Wow Whynot, a very thoughtful, elucidating post that really paints a vivid mental picture for someone who has never been there. My Father worked there a couple years ago and raved about the city being pretty amazing, especially the nightlife. If you could magically be in charge of the police force is there something you think they could do to curtail the violence? I imagine maybe if they could recruit members from those communities to police their own neighborhoods would that change anything or just make them targets for the gangs? The gang situation seems awful because of a lack of prospects, poverty, and a basically segregated population I would think it prevents a lot of businesses and city resources from being invested in these areas, essentially the gangs are ruining it for everybody else.
I really, really wish I knew. I’m very wary of imposing some sort of colonialist opinion on the matter. That is, the segregation is so real that anyone who didn’t grow up and stay there can’t really understand everything going on there. I probably know more than most 42 year old White women, but I don’t fool myself that I know everything, or even the half of it. People talk to me, but always guardedly. 42 year old White women have a strange relationship in those neighborhoods - my patients love me as a nurse, and some of them adore me as a person, but no one completely trusts me. And I get it. 42 year old White women are the women who bring both help and trouble. I might be there to dress grandma’s wound, or I might be there to take sissie’s baby away. No one’s ever really sure.
I think the first step might be asking them, and then actually listening to their answers and trying some out.
:rolleyes:
Oh yes. The old “importing guns” excuse. As if New York and LA were on magical islands that render it impossible to have guns.
What liberals – for some unfathomable reason – cannot seem to understand, is that criminals often have a sense of self-preservation. This manifests itself as a strong objection to targeting people who can legally shoot back.
Which is why 100% of the people that are shot don’t have guns themselves.
Oh wait, that’s complete bullshit and most of the victims themselves are gang members.
I was thinking about this more today as I was standing in line at the new Chipotle in Englewood. It’s next to the Starbucks, in the same new shopping center as the new Whole Foods.
And THAT, my friend, is a paragraph I never thought I’d write. Chipotle, Starbucks, and Whole Foods? In Englewood?!
I honestly don’t know if it’s a good thing or not. It’s brought a couple hundred jobs to the neighborhood, which is awesome. It’s provided a great grocery store (I haven’t been inside to check it out yet, but in the planning stages, they promised their prices would be lower than other Whole Foodses) in an area with few grocery options. There’s a fast food option that isn’t burgers or fried food, that can actually be made fairly healthy if you order strategically. And there is Starbucks.
These are things that could be great for the community. The question is: will the community be able to stay there, or is this the early stages of gentrification? The businesses claim to be working closely with community leaders to prevent gentrification, but I don’t know, man. There in the sea of Black employees, Black customers and Black cops getting lunch (9 of them in and out in the 10 minutes I was there…yes, I counted) were two adorable White Millennial college girls sharing a table, eating burrito bowls and working on homework, looking a lot like canaries in a coal mine…
Some great and thoughtful replies especially from WhyNot. At least I can understand a little better now. Watching and reading the media can make Chicago seem like Bagdhad or Aleppo. It’s great to see the city through the eyes of the people who live there. Thank you all!
It really does not pay to respond to what Flyer wrote as it is a response completely knee-jerk to reading the word “gun” and unrelated in any way to the post it quoted or the thread.
Thank you WhyNot for your thoughtful reality and experience-based posts.
Having spent some time there, it really depends on the neighborhood as others say. Parts of the west side and south side are dangerous.
https://www.thetrace.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Chicago-Heat-Map-copia-720x0-c-default.jpg
However the loop or the far north or far south side seem to be ok.
Also it is gang members killing each other, not random murders. However if you are caught in the crossfire you could get shot.
The murder rate per capita was 2x higher in 1990, and the robbery rate was 3x higher. So crime has declined, but the murder rate in Chicago hasn’t declined as much as LA or NYC.
As for the reason(s), I’m not sure. I once read an article that implied that crime used to be congregated into the projects and ghettos, and the gangs has solidified leadership. But a mixture of tearing down the ghettos and dispersing gang members all over the city combined with police taking down the leaders of the gangs created a scenario where now instead of a handful of gangs with strong leadership there are now far more smaller gangs all fighting over turf and reputation. I’m not sure if that theory is accurate or not though.
