WBEZ | crime

ACLU finds racial disparities in Illinois pot arrests

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 17:01:00 -0500

Leaders of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois say one way to address racial disparities in marijuana arrests is to stop making them.

A new report from the civil rights group calls for the legalization of marijuana. The study found that African Americans in Illinois are almost eight times more likely than whites to be arrested for pot possession.

Ed Yohnka, director of public policy for the ACLU of Illinois, says whites and blacks use pot at about the same rate, but enforcement focuses on African Americans.

“We see this in the city of Chicago, we see it in other areas, that … where the enforcement is targeted is at people of color. And it results in this grossly disparate rate of arrest,” Yohnka said.

In an emailed statement, a spokesman for the Chicago police Department said police officers enforce laws in the interest of public safety and without regard to race.

According to the ACLU report, Illinois has the fourth highest rate of race disparity in marijuana arrests in the country.

Yohnka says that disparity “results in really tragic outcomes in … people’s lives,” because of court costs and the stigma of a criminal record. It cost the state about $221 million to enforce marijuana laws in 2010, according to the report.

“This war on marijuana … is an abject failure,” Yohnka said.

In its report the ACLU recommends that pot be legal for anyone over 21, and be licensed, taxed and regulated like any other product. The group also suggests that tax revenue from marijuana sales could be earmarked for substance-abuse prevention, among other things.Yohnka says the public wants marijuana to be legalized and that elected officials are lagging behind popular opinion.

Despite that, marijuana arrests are trending up, not down, in Illinois and throughout the country.

Illinois had 12,406 more pot arrests in 2010 than it did in 2001, according to the report.

The results of the study didn't come as a big shock to Juliana Stratton, but she says she was surprised to see that Cook County had the most marijuana possession arrests in the country.

Stratton, who heads the Cook County Judicial Advisory Council, says the report confirms the importance of the work being done by Cook County President Toni Preckwinkle to try and cut down on the number of marijuana arrests in the county.

She says more money and energy should be diverted away from law enforcement and toward treatment and prevention. In the coming months, she says the county will be unveiling programs that will divert minor drug offenders away from jail and toward rehabilitation.

As for Cook County's high number of pot arrests, Stratton says part of the reason could be the Chicago Police Department's focus on quality-of-life policing and the drying up of state funds for drug treatment.

Stratton says CPD's policy of arresting minor offenders as part of the "broken windows theory" of policing, runs counter to the county president's aim of decreasing the population of the Cook County Jail.

Illinois state Sen. Mattie Hunter, who heads the Illinois Disproportionate Justice Impact Study Commission, also said she was not surprised by the ACLU’s findings. She says the report echoes what she and her colleagues have found in years studying racial inequality throughout the state.

But Hunter says the problem won’t go away until racism is eradicated from the justice system.

Hunter does not support the legalization of marijuana.

Cook County led the nation in marijuana possession arrests in 2010 with 33,000, or 91 per day, according to the ACLU report.

The crime of the century

Tue, 21 May 2013 05:00:00 -0500

The Lindbergh Kidnapping . . . The O.J. Simpson Case . . . The Murder of Stanford White. . .

20th Century America had an abundance of crimes that were labeled The Crime of the Century. Chicago’s version took place on May 21, 1924.

Shortly after 5 in the afternoon, 13-year-old Bobby Franks left the Harvard School for Boys in the Kenwood neighborhood, and began walking the three blocks to his home. He never got there.

The next morning Bobby’s wealthy parents received a ransom note. But before any money could be paid, the boy’s body was discovered near Wolf Lake.

Teachers at the school were considered prime suspects. Then police found a pair of eyeglasses near the crime scene. The glasses were traced to 19-year-old neighbor Nathan Leopold.

Leopold said he must have lost the glasses while bird-watching. On the night of the murder, he had been out with a friend, 18-year-old Richard Loeb. Loeb was called in. He supported Leopold’s story.

The police continued to question Leopold and Loeb separately. Their alibis broke down. They admitted they’d kidnapped Bobby Franks. Leopold said that Loeb had done the actual killing. Loeb claimed that Leopold had done it.

Leopold and Loeb were unlikely criminals. They were rich. They were intellectually brilliant. But they also considered themselves superior to the common herd of humanity, above any arbitrary rules of conduct. They had killed Bobby Franks because they wanted to commit “the perfect crime.”

The Leopold and Loeb families hired Clarence Darrow for the defense. To avoid a jury trial, Darrow had his clients plead guilty. Otherwise, he felt certain they would be hanged.

At the sentencing, Judge John Caverly heard Darrow’s arguments. Darrow reminded the judge that Leopold and Loeb were legally minors. They might be intellectuals, but they had diseased minds. The murder had not been brutal. Besides, capital punishment itself was brutal and uncivilized.

Darrow convinced the judge. Leopold and Loeb were each sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Bobby Franks. Added to that was a 99-year sentence for kidnapping.

The killers were sent to the state prison at Joliet. Both of them used their time organizing a school for the other convicts. In 1936 Richard Loeb was killed in a brawl with another inmate.

Nathan Leopold was paroled in 1958. He moved to Puerto Rico and worked in a hospital. He died in 1971.

