CThe mayor of hicago, Lori Lightfoot, said she woke up Monday in shock and pain to her city after crowds brought overnight windows and shops in the shopping area of the north known as the Magnificent Mile.
Following a controversial situation 10 miles away on the south side of the city on Sunday, where police shot a 20-year-old Black man in the back, he was arrested more than 100 people in the trouble that appeared, apparently in retaliation for the shooting, in the upscale business district.
For many of the city’s residents, the events were not so much a shock as a social time bomb going off that has been louder and louder since the spring.
While the destruction in flagship stores made national headlines, weeks of smaller-scale outbreaks on the south and west sides of the city had received relatively little attention, along with a rise in gun violence, amid a public health crisis, economic and policing crisis already poor neighbors.
Joseph Williams, a Black South Side, father of five and community organizer, found himself at a nexus on Sunday when he saw a crowd gathering in his neighborhood after the last police officer was shot. He was warned by a Facebook live stream, he said, and came across an all-too-familiar incident.
‘Minutes after I arrived I looked up [the police] drag a man under the tape of the crime scene and beat him bloody on the sidewalk. “Then they put him in the police car, like he was the one who did something wrong,” Williams told the Guardian.
Williams said he was no stranger to poverty and police violence.
He sees decades of investment in some parts of the city and systemic deprivation in others, such as his own, a majority Black community, where life expectancy is 30 years lower than for those living on the north side of Chicago , home of the Magnificent Mile.
‘If you look at how the system is built, it was never built for our communities to be truly successful. The pandemic shows us that, ”he said.
Normally on Sundays, one of his biggest challenges is finding the perfect Netflix show to watch with his kids, but after the shooting, he spontaneously found himself at the center of mediation efforts between astonished residents and more than 100 officers, some armed with assault rifles, after shooting the police.
Williams, who runs an organization that supports fathers on the south side, was able to help other organizers on the scene reduce tensions by forming what he called a ‘peace wall’ between angry southerners and the police. People slowly dispersed, and he went home.
Then Monday, police chief David Brown cited messages on social media urging people to go north to the Magnificent Mile to cause destruction.
And Lightfoot decided “brazen criminal looting and destruction” at a press conference.
Page May, co-founder of Assata’s Daughters, a radical organization of Black women, said: “Chicago has this unique dissonance in calling itself a progressive place because of Obama and having a Black gay woman as mayor. But if you are incredible having police violence and an apartheid level of segregation and rejection, communities are being forced to support themselves in ways that politicians do not like. ‘
The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the assassination of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May led to nationwide protests and in Chicago has once again put the spotlight on the police department, which has a job record has of racial bias and brutality that goes back years.
Since 1964, Chicago has nearly eliminated the spending per capita of the protagonist, according to recent analysis, making it the third largest police force in the country and the largest relative to the urban population.
After the holiday weekend of the fourth of July ended with 17 people fatally shot and 63 more injured in a rise in gun violence, warned the Rev Gregory Livingston, who until last summer ran an anti-gang organization on the south side, warned of a grim “story of two cities” in Chicago and a legacy of “corruption and racism” exacerbated by coronavirus and the economic fallout.
“There is an individual responsibility [among those shooting], but there are also circumstances that create a climate of violence, “he said at the time, calling on the mayor to address” inequality “.
While the pandemic is calling for life in Chicago and across America, Lightfoot has won praise for its decisive leadership, often viral for its tweets that support social distance.
But while the mayor initially praised protests over Floyd’s assassination as “righteous angerReferring also to some Chicago police killers, this was counteracted by the suspension of free school meals, aggressive policeman and stopping public transportation.
But accused her of running the city under a ‘progressive facade’.
In June, city council members pleaded with Lightfoot to help protect their communities and businesses from the clashes Protestants faced with police and property and business damage.
The council’s Black Caucus accused the mayor of using a national guard to protect the central business district while exposing southern and western communities to chaos and damage, a suggestion that Lightfoot said “insults me deeply, personally , in part because it’s just not the case. “
But Michelle Harris, alderwoman for the Eighth Division on the South Side, asked how she could persuade companies to rebuild there.
‘It is, how will we survive in our community? Nothing, ”she said.
Since March, Chicago’s unemployment rate has grown to 15.6%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Estimates show that on the south side the unemployment rate is more than double that, while on the north side it is below 10%.
Last week, the city announced that a record $ 926 million, more than a third of the city’s tax revenue, would be funneled into new investments through a complex and controversial property tax special program that finances services such as new roads and job training, but has long been criticized as favorite communities and developers.
Meanwhile, poorer Black and Brown communities were asked to compete for a single $ 10 million “Chicago Prize” to fund one community-led initiative to transform their neighborhood.
In April, the mayor joined a row for housing foundations, revealed in a leaked call with councilors.
And although at that conversation they prioritized the supply of hospital beds, seeing the pandemic, but now there are concerns of a looming ‘health desert’ on the south side with a hospital closed after the failure of state funding to to form a larger system with other hospitals. If the closure continues next year, it will be the third such closure of a hospital in a majority Black neighborhood in two years.
And this against a backdrop of other rampant inequalities that fuel gun violence. More than 2,200 people have been affected in the city this year, nearly 700 more than in the whole of 2019.
Now, Lightfoot, which previously promised to remove federal agents, agreed to the Trump administration’s proposal to send 200 federal agents to the city, despite the problems they created in Portland, Oregon. Such agents should not be confused with the federal investigators already on the ground in Chicago who scored an important gangbust earlier this month.
The idea of militarized federal lawmakers coming down to Chicago on the orders of Donald Trump’s Operation Legend is another thing entirely and community organizer Williams fears they would do more harm than good.
“None of these people really want to build relationships with these communities. They do not want to know us, so why are they getting this job, carrying deadly weapons and our police? ” he said.
Black Lives Matter-Chicago, the Black Abolitionist Network and Good Kids Mad City, a non-profit non-profit for youth, want the city to defend the police and cancel the $ 33 million contract between police and public schools in Chicago, to much needed to shift funding to other needs on the South and West sides.
On Saturday morning, ahead of the eruptions on Sunday, mothers are leading a rally calling for police reform and an end to brutality. On Monday, members of Black Lives Matter-Chicago also held a rally, calling for funding from police to divert education, jobs, housing, health care and other public services, and issued a statement.
It reads, in part: “In recent months, too many people – disproportionately black and brown – have lost their jobs, lost their income, lost their homes, and lost their lives because the city did nothing and the Chicago- elite has benefited.
It went on: “If Protestants attack offensive retail stores owned by the rich and serve the rich, that is not ‘our’ city and is never meant for us.”
Williams told the Guardian he wanted a city where his children could “enjoy life” and where city leaders could not maintain and intensify the differences between “up north” and “down south”.
“If there’s going to be one Chicago, make it one Chicago,” he said.
.