Whynot certainly gets it. Lots of reasons, hard for outsiders to make suggestions, no easy answers, but a whole complex of factors. One that may not be a direct cause but is definitely a part of the problem is, as Peedin implies, is the destruction of public schools as we knew them, and neighborhood schools in particular. When neighborhoods were truly neighborhoods, the school was the center. Teachers knew all the kids and families and there was a degree of mutual respect if you were lucky. Neighborhood meetings were held at schools. It allowed parents and members of the community to see each other face to face. There were afterschool programs there, staffed often by the people in the neighborhood and by the teachers. You can blame this breakdown on many factors, many beyond the city, but here Rahm has presided over and strongly supported the rise of charters and magnets - competition for local neighborhood schools. (Making this uglier is that many of his cronies are on the boards of many of these schools, ensuring that someone is going to profit, and it’s not the public schools.) He’s demonized the teachers. He’s done nothing to support the idea of neighborhood schools, hence, they have ceased to function as a significant part of the communities they used to serve - the local neighborhoods. He has exacerbated the trends and problems. He’s the enemy of public school.
A huge issue in and of itself, but after having spent many years in the edubiz, many of those visiting schools all over the city, I believe that the changes in public education over the past 20-30 years are part of the breakdown of services and support that ostracized neighborhoods sorely need and seldom get.CC, very good addition. I’m used to thinking of schools as where kids go to get educated (and, yeah, we’re not doing so great on that score at all our schools) but I hadn’t really thought about neighborhood schools as community hubs. Thanks for sharing that.
Sent from my XT1585 using Tapatalk
As an outsider can Chicagoans tell me what happened to Rahm? As far as I know of him he was a star among the Democrats before taking on the mayorship of Chicago. How did he manage to win a second term last year after the apparent shortcomings of his first? And now I’m reading that he’s the least popular mayor in the city’s history. It’s a puzzling arc for what I assume is an accomplished politician. What went wrong?
Gun Free zone life
IMO many Chicagoans perceive him as a privileged suburbanite who doesn’t understand what regular people need. And taking on the Chicago Teachers’ Union didn’t endear him to parents, or to quite a number of non-parents.
Emanuel also inherited a train-wreck of a budget from Richard M. Daley. Daley mortgaged away sources of future funding (such as selling the parking meters to a private company), then blew the incoming money almost instantly, kicking the budgetary can down the road until he left office, and it was no longer his problem. The city’s budget is now a shambles, with a massive pension bill for city employees, with no apparent way to address it, other than slashing services and raising taxes.
Even if Emanuel were a great mayor, he would be severely challenged by Chicago right now.
I would just like to echo a bit of WhyNot’s experience.
Up until this last year when my husband and I moved back to Wisconsin, I had been working as first a hospice, then a mental health, social worker in Chicago. We lived in Ravenswood, near Uptown on the North Side, which has violence issues, my place of work was situated in Rogers Park, which is North but is prone to violence as well, but I did home visits all over the West, South, and North Sides, in some of the worst buildings in the worst neighborhoods.
Many gang members were my clients, or were the relatives of clients that I had. I never felt particularly unsafe with them, and they almost always treated me respect, which in the beginnig was really shocking to me. I actually had one young man in Englewood walk me from my car to the apartment of a client- he could tell immediately I was a social worker and told me the neighborhood was unsafe so he would escort me, and warned me to not stay after dark. I frequently had others able to guess my vocation and they often asked for referrals for services for them or a family member.
Navigating these places never was particularly awful during the day, I would agree that it is never a good idea to arrive or stay past school hours if at all possible. Some of our nurses had been in client homes where stray bullets flew before.
One issue I found troubling is that quite a few of my clients that were gang members were severely mentally ill and/or cognitively delayed and easy to manipulate (this does not excuse personal choice, but it is an important factor in understanding). They were almost always incredibly low in the gang hierarchy. I was constantly going to the court house to advocate for them for a multitude of crimes, ranging from petty to violent.
