April 29, 2021

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent non-profit newspaper by and for the South Side of Chicago. We provide high-quality, critical arts and public interest coverage, and equip and develop journalists, artists, photographers, and mediamakers of all backgrounds.

Volume 8, Issue 11 Editor-in-Chief Jacqueline Serrato Managing Editor Martha Bayne Senior Editors Christian Belanger Christopher Good Rachel Kim Emeline Posner Adam Przybyl Olivia Stovicek Sam Stecklow Politics Editor Jim Daley Education Editors Ashvini Kartik-Narayan Michelle Anderson Literature Editor Davon Clark Contributing Editors Mira Chauhan Joshua Falk Lucia Geng Matt Moore

Francisco Ramírez Pinedo Robin Vaughan Jocelyn Vega Tammy Xu Scott Pemberton Staff Writers AV Benford Kiran Misra Jade Yan

Data Editor

Jasmine Mithani

Director of Fact Checking: Charmaine Runes Fact Checkers: Abigail Bazin, Susan Chun, Maria Maynez, Elizabeth Winkler, Lucy Ritzmann, Kate Gallagher, Matt Moore, Malvika Jolly, Ebony Ellis, Katie Bart Visuals Editor Haley Tweedell Deputy Visuals Editors Shane Tolentino Mell Montezuma Anna Mason Staff Photographers milo bosh, Jason Schumer Staff Illustrators Mell Montezuma, Shane Tolentino Layout Editors Haley Tweedell Davon Clark Web Editor Webmaster Managing Director

AV Benford Pat Sier Jason Schumer

The Weekly is produced by a mostly all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute each Wednesday in the fall, winter, and spring. Over the summer we publish every other week.

Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773) 234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly.com

Cover Illustration by Madison Muller

IN CHICAGO Cover story As this issue went to press, the family of Anthony Alvarez was meeting with COPA representatives to watch the police videos of the March 31 shooting of the twenty-two-year-old Portage Park resident.

This cover story, co-published with the Invisible Institute and the Intercept, was finalized before the family made a public statement. We took the unusual step of running it after multiple sources close to the investigation described to reporters what was depicted in the footage: that Alvarez was shot in the back. The footage was scheduled to be released to the public on April 28. By the time this is printed, the rest of us will see what the family has seen; at the Weekly we’ll continue to cover this developing story, and keep the City and CPD accountable to their long overdue, seemingly empty promises of justice.

Justice for George Floyd On April 20, Derek Chauvin, the ex Minneapolis cop who killed George Floyd by pushing a knee into his neck, was convicted on all charges, causing tears of celebration in many parts of the country.

“Justice for Black America is justice for all America," said the Floyd family lawyer after the verdict. Some progressive elected officials are proposing a bill called the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act that would "establish a national standard for the operation of police departments" and would include banning police chokeholds and noknock warrants and mandate police deescalation procedures.

Biden relief package A year ago, using her emergency powers, Mayor Lori Lightfoot designated $281 million of the CARES Act to the police department. The City is now counting on another round of COVID-related federal funding, and community groups are urging Lightfoot to allocate those funds to struggling neighborhoods. Lightfoot has already made her intentions known that about half of the $1.9 billion will be used to pay Chicago's high-interest debt. CPS will receive another $1.8 million that will help fill a budget hole caused by the pandemic. School officials have also said they will use the funds for COVID-related expenses and "to address unfinished learning and mounting social and emotional needs," as students trickle back to the classroom to finish the remainder of the year.

City pumps money into the arts It’s the largest public arts’ investment in decades. The Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) announced Arts 77, a $60 million arts-recovery initiative that will provide funds to local artists and arts organizations in Chicago’s seventy-seven community areas. According to the City, Arts 77 will expand existing programs and jumpstart new ones, including the Neighborhood Access Program, which will provide $1 million in funding for up to forty grants to respond to community needs; Chicago Presents, a funding program for the performing arts; a 2021 Individual Artists Program that will provide grants of up to $5,000 to each of 162 artists; and the Culture in My Neighborhood program to support park and library programs.

Arts 77 also boasts $15 million in the Capital Plan for public art in the city and $3.5 million to fund public art in O’Hare Airport.

IN THIS ISSUE public meetings report

A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level. olivia stovicek and scott pemberton.........4 anti-asian violence stirs conversation on policing and abolition in aapi communities

Chicago communities of Asian descent reflect on a year of heightened anxiety. mallory cheng and yiwen lu........................5 vaccinating chicago’s asian communities

Asian residents rely on pop-up vaccination events to obtain vaccines. linghua (lily) qi and mallory cheng..........9 southwest side neighborhoods try to catch up on their vaccines

Many Spanish-speakers depend on phone calls and text messages to request a vaccine in their language deysi cuevas....................................................11 ‘looters,’ ‘bandits,’

and ‘gangbangers’

Eight decades of media describing children who died in police encounters. madison muller, alex stein, and edward vogel.........................................14 from playgrounds to policing

A historian describes Chicago’s shifting attitudes toward so-called delinquent children. oenone kubie..................................................17 op-ed: communities deserve to have a say in our own public safety

A coalition of organizers continues to demand civilian oversight of CPD. frank chapman and desmon yancy.............19 op-ed: end the city’s shotspotter contract

ShotSpotter creates deadly encounters—but doesn’t reduce crime. freddy martinez, lucy parsons labs..........20 why are you shooting me?

The question Anthony Alvarez asked with his last breath demands a better answer. madison muller & jamie kalven, invisible institute........................................................21 running for the southside

Running groups aim to make Black and brown runners visible and safe. charmaine runes...........................................24

ILLUSTRATION BY HOLLEY APPOLD

Public Meetings Report

A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level for the April 29 issue.

BY OLIVIA STOVICEK AND SCOTT PEMBERTON

Apr. 12 The City Council Committee on Health and Human Relations approved a substitute ordinance strengthening the prohibition on pet stores selling commercially bred dogs at its meeting. The ordinance, which elicited significant public comment in support, closes a 2014 loophole that allowed stores to sell dogs raised in “puppy mills” as rescues.

Apr. 13 Employers in Chicago are now prohibited from retaliating against workers who take time off to be vaccinated against COVID-19. At a meeting of the City Council Committee on Workforce Development, council members reviewed an ordinance that would set standards for the treatment of workers who are getting vaccinated and provide that employers that require COVID-19 vaccinations must pay employees for that time. A version of the ordinance passed the City Council the following week.

Apr. 14 Chicago expects to receive $1.9 billion from the federal government as part of the American Rescue Plan, the COVID-19 relief package passed by Congress in March. At the City Council Committee on Budget and Government Operations meeting, top budget and finance officials said Mayor Lori Lightfoot wants to allocate approximately half of those funds to pay off city debt. Council members argued that money would be better spent on supporting those hit hardest by the pandemic.

Apr. 15 According to a survey presented at the Regional Transportation Authority Board of Directors meeting, many transit riders have stopped using CTA, Metra, and Pace during the pandemic, and current riders are disproportionately essential workers, Black, Latinx, and low-income people. Forty-six percent of current CTA riders have a household income of less than $25,000 a year, according to the survey.

noted the officer who killed Toledo has been placed on administrative duty for thirty days. Public commenters were not satisfied, with one calling for more dialogue with community members and another saying, “You know what will keep us calm? Stop killing us!”

Apr. 20 The City Council Committee on Zoning, Landmarks and Building Standards approved a proposed amendment to an ordinance regarding the City’s Building Code Scofflaw List at its meeting. The change updates criteria for the list, such as expanding it to non-residential landlords, and prioritizes buildings with chronic code violations.

Ald. Raymond Lopez (15th) expressed serious concerns about whether scofflaw buildings are a priority for the City’s Law Department.

The City Council Committee on Housing and Real Estate approved changes to Chicago’s Affordable Requirements Ordinance (ARO) when it reconvened for a second meeting. The ARO compels developers who need certain City approvals to rent ten percent of units in residential buildings at affordable prices. The update includes expanding that to twenty percent in neighborhoods that are losing lowincome residents or have little affordable housing. The changes later passed the City Council, though some argued the changes didn’t go far enough.

Apr. 21 Chicago Board of Health members learned at their meeting that COVID-19 cases are down overall but increasing for some ages on the far South and West Sides, where vaccination rates are lowest. Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady reported a third of adults are fully vaccinated. Also, member Juan M. Calderon asked why the department hasn’t commented on the Adam Toledo case and police violence as a public health issue; CDPH took no action in response to the killing.

At the City Council Committee on Housing and Real Estate meeting, Council members considered the $5 million Saint Anthony Hospital development on 31st & Kedzie. Committee members decided to end the meeting early when the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) released the video of Chicago police killing thirteen-year-old Adam Toledo, but the Focal Point Campus was approved in the City Council meeting the following week.

At its first partly-in-person meeting since March 2020, the City Council approved major changes to Chicago’s affordable housing ordinance (see above). Ald. Mike Rodriguez (22nd) introduced a resolution to honor the life of Adam Toledo that called for a transparent and speedy investigation. Outside, protesters called for the passage of the Empowering Communities for Public Safety police oversight ordinance. Lightfoot cut off Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25th) when he mentioned the ordinance and urged “more than prayers or platitudes, but action, Mayor Lightfoot.” ¬

Hours after the COPA released videos of police killing Adam Toledo, the Chicago Police Board convened its monthly meeting. CPD Superintendent David Brown

This information was collected, in part, using reporting from City Bureau's Documenters at documenters.org

4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ APRIL 29, 2021

JUSTICE A RALLY AND VIGIL FOR ATLANTA SHOOTING VICTIMS AT HORNER PARK ON FRIDAY, MARCH 26, 2021. PHOTO BY SARAH-JI

Editor’s note: This story uses Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) to refer to the community being reported, recognizing that the community includes a diverse range of ethnicities and identities. Sources may refer to particular or collective groups as “people of Asian descent” or “Asian Americans,” in which cases we maintain the original language from the sources.

O

Anti-Asian Violence Stirs Conversation on Policing and Abolition in AAPI communities Chicago Communities of Asian descent reflect on a year of heightened anxiety.

BY MALLORY CHENG AND YIWEN LU

ver the past year, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community members in Chicago and across the nation have struggled with fear, stress, and anxieties coming from the rise of anti-Asian violence, on top of the alienation and stressors exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.

“I was heartbroken and deeply sad and angry. I think it took me some time to really fully grieve what happened,” said Grace Pai, the Director of Organizing at Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAAJ) Chicago, about the March 16 mass shooting in Atlanta that killed eight people, six of whom were women of Asian descent.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, AAAJ led virtual healing spaces for community members to reflect and help each other. Among these discussions, she heard stories about antiAsian harassment and discrimination in the workplace and on the streets. “A lot of this kind of harassment has become very normalized, especially because of the Trump administration’s rhetoric.”

The greater Chinatown community continues to be deeply affected by the murders of Huayi Bian and Weizhong Xiong, who were fatally shot in an attempted robbery in Chinatown in February 2020. The carjacking-turned-murder of Shuai Guan in Bridgeport in December 2020 increased calls for community safety.

“We’ve seen an increased number of patients looking for mental health counseling,” said Dr. Hong Liu, executive director of the Midwest Asian Health Association (MAHA) and vice president of the Chinatown Security Foundation, a neighborhood watch group that came together after the murders of Bian and Xiong. “The pandemic has impacted people’s social lives, job loss, and with the recent increase of robberies… people are scared to go out.”

APRIL 29, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

JUSTICE

Over the course of three months, community organizations facilitated conversations to think about long-term solutions and goals for a planned march in January, but rescheduled to March 27 due to safety concerns after the U.S. Capitol insurrection. The original intent of the March rally was to respond to the death of Guan, but it evolved after the revelation that Asian women were targeted in the Atlanta shooting amid a rise in reports of anti-Asian violence.

Over seventy greater Chinatown community organizations sponsored the rally on March 27, consisting of a multitude of different Chinese interest groups, family associations, and social groups. “We cannot be silent anymore,” Liu said.

The unheard side of data

S

hortly after the Atlanta shooting, The New York Times tallied nationwide media reports of harassment against people of Asian descent, including physical or verbal attacks and vandalism that involved clear evidence of racial motivation. Among more than 110 reported crimes, two happened in Chicago in March 2020 and January 2021. The Chicago Police Department (CPD)’s hate crime dashboard showed that in 2020, two hate crimes based on “anti-Asian bias” were reported, a number that is consistent with the previous ten years.

