out a way to get more people to come, to see there is value in having a relationship with the police on your beat. That relationship goes a lot further than just “Hey you, I need help now,” but actually building a rapport, building a relationship, building respect, and that gets results. The residents are now taking pictures and sending them to the police. They are not hiding behind the phone. They are saying: I am involved, I am engaged. And when the police have support from the community they actually police better, because now they are not harassing people, they are being dispatched based upon a call. When you are visible, if you stand up, speak out, they can make change. But if we do not stand up and speak out, [they] cannot help.

Is there something you would do to improve the CAPS program in general?

People who speak up need to get credit. When people get recognized for speaking up, it becomes a norm. Right now when people speak up, it seems like it is an anomaly, because it is not recognized. For example, the officer said tonight, “Thank you.” A real simple word but it speaks volumes because they think, there is an appreciation for what I am doing as a resident. They applauded the police because they felt that they were getting service, not protection. We stress the issue of service. We do not want protection. We do not want guns blazing. We want service.

What are aspects of the CAPS program that you consider the most effective and why?

The most effective thing is when civilians run the meeting. It is among peers, residents to residents, citizens to citizens, versus having the authority figure running it.

Is it common for civilians to be running meetings or are most meetings run by police officers?

Years ago it was always the civilians running the meetings, who were unpaid volunteers, but I noticed that’s not the case anymore.

What are some obstacles or what is not working within the CAPS program in your district?

The biggest obstacle is trust. People in my neighborhood have called [police] and they were afraid to leave their name. I have told people in my neighborhood that you do not want to be anonymous, because when you stand up and you speak out, people respect that. It may seem risky at first because you are not accustomed to doing that, but if you leave your name, there is accountability.

When you say I am anonymous, it is a so-so call. [The police] will go but the results will be a lot different. If you stand out[side] and wait for the supervisor, you will find out that that supervisor wants the same thing you want. The supervisor recognizes you are committed. When people recognize you want a better community, from a policing side, they police better because they realize they have got backup. We generally only talk in terms of a one-way street, but the police have to be backed up by the citizens and the citizens have to be backed up by the police.

What could the community do to improve these issues and what could CAPS officers do to work with the community and improve these issues?

In our area we have used an app called GroupMe. The way the app works is that you can sign people up so they can get [group] text messages directly to their phone or to the app. When someone sees something, they call 911, they describe it and they alert other people to call on the same issue [via GroupMe]. So now there is a pool of calls going on the same issue, with the same address, with the same description. We have gone to another level of organization to ensure that we can better service and better support the community and the police.

What could you do to improve the communication among beats?

Get rid of boundaries and start doing best practices, [learn from] what works in another beat. And communicating across beats, rather than [beats being] silos. There is a silo between our district and the 1st District, even if we share boundaries. We even suggested that they have joint beat meetings, [so] people now learn [from] other people and make a bigger family.

This report was produced in collaboration with the South Side Weekly. An introduction to important concepts relating to CAPS and restorative justice can be found here.

The Call You Might Regret

BY KRISTIN BROWN | ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAVIER SUAREZ

On March 26, 2016 at 2:31pm, a distress call was made to Chicago’s 911 center. Through loud sobs the caller identified herself as a twenty-one-year-old African-American female in the midst of a mental breakdown. “I don’t want to hurt myself but I need help” was the last thing she said before dispatchers hung up.

Six minutes later, two EMTs and seven CPD officers showed up to her South Side residence. The caller was me; I wiped my face on the sleeve of my jacket as I opened my door to the paramedics waiting in the hall. The taller one said, “Come with me,” while the other held a folded-up stretcher in his hand. Though I was glad to not be alone anymore, I was still distraught—and I froze once I saw the slew of male oficers, who seemed unhappy to be there and showed no sign of concern about my situation. So I stepped behind the EMT as I tried not to noticeably cry or make any sudden movements to ensure my safety.

At the top of my mind was Quintonio LeGrier, an allegedly mentally ill nineteen-year-old who was shot and killed by police responding to 911 calls the day after Christmas last year. But that’s just one example; according to the Treatment Advocacy Ceter, one in four people killed by police has a severe mental illness. Only fifteen percent of Chicago police officers have gone through specialized training (known as Crisis Intervention Team or CIT) to handle mental health cases, says Amy Watson, a sociologist and expert on the subject. Chicago Police data show only forty-two officers in the 3rd District (including parts of Hyde Park, Kenwood, Woodlawn, South Shore, Auburn Gresham, Englewood, Washington Park, Avalon Park and Chatham) have been CIT certified in the past three years. That means even when people call into 911 specifically asking for mental health help, it is difficult to ensure that a CIT-trained officer is dispatched.

