SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ✶
A R T S , C U LT U R E , A N D P O L I T I C S
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S O U T H S I D E W E E K LY. C O M
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WE CHARGE GENOCIDE, JAMIE KALVEN, UCPD COMMUNITY FORUM, BUDGET HEARING
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MORE INSIDE
NOVEMBER 5, 2014
IN THIS ISSUE kicking the pigeon
“It was not something threatening about Diane Bond that drew the skullcap crew to her. It was something vulnerable.”
jamie kalven...4 sketches from
the ucpd community forum
“In the absence of information, you don’t have what you need to be a citizen.”
jean cochrane...10 we charge genocide
“Police are the people who are supposed to protect you; when they’re the ones committing the crime, who do you go to?”
hannah nyhart...12
chicago hyde park village
“People are living longer, but not necessarily better. “
jeanne lieberman...16 extending the track
“The only black power was me running down that track.”
max bloom...17
A protestor at Daley Plaza on October 22, 2014, at the National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, theWEEKLY Criminalization of a Generation. 2 SOUTH and SIDE ¬ NOVEMBER 5, 2014
kiran misra
SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is a nonprofit newsprint magazine written for and about neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. We publish in-depth coverage of the arts and issues of public interest alongside oral histories, poetry, fiction, interviews, and artwork from local photographers and illustrators. Started as a student paper at the University of Chicago, the South Side Weekly is now an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting cultural and civic engagement on the South Side, and to providing educational opportunities for developing journalists, writers, and artists. Editor-in-Chief Bea Malsky Managing Editor Hannah Nyhart Deputy Editors John Gamino, Meaghan Murphy Politics Editors Osita Nwanevu, Rachel Schastok Education Editor Bess Cohen Visual Arts Editor Emma Collins Music Editor Jake Bittle Stage & Screen Olivia Stovicek Editor Web Editor Sarah Claypoole Contributing Editors Maha Ahmed, Lucia Ahrensdorf, Lauren Gurley Photo Editor Illustration Editor Layout Editors
Luke White Ellie Mejia Adam Thorp. Baci Weiler
Senior Writers Patrick Leow, Jack Nuelle, Stephen Urchick Staff Writers Olivia Adams, Christian Belanger, Emily Lipstein, Noah Kahrs, Maira Khwaja, Olivia Markbreiter, Jamison Pfeifer, Wednesday Quansah, Arman Sayani Staff Photographers Camden Bauchner, Juliet Eldred, Kiran Misra, Siddhesh Mukerji Staff Illustrators Wei Yi Ow, Hanna Petroski, Amber Sollenberger Editorial Interns
Denise Parker, Clyde Schwab
Business Manager
Harry Backlund
The paper is produced by an all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute each Wednesday in the fall, spring, and winter, with breaks during April and December. Over the summer we publish monthly. Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 1212 E. 59th Street Ida Noyes Hall #030 Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773)234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly Read our stories online at southsideweekly.com
Cover illustration by Ellie Mejia.
IN THE CPD Last Thursday, CPD Superintendent Garry McCarthy faced questions from aldermen as part of the city’s annual budget hearings. The Weekly was there to take notice. What follows are figures McCarthy gave at the hearing, numbers from the proposed 2015 budget, and other stats, quips, and items of interest. ( John Gamino) Rank of the CPD among city departments, by amount of city allocations: 1 Rank of the CPD among city departments, by number of employees: 1 Total number of CPD employees: 14,418 Number of CPD officers: 12,000 Percentage of African Americans among CPD employees: 24 Percentage among Chicago population: 32.9 Percentage of whites among CPD employees: 53 Number of people on the CPD command staff: 7 Number of African Americans: 0 (McCarthy: “That’s something we’ll have to work on”) Percentage of African Americans among McCarthy’s hires: 18 Year in which Alderman Willie Cochran, a former police officer, said there were more African-American leaders in the CPD: 1977 Amount allotted for overtime in 2015: $71,000,000 Expected amount of 2014 overtime expenditures, at the time of the budget hearing: $93,000,000 Expected amount of 2013 overtime expenditures, at budget hearing last year: $93,000,000 Actual amount spent on overtime last year: $103,000,000 Amount allotted for overtime in 2014: $71,000,000 Amount allotted for overtime in 2013: $32,000,000 Criteria the CPD uses for officers it puts on overtime, after seniority: “active and aggressive” Percentage drop in police complaints so far this year: 18 Percentage of police misconduct complaints sustained in 2011 and 2012: 1.2 Percentage by which an April 2014 audit found that CPD had been undercounting aggravated assaults and batteries, due to a failure to count multiple victims: 20.8 Percentage by which the audit found CPD had incorrectly classified assault-related incidents, once filed: 3.1 Number of reports the audit checked for accuracy pre-filing: 0 What Inspector General Joseph Ferguson, who conducted the audit, said of such an examination: “worthy of review and assessment” Number of audits McCarthy deemed necessary, at the budget hearing: 0 Number of ongoing federal investigations of CPD shootings: 1+ Percentage of funding among city’s general operating fund that goes towards the CPD: 39 Percentage increase in the CPD’s general operating funds: 6.4 Percentage increase in the city’s general operating spending: 4.7 Amount received from general operating funds: $1,374,187,790 Additional amount received in outside grants: $49,306,000 Amount in DHS grants Chicago public safety departments will receive to combat terrorism: $60,100,000+ A list of the military-grade equipment in the CPD’s possession, as requested by Alderman Leslie Hairston: “forthcoming through the chair” Year McCarthy cited as the last time Chicago had a murder count as low as this year’s: 1963 Chicago population in 1960: 3,550,404 Chicago population in 2013: 2,718,782 Number of times McCarthy referenced Mike Ditka, when comparing the murder count to 1963: 2 Number of hours between references: 6
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h e world that journalist and activist Jamie Kalven depicted nearly a decade ago in the monumental series on police abuse “Kicking the Pigeon” has largely disappeared. The housing projects at Stateway Gardens, where a clique of Chicago Police Department officers known to many residents as the “skullcap gang” sexually assaulted and tormented Diane Bond, the central figure of the series, along with others, were torn down in 2007. But, as documented through the work of activists and organizations featured throughout this issue, the kinds of concerns about police accountability raised by Kalven’s journalism remain highly relevant. It was out of respect for those concerns that the Illinois Appellate Court ruled this past March that the public has the right to access documents and information pertaining to police misconduct allegations. That ruling was the result of seven years of legal work done by Jamie Kalven and the University of Chicago Law School’s Craig Futterman. In 2007, Kalven asked the district court to make public confidential documents identifying CPD officers with a significant number of complaints made against them, including those accused in the Bond case. After District Judge Joan Lefkow granted Kalven’s request, the city appealed, leading to the overturning of Lekow’s ruling by the 7th Court of Appeals in 2009. Kalven and his team appealed that second ruling, leading to this spring’s victory. In June, the Emanuel
administration announced that it would not appeal the new ruling, and instead outlined unprecedented new procedures that will allow the public to access investigative documents relating to police misconduct. The following is an edited and condensed version of “Kicking the Pigeon,” the series that produced the allegations that led to Kalven’s suit against the city. It was originally published in 2005 on The View from The Ground, an online publication of the Invisible Institute, a journalistic collective comprised of Kalven and five other members, that publishes investigative journalism about marginalized issues and communities. The data and statistics referenced in the piece were accurate at the time of original publication. The Office of Professional Standards (OPS), referenced throughout the piece, was replaced by the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) in 2007. Although IPRA, unlike the OPS, is an independent office outside of the CPD, the Chicago Justice Project, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on issues of police accountability, alleges that the office has not significantly improved on the former organization’s rate of sustaining complaints against officers. (Osita Nwanevu) Content warning: This piece contains graphic descriptions of sexual assault and violence.