But community testimonies outside of law enforcement reports said otherwise.

MAHA and the Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community (CBCAC) sent out an informal community survey on WeChat, a social media and communication platform primarily used by Mandarin speakers, to gauge if Chinese speakers experienced discrimination. Around 150 people from the greater Chicago Chinatown community answered the survey, with about sixty percent of participants stating they experienced bullying or discrimination in primarily public spaces such as on the street or in school; and of those who were discriminated, the majority felt it was because they were Asian or Chinese.

6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ APRIL 29, 2021

Meanwhile, an overwhelming majority, around ninety percent of those respondents, said they chose not to report the incidents.

Other outlets like the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center launched at the beginning of the pandemic collect selfreported data, which includes all kinds of incidents, many of which do not fit the legal definition of hate crime and yet show the subtle and insidious pressure of racism experienced by the AAPI community. In a 2020 report that covers nearly 4,000 nationwide incidents, 92 occurred in Illinois.

Few from the immigrant community report to law enforcement in the first place, due to fear of losing immigration status or being racially profiled, according to Pai. In the MAHA and CBCAC survey, respondents considered reporting to the police as useless because of the language barriers to make a report, lack of understanding of how to report, and fear of retaliation.

The underreporting of anti-Asian incident data called into question the disconnect between the city and the community. In Chicago, the AAPI community is largely invisible due to lack of political representation. While more AAPI representatives went into the state legislature in the past five years, the number was still only five out of 177 members. In the City Council, there are no AAPI officials. Compared to other large cities and states with similarly large AAPI populations, Pai believes that the political infrastructure in Chicago—and the Midwest—is not as strong.

“No one is necessarily asking us, like, how we're doing and what we're experiencing—so then you start to just brush it off or internalize it, but not talk about it outwardly,” said Yasmine Ramachandra, a Chicago Chapter Leader at the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF).

As a result, she believes that community members are desensitized, and many of them wouldn’t think of their experiences as reportable crimes.

Without the accurate data that reflects AAPI experiences, officials tend to ignore the needs of the community. Last

. A RALLY AND VIGIL FOR ATLANTA SHOOTING VICTIMS AT HORNER PARK ON FRIDAY, MARCH 26, 2021. PHOTOS BY SARAH-JI

summer, NAPAWF compiled a report of anti-Asian crimes with testimonies from local chapter members, including in Chicago, and sent the report to the offices of Governor J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Lori Lighfoot, requesting a public statement denouncing the rise in incidents targeting the AAPI elderly. “Unfortunately what the government did was ignore it for some time,” Ramachandra said.

Broadly, because of the sustained low number of official reports on antiAsian attacks, high-profile cases that caught wide attention on social media were not being investigated because these “occurrences don’t show signs of being

racially motivated,” NBC News reported.

“We need to do a better job educating our community,” said Paul Luu, the chief executive officer of the Chinatownbased Chinese American Service League (CASL), pointing out that efforts need to be made for community members to recognize that they have the right to speak up about the assaults they have faced.

“When they are able to have the data, we need to illustrate [their] needs to our stakeholders that this is happening,” Luu said. “When you do that, you now capture something larger than just data… you have a larger voice to say there is a need.”

JUSTICE

#STOPASIANHATE RALLY AT CHINATOWN ON SATURDAY, MARCH 27, 2021. PHOTO BY YIWEN LU

Ultimately, in the videos and the data, the physical and verbal violence hits close to home. “People can see themselves or their families in the victims,” said Grace Chan McKibben, executive director of CBCAC. Recent Chinese immigrants experience a great culture shock when it comes to gun violence, Chan McKibben said. “No one they know has ever been killed by gunshots. That’s completely unheard of in China.”

Divided visions of safety With recent incidents clearly calling safety into question, Asian communities in Chicago are divided on the subject of police presence.

There were calls at a recent Chinatown rally to increase public safety and surveillance, improve street lighting, and create harsher punishments through the legal system for anti-Asian hate crimes to support more people to come forward to report incidents. This would be in collaboration with the CPD; Commander Don Jerome from the 9th District spoke at the March 27 gathering along with elected officials.

“We need to be united, we should work with legislators, and the police

district,” Liu said, adding that working with police would help to “trace criminal activities and to arrest the criminals.”

Organizers called for officers to act on any potential hate crime report in a culturally sensitive manner. Most recently, after conversations with Chinatown community members, at least one CPD officer now patrolling through Chinatown is either a Cantonese or Mandarin speaker. And the organizers hope that relationships with the police will encourage more Chinatown residents to report incidents.

Darek Lau, a program associate at CBCAC, immediately saw the “diverse opinions of pro-police and anti-police” in the Chinatown gathering crowd and amongst the speakers. Throughout the crowd, Lau noticed a generational divide between younger folks holding posters advocating for abolition next to older folks with posters for calls of increased law enforcement.

Just one day prior, in a vigil and rally held in Irving Park to mourn and victims of the Atlanta shooting, organizers directly called for “a response which centers Asian American women, femmes, and elders — NOT an increased police presence,” reads a tweet by NAPAWF, one of the leading organizations for the event.

According to Neha Gill, the executive director of another participating organization, Apna Ghar, which serves AAPI survivors of genderbased violence, the organizations “ talked about making sure that our work does not come at the expense of work that Black and Indigenous communities have already been doing...we are very much in solidarity with not warning law enforcement.”

Bob Wong, a pastor with the Englishspeaking congregation at The Chinese Christian Union Church (CCUC), said that church leadership internally asked: “How can we be a part of the preventative work to try and protect people? To seek ways to be a part of the solution?”

CCUC is partnering with the Chinatown Neighborhood Watch and the CPD to implement The Chinatown Peace Project. With CPD, church staff are going door-to-door to “educate our neighbors about crime prevention and safety practices,” said Wong. CCUC has also partnered with Ring, a home security and smart home company owned by Amazon, to provide any Chinatown resident with a doorbell security system.

This motion-detected doorbell allows the resident to see and can record whoever is at the doorstep. Since 2019, Ring has partnered with CPD to allow access to any surveillance footage.

Wong said the community care team wanted to take a holistic approach in figuring out solutions to seek justice and mercy for both victims and the offenders.

The team also wants to work with victims, supporting them throughout the legal process, helping with medical expenses, and continued emotional support. CCUC aims to provide career, educational, or spiritual resources to offenders.

Luu also mentioned that CASL has and will communicate with CPD to advocate for the safety of the community. With more than 500 employees, CASL is now one of the largest and most comprehensive AAPI advocacy organizations in the country. Luu regularly meets with the police commander to make sure that when incidents happen, CASL learns about it and can be there to serve as a

representative of the community.

“I know that the Black community may have a different view,” he said, “but right now what we do and what we are saying is that we want to communicate and continue working with the police.” Luu emphasized that AAPI organizations need to work with Black and Latinx communities to strengthen the connections and pursue a common goal of having a healthy community space.

Yet among local organizations, there are voices against policing. “People who feel the most comfortable with calling for police don’t necessarily have the most awareness about issues that our Black neighbors face,” said Ramachandra.

On April 15, released body-worn camera footage made the fatal shooting of thirteen-year-old Adam Toledo the center of national attention. Protesters across the city went on the streets to decry CPD, who took away the life of one child—and many more over decades of police violence. Across the state line in Minnesota, twenty-year-old Daunte Wright was killed while the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis officer who killed George Floyd, was held about 10 miles away.

As nationwide sentiment calls police accountability into question, organizers like Ramachandra believe that asking for more policing ultimately oppresses other minority groups. “If Black people are not calling for police, why are we calling for police, when our liberations are tied to one another? How can that exist?” she said.

Other organizers such as Pai also pointed out that racism has been deeply pervasive in law enforcement and equally affects AAPI communities. After the Atlanta shooting, local Sheriff ’s Office Captain Jay Baker described the shooter as having a “bad day” instead of mentioning racial motivation behind the attack, stirring backlash and anger across the country. Although Baker was later removed from his position as spokesperson on the incident, the Sheriff ’s Office defended his intention, claiming that his words “were not intended to disrespect any of the victims.”

APRIL 29, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

JUSTICE

“That just shows how much a disconnect there is between law enforcement and our communities,” Pai said. “When we see police downplaying what the shooter said, it’s hard to trust that those police officers will protect our communities.”

Conversation within the communities Discussion over community safety is part of the ongoing dialogues within the AAPI communities living in America. “It’s a matter of figuring out the racism within our own community,” Ramachandra pointed out.

In particular, the generational difference made it hard to start an antiracism talk among AAPI groups. When young organizers at NAPAWF tried to raise awareness of AAPI solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement in the past summer, most of them were hesitant to talk to their parents and grandparents about their activism. To many of them, one of the values that they were taught during their upbringing is “family comes first,” Ramachandra said, which includes paying respect to the elders and following the ancestors’ lead.

When she talked to her family about her activism and organizing, Ramachandra received pushback from her family members, who told her that “your great grandma would not do that,” pointing to an idea of how the wishes of “the dead” can weigh on younger AAPI generations.

But the ancestors, she said, were also radical in themselves. “A lot of them faced state violence in their homelands.

Sometimes I think we forget when we come here.”

In addition, the concept of the AAPI community in itself is complicated and diverse. In Illinois, the AAPI community comprises groups that are radically different in ethnicity, history, and socioeconomic background.

According to data from the 2010 Census, Chicago is the seventh city with a large Asian population. In Chicago and the surrounding suburbs, the Asian populations are predominantly Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, and Pakistani.

Most of Chicago’s Asian populations 8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ APRIL 29, 2021

primarily reside on the Southwest and far North sides. Generally, South and Southeast Asian groups, including Indian, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Filipino, Pakistani and Thai populations reside on the far North Side in neighborhoods such as Uptown and Rogers Park. A large Korean population moved from the Northwest Side to suburbs to the North and Northwest like Des Plaines.

On the Southwest side, the majority are Chinese residents around the Greater Chinatown area that includes Chinatown, Armour Square, Bridgeport, and McKinley Park. However, the community also includes immigrants from different parts of China who speak different dialects, like Mandarin or Cantonese.

Today, eleven percent of Asian Americans in Illinois live in poverty. In a 2012 Midwest Demographics Report compiled by AAAJ Chicago, Asian American-owned businesses employ the most people and dispense the most payroll among all ethnic groups, while the number of unemployed Asian American in Illinois grew 200 percent from 2007-2010.

Different voices naturally arise from this diverse makeup. Gill recalled that when AAPI leaders came together to meet with the elected officials, there were different opinions. “With the governor and everybody else that we’ve been speaking to, [we said to] not pit Asian communities up against other communities of color, because we’ve seen that happen,” she said of the demand for less policing, which was also coming from the Uptown community members they work with. Yet she also acknowledged that community leaders present at the meeting represented other groups and could have heard different attitudes.

When talking about challenges in starting conversations with firstgeneration Chinese immigrants, “there’s definitely a language barrier, even using terms like ‘white supremacy’ it’s a confusing term for some people,” Lau said.

Still, he has heard and seen an interest from the intergenerational community to learn.“The community isn’t completely made up of conservative voices, propolice, or pro-carceral systems,” Lau said.

CBCAC noticed a lack of resources for Chinese-speaking first-generation immigrants about anti-racism, white supremacy, and the historical context of Chinese living in the United States. In response, CBCAC is piloting a program geared towards Chinese-speaking parents in Cantonese and Mandarin to facilitate these conversations. “We need to explain what anti-Blackness means and what history there is in the community and what white supremacy history is,” Chan McKibben said.

Chan McKibben, along with other leaders within the 25th Ward and Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez, has been in conversations on long-term solutions such as mental health services, alternative restorative justice programs, and alternatives to policing.

Chan McKibben believes that police are only a short-term solution to the larger systemic issues. “Increased police presence or police work is only a part of the solution, because the police are not able to do prevention. They only get called when something happens,” she said. “It would be good to invest in housing, invest in development opportunities, and invest in youth engagement opportunities.”

“We don’t want these conversations to blame certain other races,” she said.