Once I was safely in the ambulance, I was taken to the University of Chicago emergency room. I changed into a thick green hospital gown while all of my other belongings were taken and locked away. There was a bed in the room, a yellow overhead light, and a tray to the left of the bed. I sat there for eight hours as a man sitting in the corner with a computer silently typed notes about my every move. Finally, a young, female resident with medium-length brown hair entered the room and gave me a psychiatric evaluation. I was as honest as I could be about my previous diagnosis of major depressive disorder, my PTSD, and the emotional turmoil I was facing in the moments that led to me seeking help: at the time, I was 300 miles away from any family, eight weeks pregnant, and my mother was losing her battle with terminal cancer. I was scared and alone and wanted help—not isolation.

As alarming as that sounds, long wait times for psychiatric help aren’t uncommon. According to the CDC, average wait times in emergency rooms are at least two hours—even longer for those in psychiatric emergencies.Th e American Psychological Association task force on emergency psychiatric services released a report stating that psychiatrists should see patients within two hours of initial presentation and every eight hours during their stay. At the University of Chicago, where I was first admitted, there is no psychiatric ward, and all psychiatrists are on call rather than staffed regularly. The medical center declined my requests to speak to them regarding my experience.

Lack of reliable emergency treatment is especially problematic in Chicago; WBEZ reported last year that emergency room visits for mental health had skyrocketed since 2009, with an extra bump in 2012, when the city closed half its mental health clinics. Meanwhile, as a 2009 report by the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law pointed out, inadequate education and training has left ER physicians “ill-prepared” to deal with an increasing number of mentally ill people seeking emergency care.

The resident at the UofC eventually returned to my room and offered me the choice of intensive outpatient treatment or inpatient treatment at a psychiatric hospital. When I opted for outpatient, she said she needed my parents to confirm. Unfortunately, my mother was in hospice and my stepfather was at work and missed the call by two minutes. The resident did not leave a message, so he didn’t think to call back. Despite my objections, I was admitted into an inpatient facility.

Feeling hopeless and as if I was being punished for asking for help, I cried and flipped my food tray, empty dishes clattering to the ground, as police officers from the University of Chicago’s private force surrounded my bed and the resident walked out of the room. I spent a total of two days in that room with little human interaction; I was ignored as I begged for an ultrasound to make sure that my baby was safe. I wasn’t allowed to take a shower or even go to the bathroom; hospital workers brought in a portable toilet for me. I kept thinking, this isn’t why I wanted to go to the hospital, to be treated cruelly like this.

On March 29 at about 9pm, a private medic service arrived to transport me to the University of Illinois Chicago, the only hospital in the city willing to take my low-acuity case. Upon arrival I was given a physical exam, a list of the rules (prohibited items, visiting hours, etc.) and a set of fresh clothes. Shortly after 7am the next morning, a tall, light-skinned man with a five o’clock shadow and a long face introduced himself to me as Dr. Timothy Yovankin. I spoke with him, another psychiatrist, and four medical students, answering all their questions and reiterating that I felt as if I was being punished for being honest and seeking help. I told them I was exhausted and had regretted calling 911 almost as soon as I’d arrived at the first hospital. After a few hours, Dr. Yovankin said he had gotten in touch with the father of my child and my stepfather, who both said I’d benefit most from outpatient therapy, and he agreed.

He also told me a social worker was looking for treatment options for me, and that I’d be discharged soon. That afternoon, I was released. The hospital gave me a bus card to get home, a doctor’s note in case I needed it for work, and two prescriptions for prenatal vitamins. What I did not receive was a discharge plan, which the APA task force report recommends. Weeks later, while researching this story, I returned to the hospital to collect my medical records and saw that I had been diagnosed with another illness, despite never having been informed of this. UIC Medical Center also declined my requests to ask questions about my stay there.

It’s been more than three months since I made that 911 call, and I’ve decided to leave the city of Chicago so that I have more options in my future treatment. I’m feeling stable and more motivated than ever, which could be because of my desire to be healthy for my unborn child. My mother has since passed away and I have been seeing the therapist recommended by the UIC social worker twice a week.

For those in situations like mine who feel there are little to no options, Watson, the sociologist, offers alternatives to calling 911. She speaks highly of NAMI’s (National Alliance on Mental Illness) Living Room, which offers free services in non-clinical settings with licensed therapists, nurses, and peer counselors in Deerfield and Skokie. Those who have suicidal thoughts can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

This reported essay was produced in collaboration with the South Side Weekly.

Notorious Cop Glenn Evans Back To Work, And Now His Old Boss Is In Charge

BY ANDREW FAN and SAM STECKLOW

Glenn Evans is back. The former Chicago Police commander accused of shoving his gun down a suspect’s throat has wrapped up his suspension and returned to a department now led by his old boss Eddie Johnson.

Earlier this month, Police Supt. Johnson told a small gathering of the Park Manor Neighbors Community Council that Evans, who was acquitted of the aggravated battery and official misconduct charges tied to the 2013 incident in December, is back on the force after a 1½-year suspension.

Evans, demoted to lieutenant, is on administrative duty at police headquarters in Bronzeville.

Johnson recently declared he’s never witnessed police misconduct, but he directly supervised Evans during a time when a series of serious misconduct charges were lodged against Evans.