The Leopold-Loeb case was one of the inspirations for "Rope," a 1948 Hitchcock film. "Compulsion," a more straight-forward treatment (though with the names changed) came out in 1959. The most recent book on Chicago's Crime of the Century is Simon Baatz's For the Thrill of It.

The Jon Ronson interview

Fri, 10 May 2013 08:01:00 -0500

Jon Ronson is one of those writers who embodies what creative nonfiction is all about by demonstrating just how strange and wonderful the world can be. A Welsh journalist, documentary filmmaker, radio presenter and nonfiction author, his books include Them: Adventures With Extremists, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry and most recently Lost At Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries. His book The Men Who Stare At Goats was turned into a movie starring George Clooney. You can learn a lot more about him here.

I saw that you have a standing reply on your website that you will not investigate people’s claims that they are victims of mind control. Aside from that, what personal information do your readers tend to volunteer to you most frequently?

That they are married to psychopaths. Or that they're worried they may be psychopaths. There is an adage in psychology that if you're worried you may be a psychopath that means you aren't one. Because psychopaths never worry about being psychopaths. They're FINE with it. Which makes me suspect that psychopathy is the most pleasant feeling of all the mental disorders.

Isn't it interesting that so many people share the exact same delusion - that they're being mind controlled by the CIA. When our brains go wrong they go wrong in uncannily similar ways. It shows that we aren't all individual snowflakes. My guess is that some of the people who believe they're mind control victims actually suffer from a rare disorder called Delusional Disorder. The symptoms include 'non-bizarre' delusions. That delusion is non-bizarre because some people over the years HAVE actually been mind controlled by the CIA.

Of the different cultures you’ve written about, what have been some that seemed most tempting to join up with, even if just in theory?

I had a good time writing the story Running Through Cornfields for my first book, Them, about Rachel Weaver, one of the survivors of Ruby Ridge. But that's just because I liked Idaho and Montana. The rivers and mountains. But I guess that's not a great reason to become a white separatist. Anyway, they'd never have me.

How can you tell which media are right for which subjects (what works well for radio, web, books, etc?)

Sometimes it's just whoever is interested in having me work with them at any particular time. I go in and out of favor with different people. For instance, British nonfiction TV has no interest in me at the moment. Sometimes the subject matter dictates it. I once made a documentary about the band The Shaggs that I knew had to be for the radio. There was no way I could do that story without getting to play their music. Here it is:

But the thing I'm always looking for is an adventure that might become a book. Whenever I do a documentary or a feature I'm always wondering if it could be a rabbit hole that takes me to a book.

I remember asking Christiane Kubrick - when I was making my film Stanley Kubrick's Boxes - what her husband was looking for during those ever lengthening gaps between films. She said, "The magical moment of falling in love with a story." I know that feeling well. Whenever I start a story I look for that magical moment of falling in love with it enough that it may become a book.

Who are some of your "favorite" criminals ("favorite" of course meaning compelling, not as in you’d want to move in with them).

I loved my adventures with David Icke and Alex Jones in Them, infiltrating Bohemian Grove with Alex. Not sure he counts as a criminal. Tony in The Psychopath Test. I liked him personally, and also he was mysterious. He claimed to have faked madness to escape a prison sentence and now he was stuck in a hospital for the criminally insane and nobody believed he was sane. I loved trying to work out if he was insane or not. It opened up such an interesting area about how we view and judge other people, how we read between lines, how morally corrosive it can be.

If you had to teach a ten-minute course on interviewing, what advice would you be sure to impart upon your students?

This could be terrible advice, but don't plan any questions in advance. That way you have to listen. You have to be a twig in the tidal wave of the conversation. But not preparing any questions doesn't mean don't do research. Do lots of research, just assimilate it, rather than plan and structure the interview. As I say, that might be the worst advice.

You immerse yourself so fully in the stories you write. What have been some scenarios where you were conducting research or interviews and then found yourself in a potentially unsafe environment?

The most recent time was writing The Amazing Adventures of Phoenix Jones, which is in my new collection, Lost At Sea. He's the real life superhero I was patrolling with in Seattle. He took me to Belltown to break up a gang of armed crack dealers. They were, "What the f*ck are you doing coming here in your costumes? This is not fun and games to us. If you don't get off our block we're going to shoot you." And Phoenix said, "We're staying."

What are you reading right now?

Nothing. I'm watching Freaks and Geeks on Netflix. I think it's just about the best thing I ever saw. It breaks my heart that they only made one series. It makes me feel so helpless that I can't go back in time and fix it so they made more. It's like finding out someone died. Although I did notice one or two jumping the shark moments in the last episode or two - like James Franco liking Dungeons and Dragons. So maybe it was for the best that it died young and left a good looking corpse.

Do you stay in touch with anyone you write about?

I would like to stay in touch with everyone. I consider it a real honor and compliment if people want to stay in touch with me after I've written about them. Even if we massively disagree with each other politically, I always think we've been thought something intimate together when we've had some kind of encounter or adventure. They feel like family members.