Kicking the Pigeon BY JAMIE KALVEN
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n Sunday, April 13, 2003, at about 5pm, Diane Bond, a forty-eightyear-old mother of three, stepped out of her eighth-floor apartment in 3651 S. Federal, the last remaining highrise at the Stateway Gardens public housing development, and encountered three white men. Although not in uniform, they were immediately recognizable by their postures, body language, and bulletproof vests as police officers. Bond gave me the following account of what happened next. “Where do you live at?” one of the officers asked. He had a round face and closely cropped hair. Bond later identified him as Christ Savickas. “Right there,” she pointed to her door. He put his gun to her right temple and snatched her keys from her hand. Keeping his gun pressed to Bond’s head, he opened her front door and forced her into her home. The other officers followed. As Bond stood looking on, they began throwing her belongings around. When she protested, one of them hand4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
cuffed her wrists behind her back and ordered her to sit on the floor in the hallway of the two-bedroom apartment. An officer with salt-and-pepper hair, whom Bond later identified as Robert Stegmiller, entered the apartment with a middle-aged man in handcuffs and called out to his partners, “We’ve got another one.” Bond’s nineteen-year-old son Willie Murphy and a friend, Demetrius Miller, were playing video games in his bedroom at the back of the apartment. Two officers entered the room with their guns drawn. They ordered the boys to lie face down on the floor, kicked them, handcuffed them, then stood them up and hit them a few times. “Why are you all doing this?” Bond protested. Savickas came into the hall and yelled at her, “Shut up, cunt.” He slapped her across the face, then kicked her in the ribs. In the course of searching the apartment, the officers threw Bond’s belongings on the floor, breaking her drinking glasses. Savickas knocked to the floor a large pic-
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ture of a brown-skinned Jesus that sits atop a standing lamp in a corner of the living room. “Would you pick up my Jesus picture?” Bond appealed to him. “Fuck Jesus,” replied Christ Savickas, “and you too, you cunt bitch.” Stegmiller then forced Bond to her feet, led her into her bedroom, and closed the door. “Give us something to go on,” he told her. “If you don’t, we’ll put two bags on you.” He took off his bulletproof vest and laid it on the windowsill. He removed the handcuffs from her wrists. “Look into my eyes, and tell me where the drugs are. If you do,” he gestured toward the hallway where the man he had brought into the apartment was being held, “only that fat motherfucker will go to jail.” Another officer entered the bedroom. Bond later identified him as Edwin Utreras. “Has she been searched?” he asked. “I’m not waiting on no female.” Utreras took her into the bathroom
and closed the door. He ordered her to unfasten her bra and shake it up and down. Sobbing, she did as he told her. He ordered her to take her shoes off. Then he told her to pull her pants down and stick her hand inside her panties. Standing inches away in the small bathroom, he made her repeatedly pull her panties away from her body, exposing herself, while he looked on. “You’ve got three seconds to tell me where they hide it or you’re going to jail.” She extended her arms, wrists together, for him to handcuff her and take her to jail. Utreras didn’t handcuff her. He returned her to the hall and ordered her to sit on the floor. An officer she later identified as Andrew Schoeff was beating the middle-aged man Stegmiller had earlier brought into the apartment. Bond and the boys looked on as he repeatedly punched the man in the face. “He was beating hard on him,” recalled Demetrius Miller. “Full force.” Knocked off balance by his blows, the man fell on a framed picture of the Last
KALVEN they threw a few punches, Stegmiller intervened and removed Fuller’s handcuffs “to make it a fair fight.” The three rolled around on the floor for a couple of minutes. The officers looked on and laughed. “I told the boys to make it look good,” Fuller recalled. “It was for their amusement.” Stegmiller applauded. He left laughing. No arrests were made. The basis for this narrative is a series of interviews with Diane Bond, beginning on the day after the alleged incident, April 14, 2003, and continuing to the present; interviews with Willie Murphy, Demetrius Miller, and Michael Fuller; and the plaintiff’s statement of facts in Bond v. Chicago Police Officers Utreras, et al, a federal civil rights suit brought by Ms. Bond. Officers Robert Stegmiller, Christ Savickas, Andrew Schoeff, and Edwin Utreras deny having any contact with Ms. Bond on the dates alleged.
“I
patricia evans
Diane Bond Supper that was resting on the sofa. The glass shattered. “There ain’t nothing in this house,” Bond kept insisting. “There ain’t nothing in this house.” “Give us the shit, and we’ll put it on him,” said Stegmiller. The name of the man to whom he referred, the man his colleague was beating, is Mike Fuller. On Fuller’s account, he had been descending from a friend’s apartment on the sixteenth floor when he encountered Stegmiller coming up the stairs between the fifth and sixth floors. “Where are you coming from?” Steg-
miller demanded. “From the sixteenth floor,” he replied. “You’re lying,” said Stegmiller. “You’re coming from the eighth floor.” He grabbed Fuller and searched him. Finding $100, Stegmiller pocketed it, then pushed him up the stairs. “I wouldn’t mind shooting me a motherfucker,” he said, “if you try to run.” Stegmiller took Fuller to Bond’s apartment. “He kept telling me that’s where I’d run to,” said Fuller. Once inside the apartment, Stegmiller took a flashlight from a shelf in the kitchen and beat the handcuffed Fuller on the head with it. (“They don’t beat
you,” he observed, “till after they cuff you.”) “If I find dope,” Stegmiller threatened, “it’s gonna be yours.” “I saw how they ramshackled her house,” Fuller recalled. The officers, having found no drugs, were now drifting out of the apartment. Stegmiller made a proposition to the two boys: if they beat up Fuller, they could go free. “If you don’t beat his ass,” he told Murphy, “we’ll take you and your mother to jail.” The boys put on a show for the officers. (“Hitting him on the arms, fake kicking,” Miller said later. “No head shots.”) After
t’s like a nightmare,” Bond told me the day after her encounter with the police. “All I did last night was cry.” When I knocked on her door, she was cleaning up. She gave me a tour and showed me the damage—the shattered picture of the Last Supper, the damaged frame of Murphy’s high school graduation picture, the broken drinking glasses, the clothes and objects strewn around Murphy’s room, the one room she had not yet cleaned up. I had at that time known Diane Bond for several years. In my role as advisor to the Stateway Gardens resident council, I worked out of an office on the ground floor of 3544 S. State, the building in which she lived. Every so often I would see her in passing, most often going to or coming from her job as a public school janitor. I didn’t know her well but formed an impression of a cheerful woman in coveralls who moved through the turbulent scene “up under the building”—at once drug marketplace and village square—with an easygoing, friendly manner. Her apartment in 3651 S. Federal is deeply inhabited. Two large, comfortable sofas, arranged around a coffee table, dominate the living room. The top of the television cabinet functions as a sort of household altar for religious objects and family photos, among them pictures of her three sons: Delfonzo, now thirty years old, Larry, twenty-nine, and Willie, twenty-one. Working as a janitor, Bond raised her boys as a single mother. She expresses pride in the fact that they have largely managed to stay clear of trouble in an environment
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The beginning of the demolition of the Stateway Gardens towers. where that is no small achievement. For the last three years, she has been involved with a man named Billie Johnson. Quiet and gentle in manner, Johnson labors in the economy of hustle: repairing cars, helping maintain the Stateway Park District field house and grounds, doing odd jobs for his neighbors. At my urging, Bond went to the Office of Professional Standards of the Chicago Police Department to register a complaint against the officers who she said had assaulted her. As it happens, the OPS office is located at 35th and State in the IIT Research Institute Tower, the nineteen-story building visible from her apartment that stands like a wall of glass and steel between Stateway and the IIT campus to the north. OPS investigates complaints of ex6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
cessive force by the police. It is staffed by civilians and headed by a chief administrator who reports to the superintendent of police. When someone makes a complaint to OPS, an investigator takes down his or her statement of what happened. The individual is asked to review the statement and to sign it. In theory, OPS conducts its own investigation, interviewing the police officer or officers involved along with any witnesses, then renders a judgment. In the vast majority of cases, it finds that the complaint is “not sustained”—i.e., the investigators could not determine the validity of the allegations of abuse. In a small number of cases each year, OPS sustains the complaint and recommends discipline for the officer(s) involved. An officer facing discipline may appeal to the Police Board, a
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body composed of nine civilians appointed by the mayor. The board has the power to reduce the punishment recommended by OPS or the superintendent and to reverse OPS altogether. OPS has long been sharply criticized by human rights activists who argue that it functions not as a vehicle for holding the police accountable but as a shield against such accountability. They cite the numbers. For example, from 2001 through 2003, OPS received at least 7,610 complaints of police brutality. Significant discipline was imposed by the CPD in only thirteen of those cases—six officers were terminated and seven were suspended for thirty days or more. In other words, an officer charged with brutality during 2001–2003 had less than a one-in-a-thousand chance of being
fired. It is, thus, extremely unlikely that an OPS investigation will yield any meaningful discipline for the officers involved. Yet it does not seem unreasonable to hope that a pending OPS investigation will at least serve to deter the officers named from further contact with the person who filed the complaint. That, at any rate, is what I told Diane Bond by way of reassurance.