With the exception of a single one-year stretch, Evans reported directly to Johnson between March 2008 and March 2014. While working under the future superintendent, Evans racked up at least 11 formal complaints, including an incident in which then-lieutenant Evansallegedly fractured bones in a woman’s face at the headquarters of the district where Johnson was commander.

Even though investigators eventually recommended discipline for Evans in that case, he later was promoted to district commander, again serving directly under Johnson, who at that point was a deputy chief.

Shared history

Johnson’s confirmation of Evans’ return to the force, which came in response to an audience question during an unannounced visit to a South Side community meeting at St. Columbanus Church, comes five months after Evans was acquitted of the battery and misconduct charges.

In January 2013, then-commander Evans was alleged to have chased a gun-possession suspect into an abandoned building, where he was accused of tackling the man, sticking his gun into the man’s mouth and pressing his Taser against the man’s groin. 

While serving under Johnson as both a lieutenant and later a district commander, Evans won widespread praise from community leaders for his aggressive style of policing. Still, the numerous excessive force allegations surrounding Evans call into question whether his longtime supervisor, now head of the Police Department, can truly address police misconduct in the city.

In a March 29 interview with CBS2, Johnson declared that “I’ve actually never encountered police misconduct, ’cause you got to understand, officers that commit misconduct don’t do it in front of people that they think are going to hold them accountable for it.”

Several cases involving Evans, who did not respond to interview requests, and other officers serving under Johnson raise doubts about that claim.

Johnson and Evans: A Timeline (story continues below)

Johnson commanded the Gresham District, which includes the South Side neighborhoods of Chatham, Auburn Gresham and Park Manor, between March 2008 and August 2011. Evans served as one of his lieutenants during that period.

In April 2011, Evans allegedly pushed his hand into the face of a recently arrested woman, Rita King, for minutes on end. King claimed in a federal lawsuit that Evans repeatedly told her, “I’m going to push your nose through your brain,” and hospital records from a visit several days later show that King suffered multiple bone fractures in her face, according to a report by WBEZ.

The Independent Police Review Authority, the police watchdog often criticized for supporting officers against their accusers, found some of her claims credible and recommended Evans receive a 15-day suspension. The incident involving Evans took place inside the Gresham District headquarters, where both Evans and Johnson worked at the time.

IPRA sustained a second complaint against Evans later in 2011, stemming from when the lieutenant, off-duty and in civilian clothes, allegedly threatened Chas Byars at a South Side diner after Byars criticized his treatment of another patron. While arresting Byars, Evans caused the man’s infant son to fall from his carrier and hit his head on a table. IPRA recommended a seven-day suspension for Evans in the case. This incident took place after Johnson had been moved to an interim position in which he was not Evans’ direct superior.

Despite the charges, Evans soon would be promoted to work directly under Johnson again. After then Supt. Garry McCarthy elevated Johnson to deputy chief for Area Central in March 2012, Evans was chosen to serve as one of his district commanders — bypassing the rank of captain entirely — to take over the Grand Crossing District, just northeast of his old post in the Gresham District.

More accusations against Evans

Evans continued to rack up citizen complaints, even while in charge of an entire police district. While serving under Johnson as the commander of the Grand Crossing District, Evans received eight complaints in a little more than 1½ years, according to data from the Invisible Institute.

During that period, only 14 of the Chicago Police Department’s roughly 12,000 officers received more complaints than Evans. His complaint numbers were high for a senior officer: The 22 current district commanders received only six total complaints in the same stretch. In total, police records obtained by WBEZ show that Evans has been the subject of more than 120 misconduct allegations over the course of his nearly 30-year career. About half of these cases relate to excessive force.

Additionally, four federal lawsuits have named Evans as a defendant for acts of alleged misconduct committed while directly under Johnson’s command. Since 2002, the city has paid out more than $300,000 in settlements stemming from misconduct complaints against Evans, without admitting to any wrongdoing.

Evans is not the only Johnson subordinate facing misconduct allegations. An Injustice Watch investigation last month identified 15 other federal lawsuits naming officers who served under Johnson’s command.

Community members appreciated the working relationship between the two officers, however, with some tying Evans’ tactics under Johnson’s supervision to a general decline in crime.

After Johnson was assigned to the Gresham District and promoted Evans to be his tactical lieutenant, “Crime ceased to rise and started to decline. Our community was elated at the effectiveness of both Commander Johnson and Lieutenant Evans,” Keith Tate, president of the Chatham/Avalon Park Community Council, said at a September 2014 Police Board hearing.

Tate also tied Evans’ later “relentless efforts” in the Grand Crossing District to a drop in the crime rate.

At the meeting in Park Manor this month, Johnson declined to elaborate on exactly where in the department Evans’ new job is, though police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi clarified that Evans, who returned to work on May 1, is still stripped of his police powers. He had been on an unpaid suspension since his indictment in August 2014.

Though Evans was acquitted of criminal charges in December, he remains the subject of an IPRA investigation, according to Guglielmi. Johnson’s announcement of Evans’ return originally was noted by Worlee Glover, a community member who attended the meeting, on the Facebook group Concerned Citizens of Chatham.