What have been some of your most recent obsessions, even if they were only fleeting? (I for instance spent part of today googling Aleister Crowley and his ilk.)

Ha. Last few days I've looked at the disappearance of Maura Murray, workplace bullying and Amanda Palmer.

What’s a potential story topic you figured would be rich for material but turned out to be relatively banal, and then another where you stumbled upon a wormhole in an unexpected place?

The saddest example of a story that went nowhere was the months trying to write a book about the credit card industry. This was before the crash. I realized was that all these people who work in the credit industry – the list brokers, all these people who’ve got these devious tricks to keep us ensnared – are really important. But they are also incredibly boring. They couldn't light up the page for me. So I abandoned the book. And instead I went to Alaska to write my story Santa's Little Conspirators, that ended up in Lost at Sea, my new collection. That was about shenanigans in a Christmas theme town.

The opposite - a story I wasn't into but turned out to be extraordinary - was going to Hawaii to interview a soldier called Glenn Wheaton. He had been part of the US Military's remote viewing program. The psychic spies. I really didn't have any interest in them. The writer Jim Schnabel had already written a very intricate book about them called Remote Viewers. I felt like I was telling a story that was already known. It was really miserable for me. While I was interviewing him we got talking about the 'other stuff' they were doing. He said they were trying to become invisible and kill goats just by staring at them. So the wormhole opened up. And I ended up writing The Men Who Stare At Goats.

Factchecking your work must be thrilling and exhausting. Which stories of yours were the most difficult to clear before publishing?

I don't remember ever having much of a problem. I'm pretty assiduous when I'm gathering the stories. So fact checking is usually fine.

How does it feel to be the 348th person interviewed for Zulkey.com/WBEZ?
It feels good!

RedEye article sparks discussion about media racism

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 01:18:00 -0600

On days where the wintry weather overtakes Chicago and you can barely see outside of your window, I’m oddly reminded of the 2000 kids’ movie Snow Day. According to the logic of the film, snow days change things; they re-write the rules. When the snow began to hit in the wee hours of the morning, I poured myself a glass of wine, listened to the new David Bowie and re-posted a photo of the RedEye to Facebook before bedtime. All in all an average night, right?

But I forgot the movie’s lesson: anything can happen on a snow day.

When I woke up Tuesday morning, that photo had been shared from my personal page over 2,500 times and another 600 from the author’s page. I figured that a couple friends of mine would comment on it, and we would privately lament the state of media racism in this country, before we move on to eat sandwiches and poop (not at the same time). I’ve become so desensitized to racism that I no longer am surprised when things like this happen, because they’re such a common occurrence. We want to be newly incensed every time Victoria Jackson says something stupid or people have racist reactions to chips, but at a certain point, these things become the expected norm, yet another dick in the wall

On the evening in question, racism just made me sleepy. Call it racism fatigue.

However, the photo going viral Tuesday reminded me how much we need this dialogue, how much we need to be reminded that these issues are worth engaging and that we have a responsibility to spread awareness. It reminded me of my own privilege in being able to shut the computer on racism and ignore it if I want to. I can plug my ears and say la-la-la if I want to, because (as a non-POC) structural racism benefits me. On an unseasonably cold March morning, it was the ultimate alarm call. The best part of waking up is racism in your cup.

For those unfamiliar, Westgard’s photo breaks down the amount of coverage allotted to crime in Chicago, where the shooting of a woman in Rogers Park gets 10 times the word count of four people killed in the Back of the Yards, Englewood, Gage Park and New City. The RedEye piece is a abridged version of Adam Sege’s original Chicago Tribune article, which goes further into the incidents in the latter four neighborhoods. It’s problematic that Sege had to lead with the woman in the Northside neighborhood, burying the others at the back of the article. But at least it’s more equitable. That's better, n'est-ce pas?

Spoiler: Non.

Is it sad that I could even think about “defending” the Tribune for devoting 50 percent of their content to one North Side woman and the other 50 percent to folks in “black” neighborhoods? Is it sad that we can so easily overlook the fact that the RedEye truncated coverage of everyone not in Rogers Park, deciding that mention of them was all but expendable? Yes, but that’s what it’s come to these days. It's sad that this is the reality. You can comforting yourself by saying, “Well, at least the RedEye didn’t leave out the South and West Side stories entirely. Those folks got a whole paragraph, 23 words of shiny, abridged, motherf*cking inclusion. Where’s my wine? Let’s get drunk.” Welcome to the fatigue.

In Westgard’s breakdown of the article, he labels Rogers Park as being a “white” neighborhood, which (to an extent) it is. Statistics show that the neighborhood has a larger white population than any other demographic, but Rogers Park boasts Black and Latino statistics that nearly match it, with respective counts of 26.3% and 24.43%. If you’ve ever been to West Rogers Park, you know that the neighborhood is famous for its thriving South Asian scene, with bustling Indian and Pakistani restaurants up and down Devon. You can’t go anywhere without tripping over great South Asian cuisine.