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n the evening of April 28, 2003— two weeks after she filed a complaint with OPS about the April 13 incident—Diane Bond returned home at about 7:30pm from the corner store. She encountered Officers Stegmiller, Savickas, Utreras, and Schoeff outside her apartment door. Also present was a fifth officer she
KALVEN later identified as Joseph Seinitz. He was tall and lean, in his thirties, with closely cropped blond hair. She recognized him as the officer known on the street as “Macintosh.” The officers had two young men in custody. Demetrius Miller was one of them; she didn’t recognize the other. His name, she gathered, was Robert Travis. Bond recounted the incident to me the next day. One of the officers barked at her, “Get the hell out of here!” Moments later, as she was descending the stairs, another yelled, “Come here!” Seinitz came down the stairs and grabbed her. Holding her by the collar of her jacket, he dragged her back up to the eighth floor, her body scraping against the stairs. While Seinitz held Bond, Savickas punched her in the face and demanded, “Give me your fucking keys!” “They snatched my jacket off and took the keys out of my pocket,” she told me. “I was so scared, I pissed on myself.” The officers entered her apartment. They ordered her to sit on the sofa in her living room. The two young men, handcuffed, sat on her glass coffee table. Stegmiller came in from outside the apartment and placed two bags of drugs on the top of her microwave. He would later testify that he had found the drugs in an “EXIT” sign in the corridor outside her apartment. One officer stayed with Bond and the two boys, while the other three searched the apartment. The officer leaned back on her television cabinet, where family pictures and religious artifacts were arrayed. She begged him not to sit on her icon of the Virgin Mary. “Fuck the Virgin Mary,” he said, as he swept his hand across the top of the cabinet, knocking the icon and other religious objects to the floor. Seinitz and two other officers were searching Bond’s bedroom. They motioned to her to come into the room. They told her to pull down her pants. Then they told her to pull down her panties. Seinitz brandished a pair of needle-nose locking pliers and threatened to pull out her teeth if she didn’t cooperate. “Why’d you pee on yourself?” one of them taunted. They ordered her to bend over with her back to them, exposing herself. While she was in that position, they instructed her to reach inside her vagina “and pull out the drugs.”
Bond was overcome by terror. As a child and young woman, she had, she told me, suffered repeated sexual abuse at the hands of men, including a gang rape when she was a high school student. Now, despite the official complaint she had made against these officers, they were again swarming around her, threatening her, cursing her, forcing her to undress. She feared they would rape or kill her. “I didn’t know what they were going to do next.” She only knew that each thing they did was worse than the last. They brought her back into the living room. One of the officers instructed Travis to “stiffen up,” as he punched him repeatedly in the stomach. “Do you want us to put a package on
the arm. “Where are you going?” he demanded. “To the store.” She had her keys in her hand. “Give me your keys,” he said. “Give me your goddamn keys.” “I’m not going to give you my keys,” she protested. “I’m not going through that again.” She shifted her keys from one hand to the other and put them in her pocket. Stegmiller grabbed her around the throat and pushed her up against the elevator door. “I’ll beat your motherfucking ass.” “Somebody please help me,” she called out. “Please help me.” Savickas stood by, while Stegmiller choked Bond. When Johnson appealed to
Stegmiller made a proposition to the two boys: if they beat up Fuller, they could go free. “If you don’t beat his ass,” he told Willie, “we’ll take you and your mother to jail.” her?” the officer asked Travis. “I don’t care what you do with her,” he replied. They left with the two men. Bond locked the door, collapsed on her sofa, and wept. Being forced to expose herself while Officer Seinitz and the others threatened her was “like a dry rape,” she told me the day after the incident.
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n April 30, 2003—two days after her second encounter with the police—Bond and her boyfriend Billie Johnson went downstairs at about 11:30pm. They were going to the store to get some wine. As they came out of the stairwell into the elevator corridor in the lobby, they encountered Officers Stegmiller and Savickas. Stegmiller grabbed Bond by
him to intervene, Savickas gave him a hard push in the chest. Only when other residents came on the scene did Stegmiller release Bond and tell her, “Get the fuck out of here.” “I was crying, I was angry. I was hysterical,” Bond recalled. “I told my old man, ‘I’m so tired. I’m tired of this.” She and Johnson went directly to the OPS in the IIT building at 35th and State. Although OPS is open twenty-four hours a day, security personnel in the lobby of the building would not let her go up to the office. She left and went to the administrative headquarters of the CPD at 35th and Michigan. The officers at the desk were not welcoming. They threatened to put Bond and Johnson in lockup. In the end, they took down her name and address. She then went to a store on the corner of 37th and
State and attempted to call OPS, but the phone in the store was dead. It was raining hard. Bond and Johnson returned to the building. The police were still there. They slipped in. He went to her apartment on the eighth floor. She went upstairs to thank the neighbors whose presence had stopped Stegmiller’s assault on her. In a vacant apartment on the fifteenth floor, she saw Seinitz—“Macintosh.” He didn’t see her. She fled the building. Again, she attempted to go to OPS, and again she was barred by security. She returned to 3651-53 S. Federal and waited outside in the rain and darkness for about half an hour until the police left the building. Then she climbed the stairs to her home. Officers Seinitz, Savickas, Stegmiller, Utreras, and Schoeff were, until recently, familiar presences at Stateway Gardens and other South Side public housing developments. With the exception of Seinitz, who is known as “Macintosh,” they are referred to on the street not by their names but as “the skullcap crew” (they often wear watch caps) or “the skinhead crew” (several have buzz cuts). They are reputed to prey on the drug trade—routinely extorting money, drugs, and guns from drug dealers—in the guise of combating it. But what distinguishes them, above all, say residents, is their racism. Several are rumored to have swastika tattoos on their bodies. One resident described them to me as “KKK under blue-and-white.” And black officers have been heard to refer to them as “that Aryan crew.” “They get their jollies humiliating black folks,” a former Stateway resident told me. “They get off on it.”
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question persists at the center of this narrative. Why? Assuming Diane Bond’s account is true, why did members of the skullcap crew repeatedly invade her home and her body? What possible rationale could there be for their conduct? The abuses occurred in the context of the “war on drugs.” That was the pretext for raiding her building, searching her home and person, and interrogating her. But does the enforcement of drug laws, in the absence of individualized suspicion (much less a search warrant supported by probable cause), explain the abuses? Does it make sense of the senseless, sadistic conduct alleged? This is not an easy question to answer. For it demands we entertain the possibility that the abuses were an end in themselves and the drug war a vehicle to that end: the possibility that members of
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the CPD terrorized Diane Bond for the perverse pleasure of it. I recall arriving at 3651 S. Federal on a winter day in 2003, just as an unmarked police car was driving away. Once it was out of sight, the drug marketplace up under the building would reopen for business. Several people were standing outside the building, looking on. Among them was a woman known on the street as Betty Boop, who acts as a lookout for drug dealers to support her heroin addiction. “You know what that crazy man did?” she asked me, referring to one of the officers. “He just walked up and kicked that bird for no reason.” She pointed to a pigeon on the pavement. It was wobbly and disoriented—in obvious distress. “Now why did he have to do that?” Betty asked. The image comes back to me now, as I try to make sense of the patterns of the skullcap crew: kicking the pigeon. Casual cruelty can become a way of life in a setting where everything is permitted, where you enjoy de facto dominion over other human beings who are by definition not to be believed. Any account they might give as victims or witnesses is impeached in advance, for they are gangbangers and drug dealers. They are the mothers and grandmothers of gangbangers and drug dealers. They are residents of a public housing development that is seen less as a community than as a loose criminal conspiracy to engage in gangbanging and drug dealing. Some officers are made uncomfortable by the license this perverse logic confers upon them; they know if they don’t restrain themselves, nobody else will. And some exult in the power it gives them to toy with other human beings. Seen in this light, it was not something threatening about Diane Bond that drew the skullcap crew to her. It was something vulnerable.
