We joke that March never ended but blink and it’s like summer is over. Tomatoes turned in the last week, so I brought in a bowl of San Marzanos and another of cherries. Just enough for two jars. But also pounds of pesto, dozens of dried cayenne peppers. Mint for winter tea.
I wrote about the family and friends of two brothers, Ty and Munchie Malden, who were killed within a couple months of each other. At the second shooting scene, while paramedics were tending to Munchie, a police officer asked the boys’ mother to walk to the edge of the scene to calm down agitated family members.
I wasn’t there; I can see it happening. I’ve seen it happen. When she told me about it, it didn’t feel fair. That she be asked to perform some function when she was going between shock, hope and grief. She just wanted to be with her son. But nothing leading up to this was, and there’s no ideal in a situation like this, only triage. She was uniquely suited for the task, and in the moment, she went and collected her family. About an hour later, doctors told her Munchie died.
Something feels different about the way the Chicago Police Department has deployed officers in response to violence this year. I want to allow for the small sample size here, and the potential that I’m just not seeing something; we all have blind spots.
That said.
A funeral was raked with gunfire last month, and it resulted in fifteen people suffering gunshot wounds. More people were wounded in that shooting than any other anyone can remember, though it’s hard to say “ever” because of the quality of archives available. Not long after this, a kid was shot, at night. A few others wounded.
From these two incidents, we have twenty victims. Women, old folks and kids mostly. Each with multiple shooters, one with return fire. Everyone survived. It doesn’t always happen this way.
Both of these would have been heater cases a few years ago. Heaters for the police, but for us too.
The morning after the funeral home shooting, a small bit of theater. Three beat cars trailed by a sergeant on a slow roll around the neighborhood with lights on, past the scene a couple times for TV cameras. By afternoon, a few feet from where police found more than 60 shell casings, guys were stepping into the street to slow passing cars and checking into them, business as normal. This, basically.
The morning after the kid was shot, an open-air dope spot a few houses down opened up like normal, dawn til well past dark. It’s a logical, defensible location for setting up a shop. One-way streets, overgrown vacant lots providing cover and limiting people on foot, next to residents hoping their positive presence will outlive the dope and despair all around them. Everyone in that small section knows knows the rhythm and can spot anomalies.
Nobody thought to order a washdown, so there was blood all over the sidewalk and street, a blood trail stretching 15 or 20 yards. There was a shell casing still out there. Either someone missed it or it was from another shooting. Neither is good.
And, maybe my eyes and memory are both deceiving me, but it used to be that after kids were shot or you had a mass casualty incident that there was some sense of responsibility to reassure residents in the area afterwards. Not security theater, but an honest attempt.
Police are a greater part of the short-term solution to violence than the long-term, I think. Presence alone, it’s not a sustainable or effective long-term solution. But presence can help in the short-term.
Beyond presence, you would have some attempt from the police department to engage the block or two or three near the crime scene. A lot of these were faith-based, usually involving a pastor from the area, sometimes food, sometimes family of the victims, along with pleas for help from police.
Some of these felt sort of forced, it felt like they weren’t likely to help. You could almost hear the lack of hope in speakers’ voices. But most felt honest, useful, important. At more than a few of these, residents have told us they’re happy to let their kids can play outside in the street, but it’s upsetting that it’s because police are parked two or three to a block in each direction because someone was shot or killed the night before. (And they wonder too if their presence would have prevented it.)
That’s going to be the reality of any type of police response to major cases - it will depend on the quality of command in the police department, the relationships officers of all ranks are able to build in an area and the strength of the community infrastructure nearby too (churches, community organizations, block clubs, etc.)
It’s true that sometimes gunmen will fire upon someone in front of police. That happens. (Happened in the funeral home shooting.) It happens “often” because there are a lot of shootings in the city (we’re past 2,500 victims for the year already) but it’s a tiny percentage of city shootings and it’s not a reason to avoid some type of positive engagement.
How the city uses police speaks to its priorities. And it’s a lot more complicated than daily media conversation allows for. But even if the after-the-fact engagements felt futile at times, it also felt like people were making an effort and some good could have come from it. That’s not complicated to me. That’s trying to do something helpful in the aftermath of something traumatic. I just haven’t seen that type of leadership, urgency or intention with two cases where it would have been predictable in the past.