“Asian Americans don’t want to be blamed for the [COVID-19] virus or be blamed for whatever the Chinese government does. We also don’t want Chinese Americans to blame all African Americans, all Latinx Americans, or all white people for action that only some may do.”

A path forward On April 14, the Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History (TEAACH) Act was passed in the Illinois House of Representatives and is moving to the Illinois Senate.

The call for passing the TEAACH Act was one of the demands at the Chinatown rally and was led by AAAJ Chicago. The act, once passed, would add Asian American history to the Illinois

School Code and be implemented in every public school in the state. Supporters believe it is extremely important for all Illinois residents to learn about the history of the Asian diaspora in the United States and challenge the singular notion of race.

One example of an important historical piece is the murder of Vincent Chin, Pai said. The Chinese American draftsman was beaten to death in 1982 by two white men outside of Detroit who blamed him for the success of Japan’s auto industry. Meanwhile, she hoped to bring up positive examples such as when Filipino workers, led by Larry Itliong, partnered with Mexican-American farmworkers to fight for fair treatment.

“So much of our experience of harassment and discrimination is based on how people perceive us, not necessarily the identities that we hold. That shapes so much of what it means to live in a society that is grounded in white supremacy,” Pai said.

“My ten-year-old daughter said about the TEAACH Act, she said it’s so important that my friends can be good champions of our community too, so that we don’t have to do this alone,” Luu said.

For AAPI organizers in Chicago, the need for more political representation is as important as educating future generations and raising awareness of the situations that AAPI communities face among allies. The TEAACH Act is a starting point. “We need that consistent investment to get to the similar level as those other [city] contexts,” Pai said. Mallory Cheng is a freelance audio producer and reporter based in Bridgeport. Her work has appeared in The Anti-Racism Daily Podcast and The Gazette Chicago. She is also a City Bureau Documenter. She previously contributed to BoSS for Best of Chinatown 2020.

Yiwen Lu is a reporter for the Weekly who primarily covers politics. She last wrote about Chicago frontline workers’ experiences with the vaccine.

HEALTH

A

Vaccinating Chicago’s Asian Communities

t Wentworth Avenue near the Chinatown gate, a line wraps around the block waiting to enter the Pui Tak Center’s April 12 vaccination event. At the front door, staff welcome visitors in Cantonese and Mandarin and help them check in for their appointments as the line snakes up the stairs of the historic former On Leong Merchants Association Building. At every step, there is someone available to translate, explain the vaccination process, and answer any questions.

Karen Lee, assistant to the director of Pui Tak, floated around switching between Cantonese and Mandarin depending on the person. “Everyone that I’ve spoken with is so grateful,” Lee said. In the days leading up to the event, Lee, Pui Tak staff, and other community partners called as many as 800 people per day to let them know about it. This was the largest vaccination event to date that Pui Tak hosted, with over 450 shots administered.

Community organizations have been vaccinating residents of the Chinatown area since February. About 2,000 people from Chinatown and nearby neighborhoods have received their vaccines here, according to David Wu, the executive director of Pui Tak Center, and 2,500 people and counting are on the waiting list for the next vaccination event.

Two recent vaccination events at Pui Tak Center targeted Chinatown restaurant and shop workers, who faced significant risks throughout the pandemic and are crucial for Chinatown’s business sector reopening.

“We don't have any funding to do this,” said Wu. “But this is one of the really important things worth doing so that we could keep people safe… so that Chinatown can reopen the suffering businesses.”

While the city’s Protect Chicago Plus program targeted people living in certain vulnerable ZIP codes and people who are 65 and older, the ZIP codes where many Asian immigrants live were left out of the city plan to improve vaccination rates in these areas, Wu said.

Immigrants therefore rely largely on their neighborhood pharmacies and community organizations such as Pui Tak Center and Chinese American Service League (CASL) for vaccines, often due to language and technological barriers. “We wanted to be able to provide a location for seniors to come [who] couldn't go to some of the sites that were only done in English or Spanish, or didn’t have the technology to be able to register themselves on the websites,” said Jered Pruitt, the chief operating officer of CASL, an organization that also serves the suburbs.

Twenty-two percent of the 54,197 residents living in the 60616 ZIP code are sixty and older, which is four percent more than the city’s average. The area is also where the business corridors of Chinatown are located, with a large population of food service workers and small business owners.

A Chinatown liaison for the 25th Ward Office said the office has collaborated with all the senior homes in Chinatown to distribute vaccines and continues to support Pui Tak’s vaccination efforts. The area is home to hundreds and thousands of first-generation immigrants, who are mostly seniors or frontline essential workers, and very often, have limited English proficiency, no access to internet, do not drive, or are without health insurance.

Asian immigrants face considerable language and technological barriers to vaccine access: Flyers about mass vaccination sites at the United Center and elsewhere are only available in English and Spanish, and there has been limited signage or interpreters for Cantonese and Mandarin speakers at the United Center vaccination site. When booking appointments through the COVID-19 vaccine hotline, some Spanish and Chinese-speaking 25th Ward residents have reportedly had difficulty obtaining interpreting services over the phone.

Asian residents rely on pop-up vaccination events to obtain vaccines.

BY LINGHUA (LILY) QI AND MALLORY CHENG

RESIDENTS WAIT FOR THE VACCINE AT THE PUI TAK CENTER ON MONDAY, APRIL 12, 2021.

LOCATED AT THE HEART OF CHINATOWN, PUI TAK HAS BEEN HOSTING VACCINATION EVENTS FOR THE CHINESE-SPEAKING POPULATION SINCE FEBRUARY. PHOTO BY MALLORY CHENG

APRIL 29, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

HEALTH Lee said she’s heard from community members who had negative or confusing experiences at the city’s mass vaccination sites and ultimately left. Many preferred to wait for a spot at Pui Tak, closer to home than go to the United Center, she said.

The Chinatown liaison noted that those in the 60616 ZIP code can go to Saint Anthony Hospital near Douglass Park to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.

However, residents often cannot find reliable transportation and must rely on family, friends, or volunteers from community organizations to get to vaccination sites outside of their neighborhood.

Wu said the center purposely made the vaccine registration form only available in Chinese, a measure he believes can prevent Pui Tak’s vaccine supply from going to people outside the Chinese-speaking population. For those who don’t have internet access, staff at Pui Tak walk them through the registration form over the phone.

The Chinatown liaison from the 25th Ward Office had heard little from the City regarding any plans for mass vaccination sites to be established in Chinatown.

The Bridgeport Free Clinic (BFC), run by a group of Asian American medical students from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, plans to fill in the gaps. BFC focuses on providing free health services for the Asian American community. The group is currently partnering with the Asian Health Coalition to provide the vaccine supply for a future vaccination event in the Bridgeport/Greater Chinatown communities. Anthony Hung, co-director of the clinic, said, “What would be really helpful to our patients, especially those living in the Chinatown or Bridgeport areas, are more local vaccination events.”

With Chicago now in Phase 2, and all residents sixteen and older eligible to receive vaccination, both Pui Tak and CASL feel the need to speed up the process to get the most vulnerable inside the community vaccinated.

The complex and time-consuming process of getting the Chicago Department of Public Health approval, 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

however, sometimes made it difficult for community organizations to have a set date for events like this. When asked when the next vaccination event would be, Pruitt said CASL is “actively working with healthcare partners and will have an update on vaccination availability very soon.” Wu also said that there’s a big demand for vaccines in the community, but they can only provide a limited number of vaccines at a time.

Across the city in Uptown, Jennifer Pham, co-owner of MiniTX Pharmacy (or Mini Thương Xá Pharmacy, Mini Mall in Vietnamese) and one of the founders of the community initiative Celebrate Argyle, has worked independently with Johnson & Johnson to obtain COVID-19 vaccines for area residents.

As the oldest Vietnamese business on Argyle St., MiniTX Pharmacy has served for years as a community center for Southeast Asian and Chinese immigrants. Pham said when her dad, Nam Pham, opened the business in 1983, he “wanted to provide as much as he could to the community.” MiniTX has always been a bit of everything; at various points in time the pharmacy had a video rental store, a jewelry store, and even a travel agency.

Today, the pharmacy continues Nam Pham’s legacy by administering the COVID-19 vaccine. “Our phone has been ringing off the hook,” said Pham. “We’ve been getting hundreds of messages on social media, and a lot of people are walking in to ask for appointments.”

MiniTX’s small staff was quickly overwhelmed with the demand from local residents; eleven percent of the population in the 60640 ZIP code are of Asian descent. Pham said they needed to utilize their personal networks to recruit other pharmacists or nurses to administer the shots and multilingual volunteers to help patients fill out the paperwork.

“It was beautiful to see the community coming together,” Pham said.

However, MiniTX has also struggled to figure out when future shipments from Johnson & Johnson would arrive. After reports surfaced of the very rare potential for dangerous blood clots to result from the J&J vaccine, MiniTX followed Centers

¬ APRIL 29, 2021

JENNIFER PHAM, CO-OWNER OF MINITX PHARMACY, AND HER COLLEAGUES HAVE BEEN ADMINISTERING VACCINES FOR RESIDENTS IN ARGYLE. MINITX PHARMACY IS THE OLDEST VIETNAMESE BUSINESS ON ARGYLE STREET. PHOTOS BY LINGHUA QI

for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration’s recommendation needed to briefly pause the use of the single-dose vaccine. With the updated recommendations, they will continue administering the J&J vaccine.

When envisioning the future of her neighborhood, Pham said, “I see Argyle being a strong community where all of us know each other, take care of one another, and are stronger together.”

City data shows that more than fifty-four percent of Chicagoans of Asian descent have been fully vaccinated. ¬

Linghua (Lily) Qi is a multimedia journalist based in Chicago. She previously collaborated with the Weekly on the Seeking Solidarity video series.

Mallory Cheng is a freelance audio producer and reporter based in Bridgeport. Her work has appeared in The Anti-Racism Daily Podcast and The Gazette Chicago. She is also a City Bureau Documenter. She previously contributed to BoSS for Best of Chinatown 2020.

HEALTH

Southwest Side Neighborhoods Try to Catch Up on Their Vaccines Many Spanish-speakers depend on phone calls and text messages to request a vaccine in their language.

BY DEYSI CUEVAS

ILLUSTRATION BY GABY FEBLAND

W

hile more than a million Chicagoans have already received their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, some residents have yet to book an appointment, even after the City expanded eligibility under Phase 2 to everyone over 16. In underserved parts of the Southwest Side, residents still face technological and language barriers when trying to access information about the vaccine—but they’re trying to catch up.

Gage Park and Back of the Yards were two of fifteen neighborhoods initially targeted in Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Protect Chicago Plus program, a plan to direct vaccines to areas that have been hard-hit by the pandemic. Both Mexican immigrant communities ranked the highest on the City’s COVID-19 vulnerability index after West Englewood, and they are home to high numbers of essential workers.

Miguel Blancarte Jr., director of COVID-19 response and community outreach at Esperanza Health Centers, which is a partner in this initiative, stated that the vaccine clinic in Gage Park is one of four clinics Esperanza established to administer vaccines. “The first one we set up was in Brighton Park [at Mansueto High School], and then we made the decision to open the site at Gage Park on 61st and Western,” he said.

“Just knowing the propensity of positivity rates and the health disparities, we decided to bring a vaccine clinic there, to make it accessible to community members and other neighborhoods in the area as well, such as Back of the Yards, West Englewood, [and] Chicago Lawn,” he said of Esperanza, which has normally concentrated its efforts in La Villita neighborhood.

The team considered language and technological barriers in the Southwest Side and attempted to account for them when opening in Gage Park. “We know that scheduling online is an option, but at the same time,” Blancarte Jr. added, “what has been the main driver for us—even before COVID—has been our phone lines, having patient service representatives that will answer phone calls to schedule patients in English and in Spanish. So we offer different modes of being able to receive and schedule an appointment.”

Esperanza partnered with several community-based organizations, providing training to ensure they’re comfortable answering patient questions. The Gage Park Latinx Council became a reliable APRIL 29, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

HEALTH

neighborhood call center and vaccine information hub during the height of the pandemic. Esperanza also implemented an efficient text messaging service that encouraged residents in Gage Park, La Villita, Chicago Lawn, and other neighborhoods to text the name of their neighborhood and expect a callback from a bilingual Esperanza representative.