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April 12, 2004, the Edwin F. Mandel Legal Aid Clinic of the University of Chicago Law School filed a federal civil rights suit on behalf of Diane Bond. The suit names as defendants five officers—Edwin Utreras, Andrew Schoeff, Christ Savickas, Robert Stegmiller, and Joseph Seinitz—and the city of Chicago. It claims the defendants violated Bond’s constitutional rights by subjecting her to illegal searches, unlawful seizures, and the use of excessive force. It further 8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
claims they were motivated to abuse Bond by her gender and race, in violation of the equal protection provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Illinois Hate Crime Statute. The Bond suit is the fifth federal civil rights suit that Professor Craig Futterman
Bond v. Chicago Police Officers Edwin Utreras, et al is straightforward: each officer denies having had any contact with Diane Bond on any of the dates she claims she was abused. In their reply brief to a motion seeking access to police photos for the purpose of identification, the city attorneys
From 2001 through 2003, OPS received at least 7,610 complaints of police brutality. Significant discipline was imposed by the CPD in only thirteen of those cases. In other words, an officer charged with brutality during 2001–2003 had less than a one-in-a-thousand chance of being fired. and his student colleagues at the Mandel Clinic have brought against the CPD in recent years as part of an initiative called the Stateway Civil Rights Project. In my role as advisor to the Stateway Gardens resident council, I helped develop this initiative and initially brought the Bond incidents to the attention of the UofC lawyers. On April 7, 2005, Futterman filed a motion for permission to amend the complaint to charge that Bond’s abuse resulted from systemic practices and policies of the CPD, and to add as defendants Philip Cline, the superintendent of police, Terry Hillard, the former superintendent, and Lori Lightfoot, the former administrator of the OPS. On June 6, the court granted the motion. The theory of the amended complaint is that the city had a de facto policy of “failing to properly supervise, monitor, discipline, counsel, and otherwise control its police officers,” and that top police officials were aware “these practices would result in preventable police abuse.” As a result, Futterman argues, members of the skullcap crew knew they could act with impunity. The city and the high officials named in the suit were thus complicit in their abuses. The city’s defense strategy in Diane
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make reference to “the highly unusual and outlandish allegations of abuse in this case” and to “the vague and reckless nature of plaintiff accusations”—language that suggests they will seek to portray Bond as unstable and delusional, that they will argue the abuses she alleges are figments of her imagination. The fact she was not arrested is relevant to the issue being addressed in the brief—access to police photos—for the absence of the documentation provided by arrest reports makes identification of the officers involved a central issue. The brief ’s phrasing and repetition, however, go beyond that point to imply Bond cannot have been “severely victimized and humiliated by the police officers,” because she was not arrested in any of the incidents. The second means by which the city attorneys seek to impeach Bond’s account is to emphasize repeatedly that her physical injuries are inconsistent with her allegations of abuse. For example, with respect to the first incident, they state: Despite the elaborate description of physical abuse she gave, as of April 15, 2003, plaintiff had only a dime size area of swelling under
her right eye for which she sought no medical treatment. The city seeks, in effect, to narrow “abuse” to “physical abuse.” In her OPS interview regarding the April 13 incident, Bond states she was slapped once in the face and kicked once in the side. One sentence of the two-and-a-half page interview is devoted to this physical abuse. The “elaborate description” of abuses that constitutes the bulk of the interview details a series of assaults that caused serious injury without leaving marks on her body. She describes, among other things, having an officer put a gun to her head; witnessing officers destroying her property, including religious objects sacred to her; looking on while officers struck her teenaged son; being forced to disrobe and expose herself under the gaze of a male officer; watching the police beat a man they had brought into her home; and seeing her son and his friend forced to assault that man—to put on a demeaning show for the amusement of the officers—as a condition of release. The injuries inflicted by these abuses were not the kind that could be documented by a trip to the emergency room.
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PS has an inherently difficult mission. Police misconduct tends to take place in the shadows. And the darkness is deepened by the “code of silence” among officers. The Bond complaint describes the code: According to standard practice, police officers refuse to report instances of police misconduct, despite their obligation under police regulations to do so. Police officers either remain silent or give false and misleading information during official investigations in order to protect themselves and fellow officers from internal discipline, civil liability, and criminal charges. In order to bring misconduct to light, the CPD would need to move aggressively against this institutional culture. It would need to bring a high degree of skepticism to the process and be alert to the gang phenomenon that so often figures in police misconduct. It would need to create incentives and disincentives to encourage cooperation. And it would need to provide meaningful forms of protection for officers
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patricia evans
Drug dealers' place of work "up under" a building at Stateway Gardens.
who come forward to report on the misconduct of fellow officers. The CPD does none of these things. OPS uncritically gives corroborative weight to the statements of other officers at the scene. It appears rarely, if ever, to recommend that an officer who witnessed an incident of misconduct by a fellow officer be charged with failure to report a crime. And it is subject to a city policy that bars the CPD from transferring whistleblowers from their units in order to protect them against retaliation. Rather than penetrating the code of silence, OPS practices mesh with it to form a system that seems designed to produce judgments of “not sustained.” The universal defense offered by police departments charged with brutality, as by governments charged with torture, is that “there will always be a few bad apples in any barrel.” There is a measure of truth in this. It is generally agreed that the vast preponderance of abuse is committed by perhaps five percent of officers. This is not an insignificant number in a force of more than 13,000. And there is no reason to assume the five percent is evenly distributed; there may be sections of the police force,
such as the public housing section, where the percentage is significantly higher. Yet the image of “a few bad apples” remains plausible. It is a way of talking about police abuse that keeps visible the large majority of officers who do not commit abuses and can be assumed to deplore such conduct. The image is, however, fatally flawed in two respects. It does not comprehend the scale of the harm a handful of violent agents, acting with impunity, can do. Nor does it convey the impact those few bad apples, if not removed, will have on the barrel. “We’re the real police.” Several Stateway residents have quoted this declaration by members of the skullcap crew. Also: “You know what we’re capable of.” Or alternatively: “You have no idea what we’re capable of.” The implication is clear: we are above the law. Residents have little reason to question that assertion, for despite numerous complaints against them, crew members have continued to prey at will on public housing communities. A rogue crew, operating with impunity, can also do profound, long-lasting damage to the legitimacy of government, alienating whole populations from civil au-
thority and engendering the criminal and anti-social behaviors it is supposedly combating. This is a dynamic I have become familiar with during my years at Stateway. s you read this account of the abuses Diane Bond alleges Chicago police officers committed against her—so raw, so appalling, so unacceptable—did you find yourself thinking, “But maybe she’s a drug dealer...maybe someone close to her, her son perhaps or her boyfriend, is a drug dealer...maybe her community is overrun by drug dealers”? Did you find yourself searching for reasons that could somehow explain and perhaps justify the police conduct alleged? The impulse is understandable. Indeed, it is hard to resist, because we do not want to believe police officers would act this way. But consider the implications. Are “the series of horrendous acts” (to quote the city attorneys) alleged in the Bond case any less horrendous, if the officers had probable cause to come to her door? The defendants are not making that argument. They are flatly denying any contact whatsoever with Bond on the dates of the alleged incidents. Yet is there perhaps a sense in which we are
A
inclined to make the argument on their behalf? Are we so conditioned to apartheid justice—to “the war on drugs” as an exception to constitutional norms akin to the exception being carved out for “the war on terror”—that we can no longer confidently recognize the heinous nature of the crimes at issue? After decades of mass incarceration and the practice of guilt by association have we so lost our bearings that the mantra “gangs and drugs” suffices as an all-purpose rationale for any act a police officer commits in an abandoned neighborhood? Has the process by which those who live in such neighborhoods come to be defined as “criminals” rather than “blacks” (or “fellow citizens” or “neighbors”) advanced so far that it now blinds us to the character and antecedents of what we are allowing to be done in our names? Postscript: In 2007, Bond settled her case with the city out of court for $150,000. © 2014 the Invisible Institute, all rights reserved.
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HYDE PARK
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We Charge Genocide Activists allege torture in a report to the U.N.
lexi drexelius
D
ominique Franklin, “Damo” to friends, was twenty-three-years-old when he died. He spent the last two weeks of his life in a coma at Northwestern Memorial Hospital after being tased multiple times by a Chicago police officer. Witnesses, speaking anonymously to the Tribune, said he’d been turning to run away. The following month, activists in Chicago came together in answer to a call from tenured organizer and educator Mariame Kaba, spurred by his death. Next week, this same group of activists will send a delegation to the United Nations to argue that the unchecked violence of the Chicago Police Department must be recognized as torture. Their report is titled “We Charge Genocide.” The eight delegates, none older than thirty, will present a fifteen-page paper on systemic police brutality against youth of color in Chicago. The report makes the case that this violence, and the alleged impunity with which it is enacted, violates six articles of the U.N. Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. It takes its name from a petition presented long before the Convention existed, when black leaders took charges of genocide to the U.N. in Paris, in 1951. Its body of evidence, culled from verbal testimony, online submissions, and CPD and independent data, paints a picture of brutality and discrimination, much of it unchecked by official systems. The Convention’s definition identifies torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person,” where that act is committed by someone in an official capacity in pursuit of information, punish-
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BY HANNAH NYHART
ment, or intimidation. “We had multiple stories that young people were sharing with us of instances where they’re clearly turning themselves in or complying with officers’ wishes, in a way that there’s no need for more force,” explains Page May, the report’s lead author and one of the U.N. delegates. “It’s clearly intentional, it’s by a public official, it’s absolutely unlawful.” “There’s also the constant grind of it all,” May continues. “Youth report constant harassment, constant verbal abuse. The feeling of always being criminalized by the police. And at any moment they have to power to take your life away. And when we look at how specific this targeted harassment is, and how widespread within those targeted communities it occurs, to me that’s torture. And I’m not a lawyer or a U.N. Committee member, but I don’t see how this isn’t torture. I think that’s a hard word for people to reconcile with, but torture is what’s happening. It really is that bad.” Since Franklin was tased six months ago, twenty-five people have been shot by the Chicago police. In the following pages, Mariame Kaba and Todd St. Hill, one of the U.N. delegates, talk about where the report is drawn from, and their hopes for its impact. The Weekly asked the CPD for a response to the We Charge Genocide report, but was not given one by press time.