Community remains supportive

Despite the many accusations against Evans, he remains well-regarded by community members in his old districts. Park Manor Neighbors Community Council President Darlene Tribue said in a phone interview that as commander, Evans made the Park Manor community, which sits between the Grand Crossing and Gresham districts, feel safer.

“They would see him standing on the street, and the gangs would run the other way,” she said.

When Supt. McCarthy transferred him from the Grand Crossing District to the Harrison District on the West Side in March 2014, Tribue led community members to protest outside police headquarters. McCarthy acknowledged the community’s frustration, saying at a Police Board hearing that month that he had moved Evans because he was his “favorite among [his] favorites,” and needed him in the increasingly violent West Side district.

“I don’t condone any violation of the law but I respect Commander Evans because he is brutally honest with residents about what is going on,” Glover wrote in an email. “There were those in attendance [at the Park Manor meeting] who made it clear they would take Commander Evans back.”

Tribue said in a phone interview Tuesday that things in Park Manor since Evans left are “back to the way [they] were before him.”

On the surface, the city crime statistics reflect her statement. While Evans was Grand Crossing District commander, serious crimes steadily declined, hitting a plateau in 2015, the first year after he left.

These statistics mirror citywide crime drops, however, and the Police Department’s record-keeping under McCarthy has been called into question in probes by CBS Chicago, Chicago magazine and Truthout.

“All of us would welcome him back,” Tribue said, while noting that many of the incidents of accused misconduct occurred within the neighboring Grand Crossing District.

According to the Citizens Police Data Project, those incidents include at least seven allegations, with an additional five originating in the neighboring Gresham District.

The decision about whether Evans returns now rests partly in the hands of his old boss.

This report was published in collaboration with DNAinfo Chicago. Additional reporting by Darryl Holliday.

One Change Police Can Make to Show They’re Serious About Reform

BY ELEANORE CATOLICO

Very few police misconduct complaints see the light of day. Only about 7 percent are sustained, and only 2 percent result in officer discipline, according to the City of Chicago’s own data. What most troubles people looking to enhance police accountability, including Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s handpicked task force, is that the majority ofthe complaints never get investigated.

Of the 17,700 civilian complaints filed from 2011 to 2014, investigators didn’t open cases on 58 percent of them. Why? They were marked “no affidavit.” Due to a state law and police union contract rules, civilians must sign sworn affidavits to accompany their official complaints.

After a blistering 200-page task force report detailed the alleged failures of the Police Department, Emanuel and the city’s new top cop Eddie Johnson say that they’re ready to tackle police accountability and transparency. One way to regain the public trust, as suggested by groups as diverse as state lawmakers, policy researchers, civilian advocacy groups and the Independent Police Review Authority, is to nix the affidavit requirement and start investigating more claims.

The affidavit requirement is enshrined in the current police union contract—and it became a state law in 2004, after the city’s police union lobbied for it. Proponents of the law argue that it’s a deterrent for false claims and helps make the investigative process fair for police officers. Fraternal Order of Police President Dean Angelo told the Chicago Tribune last year that the law protected officers from biased or unfounded misconduct allegations.

But opponents of the requirement, including the Police Accountability Task Force, appointed by the mayor, say the law has a chilling effect.

“The affidavit requirement keeps people from bringing complaints and helps some police misconduct remain hidden from view,” the task force report reads. “[M]any citizens lack faith in the oversight structure or broader legal system and may think that even if their complaint is justified, signing an affidavit could put them in legal jeopardy.”

And there’s some merit to that, though IPRA spokesperson Mia Sissac couldn’t name a particular instance where an affidavit was used against a complainant in court. The reality is that the signed, notarized document could be used against complainants under suspicion of perjury, which is a Class 3 felony in Illinois.

Another reason the affidavit presents a barrier is the requirement that complainants sign the form in the presence of an IPRA employee.

“Either the affidavit is signed at HQ or the investigators have to go to the complainant to have the paper signed,” says Bocar Ba, a doctorate student at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy who has conducted research on the affidavit requirement. “In both cases, distance is an important factor.”

Right now, it’s up to the rapid response investigators to collect the affidavit within 30 days of the complaint filing or the complaint will get marked “no affidavit,” according to IPRA’s intake and rapid response manual.  Investigators coordinate with complainants to get these sworn testimonies on the books.

“Overall, the investigators will make every good faith effort — visiting homes, hospitals, jails, etc. — to obtain an affidavit at the same time they are taking a statement,” Sissac said.

But, according to the task force report, this practice has waned in recent years. IPRA has no clear guidelines on when an investigator is sent to retrieve a signed affidavit from a complainant.

“Investigators used to actively seek out the affidavits, sometimes even knocking on doors,” the report reads. “Investigators now play a much more passive role and have placed the burden on the complainant.”

Ba found that the proportion of affidavits signed dropped by 15 percent after IPRA moved its headquarters from its South Side location on 35th Street to the Goldblatt’s Building at Chicago and Ashland avenues in late 2011. The new, nondescript location currently lacks clear outdoor IPRA signage and sits nearly a mile from the nearest L station.