I live in a building that’s half-immigrant and half-white—with Rogers Park’s student population blending with its first- and second-generation residents, populations that overlap just as often as they don’t. But despite this fact, Rogers Park is perceived to be white, with Loyola University getting most of the credit for generating the neighborhood’s energy. Additionally, Rogers Park gets lumped in with the rest of the North Side (often called the "White Side"). Despite enjoying the diversity of everything from Uptown and Buena Park to Andersonville and Albany Park, we stereotype the North Side as a homogeneous Caucasian fantasia, as if Lakeview were the only neighborhood. Even if it’s not the reality, the specter of Wrigley takes over the North. We get whitewashed.

Because of the North Side’s perceived white centrality, we get the coverage that the South and West Sides do not. Last year, I wrote an article on my experiences living in Chicago, an ode to everything I love about the city after calling it home for almost a decade. The piece was called “40 Reasons I Love Being a Chicagoan,” and it included everything from Big Chicks to Costello’s, whose Mess Sandwich I would eat every day if my heart would allow it. I wrote it from my limited view as a North Side resident, where I’ve lived every year of my residency here.

A number of respondents accused me of "Northsider Bias," charging that I left out perspectives that were reflective of a larger cultural population. I was furthering the stereotype that Chicago only happens on the North Side. Where was Bronzeville? What about Pilsen? Why didn’t I mention Bridgeport? At first, I was taken aback by the accusation—but then I realized they were right. I'd been to the South Side a handful of times, and it was a faint blip on my cultural radar. This is a common reality in Chicago, where you can barely find a train to take you anywhere past Roosevelt. For Northsiders, it can be difficult to get outside of your niche experience or learn to think about Chicago differently. You get trapped in your own reality.

This ideological infrastructure permeates the ways in which we talk about Chicago and how we live our lives here. When realtors and property agents signify “good neighborhoods,” they aren’t talking about Back of the Yards or Englewood. They wouldn’t even show you a property in Englewood. They mean Roscoe Village. When they talk about neighborhoods that are “up and coming” or “on the rise,” they mean Uptown. In Rogers Park, Loyola has been buying up a great deal of the property in the area. They now own our building. It might not be a “white neighborhood” currently, but it’s slowly getting there. Baby steps.

As a representation of a city that’s heavily segregated, the RedEye article reflects larger issues of racial inclusion in our city, ones that are so pervasive that they are nearly invisible. It’s a symbol of a media industry that’s equally structurally classist and racist as the city, driven by economic incentives to reach a majoritarian audience of white consumers. The reason I barely blinked at the RedEye article is that coverage like this is so commonplace. It even has a name: “Missing White Woman Syndrome.”

Can you name any non-white woman who has gone missing and gotten major press coverage? Rosie Perez doesn't count, so me neither. Reason magazine gives us two telling examples of this:

“Remember Laci Peterson, who disappeared on Christmas Eve, 2002? Her case received saturation coverage in the U.S., and widespread coverage elsewhere. You could follow it in the Taipei Times if you cared to. By contrast, Evelyn Hernandez – like Peterson, very pregnant at the time of her disappearance – went missing seven months before Peterson did. Her torso was later found in the San Francisco Bay. The case got a few mentions here and there, but was largely ignored.

“Last summer a jury acquitted Casey Anthony of murdering her daughter, Caylee, in 2008. You remember. Her trial received seemingly nonstop attention across the nation. But as Alexander points out, just about nobody has ever heard of Aja Fogle, N’Kiah Fogle, Tatianna Jacks, or Brittany Jacks. Like Caylee Anthony, those girls – ages 5, 6, 11, and 16 – were murdered in 2008. Their mother was convicted of the crime and sentenced to 120 years in prison.”

The more you read the news, the more you realize that the axiom isn’t if it bleeds, it leads. The reality is that if it bleeds white, it leads. Such framing is meant reach the demographics that media outlets find more attractive as an audience; those with cultural and financial capital get the coverage, whereas less "lucrative" markets are otherized, left out or footnoted. (See: them urbans.)

Although the woman in the RedEye piece’s race was never mentioned, ethnicity is often interpellated as white in news media—as whiteness has become our socioeconomic default setting. Observe any billboard, newspaper, advertisement or magazine. Turn on CBS, our most-watched network. The media is white people. We’re looking at an industry where “white journalists write 93% of front pages in the U.S,” and statistics from 2011 show that just 13.26 percent of journalists overall are writers of color. Hell, I’m white and in the media. I’m part of the problem. I am the man.

Written at the tail end of the Obama-Romney race, a write-up from Salon further addresses this issue:

“The percentage of [front page election] articles written by Asian American reporters is 3.3%, by African American reporters is 2.9%, and by Hispanic reporters is 0.7%. This under-representation of minorities reporting on the front page holds true across most media outlets for most ethnic groups. The Dallas Morning News stands out as an exception where 18.8% of their front page stories were written by African Americans. The most striking under-representation of minorities in our data is that of Hispanic journalists, considering the Hispanic population stands at approximately 16.3% of the U.S. population (according to the 2010 Census).”

Although I’m happy to see the Internet take the RedEye to task over its exclusion of minorities in coverage, this criticism needs to be shared with an entire industry and city that continues to marginalize voices and perspectives of color. The RedEye is such a tiny fraction of the problem that I worry we’re not seeing the forest for the racist trees, but I’m heartened by the RedEye’s timely response to the criticism.