According to their data, as of April 26, Esperanza Health Centers have administered over seventy thousand vaccines in Chicago. Of those, 92.5 percent have been to individuals that identify as Hispanic or Latinx.

In the 60629 ZIP Code, which includes Gage Park, more than 13,000 first doses of Moderna vaccines have been administered to residents. In the 60609 ZIP Code, which encompasses Back of the Yards, Esperanza has administered more than 1,600 first doses to residents to date.

Dr. Susan Lopez, an assistant professor at Rush University Medical Center, said that technology was a big barrier at the beginning of the vaccine rollout, when many registrations were only available online and required different registration forms. “I think now that the vaccine is open to anyone over the age of sixteen, and there’s walkin appointments available, I think that makes it much more approachable,” she said.

Lopez has been doing informational sessions in La Villita, Pilsen, and Brighton Park at churches and schools.

In reaching out to these communities, she has learned that for some, it’s easier to ask questions if they see someone who looks like them and speaks their language, no matter what the question might be.

Lopez understands that sometimes people can be afraid to ask their doctors questions. “Or maybe they don’t have a primary care doctor, so they don’t have the opportunity to ask.”

Often a vaccine site will ask for proof of address to ensure that people in the communities targeted in the Protect Chicago Plus program are the people getting the vaccine. According to Lopez, there has also been some potentially 12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

“Just knowing the propensity of positivity rates and the health disparities, we decided to bring a vaccine clinic there, to make it accessible to community members and other neighborhoods in the area as well, such as Back of the Yards, West Englewood, [and] Chicago Lawn”

confusing variation as to whether or not identification or proof of address is required for the vaccine. Lopez stated that this varies by vaccination site, creating a dilemma for undocumented immigrants.

Still, Lopez makes it clear to patients that she’s not there to judge or to convince them to do anything. “I’m just here to give you the information and answer questions, because not a lot of this information has been very clear from the beginning.”

Volunteer groups have also stepped up to help people secure appointments.

The Chicago Vaccine Angels was formed when a small group of concerned citizens noticed how difficult it was to obtain a vaccine. If it was difficult for them, they figured it would be worse for those who are not tech-savvy. Candice Choi is part of Chicago Vaccine Angels, which partnered with My Block, My Hood, My City to reach out to those in Black and brown communities who were not vaccinated

¬ APRIL 29, 2021

and try to get them up to speed.

“We have people doing a lot of public service announcements, or marketing some would say, putting up flyers,” said volunteer Lindsay Taylor.

By reaching out to libraries, pharmacies, medical professionals, and other public places, Chicago Vaccine Angels hopes to be the point of contact for those who may not know where to get a vaccine or even where to start.

“We have volunteers who speak all sorts of languages to make sure that people understand what our group is and how we can help,” she said.

Once they have someone’s information, the group of over 50 volunteers works to help get them an appointment close to their home or one that is accessible by public transit. “We book the appointments for them and then we call or text the individual back [to] make sure that they can make the

appointment, and in some cases, we even ... provide transportation for people to an appointment if it’s hard for them to get around,” Taylor added.

In the Back of the Yards community, the Peace and Education Coalition has taken a similar approach. The group is composed of people from different schools, parks, and other businesses who come together monthly to address neighborhood issues. They work primarily with Increase the Peace, an anti-violence youth program, on vaccination outreach.

Angie Kolacinski, a Back of the Yards resident and member of the Coalition, explained that the two organizations work together to help get volunteers in the streets to help the public register for the vaccine. They also discussed which parts of the neighborhood were best to station volunteers in order to engage passersby “so they could register for a vaccine on the spot.”

HEALTH

As of publication, close to forty percent of Gage Park’s and Back of the Yards’ respective populations have received a first dose of the vaccine, according to the health department.

As the City works to distribute vaccines at an equitable rate, local organizations are workin g together to cultivate a trusting relationship with their immigrant communities during COVID. That means reaching out to patients and meeting them halfway, eliminating as many barriers as possible, and facilitating their shots. Jacqueline Serrato contributed to this story.

Deysi Cuevas is a lifelong Southwest Side resident who lives in Pilsen and whose work focuses on issues that impact her community.

She previously wrote about reducing food waste at CPS.

CHICAGO DEPARTMENT OF AVIATION

SMALL BUSINESS INFORMATIONAL SESSION

MAY 11, 2021 VIRTUAL MEETING

10 a.m. - 12 p.m.

Come join the Chicago Department of Aviation (CDA) at the Small Business Informational Session and learn about upcoming opportunities and how to do business with O'Hare & Midway International Airports.

Presenters will provide information on the Small and Mid-Size Business Initiatives (SBI and MBI) and how they are designed to increase contracting opportunities. There will also be information on the 50/50 Payment Program, along with a workshop on how to get certified (ACDBE, DBE, MBE, & WBE) with the City of Chicago.

Businesses will learn about specific CDA projects, programs, and opportunities.

To register for this event, please scan QR code.

@fly2ohare @fly2ohare @fly2midway @fly2midway

/fly2ohare /fly2midway

/flychicago

APRIL 29, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

MEDIA

‘Looters,' 'Bandits,' and 'Gangbangers’

Eight decades of media describing children who died in police encounters.

BY MADISON MULLER, ALEX STEIN, AND EDWARD VOGEL

S

ome Chicagoans still remember the record-breaking blizzard of 1967.

Public transportation halted, power was out across the city and people had to dig their vehicles out from under twentythree inches of snow. Even O’Hare International Airport—at the time the busiest in the world—shut down for two days.

Chicagoans emptied supermarket shelves citywide, and in some parts of the city residents reportedly broke into stores. Sixty deaths were attributed to the snowstorm. At least one of them, ten-year-old Delores Miller, was killed by a member of the Chicago Police Department.

News reports accepted the police account that Delores was killed in a “shootout” with “looters,” implicating the ten-year-old by association. Of the seven news articles that mentioned Delores, all of them called her a “looter” or emphasized that she was with a group that was looting when she was killed. One Tribune article, titled “Police, Firemen Find Hard Jobs Harder,” was openly sympathetic to the police for having the difficult job of policing during a blizzard.

The article, which relied solely on police sources, did not name Delores or say how old she was, and reported that police said she was “among the looters.” None of the articles about her death talked to Delores’s family or friends.

Newspaper coverage has relied heavily on department accounts of police killings at least since 1945, when James Gavin, police reporter for the Chicago Daily Tribune, wrote a breathless roundup 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

of the fourteen “bandits and burglars” killed by CPD “protectors and defenders of the home front” in 1944—a year that saw the Chicago police kill two children under eighteen.

CPD has a long history of killing children. From 2013 to today, Chicago police officers have killed more people under the age of eighteen than any law enforcement agency in the United States, according to data from Mapping Police Violence, a research group collecting comprehensive data on police killings nationwide. The CPD’s grim total is greater than those of the next two police departments combined—the Columbus, Ohio PD, where a police officer shot and killed sixteen-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant on April 20, and the New York City PD. In the wake of thirteen-year-old Adam Toledo’s March 29 death in Little Village, the Weekly analyzed eight decades of children dying in encounters with Chicago police. We compiled the data for that analysis from local newspapers and the Fatal Encounters database, a continuously updated record of all U.S. deaths resulting from interactions with the police since January 1, 2010.

Next, we reviewed 101 newspaper articles about those deaths to see how the media’s portrayal of the victims changed over time. We analyzed the adjectives used to describe the children, the number of articles citing police or other sources when discussing the incident and people involved, and whether the media narrative describing the murder changed as new evidence emerged after initial reports. Of the 101 articles we included,

¬ APRIL 29, 2021

police were cited as a source in eightyeight, and victims' families were sources in twenty-three.

Fifty-nine articles included only one source, and nine times out of ten that source was the police. Of the articles that did include the young person’s family as a source, only two did not also report the police’s narrative. For more than half of the victims, the first article about the killing used only the police as a source, even if the media eventually incorporated other sources in later articles.

A

s video footage has repeatedly contradicted official police accounts of recent killings, the press has begun to question the reliability of police narratives in cities across the nation. Chicago is no exception. Last month, CPD reported that Toledo was killed during an “armed confrontation”

with police. Officials including Mayor Lightfoot and an Assistant State’s Attorney repeated that narrative to the press for two weeks before the Civilian Office of Police Accountability released body-worn camera footage showing the officer shot the thirteen-year-old while he had his arms raised above his head— no weapon in hand.

The case of Adam Toledo is only the latest in which incident reports and public statements from CPD have later proven to be incorrect or false. When then-police officer Jason Van Dyke killed sixteen-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014, police said he was behaving erratically and “lunged” at officers with a knife. Thirteen months later, when dashcam footage from responding police vehicles was released, that account was disproven.

For decades, Chicago newspapers have relied on CPD as either the primary or sole source of information about the circumstances surrounding the deaths of children in encounters with police. In the articles the Weekly reviewed, police were the sole source of information more than half the time from the 1940s through the 1980s. While the percentage of articles citing police remained relatively constant over time—at or near ninety percent— after 1990, newspaper reports became six times more likely to include a member of the victim’s family as a source than in previous decades. Despite that, local media still rely heavily on police reports

MEDIA

when reporting on crime as well as deaths at the hands of the CPD.

T

he 101 newspaper reports the Weekly reviewed noted the victims’ youth eightytwo percent of the time. Nineteen articles omitted references to the child’s youth or inflated their maturity with descriptors like man or fellow. Twenty-one articles painted the dead child as a criminal with adjectives such as runaway, dropout, suspect, or attacker, or linked them to crime, as in articles describing Dolores Miller as a looter, or Adam Toledo, who police and news reports hinted at being associated with a gang. For victims’ families, such characterizations can be as frustrating as they are heartbreaking.

The media “definitely demonizes your child,” said Gloria Pinex, whose son Darius was killed by CPD during a traffic stop in 2011. “They make it seem like they was the one that was in the wrong. It’s sad.”

Darius was twenty-seven when the police killed him, but to Gloria, he is still her “baby.”

When Gloria went to the crime scene after her son was shot, police refused to talk to her or give her any information. But when a news anchor from WGN9 approached police, she had a story instantly.

Initial news reports repeated police claims that Pinex, who was Black, was fleeing from officers and refused to pull over. But police video footage that was hidden from the Independent Police Review Authority (COPA’s predecessor agency) for five and

“They make it seem like [your child] was the one that was in the wrong. It’s sad.”

a half years showed otherwise: Pinex pulled over within seconds of officers turning their lights on.

Gloria held her own press conferences, protested with other moms who lost children to CPD, and did everything she could to tell her son’s story, but she said the media focused on his number of prior arrests and repeated characterizations, such as “reckless driver,” from the police reports. Even when reporters did interview her, Gloria felt they turned her words around.

“It’s hard to maintain a regular life and to deal with, the way I feel it, a whole other game, because I was ganged up on to make a story fly,” Gloria said.

In September 2020, the Weekly spoke to Erik Vega, whose older brother Miguel was killed

by CPD that August. He too expressed disappointment with media portrayals of Miguel as belonging to a gang.

Arionne Nettles, a journalist and professor at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, recently wrote about this persistent narrative of “victim wrongdoing” common in major media publications.

“A police officer or wannabe vigilante kills a Black or Brown child, major media publications look for victim wrongdoing, and a debate ensues as the journalists who write about said wrongdoing argue that digging into the lives of these victims is warranted, a way to tell ‘both sides,’” she wrote.

Speaking to the Weekly, Nettles explained that people are often unaware of the biases they carry when reporting. Those biases extend beyond race to where reporters live in the city and their

understanding of the dynamics in different neighborhoods.

But whether intentional or not, she explains that it’s paramount to understand how reporting on victims of police violence holds the potential to harm communities and families.

“It’s really about how can we all work together to better serve the audiences we have signed on to serve,” Nettles said. “If people are so hurt by the work that we do that they stop listening, stop reading it doesn’t help our cause.

It doesn’t help all the hard work we’re doing.”

Nettles noted that there are newsrooms and journalists in Chicago who have been working diligently to change and build relationships with communities that have historically been disregarded. But she said it’s going to be a team effort in order to remediate harm and do better going forward.