KABA PEACE
Mariame Kaba
M
ariame Kaba, a longtime educator and activist, has advocated for black youth on issues ranging from prison justice to women’s empowerment. She is the founder and director of Project NIA, an organization dedicated to ending youth incarceration, and has had a hand in founding numerous other justice-based projects. In June, she called together organizers across a spectrum of Chicago anti-racist groups to address police violence against black youth. The collective would generate the We Charge Genocide report and its related accountability projects, including ChiCopwatch trainings and a viral campaign. She spoke with the Weekly on the morning before last week’s CPD budget hearing at City Council, for which We Charge Genocide members had published a set of questions about accountability for aldermen to ask at the hearing. She talked about the history of brutality and resistance, recent and decades old, that grounds the U.N. report, and her hopes for the future the delegation might help create. Can you speak a little bit to the shared roots of Project NIA and We Charge Genocide, issue-wise, and how you see their work as overlapping or distinct? I started Project NIA five-and-a-half years ago, and the work is focused on eradicating youth incarceration, youth justice related issues...we do popular education stuff, and then we also have an incubation side of our work; we support people who want to do projects that relate to juvenile justice and are taking initiative in making that happen. Circles and Cyphers is a project that Project NIA catalyzed and incubated until earlier this year, when they went out on their own under the auspices of the United Church of Rogers Park. Circles works with gang-affiliated and prison-involved young people and uses hiphop to kind of talk about issues and then to develop leadership. One of the young people who’d begun to get involved with that project [Dominique Franklin], was tased and killed by Chicago police back in May, and I think I saw a lot of the young people who I’ve come to know and really love very much struggling mightily around that issue, around the fact that, you know, their friend was killed. And people felt that all sorts of ways: anger and worry and sadness. But it was hard to figure out a way to mold those into a space where people could use those emotions to organize, to address the underlying issues
that would lead to this kind of violence. So I put out a call to a few people initially and said, “Do you all want to come together and talk about what kind of responses we might have, and one idea I have is to basically update the 1951 ‘We Charge Genocide’ petition, bring it up to the twenty-first century. And what would that look like? What could that be? Maybe we can get a delegation of young people and do it based on that.” And so that was the beginning. We met in early June and early July. We Charge Genocide is not an organization, it’s a vehicle where people who have many different organization affiliations, or none, come together and address the goals that we set in those two meetings. We talk about the police at Project NIA, mainly because the police are the gatekeepers of the state, and they’re also the representations that young people encounter, that they see on a regular basis, that are incredibly oppressive throughout, and that are unfair. So they talk a lot about the police. And so in that case, Project NIA deals with these issues, it has to. But We Charge Genocide is a separate iteration. In the past you’ve expressed frustration with the public discourse around these issues that treats police violence as episodic. So much of that discourse ends up hinging on individuals, and whether they were innocent, whether they were armed. As an activist, how do you balance the desire to hold up and
“Black people are ten times more likely than white people to be shot by a CPD officer. Further, from 2009 to 2013, although black people comprised only 32.3% of Chicago’s overall population, 75% of police shooting victims were black.”
WCG report, page 6
honor individual narratives, while trying to impress that this is a systemic problem? I think you do what we hope we’re doing. My belief is that you have to think about the history of these kinds of issues, how they’ve played out. You have to allow people to understand that it’s a particular social issue, a particular problem. For example, there’s been a claim being made, for as long as there’s been police, that police have violated and harmed and been violent toward people. So first, letting people understand the history of these things, and that they’ve been going on for a long time, and that people have been resisting for a long time. I think that’s important. And then the second thing is to be very much
focused on—people care about individual stories, who is it, what happened. And carrying those, that’s fine, but you always have to be putting that in the larger context, the history of the matter, but also the current articulations and the current manifestations of the issue. So I think it’s incumbent on the people who are working around these issues to constantly remind people that it is bigger than one person, while also honoring the people who’ve individually been harmed. It’s always the both-and; it’s not an either-or. It’s always both-and. Can you speak to the goals of sending the We Charge Genocide petition and delegation to Geneva? Sure. At bottom, we have dual ideas, at least
NOVEMBER 5, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13
as I saw it initially. First and foremost, it’s important to place ourselves within the broader history of how people have addressed various kinds of issues, and so I felt harking back to We Charge Genocide was also its own popular education attempt, to talk about how other people have addressed these issues in the past. So people have been able to go back and read the petition, see what other people have done, understand and know the story. So one was just rooting us in the history of struggle, and in particular the black freedom movement.
original petition and not connect it to the other things that happened afterward that allowed for some changes to come into being in the country, whether it was laws or it was people getting fired from their jobs or whatever it was. It was building more of a movement, more momentum. In the same way that those particular folks operated at that time, it seemed to me important at this stage, in this historical moment, for us to break out a little bit of the ways in which we had traditionally done things.
Part of the reason why the original delegation came into being was because [W.E.B.] Du Bois and [Paul] Robeson and [William L.] Patterson and all of the other folks who were involved in that petition [the Civil Rights Congress] were incredibly frustrated. This was 1951—the ideas earlier than that, what people understand as the civil rights movement but is really the black freedom movement—in a moment when that was actually stalled…people are getting killed left right and center, still, with impunity, and this is before the Montgomery bus boycotts, right, this is before all of those things.
This delegation, we think, is the first ever del-
And so you can’t look at the history of that 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
But it’s not just holding the police accountable, it’s asking the questions of, “why the police” and “why policing” at all. I think that it’s a question. Again Wilderson had made a great point: “I’m not against police brutality. I’m against police.” I’m against police. And that’s a different conversation, right, because it’s a conversation that begs the question of whether you can reform the system, and basically suggests that you cannot, and that therefore you have to think of abolition. And then what does that lead to? That’s a bigger and different question.
“We’re sitting in a house playing video games and we hear a banging on the door. Before we know it, the door is kicked down and there’s five special-ops officers with their huge M16s drawn, pointed at us: Three fifteen-year-olds playing video games...They say if we move they are gonna kill us.”
And so people are looking for something that would break open the struggle for black freedom in this country in a different way, and they come up with going to the U.N. on that. The idea was that the United States needed to have a flashlight pointed at it from the outside that would change the dynamic in some way. That people were sick and tired of the traditional ways they’d been trying to do things and getting nowhere. And so they needed to do something outside of the box, and get out of the box. When Patterson shows up to Paris, his stash of petitions are all gone from his luggage— so that shows you something about what the country felt about the threat of having black people going overseas to talk about the crimes and the basic torture of the population, particularly black people in this country. They don’t ever want to be put on blast in front of other people and then be unable to claim that this is a country that values human rights, and is exceptional. Every time you out, from the inside of the country, the myth of American exceptionalism, that makes a lot of Americans—not just the elite, but even those people who see themselves as aspiring to the elite, as becoming the elite—that makes them incredibly upset and unhappy.
work, really deeply in the white community.
WCG report, page 3
egation of young people of color, certainly ever to present to the Committee Against Torture, and maybe to present in any of those kinds of forums before. So that’s also significant, in and of itself: who is going.
I always engage in reform mainly because real people are harmed, and targeted, and I think of reform as harm reduction, but I don’t think of it as an end in and of itself, ever.
Who do you think should be holding the police accountable that isn’t right now?
In the meantime, what do you think communities can be doing directly to hold police forces accountable?