African-Americans saw the highest drop in affidavits signed as compared to other minority groups following IPRA’s move to the North Side.

Ba emphasizes that dropping complaints without affidavits doesn’t just hurt the complainant, it also hurts the Police Department — even if investigators rule that the complaint is not sustained.

“[I]f the affidavit is not signed, nothing will appear on the disciplinary history of the officer,” Ba said. “So essentially, the complaint is not binding and it is not a credible threat. If it’s fully investigated and we know that the officer was innocent, it provides useful information.” With the affidavit requirement in place, the complaint is ignored completely, he said.

In very rare cases, investigators can bypass the affidavit. If the complaint alleges criminal misconduct and the information provided proves “sufficiency based on objective verifiable evidence” — for example, video footage — then an investigator can request an override affidavit exception. The commanding officer of the Internal Affairs Division has the final say for IPRA cases, according to the FOP’s collective bargaining agreement with the city. But the “override process” is under-used, the task force found. Twenty-two “no affidavit” complaints that accuse officers of criminal misconduct never got an override request between 2011 and 2015, according to the Citizens Police Data Project. Four of those complaints accuse officers of criminal sexual assault and were never investigated.

The Commission on Accreditation of Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA), which developsnational standards for public safety and law enforcement agencies, has joined the chorus of organizations that don’t consider the affidavit law best practice.

“[A]gencies should investigate all allegations of misconduct, regardless of their source,” CALEA recommends. “The agency [should] carefully review each complaint for validation before disregarding it for lack of a credible complainant” in the case of anonymous complaints.

In an open letter posted on IPRA’s website, Chief Administrator Sharon Fairley said that the agency had begun implementing some of the task force’s recommendations, including new case review procedures that will improve the quality of investigations and the implementation of guidelines for when an override of the affidavit requirement can be used.

Illinois legislators are taking action to reform the law that requires affidavits at the state level. In January, State Rep. Mary Flowers, D-Chicago, introduced HB 4476, which, among other things, seeks to eliminate the need for the affidavit requirement.

“HB 4476 will not require a public employer to investigate every complaint of alleged police officer misconduct,” Flowers said. “But it will prevent a public employer from using state law as justification for its failure to do so.”

Right now, the bill is being stalled in the Rules committee.

“We need to all be working on these issues,” she said. “Millions of dollars are paid out and so many lives are affected. It’s incumbent upon all of us to make sure this system works for everyone.”

This report was produced in partnership with The Chicago Reporter.

Data Plays Central Role in Police Reform Efforts in Chicago and Beyond

BY ANDREW FAN

Over the last 20 years, a data revolution has swept policing, with sophisticated computer programs that track and predict wrongdoing helping police across the country drive crime rates to record lows.

Now that same revolution may finally be coming to police accountability.

On April 13th, a special mayoral task force, appointed in the wake of the Laquan McDonald protests, announced the findings of its investigation into the Chicago Police Department, bluntly declaring that “the community’s lack of trust in the police is justified.”

The task force’s claims rest on a mountain of data, cataloging major racial disparities in everything from police shootings to traffic stops to promotions within the CPD. Their report states that “the CPD’s own data gives validity to the widely held belief the police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color.”

Police Accountability Task Force chair Lori Lightfoot speaks about the findings of the panel’s report at the Harold Washington Library on April 13, 2016. (Stacey Rupulo/Chicago Reporter)

Data is driving police reform in Chicago and beyond. Nationally, a wave of organizations is beginning to document and quantify police misconduct, sometimes using the same approaches police departments use to track crime. In Chicago, police data compiled by journalists, activists, and academics provided central evidence for the task force’s report. The report’s proposed reforms also lean heavily on data analysis to identify and reduce misconduct, meaning the work done by watchdogs and media organizations could eventually be standard practice within the CPD.

Despite the task force’s sweeping claims, their report provides extensive detail for only one case of alleged police misconduct – the shooting of Laquan McDonald. Instead many of the task force’s key assertions rely on a type of analysis known as “disparate impact,” which examines whether policies and practices disproportionately hurt minority groups in order to prove the existence of discrimination.

Often used in housing discrimination cases, disparate impact has been increasingly applied to police departments, playing a major part in the Justice Department’s recent investigation of the Ferguson Police Department. In New York City, a disparate impact analysis built on sophisticated statistical work helped convince a judge to sharply limit the NYPD’s controversial “stop and frisk” program. Judge Shira Scheindlin wrote that “NYPD officers are more likely to stop blacks and Hispanics than whites… even after controlling for other relevant variables” like local crime rates.

While Chicago’s task force employed a less detailed approach, it also found “significant disparate impacts associated with the use of force, foot and traffic stops and bias in the police oversight system itself. African-Americans make up about a third of Chicago’s population, but 74% of those shot by the police and 72% of those stopped by the police. African-Americans are also far more likely to file complaints, but far less likely to see any form of disciple for the accused officer.