“It’s never just one story, one article, one journalist. If we can’t hold each other accountable as peers and colleagues, then nobody else can.” If you are interested in engaging in conversations about media coverage of police and police violence, both the civic journalism lab City Bureau (citybureau.org) and the Chicago Headline Club (headlineclub.org) are hosting online panels on the topic on Thursday, April 29.

Madison Muller is a graduate student of social justice journalism at Northwestern University. She last reported on disparities in media coverage of mass shootings. Alex Stein is a lawyer and researcher who lives in Chicago. He last reported on forty children who died in police encounters since 1944. Ed Vogel lives in Back of the Yards. This is his first piece for the Weekly.

APRIL 29, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

HISTORY

From Playgrounds to Policing

A historian describes Chicago’s shifting attitudes toward so-called delinquent children.

BY OENONE KUBIE

E

arlier this month, body-worn camera footage revealed police had fatally shot thirteen-year-old Adam Toledo in an alleyway while the Little Village boy had his hands raised.

His death was not an aberration: since 1944 at least forty children younger than sixteen have died in encounters with the CPD. For almost a century, the city of Chicago has responded to concerns over unsupervised children on the streets with aggressive policing. However, Chicago was once at the forefront of creating alternative responses to the apparent problem of the urban child that prioritized parks and playgrounds over police and punishment.

Children used to be everywhere on the streets of Chicago. In the late nineteenth century, when Chicago was a booming city of over a million inhabitants, almost half of the population were under twenty-one and nearly a quarter were under ten. (Today around a quarter of Chicagoans are under the age of twenty-one.) The vast majority of those young people were white, workingclass children of European immigrants.

In the Nineteenth-century, adult Chicagoans mainly spent their time indoors, but Chicago’s children worked, played, and got into trouble outside.

Families let children out almost entirely without adult supervision typically from the age of seven. School was ostensibly compulsory, but according to the Chicago Board of Education itself the law was “entirely ineffective.”

16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ APRIL 29, 2021

ILLUSTRATION BY CAM COLLINS

HISTORY

The idea of children in the past playing or hawking newspapers on the street may seem romantic or quaint to a modern audience, but youth street cultures could sometimes be dangerous, criminal, and violent. Unsupervised children playing and working on the street in the 1890s sometimes caused traffic accidents or intentionally derailed trains.

Others formed gangs, stole, gambled, fought, and sometimes killed their fellow Chicagoans, deliberately and accidentally.

In one notable example, reported in the Tribunexxxxxxxxxz in 1897, a group of boys threw firecrackers into a firework store, igniting the gasoline tank as well as many of the fireworks and causing a huge explosion.

Middle-class white Americans in the 1890s worried that the street lives of these children would lead them to delinquency and, in the words of progressive reformer Jane Addams, the “murky fire of crime.”

Middle-class whites feared the justice system was inadequately structured to halt such delinquency. They may have been right: juveniles convicted of crimes were either sent to adult jails, where they were thought to be exposed to worse influences than on the streets, or, more often, released back to the streets—sometimes after being beaten by police—without any record or further supervision. Nor did these middle-class Americans believe that immigrant parents could protect their children; in fact, they felt that the immigrant family was disintegrating under the pressures of modern urban life.

To them, American society itself seemed to be hanging in the balance.

However, progressive reformers believed urban immigrant children could be saved if only they could be protected from unsupervised street life. They were backed up by new social science being developed by researchers at the University of Chicago that blamed delinquency on the urban environment rather than on individual children’s pathology. In fact, new theories of child development suggested that children, particularly white boys, needed to pass through a period of “savagery” and misbehavior in order to become “civilized” men able to take on the burdens of citizenship. Even quite violent

behavior was normalized as the result of childish impulses in an unsupervised city environment. As one reformer wrote in 1909, “Boy gangs stoning and knifing each other is unsupervised rivalry play, organized games [e.g. baseball, basketball] the supervised.”

Buoyed with optimism that they could save the city child from delinquency, Chicago’s progressive reformers organized. The city became the nation’s home of child-saving. In just twenty years, Chicago’s reformers created a vast new array of institutions and regulations aimed at limiting children’s use of urban street space and solving the problem of juvenile delinquency.

One of their earliest efforts was a new juvenile justice system, which removed children from the adult justice system and provided for the separate detention of children who were found “dependent” or “neglected,” (i.e. those with parents who were deemed unable or unwilling to care for them) or “delinquent,” or even just in danger of becoming so. Children could also be released and placed under the watchful eye of a probation officer.

Much of this new system was based on the belief that working-class immigrant families were inferior to middle-class Anglo-Americans. The new Juvenile Court tore many children from their homes and placed them in institutions where they sometimes faced horrible abuse. In addition, the new law criminalized many of the ways workingclass children in Chicago used street spaces. For example, the new Juvenile Court Law included in its expansive new definition of delinquency, “wandering about the streets in the night time [sic] without being on any lawful business.”

Being out on the street unsupervised could now, in itself, legally categorize a child as a delinquent.

But juvenile justice was just one part of Chicago’s new anti-delinquency movement. Reformers recognized that the Juvenile Court could never solve the problem of delinquency alone. Childsavers believed they needed to break children’s relationship to the streets before they came into contact with the Court. By 1910, providing supervised

“Middle-class white Americans increasingly responded to Black youth’s corner culture with intense policing and urban flight, not the playgrounds and childsaving initiatives they created for white children.”

play spaces for children had become the centerpiece of the anti-delinquency movement. As Jacob Riis, one of the nation’s most prominent urban reformers, put it, “a community that does not give the children a chance to play will have overfilled jails and no reason to complain.”

Soon Chicago had developed a vast parks and playground system. Other reformers came from all around the country and the world to learn from Chicago’s example and Teddy Roosevelt even called the Chicago park system “the most notable civic achievement in any American city.” In addition to the new play spaces, the child-savers also organized a host of recreation clubs including the Boy Scouts, the Camp Fire Girls, and the Woodcraft Indians to give urban children supervised play opportunities and even the occasional exposure to rural life, through summer camps and similar programs.

Meanwhile, the city’s demographics were changing. By the 1910s, the Great Migration was underway, as many African American people began to move North

to cities like Chicago in search of better opportunities and to escape the lynchings and racist violence of the South.

As more and more Black families arrived in Chicago, it became increasingly clear that the new Progressive-Era childsaving institutions would largely exclude their children. For example, the Juvenile Court had, since its conception, dedicated far fewer resources to Black children and, even in 1927, had no institutions to which to send dependent Black children (i.e. children in need who were not accused of delinquency). African-American children who the court deemed dependent and delinquent were more often sent to institutional homes meant for serious offenders or to the county jail.

Parks and playgrounds were a similar story. Within the Black Belt (where the majority of the city’s African American population lived), the city opened just one playground before 1931, Beutner at 33rd and LaSalle St., and it had far poorer facilities than those in white immigrant areas. White scouting troops also barred African American children, APRIL 29, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

HISTORY

and in 1910 the Cook County Baseball League expelled Black teams.

At the same time, police and white communities worked together to keep Black children out of white play spaces.

In the five years before the Chicago Race Riots of 1919, for example, white people attacked Black recreation-seekers at eleven parks, playgrounds, and beaches just outside the Black Belt. The 1919 riots started when Eugene Williams, a Black boy, accidentally drifted into white-only water near 29th Street Beach. White beachgoers threw stones at Williams until he drowned.

Although some park police actively engaged in anti-Black violence, most simply did nothing to stop it. In one report, park police officers at Washington Park looked on as a white gang assaulted two Black girls in 1918. When violence did occur, the police were more likely to arrest Black Chicagoans involved than white ones. Following an altercation between white and Black boys on the South Side in June 1919, the Black newspaper The Chicago Defender reported, “characteristic in such scenes, only our boys were loaded into the wagon.” In 1931, the Wickersham Commission reported that throughout the 1920s, police had arrested African American children in Chicago at far higher rates than any other group of minors in the city.

The Black community routinely protested this unequal policing. In the aftermath of the 1919 riot, Black Chicagoans demanded that city and park police guarantee protection for all citizens wanting to use parks, recreation centers, and playgrounds. And in 1931, a thousand Black Chicagoans attended a meeting with the mayor to raise concerns over police brutality.

Black Chicagoans also sought to extend the benefits of progressive childsaving to their own children. African American leaders like Ida B. Wells fiercely campaigned to end the inequality in recreation opportunities for Black children. Meanwhile, middle-class Black organizations sought to create privatelyfunded institutional homes for dependent Black children.

18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

At the same time, ideas around juvenile delinquency were changing.

By the 1930s, optimism that reformers could save (white) delinquent youth by protecting them from the city was faltering. One of the most famous criminologists and proponents of the idea, Frederic Thrasher, conducted a study into delinquency rates at a boys’ club in New York. His research produced the worrying conclusion that, far from preventing crime, participation in organized recreation seemed to be linked to higher, not lower, rates of delinquency.

During the 1930s, delinquency experts increasingly turned to psychiatry to explain and treat criminal behavior.

In doing so, they conceived of young urban delinquents as individual deviant personalities, not as inherently innocent products of the city environment.

Progressive responses to delinquency began to be seen as naïve, which in many ways they were. Community organizer Saul Alinsky once characterized the work of Chicago’s reformers as “making surveys of all those kids in cold water tenements—with rats nibbling their toes and nothing to eat—and then discovering the solution: camping trips and some shit they called character building.” While child savers had acknowledged that poverty and inequality in Chicago lay behind the city’s juvenile delinquency, their proposed solutions did little to address these larger structural problems.

As Progressive-Era ideas lost ground, on the streets, changing priorities of policing increasingly and aggressively targeted children of color even as crime rates were falling. Chicago’s child population was becoming less white as the Great Migration continued, as Mexican immigrants began arriving in large numbers, and as white families began leaving for the suburbs. As urban youth grew increasingly Black and brown, they began to be considered outside the realm of “saving.” Far from being redeemable, children of color were cast as inherently unsalvageable delinquents from whom white society needed to be protected. Middle-class white Americans increasingly responded to Black youth’s corner culture with intense policing and

¬ APRIL 29, 2021

urban flight, not the playgrounds and child-saving initiatives they had created for white children.

The legacy of this history continued to be felt through the rest of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

Meanwhile, a nostalgia for a lost world of outdoor childhood emerged, especially among middle-class parents. These days it has taken the form of a movement known as “free-range parenting,” a term popularized by Lenore Skenazy, a writer and mother who in 2008 wrote about allowing her nine-year-old son to ride the New York subway alone. Billed as a “commonsense approach to parenting in these overprotective times,” free-range parenting urges parents—explicitly including urban parents—to allow their children independent mobility outside of the home.

In contrast, working-class children of color across the United States continue to be treated as delinquent or neglected when they use street spaces. Poor parents, especially those from minority groups, risk arrest when they allow their children to roam independently. In one such example, Debra Harrell, a Black working mother, was arrested in 2014 in South Carolina for allowing her nine-year-old daughter to play alone in a park near Debra’s workplace. In addition to her night in jail, the state placed Debra’s daughter in foster care.

Marginalized children face violence from the state and from other citizens if they use urban spaces, even places designed for children. This was the case for twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, who police officers killed for playing with a toy gun at Cudell Recreation Center in Cleveland in 2014. When Skenazy’s nine-year-old son rode the subway in New York in 2008 he was able to (and did) ask strangers for directions, but a decade later, Brennan Walker, a fourteenyear-old African-American schoolboy, was shot at by a stranger who thought Brennan was a burglar when he knocked on a door to ask for directions after he missed his bus and needed help finding his way to school.

On March 29 in Chicago, Adam Toledo became the thirteenth child

killed in an encounter with CPD since 2013—more than any other local law enforcement agency over the same period, according to research by the Mapping Police Violence project. In the wake of his death, some questioned why Adam was out on the streets late at night. This question sought to move the blame for Adam’s death from the state to Adam’s parents or to Adam himself.

But, as professor of political psychology Andrés Di Masso wrote in 2015, “being a citizen, in the full sense of the term, implies not being disturbed, challenged or persecuted for one’s mere presence in public space.” When it comes to Black and brown children’s safety, Chicago still has a long way to go. Oenone Kubie is a Senior Case Writer at the Blavatnik School of Government’s Case Centre on Public Leadership and has a DPhil in history from the University of Oxford. This is her first piece for the Weekly.