In addition to reaching out to Westgard on Twitter, they released a mea culpa on social media within less than 24 hours of the meme going viral. They didn’t even try to defend themselves or offer excuses for their gaffe. They simply apologized. It’s an incredibly classy move, especially from an outlet often dismissed as tabloid journalism or “fluff.” This response is anything but. Here’s what they had to say:

“The online conversation that’s developing around this story is an important one. Thank you for the comments and feedback. This is incredibly important to us, especially as we set out to shine a light on Chicago violence this year. Conversations like these will continue to inform and improve our coverage. We hope you’ll continue to join us in addressing these issues.”

We can shoot the messenger all we want, but as this statement shows, we must target the system along with them. By releasing this statement, the RedEye has recognized that this is a conversation we need to be having, whether we feel burned out on talking about privilege or our eyes are being opened for the first time by the simplicity of Westgard’s graphic. In this photo, Westgard makes the allegedly invisible plain and clear. The visual brings the discourse to those who might not think critically about structural racism or take the time to check out Racialicious or Crunk Feminist Collective, where these discourses take place every day.

We need to keep in mind that making the RedEye apologize won’t solve racism and remember to take accountability for raising awareness and shining a light on racism—with whatever tools we have available. Racism isn't just the RedEye's problem. It's everyone's.

Nico Lang writes about LGBTQ issues in Chicago. You can follow Nico on Twitter @Nico_Lang or the Facebook.

Misery loves company: What the Forbes survey of Chicago leaves out

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 05:00:00 -0600

Forbes recently listed Chicago as their fourth most miserable city, behind Detroit, Flint and Rockford—meaning that the states of Illinois and Michigan were having bad days overall. In part of their clearly objective calculus, they listed our high crime rate and weather as signs of our happiness deficit—because math said so. To an extent, I can see where they are coming from. If you’ve ever watched the news, even for a second, you know that crime in Chicago is a problem, and our crime rates on the South Side have been compared to Iraq. I don’t have to tell you about the weather. You don’t coin the word “Snowpocalypse” because everything is rainbows and kittens and sunshine. The weather is terrible, but you live through it. The redness of your skin, as you fight those below-zero winds, gives it character.

In most cities, the environmental and infrastructural issues would be cause for misery. But what makes Chicago special is that Chicagoans thrive in almost any condition. When the roads overflowed with snow in 2011 and drivers were trapped on the Dan Ryan, they helped each other to safety. On a particularly blustery January day, we huddle underneath the heat lamps for warmth, bringing shared comfort to friends and strangers. We provide for each other by bringing coffee to our co-workers, who are compatriots in our seasonal agony, and working up a smile, even in the most trying condition.

This is because Chicagoans prepare for the worst. Years of bad winters and digging our cars out of yet another blizzard have made us tough and prepared for anything. Why do you think our improv scene in Chicago is so big? It’s because Chicagoans are always ready to say “Yes, and?”—whether that’s with a pile-on joke, a punchline or a shovel. We're prepared for whatever life throws at us. In most cities, they stay indoors in the snow, hiding as if the apocalypse actually were coming. Here our universities and schools stay open and our baristas show up at 5 a.m., just like always, because we are going to need that extra cup as we brave the sodden trains.

It might be an annoyance, and our students complain when school isn’t cancelled. However, our refusal to cancel is an important aspect of our civic character. We refuse to back down, even if that means putting on another pair on Long Johns. This is what we signed up for.

And even in the most miserable conditions, Chicagoans find room not just for camaraderie but for joy. When the Snowpocalypse actually shut down DePaul’s campus—which, as a student, was a first—students took to the quad and the streets to go sledding. The empty streets gave us unexpected freedom, and we filled them with the games of our childhood. We built snowmen (and snowwomen) along Fullerton, and the truly adventurous even made snow angels in the middle of the road. The act was reckless and could have gotten the angel maker run over, but it showed we weren’t afraid of anything—whether nature or machine.

One of my best friends is from California, where snow is a cause for national emergency, and they don’t share that sense of seasonal community. They don’t have to worry about the skies erupting with ice or a surprise 40-degree day turning back to the dark side by nightfall, when the winter returns to haunt us. The winters are idyllic and peaceful. Chicagoans may beg for a mild season in our worst winters—which we strangely miss during those years when the cold passes us by.

Last year I spent most of the fall season in Paris, and when I came back to Chicago for Christmas, part of me looked forward to the season I had grown accustomed to. The benign drizzle of the Champs-Elysees felt improper in mid-December, as if a law of nature were being violated, and when I returned to see that Chicago was the same, I felt like I had been cheated out of something. This wasn’t right.

When the site crashed for the Chicago Marathon last week, Chicagoans erupted in outcry, but I wasn’t surprised that half of the city apparently wanted to sign up. Endurance is part of our life cycle, and we know that the finish line is just ahead. There’s nowhere in the world quite like Chicago in the summer, as the city erupts in a three-month celebration of music, food and beer. Our hidden communities come out into the open. Every day is like a Pride parade, and even in 90-degree heat or sudden rain, you can’t stop the party. However, without the winter, those months feel unearned, as if you’ve been given a gift without doing anything to receive it. The winter teaches you to cherish the sun. When May and June roll around, you feel as though you’ve made it. You’re here. It’s like Christmas.