The task force’s conclusions rely on work by a host of organizations in Chicago. The ACLU of Illinois originally released the data on CPD investigatory stops in March of 2015. Seven months later, the Invisible Institute launched an initiative called the “Citizen’s Police Data Project” which provided the data on over 50,000 police complaints.

Nationally, organizations are working on similar initiatives. The Guardian and the Washington Post have both launched projects to track the number of Americans killed by the police. Their work revealed hundreds of police killings not reflected in data kept by the FBI, which relies on self-reporting from local police.  Earlier this month the Post won a Pulitzer Prize for “its revelatory initiative” in creating its database and reporting on the findings.

Meanwhile, the New York Legal Aid Society – the nation’s largest public defender organization – has created the Cop Accountability Project, a database of misconduct claims lodged against NYPD officers. Unlike data projects aimed at the media and the general public, the Legal Aid Society’s work aims to help defense lawyers push back against the police in individual court cases.

Joanna Schwartz, a UCLA law professor who studies police reform and misconduct litigation, says that the last few years have seen “real movement on the data side,” with public concern about police misconduct and easier access to information helping to drive a diverse set of data-based police accountability projects.

Data also plays a central role in the Chicago task force’s recommendations for reform. In stark contrast to the CPD’s embrace of software used to analyze crime trends, the task force notesthat IPRA – the police oversight body – “has had the power to examine patterns of complaints when investigating police misconduct, but has not exercised it.”

The task force aims to change that, recommending that new oversight bodies regularly look for patterns of misconduct and use that information to investigate potential abuse.

The report also calls for the implementation of an Early Intervention System (EIS), which uses officer data to predict problematic behavior and allow supervisors to step in. Schwartz sees similarities between an EIS and the crime-tracking software embraced by police departments, noting that “early intervention systems are, in their design, very similar to Compstat,” the crime analysis program used by the CPD.

The CPD originally attempted to launch a data-based EIS during the 1990s, but discontinued the program after a few years. The task force cites lackluster support from CPD leadership and“opposition from the FOP” for the program’s cancellation.

Given the strength of Chicago’s police union, it remains to be seen how many of the task force’s recommendations will be enacted, but the increasing use of data by media and nonprofit organizations is already guiding serious conversations about the department’s future. As organizations in Chicago and around the country continue to refine databases and programsto monitor the police, it looks like data is becoming a central part of police reform.

This report was published in collaboration with The Chicago Reporter.

New Bill Would Nix IPRA in Favor of Revamped Police Oversight

BY SAM STECKLOW

If a new police accountability ordinance passes City Council muster, Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority would be abolished and replaced with a new organization dubbed “truly independent” by supporters but lambasted as a mere “IPRA plus” by critics.

Fifth Ward alderman Leslie Hairston announced a bill Tuesday that would create an Independent Civilian Police Monitor (ICPM), a new police oversight board she says would be more removed from the political process than IPRA, and more transparent about its investigations and findings.

“The establishment of an Independent Civilian Police Monitor is a win-win for both police and the public,” Hairston said during Tuesday’s press conference. “Chicago is under a microscope, and how we choose to respond to this moment will define us as elected officials and as a city.”

Her announcement came after months of protests against the current police accountability system in Chicago, and on the heels of controversy encircling Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s pick for new police superintendent.

University of Chicago law professor and longtime police accountability activist Craig Futterman helped draft the ordinance. “Everything this agency does, unlike IPRA, will be fully transparent, so that everybody can see, from beginning to end, when a situation goes down within hours, information’s going to be released to everybody,” Futterman said at the press conference. “That’s how you gain trust—by being honest with people.”

Under the current system, the head of IPRA is appointed by the mayor. Under the new ordinance, a selection committee would choose three publicly vetted candidates and recommend one for City Council approval. The selection committee would consist of representatives from civil rights groups, immigrant rights groups, LGBTQ rights groups, faith groups, and the mayor’s office, along with participation from the city’s lead police, fire, and legal organizations. The proposal bars former employees of the Chicago Police Department or Cook County state’s attorney’s office from working at the ICPM.

The ICPM’s investigative mandate would also be wider-ranging than IPRA’s, which is limited to investigating complaints made against police officers, as well as firearm discharge and death or injury under police watch.

In the new ordinance language, the ICPM would investigate any perceived or alleged misconduct by police officers, even without a civilian complaint. The ICPM would also analyze patterns within the police department, making regular public reports to the mayor and the superintendent, and maintaining its own database—something IPRA does not have and that often hampers investigations.

The ICPM ordinance also calls for a sharp increase in funding tied directly to the CPD—1.5 percent of the CPD’s budget. For comparison, Mayor Emanuel’s 2016 budget, approved by City Council, allotted $1.4 billion to the CPD and just $8.4 million for IPRA.

Additionally, the ICPM’s staffing would be tied proportionally to CPD’s, at one investigator per 100 police officers.

Reactions to the proposed legislation from police observers has so far been mixed.

“The proposed ordinance covers all the important bases: independent review of individual complaints, and an audit function regarding patterns and trends of officer conduct,” saidSamuel Walker, a police accountability expert and professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Walker regularly advises police departments, including Chicago’s, on oversight.