Everybody. Particularly white people. But white people are the police in some esoteric way, right? Frank Wilderson talks about the “corporeality of whiteness” being the police. And I think that, I think that that’s really important. And I don’t know who’s doing that
A lot of things. There are a lot of things already happening. I always say this over and over again, people are continually saying it, but it’s just true: we do not need more campaigns or organizations. We have many. We need more people. We need more people. And that means
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we need more people to join existing work. There’s work at the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression; they’re trying to push for a civilian review board that’s an elected civilian board that would oversee Chicago. There’s a Coalition for Equitable Policing on the South Side; they’re trying to fight the UofC police, which is a private police entity that’s completely unaccountable, that oversees 65,000 people, most of whom don’t go to the University of Chicago. People are fighting for transparency and data and some policies to be put in place around racial profiling, for the UCPD, which is its own entity in the city. Loyola should try to do the same, and other campuses that have police. You can join We Charge Genocide; we have a monthly meeting. You can email us and are welcome to join in and be part of that. There are people right now fighting for police issues today at the City Council hearing around pushing for Chicago police to understand better what the budget is, and to push for less money to go to the police. Asking some really good questions of the CPD, to try to get answers around police militarization and police misconduct. There’s the folks at the Invisible Institute pushing on data, for complaints to be released, and they got back this batch of data from it that came out a couple months ago about police complaints and we finally learned a lot about the complaints that aren’t actually sustained, which is most of them. I mean, for me, there’s no shortage of work. And it’s not that this work is new, most of it is work that’s been going on for many years under different auspices. So I think that people can do any number of things in their own way, whatever you feel. Whether it’s on the individual level, where you’re monitoring the police yourself, whether it’s pushing your elected officials. Stop calling the police yourself. Stop using the police as a first resort for everything that happens. Think about the reaction, the chain reaction that you set into motion when you call the cops. I hope that what comes through is the importance of people doing something. I’m so uninterested in the usual, I don’t know what you’d call it, “My strategy’s radical-er than thou’s, than yours.” I’m really uninterested in that. I really feel we’re at a time now where all hands literally need to be on deck.
ST. HILL
Todd St. Hill T
o dd St. Hill is an organizer with We Charge Genocide’s Cop Watch programming, which trains and promotes on-the-ground recording of police activity. St. Hill came to Chicago from Washington, D.C. He draws parallels between police violence in the two cities, and when he recalls growing up in the capitol, he talks about friends being followed down the street, harassed, or beaten by cops. At thirty, St. Hill is the oldest member of a delegation that has stressed leading by the youth. He talked with the Weekly about the goals of the delegation, and the brutality it names and demands redress for. Can you tell me about how you got involved in We Charge Genocide, and also about the focus on youth, both in terms of the delegation and the report as a whole, and why that was important?
to develop in a healthy way in that kind of environment? On top of that, they have the heavy hand of the police, the deadly hand of the police. It's coming down on them, every day.
I'd been doing a lot of work around anti-racist issues in Chicago, just started up back doing it maybe a little over a year ago. I was doing work with the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and with the Campaign to End the New Jim Crow. And the groups that I work with were invited to a first meeting on We Charge Genocide, all of the organizations who do work around anti-racist issues were invited, and I thought that was really important. To be a part of something that sounded like, at the time, it would be including different people from different organizations who had different ideas of different political orientations, and hadn't been working together on a specific project, which was police brutality. I thought that was very important, and I wanted to be a part of that.
When the report talks about the specific articles of the convention that it argues are being violated, those charges rely on defining police brutality in Chicago as torture. Could you talk a little more about that claim?
As far as orienting around youth of color, I think the report, the data, speaks for itself. People of color in general are disproportionately affected by police brutality, and in Chicago you have young people of color, ninety-two percent of taser uses involved black and Latino targets, forty-nine were ages eight to sixteen. I think those numbers are devastating. When you think about youth in Chicago, what environment they have to live in, it's one that lacks schools, one that lacks hospitals and trauma centers and health clinics. In some areas libraries are closing down. How are youth supposed
I think the use of excessive force by the police, the use of tasering that has injured and even in some cases killed people…I think those things can be described as torture. And the sheer numbers, the fact that black citizens are ten times more likely than whites to be shot by a police officer. Ten times more likely. And there's data that backs that up. 10,000+ general complaints. It accounts for more than saying that this is just a problem the police seem to have. I think those numbers constitute an actual case of torture. On top of that, the testimonies as well, where you have young people describing their encounters with police, being brutalized, beaten, things of that nature. Having their door kicked in when they're at home, not making a sound aside from playing video games with their friends. And the police are kicking in their doors with automatic and semiautomatic weapons pointed at them. It's not as though these are twenty-something-year-olds, either, these are fifteen-year-olds this is happening to.
lexi drexelius
“The impunity of the CPD exposes the underlying relationship between communities of color and the state...a relationship where violence isused by the police to enforce and maintain the marginalization of communities of color.” WCG report, page 9
You never know when it'll happen. Com-
NOVEMBER 5, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15
plaining oftentimes results in retaliation by the police. So not only are you in a state of heightened awareness, wondering what's going to happen to you whenever you walk outside your door, you're also concerned about being targeted for retaliation by the police if you complain. There's nowhere for you to go. What do you mean when you talk about retaliation? What do you think people are worried about? I think the report points out an example of when, after the Roshad McIntosh shootings, there were people who were playing cards on the street who saw what happened, and spoke out against it immediately, and were beaten up by the police. That's what I mean by retaliation. Police are the people who are supposed to protect you; when they're the ones committing the crime, who do you go to? And I think that's what the trip to Geneva represents. We need to go to someone who will listen to us. Both Mariame Kaba and the U.N. report itself talk about the 1951 report, and that the Committee Against Torture has cited the U.S. for police violence, but that there haven't been sufficient changes made on the part of the U.S. I'm wondering what sort of pressure you hope to bring to bear through this. Are there specific ways in which you hope this will force change? There are a couple of things that make this a little bit different from other times the topic of police violence has been taken up. I think Ferguson plays a big part in this being very different. I think the fact that Trayvon Martin's family has been to the U.N. recently—we're going to the U.N. in a context where more and more people are going to the U.N. and pointing out the police misconduct with impunity, and the fact that the federal government isn't really doing anything to address it, or even properly document the claims and complaints that are being levied against police all over the country, but in Chicago in particular. 16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
We would like to see the CPD provide some sort of information on steps that it would take to end the cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment of young people. There needs to be a pattern and practice investigation of CPD treatment. And then overall, I think this trip does raise awareness of a need to critically address the environment in communities of color across the country. This is not just a Chicago thing. It's not just a Ferguson thing. It's happening in small and large towns all over the country in relation to people of color. And there needs to be a raised awareness and action against that, to show that people of color have a voice, and that it's taken seriously. In the report, and in press releases, you touch on the militarization of police. Why, given the kind of harm that can be done even with tasers, does it matter what kind of weapon the police force has? I think it matters what they have because of how they've used those weapons. I think police do a lot of harm with the weapons that they've had: clubs, nightsticks. But they get more weapons, and deadlier weapons. For me it's kind of common sense. You see in Ferguson, where the police are using rubber bullets and in military gear, and they have tanks at their disposal, and they're using them against protesters who are unarmed...there's nothing that makes me think they won't use the military-grade weapons that are at their disposal readily on a more regular basis to exacerbate the harm inflicted on black and brown communities. One of the first steps is addressing police militarization, and the need for them to demilitarize themselves. We're talking about weapons for war. These are weapons for war, and there is not war going on in the streets of Chicago. There's inequality, and things of that nature going on. And you don't address that with more guns and more grenades.