OPINION

Op-Ed: Communities Deserve to Have a Say in Our Own Public Safety Chicago can’t afford to wait any longer to fix its police department; pass the Empowering Communities for Public Safety ordinance.

BY FRANK CHAPMAN AND DESMON YANCY

O

n April 15, the world saw that thirteen-year-old Adam Toledo, pursued down an alleyway by a Chicago police officer, had his hands in the air when the officer shot and killed him. Before the video of his fatal shooting was released, Mayor Lori Lightfoot called for a new CPD foot chase policy.

Once the truth came out, she called for calm. But community residents have been calm in crying out for decades for an end to the police abuse that costs this city far too much in lives needlessly lost and dollars squandered on police misconduct lawsuits.

As leaders in the two largest community coalitions that have led the fight for police accountability in Chicago, we know all too well a simple truth: the lack of real police reform in this city will continue to result in injury and death at the hands of those sworn to protect us.

Chicago is still without the civilian oversight board that was a central recommendation of the Police Accountability Task Force Lightfoot chaired in 2016. It is a terrible irony that if the civilian oversight board had been created in the first 100 days of the Lightfoot administration, as the mayor pledged, CPD might have had a foot pursuit policy in place today and Adam Toledo might still be alive.

As a city, we cannot tolerate this

anymore. Lives are being lost because of our inaction. Our coalitions, the campaign for an elected Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC) and the Grassroots Alliance for Police Accountability (GAPA), joined forces because we have to act now.

The Empowering Communities for Public Safety (ECPS) ordinance, crafted by this unified coalition, would create a citywide police oversight commission that would give civilians a powerful new role in ensuring police policy reflects both community values and nationally recognized best practices. CPAC and GAPA know that giving civilians a central role in police department policy-making is an essential part of strengthening the police accountability system. The ECPS ordinance has broad support within City Council—but it is being blocked

by Mayor Lightfoot, who has refused to join forces with our coalition and who has had important Public Safety Committee meetings canceled to stop our work.

Communities deserve to have a say in our own safety. Nobody ever asked residents to democratically sanction the police department tactics that ultimately led to Adam’s death. Instead, these decisions are made without us, with no democratic representation of our rights.

The CPD sets its own rules, often with little or no public input. The Community

Commission on Public Safety envisioned

by ECPS, made up of people with relevant expertise and supported by a fulltime, expert staff, can play that role. And, just like in other parts of our democratic government, when policies are made in an open process, where the people have an opportunity to participate, we’ll get better policies, and broader support for those policies.

As communities, we have to have the power to determine who runs our police department, what policies it operates under, what problems it is suited to address, and what role the police force plays in a more comprehensive, community-driven, holistic vision of safety. Both police reform advocates and police officers agree that police officers spend a lot of their time dealing with problems for which they are unprepared and ill-equipped, and for which there

could be a more effective non-police response. Non-police alternatives can help keep both civilians and police officers safer.

For decades, Chicago’s leaders have turned a blind eye to this problem, as evidenced by the hundreds of settlements and millions of dollars approved to make these problems go away. Despite positioning herself as a reformer, Mayor Lightfoot has joined this trend and has been blocking real efforts at reform for months. Now Chicago is faced with another child murdered by the police, and the mayor has blood on her hands. This time, the city council has rallied around a solution, which is ready to become law, despite Lightfoot’s opposition.

We mourn the loss of Adam Toledo and we grieve with his family and the entire city. As a community, we cannot bear to be in this place again. It’s time for the city to seize this historic opportunity to institute fundamental and enduring public safety reforms. The moment is now to pass the Empowering Communities for Public Safety ordinance. Frank Chapman is the Field Organizer of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (CAARPR), the Executive Director of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR), and a leader in the campaign for an elected Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC). Desmon Yancy is the Director of Community Organizing at the Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN) and a leader in the Grassroots Alliance for Police Accountability (GAPA) coalition. The GAPA and CPAC coalitions came together to create the unified Empowering Communities for Public Safety (ECPS) ordinance.

PHOTO BY ALEC OZAWA

APRIL 29, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

OPINION

Op-Ed: End the City’s ShotSpotter Contract Surveillance technologies are destroying lives in Chicago.

BY FREDDY MARTINEZ AND LUCY PARSONS LABS

ILLUSTRATION BY LUCAS MARTINEZ

L

ess than five minutes elapsed between the time a ShotSpotter alert summoned police officers to 24th and Sawyer and the moment officer Eric Stillman shot and killed thirteenyear-old Adam Toledo. The automated alert was part of the Chicago Police Department’s sprawling surveillance network of cameras, microphones, social media monitoring, facial recognition software, and a growing constellation of carceral technologies. In August, Chicago’s contract with ShotSpotter is set to expire, and the City should decline to renew it before the technology leads to another fatal encounter with police.

Despite being pitched as tools for public safety, many of these technologies increase criminalization and lead to more interactions with police, which are always dangerous for Black and brown communities. The police killings of young people confirm that CPD’s surveillance system poses a present and growing threat to the safety and lives of Black, brown, and Indigenous Chicagoans. We must work to abolish the use of surveillance technologies to bring justice for Adam Toledo and others like him.

ShotSpotter is a gunshot detection system which uses microphones, algorithms, and human analysts and alerts to send officers to respond to what the system thinks are gunshots.

Tellingly, there are no ShotSpotter microphones deployed in majority-white neighborhoods in Chicago. Instead, they 20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

blanket the South and West Sides.

By one estimate, more than eightyfive percent of all alerts in Chicago result in no police reports. Few studies have directly measured the accuracy of ShotSpotter, and a San Francisco court has previously found the technology inadmissible as evidence due to concerns about accuracy. Under oath, ShotSpotter representatives stated their accuracy guarantee numbers were “put together by our sales and marketing department, not our engineers.” Despite these problems, police overreliance on this technology has been ineffective and tragic for racialized communities.

Since 2018, Chicago has spent some $33 million on ShotSpotter.

As is the case with many surveillance technologies, ShotSpotter is funded through asset forfeiture—money seized through the war on drugs, under a policy that allows police to appropriate and sell property they allege is involved in the commision of a crime. Over five years, the CPD absconded with nearly $47 million from Black and brown people in their neighborhoods and spent it in what a 2016 Reader investigation with Lucy Parsons Labs described as a “secret budget.”

ShotSpotter is only a single part of the surveillance network CPD and the City have built under the guise of public safety. The City similarly claims its automatic license plate readers deter carjackings (carjackings are up); says its

¬ APRIL 29, 2021

gang database is effective (it’s woefully unreliable); promised its Summer Operations Center’s network of cameras and gunshot detectors would deter shootings (gun murders exploded, and the SOC surveilled a school during last year’s protests).

CPD has long promised violence reduction through the use of those and other forms of surveillance like predictive policing and facial recognition technology.

The truth is that none of these automated approaches address the root causes of crime—poverty, the criminalization of low-income and marginalized people, and the perverse priorities that divert desperately needed community resources to police budgets.

According to data obtained by the MacArthur Justice Center, officers respond to ShotSpotter alerts in Black and brown communities dozens of times a day. This creates a volatile mix of technology, guns, and racist policing, which in turn leads to unnecessary, dangerous interactions across the city. To make matters worse, Chicago police have a long history of engaging in dangerous and gratuitous foot chases across Chicago, leading to “officers unreasonably shooting someone—often unarmed individuals,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice. In fact, the DOJ’s report on unconstitutional use of force by CPD, released in 2017, specifically recognized foot chases at the very top of its findings.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot campaigned

as a police reformer, despite a history of protecting abusive police. In her tenure thus far, Mayor Lightfoot has allowed CPD to miss over seventy percent of deadlines related to the consent decree, a set of changes to policing to which the City has ostensibly agreed.

As abolitionists we are not fooled by calls to merely modify police policies and procedures, as the mayor has called for finally implementing recommended foot-chase reforms following the killing of Adam Toledo. What communities need is fewer interactions with police, especially punitive interactions that are activated by technology.

Reining in and ultimately abolishing these technologies is critical in preventing more deaths and in bringing justice to Adam Toledo and all others harmed by mass surveillance. We can begin by refusing to renew CPD’s ShotSpotter contract this summer. We can follow the example of other cities and ban the use of facial recognition technologies. We can end the war on drugs and stop the flow of money to CPD’s surveillance technology slush fund.

Justice for our youth requires that we dismantle the technology of militarized policing and build a society based on care, equity, and mutual aid. Freddy Martinez is the Executive Director of Lucy Parsons Labs. He was born and raised in La Villita. This is his first piece for the Weekly.

JUSTICE

Why Are You Shooting Me? CPD fatally shot Anthony Alvarez on March 31. With the release of official video, his family may finally get some answers.

BY JAMIE KALVEN AND MADISON MULLER PHOTO BY MADISON MULLER

O

n April 27, after an anguished month of seeking answers in vain, the family of Anthony Alvarez was set to learn what happened on March 31 when a Chicago police officer fatally shot the twenty-two-yearold. On Tuesday the family met with representatives of the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) to view footage of the incident. The Alvarez case has been largely eclipsed by the police killing two days earlier of thirteenyear-old Adam Toledo, an incident that commanded national attention. That may change after COPA releases video from their investigation into Alvarez’s death.

There is strong reason to believe it will be every bit as troubling as the footage of Adam’s killing.

On the evening of April 23, at the corner of North Laramie Avenue and West Eddy Street on Chicago’s Northwest Side, Alvarez’s family and friends gathered for a vigil. Many contributed to a memorial by carefully laying bouquets of flowers, lighting candles, and planting crosses in the grass beneath a one-way sign near the site of the shooting.

As the community gathered, some wearing t-shirts bearing Anthony’s picture, the memorial grew from a few prayer candles into a poignant display of grief. It was a grave and solemn occasion. Family members stood quietly, contemplating the flowers and flickering candles as if in church, while traffic streamed by on Laramie and occasional motorists sounded their horns in solidarity.

It was the second memorial the family had built on this spot. They created the first during a vigil on April 1, the day after Alvarez was killed. After

that event concluded, a resident recorded a police officer dismantling the carefully constructed memorial. On the video, an officer can be seen picking up the veladoras and tossing them into a nearby garbage can. “Come on, bro,” someone behind the camera says, “you can’t be doing that.”

As dusk fell on last week’s vigil, Roxana Figueroa, Anthony’s cousin, turned her attention to neighbors who had been watching the vigil through open windows and cracked doors. Her voice

reverberated down the quiet, tree-lined street, begging anyone with information to come forward.

“I hope at night when you’re praying to God, God touches your heart to come forward and testify,” she said. “To help bring our family a little bit of peace and justice for Anthony Alvarez.”

According to Figueroa, the family has no more information today than the day Alvarez was killed. “‘Until this day, CPD has not shown up at any of our families’ houses or done

anything to provide any explanation, any information,” she said. “Until this day, CPD hasn’t confirmed what happened here on Eddy and Laramie in Portage Park. They’ve done nothing but be disrespectful to Anthony and our family.”

When asked for comment, a spokesperson for CPD said that after the department issues a preliminary statement on a police-involved shooting, responsibility for the investigation of the incident falls to COPA. APRIL 29, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

JUSTICE “COPA remains sensitive to the grief of the Alvarez family and has worked with the family’s representative over the past few weeks to schedule a viewing of the materials related to the officer involved shooting of Mr. Alvarez,” Ephraim Eaddy of COPA wrote in a statement. “The family’s review and pending release of materials are but one of a series of actions that have and will take place over the course of our full and thorough investigation.”

When Anthony’s mother arrived at the crime scene on April 1 looking for answers, police turned her away, Figueroa said at a press conference on April 3.

“I’m supposed to feel protected by you guys,” she recounted his mother saying. “I’m supposed to get answers from you guys.” According to Figueroa, an officer responded, “we’re here to kick out people like you.”

CPD has released little information about the shooting. What information they have provided is in the form of a press release posted to Twitter by Tom Ahern, CPD’s deputy director of news affairs and communications. The night of Anthony’s death, the CPD press release states, officers engaged in a foot pursuit during which “the offender produced a handgun which led to confrontation with police.” An officer then discharged his weapon, fatally shooting Anthony just two blocks from where he lived.

He was pronounced dead from multiple gunshot wounds at 1:13 a.m. at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, according to the Cook County Medical Examiner.