But within hours of Hairston’s announcement, the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (CAARPR), an activist organization that has been working for years on a more wide-ranging proposal for police oversight, tweeted its disapproval.

We're soon issuing a response to this FRAUDULENT plan, which amounts to reopening IPRA as 'IPRA plus' (Monitor). https://t.co/huCMs96WK4

— The Chicago Alliance (@NAARPR) April 6, 2016

“It’s the same bullshit,” said Frank Chapman, a longtime organizer with CAARPR. “All it is is rearranging seats on the Titanic. We don’t want that. We want community control of the police.”

Hairston, whose ward includes parts of Hyde Park and South Shore, declined to address CAARPR’s specific criticisms. “What we can all agree on is that we all want accountability and transparency with this new agency,” she said in a phone interview Wednesday. “They have their view as to how this should go and I have my view.”

CAARPR, founded in 1973 with an implicit goal of establishing civilian control of the police, has been advocating for a similar plan called theCivilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC) for the last four years, and has urged the activist community to “soundly reject” the proposed ordinance.

“Through CPAC, the Independent Police Review Authority would be replaced, the police board would be replaced, and the Internal Affairs department would be replaced,” Chapman said. “CPAC, as a political entity, would be an elected body. It would not be by appointment.”

Chapman also argues that the proposal does nothing to change the practices of the mayoral-appointed Chicago Police Board, which rarely moves to discipline officers. (For example, the board has yet to followformer superintendent Garry McCarthy’s recommendation to fire detective Dante Servin, who killed Rekia Boyd in 2012.

UIC political science professor Dick Simpson agrees that control over the police board is key. “IPRA has been a major problem, but the overall discipline of police, particularly by [the] police board, is a major problem,” he said. Simpson is a longtime advocate of an elected police board.

In an e-mail, police board head Lori Lightfoot, also a member of the mayor’s Police Accountability Task Force, said she had not reviewed the ordinance, but that “the Task Force will be releasing detailed findings next week, some of which will address the same topics as the ordinance.” (The task force has been delayed in issuing its report, which had been scheduled to come out in late March.)

At Tuesday’s press conference, Hairston said she plans to introduce the police monitor ordinance in City Council “May or June.” As of press time, no other aldermen had publicly supported the ordinance, though Hairston said Wednesday that unnamed aldermen had already reached out to her to express their approval. If passed, the law could take effect as early as January of next year.

This report was produced in partnership with the Chicago Reader. 

After Saying #ByeAnita, Chicago's Young Black Organizers Continue Calls for Justice

BY ELEANORE CATOLICO

“This board is illegitimate!”

The cry reverberated inside police headquarters in Bronzeville on Thursday during a meeting of the Chicago Police Board. Activists with the Black Lives Matter movement turned out to demand justice for Rekia Boyd, the 22-year-old woman shot and killed by off-duty officer Dante Servin in 2012. Servin was criminally charged, but his case was thrown out due to a legal technicality, an outcome some critics blamed on Alvarez’s office.

About 40 members of Black Youth Project 100, Assata’s Daughters, and other affiliated groups, each of which had campaigned to oust incumbent Cook County state’s attorney Anita Alvarez, donned bright yellow shirts that read fire dante Servin.

At the meeting’s outset, police board president Lori Lightfoot said Servin’s public hearing would take place May 19. Demonstrators met the announcement with jeers. Former police superintendent Garry McCarthy recommended that Servin be fired nearly four months ago. Still, the police board has not heard the case.

(Michael Key/City Bureau)

The delay, said BYP100 organizer Damon Williams, “is an assertion of power to prove to the community that . . . our demands don’t matter. It seems to invalidate our presence.”

In anticipation of the four-year anniversary of Boyd’s death this Monday, BYP100 hopes the #SayHerName campaign, aimed at shedding light on black women and girls who are victims of police violence, catches fire as quickly as #ByeAnita, the social media campaign critical of Alvarez that took root in the run-up to the primary.

“We’re here to put pressure on the board, and prove their dishonesty,” Williams said, “[and] their lack of respect for human life.”

The first speaker during the meeting’s public comment section was Dorothy Holmes, the mother of Ronald Johnson III, who was fatally shot by Chicago police officer George Hernandez in October 2014 during a foot pursuit. Dash-cam footage released last December shows Johnson running away from police before he was shot and killed. Shortly after the video’s release, Alvarez declined to file charges against Hernandez because Johnson was carrying a gun when he was shot. Both Alvarez and Johnson’s lawyer blamed the slow process on the Independent Police Review Authority.

“We’re getting tired as hell. Ya’ll just as guilty as these police officers,” Holmes said, addressing the board. “Everyone else ain’t safe but ya’ll are.”

The sentiment was echoed by activists who took the microphone. Among their demands: an elected police board, the redirection of funds from the police department to schools and clinics, and Servin’s dismissal.