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Organization Supports Hyde Park Seniors BY JEANNE LIEBERMAN
“W
e were all involved in social movements when we were younger, and now as we’re getting older we’re seeing a new social issue and are forming a new movement.” The issue that Board President Susan Alitto and the Chicago Hyde Park Village is organizing around hits close to home. Seniors like Alitto are increasingly interested in aging in their own neighborhoods, but they frequently face significant barriers to growing old in one place. Organized by seniors, for seniors, the Village Movement seeks to mitigate those challenges. Villages are grassroots, volunteer-driven communities of seniors that offer their members services and social opportunities that enable them to stay in their homes as they age. In the twelve years since a group of seniors began the first village in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston, the movement has grown to include over one hundred villages. Chicago already has two villages operating on the North Side, mostly serving seniors in Old Town, River North, and the Loop. Chicago Hyde Park Village will raise that number to three with the official launch of its memberships and initial services later this month. “We share a great belief in group action for a cause,” said Alitto, describing
the Village movement as a natural step for her generation, which came of age in the 1960s. Unlike the civil rights and antiwar movements of Alitto’s past, this movement is about building new institutions rather than pressuring for change in established ones. “People are living longer, but not necessarily better,” said Alitto. Villages are trying to address the quality-of-life aspect.” She believes the Village should act “like an institutional memory, so that everybody doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel each time they are faced with a new aging problem.” After three years of planning, Chicago Hyde Park Village plans to start with the services they’ve already identified that their members need the most and then expand on an as-needed basis and as funding permits. There will be three types of services: a database of member-recommended service providers, a group of service-providers vetted institutionally by the Village, and services provided directly by volunteers. Building a volunteer base to drive members to appointments and errands will be one of the Village’s initial challenges. The Village leadership hopes most of the volunteers will be members offering services to one another, in keeping with their
SENIORS
“We were all involved in social movements when we were younger, and now as we’re getting older we’re seeing a new social issue and are forming a new movement.” mission of neighbors helping neighbors. But as a group of seniors from the Hyde Park supper club, The Salon, pointed out, this reliance on help from within may prove to be a flaw in the model. A spinoff of Chicago Hyde Park Village’s early planning stages, Salon members agree with the Village’s description of the challenges of aging: the threat of social isolation and the need for support in order to remain active in one’s community. But as one skeptical Salon attendee said at this month’s meeting, it’s likely that “people will wait [to join the Village] until they need the services and can no longer provide them.” To address such situations and the differing needs of the local senior population, Chicago Hyde Park Village will offer two levels of membership. Though the associate membership, at $240 a year, will be half the price of the full membership, the board is aware that twenty dollars a month will be a limiting factor for some seniors in the area. With this in mind, they’ve already put aside a portion of their limited funding for subsidized memberships, drawing from the bequest of a founding board member who passed away. “We don’t want to get people in as members, and then have the money dry up,” said Alitto. The Hyde Park Village board envisions their urban village as not only mixed-income, but also truly integrated. “Sometimes we’re too smug. We say Hyde Park is a wonderfully diverse, inte-
grated community, and it’s not as diverse and integrated as we’d like to think,” Alitto explains. Still, she stresses, the Hyde Park location offers certain advantages. “Whether we are truly integrated or not, there is a comfort level with diversity here that there isn’t elsewhere,” she said. The Village intends to promote meaningful engagement for seniors across Hyde Park who often live near each other but whose public engagement may be split along lines of race, age, or class. The Village also seeks to promote intergenerational dialogue within and about the Hyde Park neighborhood. This requires not only creating spaces for such conversations, but also combating the stigma of aging that makes some seniors hesitant to engage with their neighborhood. This engagement process began with a recent forum for University of Chicago students and local seniors to exchange their (mixed) opinions about the University’s latest largescale plans for a high rise on 53rd Street. Much of the Village’s programing requires minimal funding, but Alitto expects that she will need to raise a fair amount of money to pay the staff that will be needed to support the expansion of the currently volunteer-run Village. Still, she hopes that within a few years the Village will be “a major institution in Hyde Park, with spokes reaching out to other communities, helping them start their own Villages or mini-Villages in South Chicago or Chatham or Beverly.” NOVEMBER 5, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17
SPORTS
Extending the Track BY MAX BLOOM
F
orty-six years ago at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, Tommie Smith and John Carlos sped down the 200-meter track, winning gold and bronze for America with times of 19.83 and 20.1 seconds, respectively. At the podium after the race, Smith and Carlos lowered their heads and raised their fists. The gesture was immediately both iconic and controversial: the supposed “Black Power” salute earned Smith and Carlos expulsion from the Olympic Village and removal from the U.S. National Team. But on Saturday, John Carlos explained that his salute was to human rights, not black power. “We stood for human rights, the existence of human rights,” said Carlos. “The only black power was me running down that track. But because black people got together they had to discredit it…the government started calling us black militants, and the other people started backing away from us. We were isolated.” At Bronzeville’s Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies, John Carlos addressed a group of about forty track coaches, young athletes, and other South Side community members. The Friends of Track and Field association organized the event; its purpose was to attract local attention to the task of revitalizing track and field in low-income neighborhoods. The association had news of its own: it had just secured $20 million from the city to build a new track facility in Roseland. Founding member and financier Elzie Higginbottom referenced a history of inferior facilities for Chicago Public School students. “When I ran track at Bloom [High School] in Chicago Heights we were always glad to run against Chicago Public School kids,” said Higginbottom. “We had an indoor fieldhouse and they didn’t—they had to run in the halls. And they all came in with bruises from running into the hallways.” Carlos also spoke of a history of inequality. “Growing up in Harlem, we had every ethnic group, you could see everyone walking down Lenox Avenue—Italian, Irish, Jewish, black.” But the white community began moving out in the late 1950s. “They were living in one building and their housekeepers were living in the next build18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
ing over and they said at some point, ‘We got to move.’ ” Addressing a largely older, African-American audience, Carlos spoke about the problems of joblessness and drug use he had witnessed in Harlem in the 1950s. “There was very little responsibility for a black man to have, very little opportunity to feel like a ‘captain of the ship.’ Every day he heads home and his wife asks ‘Did you find anything?’ and he says ‘No, I didn’t find anything.’ And one day he looks in the mirror and he doesn’t like what he sees. And [the heroin dealers] say: ‘Hey man take this—help you forget.’ And it’s
“We had an indoor fieldhouse and they didn’t—they had to run in the halls. And they all came in with bruises from running into the hallways.”
like somebody pulled the stop out of the plug and we all been funneling down for sixty years…” But his message was also one of exhortation: his own moment of defiance at the 1968 Olympics, he said, had been inspirational for black youth, and he encouraged the audience to set the standards for future generations. “Whatever you do,” said Carlos, “kids are looking at you. When they walk with their pants around their ankles, and you say nothing, they’re looking at you. When they disrespect their girlfriends and their wives, they’re looking at you. But when you do something right, when you take a stand, they’re looking at you too.”
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STAGE AND SCREEN
Coates at the DuSable It’s been a big year for writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. A senior editor at The Atlantic and regular blogger on the magazine’s website, Coates captured popular attention with his June 2014 Atlantic cover story, “The Case for Reparations.” The piece, a year and a half in the making, examined the historical and institutional subjugation of African Americans, with a focus on public housing policy on Chicago’s South and West Sides. Coates will bring his perspective as a journalist and educator to a Public Programs Lecture at the DuSable Museum of African American History in conjunction with the museum’s present exhibition, “Spirits of the Passage: Transatlantic Slave Trade in the 17th Century.” Don’t miss this leading public voice in American discussions of race, politics, and culture— it’s not often that you get to engage with someone who turned down a regular columnist position at The New York Times. The DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th Pl. November 13, 6:30pm8:30pm. $10. (877)387-2251. dusablemuseum.org (Olivia Myszkowski)
the horrors of marriage, divorce, and violence. Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W. 111th St. Wednesday, November 12, 7:30pm. $7.50. (773) 445-3838. beverlyartcenter.org (Michelle Gan)
Your Face in Mine “How far in the future can it be when people say, I don’t want to be me anymore?” asks a character in Jess Row’s first novel, Your Face in Mine, in which the protagonist encounters an old friend who has transformed himself from a white Jew to a black man. The point, of course, is that in this case, the future is now. Or rather, the future is always—Row uses the fantastical concept of racial reassignment surgery to investigate identity and family. The novel has also been praised for its laser focus on issues particularly salient in this day and age, such as white privilege and identity politics. On Thursday, Row will be reading from and discussing Your Face in Mine at the Seminary Co-op. Come for the sensationalist, tabloid-worthy premise; stay for the compelling, dissertation-worthy execution. Seminary Co-op, 5751 S. Woodlawn Ave. Thursday, November 6, 6pm. Free. (773)752-4381. semcoop.com (Julia Aizuss)