Chicagoans jokingly blame the seasons for our high crime rate—quipping that it’s enough to drive anyone off the edge—but they are a symbol of us. Like the winters, our city isn’t easy to love, and sometimes when the Red Line spontaneously sends me to Howard or I’m told the Foster bus won’t be here for another fifteen minutes, I curse that I’d rather live anywhere else in the world. I’d rather live somewhere where our infrastructure didn’t marginalize half of its residents with little public transit, while giving Lincoln Parkers every transportation option in the world.

Would it be easier to live somewhere where the schools weren’t a mess, and I didn’t have to ever hear the words "Rahm Emanuel"—whose name is approaching Voldemort status? Yes. But Chicago is my home, and the city has taught me that you fight for your home. You criticize it when it needs criticizing, and you work to improve it. A friend of mine, Wes Perry, recently referred to Chicago as an “ensemble” city, describing our penchant for ensemble-based performance—from Second City to Steppenwolf. However, I think that phrase describes our entire city, a series of ensembles, coming together to ensure the show must go on. To repurpose an old saying, there's no business like Chicago.

Chicago might not be the simplest city ro inhabit, but I can’t think of anywhere else in the world I would live. It wouldn't be home.

Nico Lang writes about LGBTQ life in Chicago. Follow Nico on Twitter @Nico_Lang or Facebook.

The gambler, his wife, and her lover

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 05:00:00 -0600

Michael Cassius McDonald had spent much of his 67 years staying one jump ahead of the law. On this February 21st in 1907, his young wife was in the custody of the law. The charge was murder.

McDonald was Chicago’s gambling king, and a Democratic Party king-maker. He had been for decades. But as McDonald grew older, he'd sought a veneer of respectability. He moved from the working-class West Side to a mansion on fashionable Drexel Boulevard. And he shed his first wife in favor of a rabbi’s daughter named Dora Feldman, thirty years his junior.

Time passed. Dora grew bored with her husband. She took up with a decorative young man a dozen years younger than herself. His name was Webster Guerin. He called himself an artist.

About 10 o'clock on this particular morning, Dora arrived at Webster’s studio in a Loop office building. She seemed agitated. Webster took her inside one of the rooms to calm her. There was shouting. Then a single gunshot.

People came running. When the door was forced open, Dora was found standing over Webster’s body, screaming. A pistol lay on the floor.

The police took Dora into custody. Now the questions began.

Did Dora murder Webster? Did she kill him by accident during a struggle? Did Webster commit suicide? The gun was Dora’s–and it had been a present from Webster!

Motive? Was Webster breaking off the affair? Or was Dora breaking up with Webster? Dora had given Webster money for years–was it blackmail, to keep their relationship quiet? How much did Mike McDonald know about his wife’s Cougar play?

Old Mike stood by Dora. He went with the blackmail story. Dora had told him she was paying hush-money to someone, but said she could handle it. Of course, Mike had never dreamed it would turn out this way.

The gambling king used all his influence to delay a trial. Dora was placed in a private sanitarium. Then Mike’s health went into decline. By August he was dead.

McDonald left $25,000 to pay for his wife’s legal defense, a princely sum in 1907. The money was well spent. When Dora was brought to trial for murder, it took a jury only five hours to acquit her.

Dora Feldman McDonald eventually left Chicago. She moved to California, married a doctor, and lived quietly. She died in 1930.

Year 25: Ameena Matthews

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 15:39:00 -0600

It's hard to track down Ameena Matthews.

She's constantly on call, always ready to keep conflicts in the city's most dangerous neighborhoods from escalating to homicide.

Matthews is a violence interrupter with CeaseFire Illinois. You may have seen her in the documentary The Interrupters.

During a time where it seems everyone and anyone is talking about gun violence, we thought it fitting to see what Matthews has to say and what she was up to at 25.

She wasn't always the one breaking up the fights and trying to keep the peace — gang life was a big part of her growing up.

Her father, Jeff Fort, is one of Chicago's well-known gang leaders. And Matthews will tell you herself, she didn't think she'd live to see 25, as most of her youth was wrapped up in life on the streets.

That's where she begins the story of her 25th year.

Bloody Maxwell

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 05:00:00 -0600

We've been hearing much about Chicago's crime problems lately. Was it always so bad? Take a look at the Chicago Tribune from February 11— 107 years ago.

In 1906 our city was already known for the biggest Stock Yards, the busiest street corner, and the most railroad trains. Now Chicago had earned another distinction. We had the most dangerous police district in the world.

The Tribune called it “Bloody Maxwell.” Then known as the 21st Precinct, it took in the area west of the river between Harrison and 16th, as far as Wood Street. Each year, within this single square mile, scores of people were murdered.

“Murderers, robbers, and thieves of the worst kind are born, reared, and grow to maturity in numbers that far exceed . . . any district on the face of the globe,” the paper reported. “Stealing is as natural as breathing. Property belongs to whoever can take and keep it.”

