If you needed an illustration of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel’s skewed sense of priorities, the news out of Chicago during the first weekend of August was perfect. It provided a clear distillation of how his decision-making has often made Chicago a place where a swell of downtown prosperity contrasts sharply with neighborhoods in peril.
The weekend was an especially violent one in the city’s neighborhoods: 66 shootings, 12 deaths. As that Monday dawned, zero arrests had been made in response to these crimes.
The Chicago Sun-Times reported that Emanuel, in a news conference the following Monday, “doubled down on his call for people to ‘be a neighbor’ and ‘speak up’ to identify shooters. He said Tuesday an ‘attitudinal change’ is needed to tamp down the carnage.”
CBS News said Emanuel “decried what he called a ‘shortage of values about what is right, what is wrong’ and said anyone who knew the identity of a shooter has a ‘moral responsibility to speak up .’
Later in the news conference, Chicago Police Department Superintendent Eddie Johnson acknowledged a lack of trust between members of the community and the police made it difficult to investigate and solve these crimes. The department’s low clearance rate for murders and a Justice Department report describing “a pattern of civil rights violations” by the police have undoubtedly contributed to this degradation in trust.
Unmentioned in the press conference was the poor training and support given the men and women in CPD’s ranks. Late last year, one alderman described the force as overwhelmed and understaffed. A report from earlier this month described a CPD training facility as endangering the safety of its trainees. The Justice Department report describes “sloppy, outdated instruction” for new recruits. Neighborhood fundraisers are held to supply police with bulletproof vests.
Meanwhile, the mayor had other priorities.
Three days prior to Emanuel’s discussion of the moral failings of the residents of Chicago’s South and West Side neighborhoods, the mayor rolled out his plan for the city to spend $10 million dollars to revamp the eastern portion of Chicago’s Riverwalk, which largely attracts tourists and white-collar workers looking for a place to enjoy an outdoor lunch or glass of wine after work.
“For the mayor, refurbishing the older stretch of Riverwalk is the latest phase in what has become an obsession of sorts,” reported the Chicago Tribune. “The disconnect between the Riverwalk’s new and old sections is the mayor’s latest pet peeve for his pet project.”
So there it was. An obsession with making portions of downtown a little nicer for tourists and downtown office workers as people in South and West Side neighborhoods suffering from years of disinvestment are chastised for their lack of morals if they manage to survive a weekend of deadly shootings, but won’t point the finger at a shooter.
The juxtaposition was striking and wasn’t new. Nor was the mayor’s tendency to blame the victims.
This isn’t to say Chicago can’t have nice things nor should it be taken as a suggestion that we can’t deal with our violence problem while we also provide ways for the city’s downtown residents to experience joy. But more often that not, we do one and not the other.
We’re a city that chooses to build a sports stadium in the South Loop for a DePaul University team after closing fifty public schools that serve black and brown children. Then, to add insult to injury, we give the sports stadium a pass on paying property taxes that could be used to keep those schools open.
When we do build a new school, we do so in a pre-dominantly white neighborhood way that would force the closing of an already existing school that has CPS’s highest rating. It also happens to serve low-income black students.
In the name of transit improvements, we ask Elon Musk to build an underground express train to O’Hare Airport – another amenity no one was really asking for that is seemingly aimed at tourists and business travelers – while not investing in the rest of the CTA’s Blue Line, which already can’t handle the increase in riders brought on by some neighborhood development.
(Incidentally, The Harold Hill of Silicon Valley’s Magical Mystery Tube is a literal pipe dream. The Better Government Association says “there is no public evidence Musk has developed, tested or used the faster, cheaper tunnel-boring technology he claims he wants to use in Chicago.”)
Meanwhile, developers in those gentrifying neighborhoods are making it more expensive for longtime residents to live there so activists have to force wards to adopt rent control ordinances.
Decisions like this get made over and over and tell you what a city – and a mayor’s – priorities are.
We’ll build a new CTA station in a West Loop neighborhood so tech workers don’t have to walk a couple extra blocks while we take away yet another bus route that is a lifeline for South Side residents.
We close mental health clinics which help stem violence while we give $5.6 million in TIF funds to a corporate health system that denies birth control to low-income neighborhoods of color. All because it moved its corporate headquarters to Wacker Drive.
We give tax breaks to massive corporations to open headquarters here as we nickel and dime our mom-and-pop small businesses, practically forcing them to either close or leave the the city.
Meanwhile, it’s pretty clear the police need help. Some combination of new hiring, additional training, support services and – if you read this article it becomes clear – mental health support, is needed. Yet the city’s solution is to provide some of those services but also spend $95 million on a new building that even former police superintendent Garry McCarthy opposes.
These decisions shouldn’t be either/or propositions, but we seem to make it so. Mayor Emanuel will run for re-election on everything he’s done for us, but it’s really about what he’s done for some of us and not for others.
Time and again, he’s shown us who he thinks Chicago is for and who his constituencies are.
The question is whether we agree with him or not.
Image by Kurman Communications used via Creative Commons 2.0 license
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