My Poor Home Town, Part II: Send in the Feds?

Responses to my recent posting on corruption in Chicago:

MICHAEL HOLLMAN: I remember something similar from "the old days." I was driving on Sheridan Road and was stopped for an illegal left turn. Since it was December, I asked the cop if I could contribute to the Police Christmas Fund. I made a $20 contribution and off I drove. Funny how nothing ever changes in Chicago. Frozen in amber.

JOAN LICHTERMAN: Dad, Noah Lichterman, was production manager of a toy factory on the West Side. As he was his boss's right-hand man, he was the one who got emergency calls whenever the fire alarm went off. The toy factory was on the second floor, above a factory that made wooden structures for furniture. Probably because of wood dust, fire alarms were not rare. My dad would race to the factory to get there before firemen walked off with any tools that weren't locked down.

DAN LAUBER: I can remember my father giving his good buddy "Jimmy" the cop $5 to let us park right next to Comiskey Park and him getting out of a few tickets after speaking with the cop. Seems he knew a lot of cops named "Jimmy."

JIM GUTMAN: When I was in an auto accident (a bus ran a light and hit my car gently) in Evanston during my year in grad school at Northwestern, I wound up being referred to a lawyer who was the head of the Niles Bar Association. He not only steered me to a doctor who grossly exaggerated my injuries, but he also offered to invent (for a fee) disabilities for me that would prevent me from getting drafted. I refused the latter assistance, but all of this is etched into my Chicago-area memories.

LYNN ROTMAN ANSFIELD: As a teen driver, I learned to keep a ten-dollar bill sticking out from behind my driver's license "just in case." Never had to use it. I got my first (of just two traffic tickets in my life) when I was 35 in Madison WI, where an attempted bribe would have led to an arrest. By the way, I still have my ration books, if you have any Hershey bars.

* * *

Everything was rigged in Chicago. And everything was about race. The two – corruption and race – went hand in hand.

As a cub reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago, I learned the code word “blue.” Certain crimes were news when white people were involved, but “blue” when those involved were black. As in:

Reporter: ‘Hey chief, got a wife murder on South Indiana Avenue, great details, the guy was standing with a bloody knife in his hands and --.” Editor: “On South Indiana? Ain’t that in the Black Belt?” Reporter: “Well yeah boss but --” Editor: “Sorry chum, cheap it out.”

Later on at The Associated Press, I covered ghetto riots – lots of them. After reform police chief O.W. Wilson retired, the cops weren’t equal to the task of control. Neighborhood after neighborhood was laid waste. Some 50 years later, you can still see the damage.

And now those same neighborhoods are back in the news. Residents are killing one another in record numbers and the Chicago police are, apparently, only making things worse. A Justice Department investigation finds them guilty of failing the people they’re there to, in their own motto, “Serve and Protect.”

Justice says it’s common for the Chicago cops to use excessive force, chiefly against blacks and Latinos. Gangs have been blamed for much of Chicago’s appalling gun violence – accurately, I daresay – but the Chicago cops have a particularly chilling way to deal with it. They may purposely drop off gang members in rival gangs’ turf, the Justice Department report says.

In other words, not much has changed since those ‘60s riots I covered, when residents in the riot neighborhoods viewed the police as an occupying army and academics ranked Chicago as the most rigidly segregated big city in America, north or south.

I left Chicago in 1969 so I’m no expert on why things are as they are today, but one thing I will say is this: while Chief Wilson did clean up and modernize the police, some of his “reforms” backfired. Taking cops off streetcorners and putting them in squad cars, for example, severed the connection between the police and those whom they policed.

After Daley the First died, there was a succession of mayors. When Harold Washington was elected Chicago’s first – and last – black mayor in the ‘80s, racial reconciliation seemed possible. Washington was hugely popular in communities of color and even had white support along the lakefront. But Washington died unexpectedly while in office, and with him a lot of hope died too. Though his successor “Richie” Daley – Daley the Second – governed as a uniter-not-a-divider, things got better mainly in white neighborhoods.

So here we are, the dawn of 2017, and what has changed?

Chicago is still the third most racially divided big city in America, according to a 2015 Brookings Institution report quoted in the Chicago Tribune.

Another Brookings report quoted in the Trib finds that income grew 52% for white Chicagoans between 1990-2012, but just 13% for blacks and 15% for Latinos.

The North Lawndale neighborhood where the worst of the mid ‘60s rioting occurred – and where my novel-in-progress To Do Justice is set – tied for the most violent crimes of any Chicago neighborhood in December 2016.

Donald Trump is talking about sending in the Feds.

I visited Chicago last summer for the first time in several years. I stayed in nice hotels north of the Loop, sauntered the Magnificent Mile on a soft August night, ate great food in classy joints, and thronged in the streets with friendly crowds black, white and brown. In a month when the city of Chicago was experiencing the highest violent crime rate in more than 11 years, I never felt anything but safe.

North Lawndale lies only six miles away. It might as well be on Mars.

LAST WORD FROM SAM GILSTON: [Comedian/social critic] Mort Sahl also said Chicago was the only town where an introverted child could play cops and robbers by himself.

Frank S. Joseph

www.frankjoseph.com

P.S. Chicago’s mid ‘60s riots were big and bad, with many deaths and many more injuries. They’d be better remembered were it not for the cataclysms of Watts, Detroit, Newark. But I’m doing my best to bring them back to life in To Do Justice, which unfolds against the backdrop of a city in flames.

To Do Justice, winner of the Scintillating Starts contest (http://writeradvice.com/flash], is looking for a literary agent and/or a publisher. Do any of you kind folks know one or the other (or both)? If yes, please contact me at frank@frankjoseph.com.