In some families, four generations were active criminals.

The area was filled with recent immigrants. There were Irish, Germans, Poles, Italians, Greeks, Russian Jews, and others, all living uneasily together in crowded, dirty tenements. They brought with them their Old World traditions–you backed your own people, you solved your own troubles, and you didn’t trust the police.

The precinct station stood at 943 West Maxwell Street, like a Wild West fort surrounded by hostile Indians. The Tribune called the cops there ”the bravest policemen in the world.” Most of them had grown up in the neighborhood, and knew how to deal with the conditions. Yet even the most fearless officer would never enter a building alone.

The cops didn’t have enough manpower to patrol the area. The thugs knew this and were getting bolder. “Living more like beasts than human beings,” the paper said, “hundreds and thousands of boys and men follow day after day, year after year, in the bloody ways of crime.”

Even so, some young men did overcome their environment. They spurned the seductions of the streets. They went on to lead useful, productive lives.

Why did two boys growing up on the same block–perhaps even in the same tenement–turn out so differently? Why did one become a model citizen, and the other a depraved rogue? It was something the sociologists needed to study.

The story of “Bloody Maxwell” filled two full pages of the Tribune. Over a century later, it’s still interesting to read. Today much of the old 21st Precinct is gentrified, or part of the UIC campus.

The police station remains standing at the corner of Maxwell and Morgan. If it looks familiar, that’s because it was later featured on a TV series about city cops in a crime-filled, inner-city district: "Hill Street Blues.”

Crunching Lakeview's crime numbers as police start 'Entertainment Detail'

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 01:31:00 -0600

Updated 1:00 p.m.

The snow is not gone yet, but police in Lakeview are preparing to deal with the crime surrounding the area's nightlife.

One police commander has implemented an “Entertainment Detail” to patrol the neighborhood’s vibrant scene that includes bars, restaurants that cater to Cubs fans as well as the city’s gay and lesbian community. But how bad is crime in an area that has shootings and homicides in the single digits?

The numbers are interesting — and while not dealing with a large amount of violent crime — data suggest the neighborhood has become a magnet for theft and robberies.

Cmmdr. Elias Voulgaris recently took charge of the 19th police district, which contains Lincoln Park, Lakeview and Uptown.

"It all comes down to quality of life issues. [People] have to respect the residents and cut down on public drinking, urination and damage to property."

Voulgaris was echoing a similar call from his boss Superintendent Garry McCarthy.

Lakeview usually has single digit homicide numbers compared to that of some neighborhoods on the South and West Sides.

However, after 2010, there were stark increases in thefts and robberies in the neighborhood, which has residents, officials – and businesses – concerned about a neighborhood whose nightlife is a vital part of the city's economy and tourist industry.

Bennett Lawson is the chief of staff to Ald. Tom Tunney (44th). After a very public string of violent incidents, Tunney called for the formation of an “Entertainment Detail.”

The conversations and coverage during and after that time was very heated.

“We’ll have a more formal detail unit from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.,” Lawson said. “The “L” plays a big part of that.”

Lawson and Voulgaris have both mentioned the areas around the “L” stops being magnets for crime.

Also, they both acknowledged that residents have to take additional precautions to protect themselves and be aware of their surroundings.

“There are a lot that grew up in the burbs or in a large state... those that are transient, move to the city for their first job in their 20s, then move back out into the burbs in their 30s, but now we’re seeing more stay in the neighborhood, buying property, the schools are full, as opposed to those being bused into the district from years ago,” Lawson said.

“We’re educating people, telling them to take steps to protect themselves,” he said referring to residents pulling out their iPhones or listening to their headphones.

In 2012, Lakeview had 346 robberies. Of those 346, over 200 of those were strong-armed robberies, or simple muggings. About 49 were by gunpoint, with under a few dozen aggravated, or inflicting injury. It essentially means that most of the robberies are people getting their phones, wallets, etc. stolen – without serious injury.

Voulgaris said the entertainment detail is still in it infancy, and will be in full swing by the spring and summer.

He stressed that they used existing police resources, and rescheduled officers based on the increases in crime on the weekends after the bars start to close. He also said this won't affect normal beat patrols and the detail would work in addition to increased police presence for Cubs games and special events like Chicago's Gay Pride Parade.

We've parsed out the crime numbers and the data would suggest that there have been drops in some areas, like much of Chicago, but spikes in robberies and thefts, and the neighborhood has a larger amount of crime than its neighborhood to the north: Uptown.

Robberies for 2012

Batteries for 2012

Criminal damage

Editor’s note on comparing neighborhoods with a grain of salt

As Chicago’s homicides and shootings rack up, a lot of ire and media coverage centers on policing strategies. In Chicago, a city with storied racial, economic and education disparities, it’s difficult politically and logistically to address public safety issues — and effectively police them.

Are the West and South Sides experiencing more crime than parts of the North Side? Yes.

The conditions however, are more nuanced than a North Side vs. South Side discourse. That dichotomy does exist. Understanding that divide should be the start of discourse, not the end of the discussion.