Community members not affiliated with BYP 100 attempted to walk to the podium and speak but were drowned out by the activists’ chants. At one point, a woman defended another person’s right to speak, which resulted in a tense verbal exchange between the activists and other attendees.

(Michael Key/City Bureau)

The demonstrators eventually came together in the center of the room and began to chant, “Fuck Lori Lightfoot!”

About a half hour after after the protest began, Lightfoot said, “Officers, please clear the room,” and demonstrators were escorted outside. Lightfoot adjourned the meeting shortly thereafter. (The Chicago Police Department declined to comment on particular tactics used to escort protesters out of the room.)

It was the second time in the past month that an action by black youth activists in Chicago led to the interruption of a public meeting on police matters. Demonstrators previously disrupted a Police Accountability Task Force meeting.

Outside police headquarters, the activists joined hands in solidarity. Among those in attendance were people whose loved ones were harmed by a police force that, demonstrators say, doesn’t care about the loss of black life. Martinez Sutton, Boyd’s brother, has become a fixture at these meetings and protests. A man who identified himself as representative of Bettie Jones, who was shot and killed the day after Christmas in what police admitted was an “accident,” said officers had no respect for her life. Shapearl Wells, the mother of Courtney Copeland, who was killed this month but whose shooter remains unknown, said police had not done enough to find his killer.

“I don’t see this type of bloodshed and ravage on the Gold Coast,” Wells said. “This is a choice to allow our black and brown children to die in the streets.”

This report was published in collaboration with the Chicago Reader.

New Police Reforms in Newark May Hint at Chicago’s Future

BY ANDREW FAN

First Garry McCarthy ran the police department. Then the ACLU filed a lawsuit. Then the Department of Justice came knocking.

Sound like Chicago? It is, but it is also what happened in Newark—about four and a half years before us.

The results of that Department of Justice probe are now codified in a reform agreement announced this week, which includes sweeping accountability reforms and federal monitoring that could cost Newark up to $7.4 million over the course of the agreement.

Former Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy. (Nancy Stone/Chicago Tribune)

In May 2011, McCarthy stepped down from his post as police director in Newark to become Chicago’s police superintendent; within a week, the Department of Justice had announced a civil rights investigation of the Newark Police Department. Four years later, McCarthy was forced out in Chicago, and again his departure was closely followed by a federal probe, which is ongoing.

In both Newark and Chicago, McCarthy employed data-based policing techniques that provoked complaints about racial profiling, even as they reportedly reduced crime.

McCarthy and his supporters have argued that aggressive policing and “broken windows” strategies work. In Newark, a city with a murder rate about twice Chicago’s, McCarthy used CompStat—crime-tracking software favored by his friend and former boss, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton—and flooded high-crime areas with police. He presided over a 46 percent drop in shootings over four years.

Using similar tactics in Chicago, McCarthy pressured officers to increase street stops, which increased more than 50 percent in his first two years. Police said Chicago saw a 38 percent overall crime dropbetween 2011 and 2015. (But, as Chicag first reported in April 2014, some of these drops may have been exaggerated.)

The Justice Department’s probe found widespread unconstitutional practices in Newark, much of it during McCarthy’s command. Seventy-five percent of Newark police stops lacked legal justification, and these stops disproportionately affected African Americans. The Justice Department also claimed that the department’s policies “effectively promote[d] a view that living or simply being in a high-area is criminally suspicious.” Meanwhile, the ACLU of Illinois uncovered evidence of similar issues in Chicago, finding that police conducted 250,000 stops without arrests during the summer of 2014, four times the rate of stops at the height of New York’s controversial “stop and frisk” program.

In Newark, the Justice Department also found a “pattern or practice of unconstitutional force” and faulted an internal review process that sustained only one civilian use-of-force complaint during a six-year period that included McCarthy’s entire tenure. In Chicago, less than two percent of complaints filed between March 2011 and September 2015 resulted in disciplinary action, according to police data obtained by the Invisible Institute.

As part of the reform agreement, Newark’s police department must now make over 50 changes to its use-of-force policies, including limits on firing at vehicles, mandatory reports every time an officer points a gun, and stricter limits on both lethal and nonlethal force. A former attorney general was tapped to be the department’s federal monitor for five years—more if the reforms are not sufficiently implemented.

A legal expert told the Tribune that reforms and monitoring in Chicago could come close to $100 million, but the Newark agreement caps the expenses for the first five years at $7.4 million. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka said he was “not ecstatic” about spending that much money, according to the Associated Press, but Baraka said the changes could save the city money through fewer police complaint lawsuits, which cost Newark $5 million from 2007 to 2009. (Chicago paid $5 million in its Laquan McDonald settlement alone and since 2004 has paid more than $660 million in police misconduct settlements.)

New interim police superintendent Eddie Johnson must now confront a surge in homicides while addressing rising public anger over police misconduct. The previous interim superintendent, John Escalante, said last month that he would expand the use of CompStat, but Johnson hasn’t yet commented on specific strategies, only that, “We’ll talk about what’s gone well and what’s gone wrong and how we can make things right.”

This report was produced in collaboration with Chicago magazine.