At press time, it remains unclear why the officers stopped Alvarez in the first place. The CPD press release says nothing about what prompted the stop. What is clear is that when the officers sought to engage him, Alvarez ran away.

COPA plans to release multiple videos—some body worn camera footage, some third-party footage—of what ensued.

According to multiple sources close to the investigation, the relevant videos show two officers pursuing Alvarez on Laramie Avenue. As he runs, the young man has his cell phone in his left hand and what appears to be a gun in his right.

22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

“According to multiple sources close to the investigation, the relevant videos show two officers pursuing Alvarez on Laramie Avenue. As he runs, the young man has his cell phone in his left hand and what appears to be a gun in his right. At the intersection of Laramie and Eddy, he turns the corner. When officers round the corner, one of them fires multiple shots in quick succession at the young man’s back.”

¬ APRIL 29, 2021

PHOTO BY MADISON MULLER

JUSTICE PHOTO BY MADISON MULLER

At the intersection of Laramie and Eddy, he turns the corner. When officers round the corner, one of them fires multiple shots in quick succession at the young man’s back. Alvarez collapses in front of a house on the 5200 block of West Eddy.

“Why are you shooting me?” he asks the officer.

“Because you had a gun,” the officer replies

T

he question Anthony Alvarez asked with his last breath demands a better answer. More than five years after revelations about the police murder of Laquan McDonald initiated an era of supposedly urgent police reform, Chicago is descending into a deepening crisis of the civil order. The Alvarez incident, following closely on the Toledo killing, has illuminated the extent of the city’s failure to make progress on the police reform agenda that has clearly and repeatedly been articulated.

At an April 5 news briefing on the Adam Toledo police shooting, Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced that she had directed CPD to put in place a foot pursuit policy by summer. She sternly chastised others for their failure to institute such a policy long ago.

“We cannot and will not push the foot pursuit reform off for another day,” she said. “No longer can we afford to put off to tomorrow what we can address today, because lives are truly at stake.”

That strong, clear statement has a context worth examining.

In 2016, the report of the Police Accountability Task Force, chaired by Lightfoot, stated that “troubling practices” such as shooting “at the backs of fleeing suspects” made clear the pressing need for “a fundamental rethinking of the current use-of-force policies.”

In an investigation of the CPD published in 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice found that CPD engages in a pattern and practice of unconstitutional use of force, including deadly force, that disproportionately impacts communities of color. The report stated that “officers engage in tactically unsound and unnecessary foot pursuits, and that these foot pursuits too often end with officers unreasonably shooting someone—

including unarmed individuals.”

“In some cases,” the DOJ reported, “CPD officers initiated foot pursuits without a basis for believing the person had committed a serious crime. In these cases, the act of fleeing alone was sufficient to trigger a pursuit ending in gunfire, sometimes fatal.”

Having successfully pivoted and rebranded herself as a change agent in large part on the strength of her role as chair of the Police Accountability Task Force, Lightfoot became mayor of Chicago in 2019. Since she has been in office, her interim police superintendent and the police monitor who audits CPD compliance with the federal consent decree have both echoed the recommendation that CPD establish a foot pursuit policy.

That was the context when Lightfoot took the lectern, after years of failure to address the problem, to announce with an air of decisive leadership that she had directed CPD to develop a foot pursuit policy.

Hidden to the public was another critical dimension of the context in which she spoke that day: the troubling specifics of the Alvarez shooting five days earlier.

As the mayor expressed her personal sympathy for the mother of Adam Toledo at the press conference, another grieving family was suffering in the dark, unable to get anyone in city government to respond to their questions about what had happened to their loved one at the hands of the police. Madison Muller is a graduate student of social justice journalism at Northwestern University. She last reported on disparities in media coverage of mass shootings. Jamie Kalven is an author and journalist based in Chicago. He is the founder of the Invisible Institute and was awarded the 2017 Hillman Prize for Web Journalism for “Code of Silence,” written for The Intercept.

This story was originally published online on April 27.

APRIL 29, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 23

SPORTS

Running for the South Side South of Roosevelt, running groups aim to make Black and brown runners visible and safe.

BY CHARMAINE RUNES

A

lmost every Saturday morning, Courtney Philipps heads to 51st and Calumet to lead a group run. Despite the threat of rain on April 10, sixteen people—mostly Black and brown—gathered on the large patch of wood chips at 8am outside of Last Lap Cornerstore, one of the very few runningspecific stores south of Roosevelt.

Philipps adjusted her mask and raised her voice to call out the names of pre-run stretches as the Green Line trains rushed past: scoops, lateral lunges, hip openers. When she was satisfied with the warmup, she welcomed the runners, both the regulars and the newcomers, to GumboFit. She founded GumboFit in 2019 as a safe space for Black and brown people, particularly from South and West side communities, to explore different activities like archery, rock climbing, and yes—running. “We do more than just basketball,” she said. “We can run, and we can go sailing, and we can be out here taking up space, just like anybody else.”

Philipps started GumboFit after she noticed most of the existing run clubs were on the North Side and were primarily white. Black runners, she said, didn’t always feel like they could be comfortable being themselves, like they felt cared for as Black people. “If the vibes don’t align with the consideration of Black lives, then why would I show up and get there early in the morning with people that don’t care about me, you know?”

Ever since Ahmaud Arbery was chased and killed by three white men in a pickup truck in Glynn County, Georgia, while he was out for a run in February 2020, Black runners across the country have shared their experiences of

PHOTO BY AARON INGRAM

24 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ APRIL 29, 2021

#RunningWhileBlack and why running, especially in non-Black neighborhoods, made them feel unsafe. For Philipps, in the wake of Arbery’s murder, building a running community where Black people could be themselves and feel cared for was more critical than ever.

“Black people deserve to be outside,” she said. “They deserve sunshine and fresh air without being worried about what might happen to them.”

I

f you look at a map of Chicago running patterns on Strava, a popular exercise app, the North Side is streaked with routes. But west of the Lakefront Trail located along the shore of Lake Michigan, the South Side is mostly bare, Phillips observed.

Aaron Ingram, Craig Taylor, and Ian Gonzalez co-founded the running group 7 on Sundays in the fall of 2018 for Black and brown runners on the South Side.

They met as coworkers at the now-closed Nike store in Bucktown. The three had occasionally run with Nike Run Club, but participants were primarily white and the events almost always on the North Side.

“Being Black and Hispanic, being a South Sider,” Gonzalez said, “I was always kind of like, looking in from the outside.”

The group started as a conversation in their store break room: What if races and events and running meetups were hosted on the South Side? “How cool would it be if we were running in our communities, in our neighborhoods?”

While the Lakefront Trail might have been an obvious choice, 7 on Sundays’ cofounders were more interested in undoing the stigma of South Side neighborhoods.

“We want people in those neighborhoods to see Black and brown faces running down the street,” Gonzalez explained.

SPORTS

“Black people deserve to be outside. They deserve sunshine and fresh air without being worried about what might happen to them.”

“We want people to know that it is a safe place to run. You can run up King Drive.

You can run up Stony Island. You can run up 71st, you can run down 57th. Like, this is all accessible to us.”

Ingram agreed. “It’s like, ‘Hey, I run too and I’m not going to go all the way to the lakefront. I live right here.’”

And right here, for Ingram, is Bronzeville, where he grew up. The tennis courts on 37th and Prairie are where his childhood apartment used to be. He started high school at Mount Carmel, a private all-boys Catholic institution in Woodlawn well known for its athletics programs. Ingram wasn’t on the track or cross-country teams, but was nevertheless influenced by the school’s commitment to athleticism. “It was just contagious.”

So when he moved to Harlan, a public school on 97th and Michigan, he sailed through the PE class requirement to run a mile under a set time limit. “I forget what the time was, but it was just like laughable to me,” Ingram said. “I was like, ‘What? Of course I can do this.’ ” Not long after, a gym teacher encouraged him to join the track team. Ingram ran the 800m and the mile, but when he looked around during meets, he didn’t see other Black runners.

Although Taylor wasn’t on his school team, he had a similar experience when he got his start in running. Now fifty-six, Taylor grew up on 82nd and Blackstone and, as a teenager, he often accompanied an older uncle on runs. “At that point, we called it jogging,” he clarified.

Taylor seldom saw other runners in the neighborhood. “We would run all the way from 82nd Street at one point to the lakefront where then we would see other runners,” he recalled. “But we definitely didn’t see any runners that looked like us.”

Even now, Gonzalez has trouble convincing his non-running friends that recreational running is for Black people, too. “They would make those jokes like, ‘You’re doing white people stuff ! You running marathons…’ like, that’s what we’ve come to understand,” he laughed. “[That] running is what white people do.

They’ve been afforded the luxury of being able to just have this idle time where they could just go and jog to nowhere with no destination.”

The history of recreational running is rooted in a white, largely middleclass, privilege. In 1966, alarmed at the increasingly sedentary white American lifestyle in the years following World War II, a track and field coach from Oregon named William Bowerman (who would later found Nike) co-wrote a book called, yes, Jogging, that highlighted the benefits of the title practice. The book was wildly successful, selling a million copies and catalyzing a national obsession with the activity.

NPR reporter Gene Demby pointed out in a 2020 Code Switch episode that Bowerman’s home state, Oregon—which was also the only state admitted to the Union with a charter that “explicitly barred Black people from living there”— soon became “the epicenter of America’s new jogging craze.”

In an interview with Demby, historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela said that by the 1970s and 80's, jogging had become more and more associated with white yuppies. “This is the kind of upwardly-mobile professional who cares about their health, who has enough money to buy nice things, who has leisure time that they’re spending doing laudable activities like working on their health,” she said. These white middle-

class professionals didn’t just jog, she explained. They identified as athletes.

They were runners.

oncerns about runners’ safety have been around as long as “jogging” has—clad in little but shorts and shoes, and often alone and far from home, runners can be uniquely vulnerable. In that same interview with Code Switch, Petrzela explained that in the broader running culture of running, “the quintessentially vulnerable runner is always pretty much cast as a white woman.”

The two murders of white women runners in other cities in 2016 further entrenched this idea. In fact, Petrzela emphasized, the runner safety conversation often positions people of color as the threat to white people running. The 1989 Central Park jogger case, in which five New York City Black boys were wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for the rape and assault of a white woman runner after police extracted false confessions from them, reinforced this white supremacist stereotype.

As a Black man, Taylor is no stranger to the feeling of being perceived as a potential threat in an unfamiliar neighborhood. He described a recent experience of going on a longer run and getting lost, ending up in a predominantly white neighboring suburb. “I did definitely feel a little uncomfortable,” he said. “I was telling myself in my head, ‘if anybody questions what I’m doing [here], hopefully they can tell by what I’m wearing that I’m just here running.’ ” When news of Arbery’s murder reached Chicago last year, run clubs on the North Side contacted Philipps and invited her to host a GumboFit

C

run in Lakeview, which is more than seventy-five percent white. She was all for running through neighborhoods, but this felt off to her. “I like running through Hyde Park because I live in Hyde Park,” Philipps said firmly. “Like, this is my area, but I wouldn’t—I don’t feel comfortable running in another neighborhood that I’m not familiar with.”

Philipps said that in the wake of Arbery’s death, a lot of runners from other parts of the city also came down South to run with GumboFit. “Of course you can join us,” she said, “but it’s also just like maybe figure out why you want to join us first, and why you feel some type of way and why you decided to show up today.”

She doesn’t actively think of GumboFit as a running club for Black people though. She likened it to a white recreational runner starting a running group on the North Side for fun and having their friends join in. “But the issue is, like, what is the statistic? Over seventy percent of white people have no Black friends, so obviously their white friends are gonna come out and run with them.”

GumboFit attracts and prioritizes Black people, she explained, because she’s Black. “That’s my community. It’s naturally going to center Black people because how could I do anything other than that?”

O

n Sunday, April 11, just after 7am, eleven people gathered on 35th and King Drive across the street from Victory Monument, built to honor the Black Eighth Regiment of the Illinois National Guard that served in France during World War I. It was time for Sunday service: seven miles, all paces welcome.

APRIL 29, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 25

SPORTS

For newer runners, seven miles might sound intimidating, but Taylor assured me that no one gets left behind. “If you show up, we’re going to run with you,” he said. “We’re not going to strand you.”