Such discussions are and should be necessary to an informed public. And it is part of the mission of WBEZ, which takes the form of series on race, recidivism and economic mobility.

It’s important to point out a lot about the nature of statistics. First, they’re absent demographic information. Some areas are more densely populated than others – and those population numbers don’t count visitors to an area. An arrest number or rate cannot easily or accurately convey racial problems, gang activity – or economic and poverty data that are the social causes of crime.

A community area might have a larger area than another. Population is one of many factors in per capita crime. According to the 2010 census, Lakeview had 94,368 people, Austin had 98,514 and Uptown has 56,362.

So how do police divide limited resources to keep a city of nearly 3 million safe?

The police have specialized gang and narcotics units that can be deployed on top of regular patrols that are needed to maintain an overall coverage of a community.

That’s effectively why the Chicago Police Department is divided by police districts and not wards or neighborhoods. Also, those districts are divided into smaller segments called beats which can be as large as a few blocks or several. You wouldn’t waste time having police patrol a non-residential industrial area with the same zeal as a dense tourist area. Both the districts and beats were recently redrawn by the city under Supt. Garry McCarthy, similar to a Congressional district re-map. The police say the changes allow them to redeploy forces as the conditions, population and crime in a neighborhood change.

The hyperbole surrounding some crime (flash mobs) can make perceptions more frightening than reality. Does being in Lakeview mean you’re going to be robbed? No. Does being on the South Side mean you’re going to be shot? No.

The following comparisons offer a snapshot of violent crimes, and illustrate how one neighborhood can have higher rates of violence than another, even when population is taken into account.

In conversations with the commander of the 19th District and city officials, one message that the city and others want made clear is that addressing relatively non-violent crimes in wealthier neighborhoods does not necessarily translate to more or less resources being deployed to areas plagued by violent crime.

Whether or not that’s the case is hard to tell.

All these factors that should be taken into account as the city and its residents, like generations before them, debate self-governance and policing.

Homicides:

Shootings in 2012

Kenwood Blues Part II

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 13:31:00 -0600

After my article Wednesday about Kenwood, we ran a second piece about Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s response to Hadiya Pendleon’s murder which included a chart that showed crime in the neighborhood in the last 10 years or so.

It said: “The neighborhood has seen modest decreases in theft, car thefts and robberies. But what few shootings and homicides the neighborhood saw over the past 10 years has stayed relatively consistent in the single digit range.”

That is true. In fact, on paper Kenwood often looks better than many northside neighborhoods. I remember when I moved here in 2000, I had friends in Lincoln Park who were horrified and I got a heckuva kick showing them how their groovy area actually had greater incidences of robbery and assaults than Kenwood. (My friend’s response? “That’s because there’s nothing to steal in Kenwood.”)

But here’s what the stats don’t show:

1. Crime that used to be concentrated west on Drexel Boulevard and north of 40th on Lake Park has now spread and east and south. Crime is now ubiquitous. (When I first moved down here, there were highrise CHA buildings on Cottage Grove, which have since been torn down. There’s still plenty of public housing: Three senior buildings on and around Lake Park -- two are pretty well-managed and one hosts a lot of “visiting” grandkids -- and one regular CHA midrise. It’s precisely in that corridor where the two new 450 unit mixed income highrises are going up.)

2. Crime didn’t happen quite as often in the middle of the day. One of the great shocks of the Lakefront Outlook’s crime blotter is seeing that you can get your butt kicked at noon walking down 47th Street. Or killed at Harsh Park at 2:21 p.m. in the afternoon.

3. The drug dealing is more widespread and brasher. The Muddy Waters house across the street from me, for example, is between a school (Jacky Robinson Elementary is half a block away) and Kennicott Park, which has a busy Park District fieldhouse (half a block in the other direction, where there's a cop stationed daily from early morning to late evening). There’s a stream of kids that pass that house every day going to and from both places. Right now, there’s not only a dude sitting out on the sidewalk but the basement door is open, visible from the street, half blocked only by a slab of wood and tempting every one of those kids walking home alone to explore what has been designated an unsafe structure, red X ablaze on its facade. I need to stress that when we call, the cops come. Every time. Police response is very good-- but as soon as the cops leave, the dealers are back.

4. The number of empty units -- not necessarily buildings -- is breathtaking. On the the two block stretch of Oakenwald where Pendleton was killed, there are three whole empty buildings and who knows how many empty units. As I said yesterday, on my block there are twelve I know for a fact, and possibly as many as twenty. These are incredibly tempting propositions for all sorts of folks: for the homeless, yes, but also for kids, for gangs, for drug dealers. We’ve had at least one squatter in my building (one of the other residents took him in and we hired him to do some work around the building) but we know there are many more in the neighborhood.

And there's at least one other unmeasurable difference: Once, not that long ago, it felt like things were happening in the neighborhood, that things were on the up. But now it feels like we're barely running in place. There are a least two ugly unfunished construction projects alone in the two blocks from my house to the 47th Street bus stop that remind us every day of hope lost.

Listen, I love my neighborhood. It’s precisely because I love my neighborhood that I worry about conditions here becoming more and more troublesome -- not explosive just yet, but not unlike sitting on a powder keg.