CHICAGO
— On his first day of kindergarten, my son came home and told me that
his classmates should be punished because all they did was run around
and play instead of listen to the teacher. As he grew up, he played
basketball at the Jewish Community Center, was a farmer in the musical
“Oklahoma!” and celebrated his Bar Mitzvah at age 13. In the summer, he
can be found at a grill, making hot dogs and hamburgers for kids in the
neighborhood.
But
my son is a teenager and he is black. So he must be in a gang. At least
that’s what a white woman wrote in the comment section of a newspaper
article that mentioned him. And unfortunately, that’s how Chicago police
officers see my son and so many other children like him.
It
doesn’t matter that he’s from a good home, with loving parents; all
that matters to the white world is his complexion. They don’t see him as
my baby boy. They see him as a thug.
He
and I constantly fear that one day the Chicago Police Department is
going to put him in its gang database, which contains names of 130,000
people suspected of being gang members. If they put your name in it,
they aren’t required to notify you. And then if you get stopped by a
police officer, there’s a good chance you’re going to end up in jail
because it’s so easy for the police to come up with a reason to arrest
you. Being in the database can even make it hard to get jobs or
professional licenses because employers might find out when they run
background checks.
Chicago’s
gang database has become one of the few issues that community activists
and a growing number of elected officials agree is flawed and needs to
be reformed. It sweeps in young people who are “likely offenders.” In
reality, anyone can get on the list, and for reasons like dressing a
certain way, having tattoos or just sitting on their porch at the wrong
moment. It’s depressing but unsurprising that more than 90 percent of people in the database are black or Latino, a majority of whom have never been arrested for a violent offense or for a drug or weapons charge.
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How
is it that the police get to decide who is or isn’t in a gang? Trying
to survive just being poor and living in a dangerous neighborhood is
hard enough without an arbitrary system that marks you for punishment by
virtue of your existence.
Even
though Chicago is supposed to be a “sanctuary city,” our police
department shares its gang database with Immigration and Customs
Enforcement. This year, I.C.E. officers raided the home of Wilmer
Catalan-Ramirez, an undocumented immigrant. They threw him on the
ground, fracturing his shoulder, and arrested him. His name was in the
database, but the police department admitted Mr. Catalan-Ramirez wasn’t
in a gang. The city settled his civil lawsuit this month.
To
most of us this would be a nightmare, but in Chicago this is actually a
good outcome. He could have been like so many other people who can’t
afford a decent lawyer and are left to navigate the legal system without
much help.
The
saddest part is that many of us feel defeated. A mother in my
neighborhood told me that her son was arrested after his name was
wrongly included in the database. She wasn’t even angry, just resigned
to the reality in which too many of us are living. She’s poor. What is
she going to do? Hire a lawyer to get her son’s name out of a database?
Or save her pennies to bail him out of jail when the inevitable occurs?
An impossible choice because the police oppose bail for anyone in the
gang database.
When
violence and crime are the norm, it’s no wonder that a shell-shocked
and struggling community will give the police carte blanche to hunt down
the “bad guys,” civil rights be damned. If the police say they are
“documented gang members,” fine, just get them off our streets.
But
what if not all of these children — yes, we’re often talking about kids
in their early teens — are engaging in criminal activity? If the police
say that you’re in a gang, you must be, right?
Chicago’s
police department has long trampled on the civil rights of innocent
children. The truth is, no one wants to hear this when another one of
their nephews, neighbors or children has been murdered. They just want
someone to pay, and the Chicago Police Department has a ready-made
database of potential candidates.
My
city’s police department also uses a practice called “trolling” to
increase arrests. The department gives overtime bonuses to officers who
make arrests after their shifts are over. To the outside world, this may
look heroic: The police are going above and beyond the call of duty by
putting in extra hours to fight crime. In reality, however, it’s just
another way to incarcerate more people while lining the pockets of the
arresting officers. Our tax dollars at work.
For
so long the problems in our neighborhoods have been allowed to fester.
The people get poorer and violence increases. Desperate for safety and
peace, we allow terrible practices like the gang database to continue.
But there is a human cost to these policies, and I don’t want my son, or
anyone else’s, to suffer. Racial profiling has never and will never
keep Chicago safe. Real investments in our communities will.
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