VISUAL ARTS The Chicago Eight (Seven) on Film Can one fully recount the summer of 1968 and its Democratic Convention, with Chicago plunged into riot, and the trial of the infamous “Chicago Seven,” charged with conspiracy and inciting violence? Richard Brick’s The Conspiracy and the Dybbuk (1971) and Kerry Feltham’s The Great Chicago Conspiracy Circus (1970) attempt to do so. The former documents New York students’ Jewish exorcism of the trial’s judge and the latter mixes rapid-fire legal jargon from the trial with pieces of Alice in Wonderland delivered by actors dressed as hippies. South Side Projections brings you the apparent absurdity of the trial, the words of its defendants—the Seven themselves—and the chaos of that summer in Chicago. Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Sunday, November 9, 6 pm. Free. (773)702-ARTS. southsideprojections.org (Sonia Schlesinger)
An Evening with Filmmaker Akosua Adoma Owusu Akosua Adoma Owusu is one of those extremely young people who seems to have already lived a whole life, fulfilled an entire career, and achieved a grand level of success, all faster than you can click “Play Next Episode” on Netflix. On November 14, this talented experimental filmmaker will be appearing at Black Cinema House, where she will screen a wide range of her work and speak with Professor Terri Francis of Indiana University. Using a variety of avant-garde techniques, as well as inspiration from her Ghanian ancestry, Owusu explores the concepts of African identity and race through the traditional storytelling of her childhood. Her work brings a fresh perspective to the stage by offering its audience a continued dialogue concerning the connection between Africa and the United States that transcends its preconceived notions and stereotypes. Owusu is shaking up the world of cinema, and the electric narrative she’s giving us is certainly worth paying attention to. Black Cinema House, 7200 S. Kimbark Ave. Friday, November 14, 7pm. RSVP in advance, seating is limited. blackcinemahouse.org (Emiliano Burr di Mauro)
Rocks in My Pockets In a society where mental illness carries social stigmas, Signe Baumane presents the animated piece Rocks in My Pockets, a self-proclaimed “funny film about depression” that examines the intricate lives of five different women as they navigate the ups and downs of life. Baumane’s tale takes inspiration from her family and Latvian heritage, and the characters are based on her own personal experiences. She creates a film that explores the mysterious machinations of the brain quite fantastically, using both stop-motion and hand-drawn animation. At next Wednesday’s screening at the Beverly Arts Center, viewers can follow the narrator on her fascinating quest for sanity as she tries to escape and survive a family history rooted in mental illness and a world plagued by
For the Brown Kids For the month of November, a poem addressing “those who learned to live the blues before they could tie their shoes” is being reimagined as a visual art exhibit at the Beverly Arts Center. The EXPO collective has gathered Chicago artists and had them illustrate their take on “For Brown Boys,” Rodrigo Sanchez-Chavarria’s direct, emotional exploration of the experience of growing up brown. EXPO calls the event a celebration of “diversity in art and in society,” highlighting the fact that the show bridges mediums while wrestling with the same theme of race. The show ran for the first time in June, but if you missed it, this is your second chance to see ninteen artists do their best to transfer a powerful poem onto canvas. Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W. 111th St. November 7-30. Opening reception November 7, 6pm-8pm. Monday-Friday, 9am-9pm; Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, 1pm-4pm. Free. (773)445-3838. beverlyartcenter.org (Mari Cohen)
Labor Migrant Gulf The boteh is the droplet-like shape at the heart of the paisley pattern. It is also a symbol of religion, culture, and appropriation for many in Asia. Fittingly, this symbol serves as the centerpiece of the Labor/Migrant/Gulf installation at Pilsen’s Uri-Eichen. The installation was developed in part as a response to the unsafe working conditions of migrant laborers in the Arabian/Persian Gulf. Additionally, the exhibit gives due attention to laborers around the Mexican-American border and the history of migrants in California. This second half of the installation can be found one door down from Uri-Eichen at the Al DiFranco Studio. In accordance with the exhibit’s theme, the music of Joe Hill, an early 20th century Swedish-American labor activist, will be played around 8pm at this neighboring venue. Uri-Eichen Gallery, 2101 S. Halsted St. and Al DiFranco Studio, 2107 S. Halsted St. November 14, 6pm-10pm and by appointment until December 3. Free. (312)852-7717. uri-eichen.com (Emeline Posner)
MUSIC
Tafelmusik at Logan An eclectic blend of astronomy and baroque music, Tafelmusik’s Galileo Project will play Friday, November 7th, at the Logan Center for the Arts. Tafelmusik, a Canadian orchestra that specializes in music composed prior to 1760, is known worldwide for its performances and special projects; the Galileo Project has toured internationally since its inception in 2009. The project commemorates “the fusion of arts, science and culture in the 17th and 18th centuries,” particularly Galileo’s first public display of the telescope. Fittingly, the music
will be played to a backdrop of images from the Hubble telescope. If you’re a science or music devotee (or both), make sure to be in attendance for a concert that promises to be out of this world. Logan Center for the Arts, 916 W. 60th St. November 7, 6:30pm pre-concert lecture, 7:30pm concert. $35, $5 students. (773)702.2787. arts.uchicago. edu(Emily Harwell)
Memphis May Fire at Reggies Fresh off the small-venue, cross-country Warped Tour circuit, life-affirming metalcore band Memphis May Fire are making a stop at Reggies for an in-store listening party and signing in support of their new album Unconditional, a solid and unfailingly positive batch of songs that reached #1 on Billboard’s Hard Rock charts this past year. MMF are for the most part in line with the recent metalcore canon made up of quasi-Christian bands like The Word Alive and neon-and-black-graphic-tee bands like Sleeping with Sirens. The ethos of their music focuses on a “unity of shared purpose” and a “striving for something greater than the world around us,” plus probably a lot of tuned-down guitar and screams held for longer than it takes to cook a Hot Pocket. Reggies, 2109 S. State St. November 8, 1pm. Free and with free hot dogs and soda. (312)-949-0120. reggieslive.com (Jake Bittle)
Mr. Blotto at Reggies Mr. Blotto, Chicago’s most steadfast nineteen-year-old jam band legend, takes the stage at Reggies every Tuesday to play garage rock that one would both “expect and never expect.” The band is comprised of brothers Mark and Paul Bolger, drummer Alan Baster, and guitarist Bobby Georges, who, according the group’s Wikipedia page, joined the band after he “climbed out from under a rock.” These four dazed-out Dead Heads have been on the Chicago bar circuit for ages now but have never departed from calling Reggies their home sweet home; their Tuesday sets are sure to feel like abbreviated versions of “Blottopia,” the band’s annual two-day camping festival in July. If you like hearing expected-unexpected
tunes (honestly, it’s probably “Row Jimmy” played twice in a row, the second time with a beer in hand) and covers of such classic albums as Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of The Moon and James Brown’s Sex Machine, then Mr. Blotto is for you. If you don’t, then “Tipsy Tuesdays” will at least help you relieve some midweek stress. Reggies, 2109 S. State St. Tuesdays, 8pm “sharp.” $5. 21+. (312)949-0120. reggieslive.com (Denise Parker)
ARTS CALENDAR
The Jungle Brothers at the Shrine A fusion of jazz, hip-hop, and house, the Jungle Brothers are making a return next Tuesday at the Shrine. Though they’ve never reached the critical magnitude of colleagues such as a Tribe Called Quest or De La Soul, the Jungle Brothers are known for their Afrocentric lyrics and for jazz sampling that actually predates both groups. The group, composed of Mike Gee, Afrika Baby Bam, and Sammy B, have recorded hits such as “What U Waitin 4” and “Straight Out the Jungle.” Using groovy lyrics and masterful sampling to create exciting dance beats, the Jungle Brothers’ smooth rhythms should offer an interesting contrast to the current drill-rap movement in Chicago. The Shrine, 2109 S. Wabash Ave. Tuesday, November 11, doors open at 9pm. $17.50. Tickets available online. 21+. (312)753-5681. theshrinechicago.com (Clyde Schwab)
Tim Kinsella at The Promontory Come on out to Hyde Park’s swankiest new jazz joint this Friday for a lyrical evening with musical polymath Tim Kinsella (of bands such as Joan of Arc and Owls) and slam-poet-turned-non-slam-poet Marvin Tate. It’ll be a dual show in which the two artists trade and cross their respective mediums much the way they did on this year’s dynamic (and dynamically titled) poetry-as-music-as-poetry record Tim Kinsella Sings the Songs of Marvin Tate by Leroy Bach featuring Angel Olsen, which is the best (and possibly the only) such venture since Renée Fleming set Mark Strand’s poetry to music in The Strand Settings. The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. November 7, 9pm. $5. 21+. (312)801-2100. promontorychicago.com (Jake Bittle)
WHPK Rock Charts
WHPK 88.5 FM is a nonprofit community radio station at the University of Chicago. Once a week the station’s music directors collect a book of playlist logs from their Rock-format DJs, tally up the plays of albums added within the last few months, and rank them according to popularity that week. Compiled by Dylan West and Andrew Fialkowski
Artist / Album / Label 1 Bob Mould / Beauty and Ruin / Merge 2 Botanist / VI: Flora / The Flenser 3 Oozing Wound / Earth Suck / Thrill Jockey 4 Animal Lover / Guilt / Learning Curve 5 Haki / Positive / Self-Released 6 The Pen Test / Interstate / Moniker 7 Twin Peaks / Wild Onion / Grand Jury 8 Goat / Commune / Sub Pop 9 Cuntz / Here Come The Real Boys / Chunklet 10 Telephones / The Ocean Called / Running Back 11 Iceage / Plowing Through the Field of Love / Matador 12 Roughlung / Untitled / Cleaning Tapes 13 Dracula Lewis / Technical XTC / Hundebiss 14 Jackie Trash / Valediction / Z Tapes 15 Blut Aus Nord / Memoria Vetusta III / Debemur Morti
New in the Library: Oozing Wound, Earth Suck
The crushed Cheeto puffs. The severed goat’s head. The intricate tie-dyeing station. The mass of matted drain hair. Together they can only mean one thing— the Ooze has returned. On their second album, the Summer Breeze vets and local neo-thrash idols open up their toolbox, expanding from their retro riffs into some bongwater soaked galaxy, likely never to return. Yes, the slaying is plentiful, as are the cymbals, and the droplets of sweat flying from each member’s facial hair. However, it’s now more than that. Teeming with bodily fluids, nearing the brink of destruction, Oozing Wound have figured it out. What it is, I’m not sure, but it’s brilliant. (Andrew Fialkowski)
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20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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