This Was What It Was Like To Live In Chicago In 2017

There was a shooting in my neighborhood, Rogers Park, in October. There were probably shootings in every neighborhood sometime this year, but this one attracted extra notice because the victim, Cynthia Trevillion, was a teacher at the local Waldorf School—she was on her way out to a Friday-night dinner with her husband and was unlucky enough to get caught in gang-related cross fire. The bullets hit her in the head and neck and she died immediately.

That’s how things should work, but that’s not how Chicago worked in 2017. For one thing, it was the police who were making this request, and, if you’re black, as one-third of Rogers Park is, you have to wonder how much you can trust the police. (You even have to wonder this as a white person.) You wonder even if the representative the Chicago Police Department had sent to this particular meeting was black.

The protester asked the cops why he couldn’t speak his piece. A police officer told him he shouldn’t be interrupting. The protester asked why only the alderman and representatives of the police got to speak. The police officer said he didn’t know. They let the protester go.

       It’s not “your color I’m going after, it’s what you’re doing,” Warner explained.

       “People hear ‘positive loitering,’ and they think we’re going after black people because they’re the drug dealers and gangbangers. Wrong.”

       When asked what his group could do to change that perception, he said there was “nothing we can do to help that, that’s their mindset.”

And that was it: this was what it was like to live in Chicago in 2017, where everyone wanted the shooting to stop. The police thought they were doing a good thing by encouraging the people of the community to contribute to the overall safety of the neighborhood—when you have power and authority, people should accept your suggestions. They didn’t understand—or maybe they didn’t bother to acknowledge—that by squandering the people’s trust, they had also squandered their authority. Why should anyone listen to the police, even if it would be for their own good, when the police wouldn’t listen to the people they said they wanted to help? So here we are. And still the shootings continue.