Furthermore, I think a trauma perspective is important. Growing up in excessively violent neighborhoods has real and profound implications on neurobiological development, particularly with regards to impulse control and affect regulation.
Additionally, and this is not to malign police and is strictly anecdotal, but I had many situations where police were called to assist with a client that was decompensating or acting out. I often found them ill equipped to competently interact with a mentally ill individual. In some cases they actively escalated a situation unnecessarily. I sincerely wish social workers or other mental health professionals were integrated in police departments, to assist with both interacting with mentally ill community members on calls as well as aiding officers in managing stress and trauma.
Calabasita, thank you! You have just validated my feelings in a way that no one really seems to get: I don’t FEEL unsafe. I KNOW I need to be cautious, but I’m not afraid. That’s very hard to grasp unless you’re the person being respectfully engaged with by the people you’ve been told to hate and fear. They’re just people, darn it. I treat them like people, they treat me like people.
They’re people going through some rough stuff, but they’re still people.
Sent from my XT1585 using Tapatalk
My parents told me that one day I ran out of the house sometime in 1996 or 1997 alone, and if it wasn’t for cops to find me, I’d have been gone. I was living in the neighborhood of Bridgeport at the time, at the block of 28th & between Wallace & Normal. My memory is somewhat visible of the incident, but thankfully nothing serious happened to me.
We moved out in 2001 due to high rents and another reason that someone wanted to kill me (I think it was just a kid saying that in the first grade, so the threat is meaningless), now we live in the Suburbs, still in Cook County, but on the Southwestern edge. (My father should have picked houses near I-90 or something, cause I can’t get any work here and even downtown.)
I’ve been commuting for the fun of it since 2013 when I was in college, and aside from riding the 2400-series cars and the original Metra Highliners, I’ve noticed things are rougher when riding- and it’s not the ride itself. I’m a bit fearful when people go a bit too close to me when I board the train or transfer at stations, and I get a bit worried when people are in the middle of the train cars either lighting a cigarette (I assume it), using it as a toilet (and that’s gross) or just flat out doing that for no reason whatsoever. I’ve been to the west side overnight and the south side a few times, I’ve seen the changes in atmosphere at times. I have yet to had a situation where a person tried to rob me with a gun. Strangely though, I got plenty of guts to even bike a Pee-wee Herman-style cruiser down some of these neighborhoods at times, even at night. Lake street between Cicero and Damen? Why not. 47th street? Sure. Walking in Englewood? Fine? Biking in Pilsen? Little Village? Walking at the Back of the Yards? Not a problem. Riding CTA buses made things less dangerous for me at times, although I’m sure people might argue with the logic.
In the late 60s, that occurred to my father, deaf and in his teens, while he was commuting from deaf school. As he was walking from the now-closed 63rd/Racine station (they really need to re-open that station already, there’s already bus service), he was robbed at gunpoint by a black man. If things had gone badly, I wouldn’t be talking about it. Thankfully he was let go. Not sure if nowadays he’d have been let go with today’s crime situation…
I just wanted to say I recently visited Chciago and have absolutely fell in love with this place!! I already is to go back very soon.
I think three things need to happen in order to reduce crime, and especially gun crime, in Chicago. Our city/county/state laws need to catch up with the crime:
[ol]
[li]Implement mandatory minimum sentencing for illegal weapons possession on a felony level.[/li] Currently, running around with a gun in your pants with no license is the same misdemeanor as shoplifting. Most get zero jail time.
[li]Release prisoners from minor drug charges[/li] Under 15 grams of weed has been decriminalized. Release prisoners accordingly.
[li]Implement a three strikes law. [/li] Police are seriously wasting everyone’s time having to arrest the same people over and over, who then just get released again because their non-cumulative crimes aren’t bad enough. Start adding that shit up.
[/ol]
Until these things happen, nothing will change and can potentially get way worse.