This morning’s seven-mile route would run north on King, then west on Cermak before heading north again on Indiana and Michigan to the half-way point, the Art Institute of Chicago. We would then loop around to Columbus and head all the way south on Michigan. It took us through the Motor Row District and the Near South Side before bringing us back to Bronzeville.

Ingram likes the fact that seven miles starting in Bronzeville can take them through so many neighborhoods, including Woodlawn, Hyde Park, Chatham, Bronzeville, South Shore, Grand Crossing, Bridgeport, and Chinatown.

The runs through Chinatown this past year were especially meaningful to Rosalie Shyu, a 7 on Sundays regular.

“In the height of all the anti-Asian hate crimes—and no one even brought this up, but like, for me, it meant a lot that like this mostly-Black running group was willing to go to other neighborhoods, specifically another ethnic-specific neighborhood.”

Shyu emphasized how important it was for her, as an East Asian woman and relatively new Kenwood resident, to learn about Black history in her neighborhood.

When she runs along King Drive, for example, she often pauses to look at the Bronzeville Walk of Fame plaques.

“There’s a ton of Black artists, poets, athletes,” she said.

And she regularly shares what she learns on social media. On February 27, 2021, Shyu posted photos of monuments she stopped by on her run that day to her Instagram account: the Eugene Williams memorial marker near 31st Street Beach, where the Black youth was killed on a hot summer day for crossing the lake’s aqueous color line in 1919. The Jesse Owens plaque in the park on 88th. The DuSable Museum in Washington Park.

The homes of Ida B. Wells and Mamie and Emmett Till.

That the run begins and ends in 26 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

Bronzeville, a neighborhood rich in Black history, is no coincidence. By design, 7 on Sundays is also, as Gonzalez put it, unapologetically Black. “We don’t muffle our culture and the norms that we have grown up to make it a palatable place for white people to come. We are who we are.”

Ingram agreed. “It’s kind of like the barbershop of running.”

The group pushed off together before settling into groups of twos and threes, the faster runners in the front breezing along the bike lane. We ran past Olivet Baptist Church, the oldest Black Baptist church in Chicago, on 31st and King. The church was established in 1850, thirteen years before the Emancipation Proclamation, and in the 1940s, was known as the largest Protestant church in the world.

In a 2020 interview with WGTV, Pastor John L. Smith described how Olivet, in the early twentieth century, became a first stop for many Black Southerners during the Great Migration. “Olivet had a nursery, daycare, employment center, medical facilities… everything that you can imagine that somebody might need.”

Both Ingram and Taylor compared 7 on Sundays to the experience of fellowship at a Black church. “If you grew up Black in Chicago,” Taylor explained, “the Black church has always been an important part of the community.” It was a welcoming place, he continued, regardless of whether you came every Sunday or only showed up on Easter.

He acknowledged that even though he believes that consistency is the backbone of their running group, some people might stick it out and some people might drop off to come back, or not. To him, it doesn’t make a difference.

“Any time you show up at church, you’re welcome. Any time you show up to 7 on Sundays, you’re welcome.”

Ingram is glad to have all kinds of people join 7 on Sundays, but if they’re not from the area, he wants them to respect the neighborhoods and their histories. “I don’t own this neighborhood,” he said. “But I’m very proud of it. I want to preserve its history. I want to respect its history. And I want people that embark

¬ APRIL 29, 2021

PHOTO BY AARON INGRAM

on the journey with us to do it as well.”

We passed by a large bronze figure holding a battered suitcase and waving north—the Monument to the Great Migration—on our left.

“We all kind of have…,” Ingram paused. “We have a duty to people of color. To represent a health and wellness community for the South Side. To be like that representative. That’s why we run the streets.” GumboFit currently starts its weekly Saturday runs (three miles and six miles) at

Last Lap Cornerstore on 51st and Calumet at 8am. Starting May 1, GumboFit will move its starting point to Promontory Point on 55th St. 7 on Sundays will continue to meet at 7am on 35th and King Dr. at 7am for three- and seven-mile runs.

Charmaine Runes is a graduate student at the University of Chicago’s Computational Analysis and Public Policy program. She last wrote about lagging vaccine rates among ZIP codes with higher shares of essential workers eligible during Phase 1b.

CLASSIFIED Section Help Wanted 066 Apartments for Rent-Chgo 001 305 Autos Wanted :H :DQW <RXU 2OG &DU We Pay Cash! $100 to $500 cash!

3KHQRPHQDO 7RZLQJ Jump Starts, Tire Change, Local Tows &RQWDFW 5RG DW 773-930-7112 Cleaning

070

Best Maids Will clean your house or apt.

References available.

Call Best Maids 708/599-7000

Construction

083

JO & RUTH REMODELING We Specialize in Vintage Homes and Restorations!

Painting, Power Washing, Deck Sealing, Brick Repair, Tuckpointing, Carpentry, Porch/Deck, Kitchen & Bath Remodeling. *Since 1982* 773-575-7220

Furniture for Sale

092

0,.(·6 )851,785( ´)XUQLWXUH )RU $OO µ Beds, Sofa sets, Lamps, Kitchen Appliances, more!

773-276-0599

Masonry

120

$FFXUDWH ([WHULRU DQG 0DVRQU\ Masonry, tuckpointing, brickwork, chimneys, lintels, parapet walls, city violations, FDXONLQJ URRÀQJ We are licensed, bonded and insured.

5DWHG $ RQ $QJLH·V /LVW Free Estimates 773-592-4535

Movers

123

0,&+$(/ 029,1* We Move, Deliver, and Do Clean-Out Jobs

Plastering

WK DQG :RRGODZQ Large 1 bedroom. Includes all utilities, heat, air conditioning, stove and refrigerator. $1,050/month. Section 8 OK. 773-684-1166 Newly Decorated %HGURRP $SW 1 block South of Campus 773-987-6835

SERVICE DIRECTORY SERVICE DIRECTORY SHOWCASE:

/<5;,9 7967,9;0,:001

Help Wanted

KELLY

: )SHJRZ[VUL (]L /`KL 7HYR 5LPNOIVYOVVK :[\KPVZ Z[HY[PUN H[ HUK ILKYVVTZ Z[HY[PUN H[ +HDW ,QFOXGHG

6RPH XQLWV LQFOXGH DOO XWLOLWLHV 5HPRGHOHG YLQWDJH FRXUW\DUG EXLOGLQJ ZLWK KDUGZRRG ÁRRUV DQG RQ VLWH ODXQGU\ &ORVH WR 8QLYHUVLW\ RI ,/ JUR FHU\ VWRUHV UHVWDXUDQW ZDONLQJ GLVWDQFH WR 0HWUD WUDLQ ZDONLQJ GLVWDQFH WR 0XVHXP RI 6FLHQFH ,QGXVWU\ ODNH DQG PXFK PRUH $SSOLFDWLRQ IHH 12 6(&85,7< '(326,7 -VY H ZOV^PUN JHSS .VYKVU HUK MVY ZHTWSL WPJ[\YLZ NV [V V\Y ^LIZP[L ^^^ O\U[LYWYVW JVT

773-477-7070 • www.hunterprop.com

PLASTER PATCHING DRYVIT STUCCO FULLY INSURED

(815) 464-0606

APPLIANCES + Refrigerators, + Full Beds - 99 Stoves - $9800 & Up + Single Beds - $6900 + Washers, Dryers + Bunk Beds - $19900 and Freezers + Chests - $4900 + Family Tables & + Sofa Sets - $22900 $ 00 Chairs - 115 + Lamps - $29/Pair

7KH 3OXPELQJ 'HSDUWPHQW Available for all of your residential plumbing needs.

Lic. & insured. Serving Chicago & Suburbs. Senior Discounts.

Call Jeff at 773-617-3686

Records/Music

146

&DVK 3DLG )RU <RXU 5HFRUG &ROOHFWLRQ Looking for Jazz, Blues, Soul, Rock, Dance, Hip Hop, Reggae Etc. )PNF WJTJUT BSF mOF BT * N GVMMZ WBDDJOBUFE $QG\ DW 7KUHH /HJJHG 'RJ 5HFRUGV 773-241-0929 9VVÄUN

&215$' 522),1* &2 Specializing in Architectural Metal Work, Gutters & Downspouts, Bay Windows, &RUQLFHV 5RRÀQJ 6ODWH Clay Tile, Cedar, Shingles, Flat/Energy Star Roof 773-286-6212

Real Estate Services

00

“Furniture For All!”

MIKE’S FURNITURE 1259 N. Ashland Avenue (773)

276-0599

OPEN 7:30 AM + FREE Layway 1000 OFF APPLIANCE with this ad

$

AUTOS WANTED -

WE WANT YOUR OLD CAR! We Pay CASH! 100 to $500 Cash!

$

300

+8' %DQN )RUHFORVXUHV City & Suburbs &DOO )UHG ' &OLQN 773-294-5870 5HDOW\ 6HUYLFHV &RQVRUWLXP

• JUMP STARTS • TIRE CHANGE • LOCAL TOWS Contact Rod:

Residential Plumbing Service SERVICES INCLUDE:

Plumbing • Drain Cleaning • Sewer Camera/Locate Water Heater Installation/Repair Service • Tankless Water Heater Installation/Repair Service Toilet Repair • Faucet/Fixture Repair Vintage Faucet/Fixture Repair • Ejector/Sump Pump • Garbage Disposals • Battery Back-up Systems

Licensed & Insured • Serving Chicago & Suburbs

10% OFF Senior Citizen Discount License #: Call 773-617-3686 058-197062

CONSTRUCTION $

143

145

of Illinois Inc.

PLASTERING CO.

.(//< 3ODVWHULQJ &R Plaster Patching, Dryvit, Stucco.

FULLY INSURED. 815-464-0606

Plumbing

Conrad Roofing Co.

(773) 930-7112

CLEANING -

708-599-7000 House Cleaning Services

Family owned since 1999

www.bestmaids.com

Let Us Help Build Your Business!

Advertise in the Business & Service Directory Today!!

JOE & RUTH REMODELING

SPECIALIZING IN ARCHITECTURAL: METAL WORK:

• Cornices • Bay Windows • Ornaments • Gutters & Downspouts • Standing & Flat Seam Roofs ROOFING WORK: • Slate • Clay Tile • Cedar • Shingles • Flat/Energy Star Roof

(773)

286-6212

ZZZ FRQUDGURRÀQJ FRP

PLUMBING -

General Contractors

- Family Owned Since 1982 -

Complete Remodeling Services Specialists in: • Vintage Homes Restorations • Kitchens & Baths • Basements • Electric & Plumbing • Wall & Floor Tile • Painting & Carpentry

We Work With You To Meet Your Needs

773-575-7220

MOVING -

MICHAEL MOVING COMPANY Moving, Delivery and Cleanout Jobs

Serving Hyde Park and surrounding communities

773-977-9000

Residential Plumbing Service SERVICES INCLUDE:

Plumbing • Drain Cleaning • Sewer Camera/Locate Water Heater Installation/Repair Service • Tankless Water Heater Installation/Repair Service Toilet Repair • Faucet/Fixture Repair Vintage Faucet/Fixture Repair • Ejector/Sump Pump • Garbage Disposals • Battery Back-up Systems

Licensed & Insured • Serving Chicago & Suburbs

10% OFF Senior Citizen Discount License #: Call 773-617-3686 058-197062

ROOFING -

Conrad Roofing Co. of Illinois Inc.

SPECIALIZING IN ARCHITECTURAL: METAL WORK:

• Cornices • Bay Windows • Ornaments • Gutters & Downspouts • Standing & Flat Seam Roofs

ROOFING WORK:

• Slate • Clay Tile • Cedar • Shingles • Flat/Energy Star Roof

(773)

286-6212

ZZZ FRQUDGURRÀQJ FRP

PLASTERING -

KELLY

PLASTERING CO. PLASTER PATCHING DRYVIT STUCCO FULLY INSURED

(815) 464-0606

Let Us Help Build Your Business! Advertise in the Business & Service Directory Today!!

Call 773-358-3129 to place your ad!

HELP YOUR BUSINESS GROW! Advertise in the South Side Weekly’s Business & Service Directory today!!

Get the South Side Weekly in your mailbox Subscribe at southsideweekly.com