This time in Chicago.

Police try to keep peace downtown, along lake by ‘directing’ large groups of troublesome teens to express trains

Troublesome teens.  Those kids and their shenanigans.  Kid things like hopscotch, or running through traffic, or beating the shit out and people and robbing them.

The teens, numbering more than 100 and some deemed “borderline criminal” by police, were first steered onto Red Line trains that ran express from the Gold Coast to the South Side. Then they were chased from 31st Street Beach and began running through traffic on King Drive.

As the teens approached 38th Street, eight or 10 of them knocked a 15-year-old boy to the ground.

“I didn’t do nothing,” the boy protested, guarding his head with his arms as a teen stood over him and swung left-right, left-right while others kicked his ribs and back, an attack witnessed by a Tribune reporter. They kicked his face, they stomped his head. They emptied his pockets, they took his shoes.

How did the police define this behavior?

Chicago police spent much of Memorial Day weekend tracking and chasing groups of teens through downtown for what often began as “borderline criminal behavior” and sometimes ended in vandalism and fights. 

“Borderline criminal.”  It’s just vandalism and fights.  Nothing serious like aggravated assault and robbery.

Officers shut down beaches and parks early, and “directed” large groups of teens toward trains and buses.

The holiday weekend trained a spotlight on the Police Department’s delicate strategy of keeping the peace downtown and along the lakefront — areas heavily trafficked by tourists — without resorting to more arrests or heavy-handed tactics.

“I know there were some questions about us forcing people to get on CTA buses and what I can tell you is this: We didn’t force anybody,” Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said Tuesday. “We directed people to different stops — it’s simply a public safety issue.”

But Edwin Yohnka, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, said reports of police funneling groups en masse to express trains were “incredibly troubling.”

“Who made that decision?” he said. “How were decisions made about who was going to be put on that train?”

God forbid the police arrest some kids just up to kids stuff.  Instead they are just going to send the kids home on public transportation.

Of course that was too much for the ACLU which thinks that kicking the shit out of tourists is part of the first Amendment’s “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”  Assuming the people assembled aren’t Nazis.

Holiday weekends are traditionally more violent than other weekends in the summer, and the Police Department in recent years has turned to using overtime and canceling days off to put more officers on the street. This year, 1,300 more officers than usual were deployed.

The 4th of July is on a Wednesday this year.  That means that the “holiday weekend” is Wednesday – Sunday.  That’s five days of potential mayhem.

All four nights of the holiday weekend, these extra patrols kept track of groups of teens as they arrived downtown on the Red Line and made their way to beaches and parks. Some lingered around Michigan Avenue or near CTA stations. The groups ranged in size from a few dozen to more than a hundred.

“They came down here specifically to cause problems,” Deputy Chief Al Nagode said. “They were running in and out of traffic, they were confronting different groups, they were running into businesses doing different activities that were borderline criminal, mostly nuisance, so the officers have to work that fine line of, do we (go) out there to arrest somebody.”

So if beating people up and robbing them isn’t arrest worthy, what is?  Especially if you know they are there to cause trouble.

In one instance, teens damaged property at a Target store at Roosevelt Road and Clark Street, police said. There were reports of gunfire near the Bottled Blonde bar on Wells Street late Saturday, near LaSalle Drive and Ontario Street early Sunday and at Chicago Avenue and Lake Shore Drive early Monday. That night, officers reported people running from the sound of gunfire as crowds left North Avenue Beach.

“A lot of it is the nuisance that they’re doing. It’s part of what we get with teens,” Nagode said. “The resources it would take me to lock up 100 kids who were fighting would be tremendous, so we have to mitigate, stop the problem and do what’s necessary to make (everyone) safe.”

Now gun shots and property damage is a “nuisance?”

“Your husband will be fine ma’am.  Having a bullet in his liver is just a nuisance.”

Several teens were arrested downtown on misdemeanor reckless conduct and disorderly conduct offenses. But for the most part, police attempted to disperse the crowds. Once orders were given to start clearing beaches and parks, officers directed the teens toward buses and train stations. They mostly complied as officers opened gates and moved people through.

“We’re just not randomly picking an ‘L’ stop and getting them out of there, we’re affording them an opportunity to leave the area,” Nagode said. “And once they realize a lot of times they will be placed under arrest if it rises to that level, a lot of people will thankfully take that option and get out of there.”

Such tactics are preferable to making mass arrests but they still raise red flags, particularly because the teens involved were all black, said Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago law professor who works on civil rights and police accountability issues. “I don’t know what ‘borderline criminal’ means. It is or it isn’t.”

The police strategy may make sense in isolation, but against the backdrop of the city’s long history of discriminatory police tactics, it becomes troubling, he said. “(Police should not) pick on or single out groups on the basis of race for selective treatment or discriminatory treatment. That’s a problem.”

Let me see if I get this straight.  The police admit there were fights, beatings, robberies, property damage, and shootings, but they rather disperse crowds of kids than arrest them.

Because the kids are black, dispersing crowds of kids who are engaged in fights, beatings, robberies, property damage, and shootings is racist.

All the time the kids are learning just what they can get away with.  They are testing the police.  Just how bad to they have to beat someone and how many people do they have to beat and rob before they get arrested.  Can they loot a store?  Smash windows?  What is the limit before somebody ends up in handcuffs.

On Sunday night, the crowds were broken up after fights broke out near the Red Line station at Chicago Avenue, long a trouble spot.

“All they wanna do is act stupid. Puts more pressure on citizens, more pressure on police, more pressure on the CTA,” said Rosanna Wallace, a 49-year-old retired bus driver who lives near Chicago Avenue and State Street. “My mother never would allow us down here without them.”

Wallace said most weekends downtown there are large groups — usually between 100 and 200 kids — who go back and forth from the lakefront to the McDonald’s at Chicago and State. The shopping center at Water Tower has had to close early because of groups running through the mall and using other entrances after being kicked out by police and security.

So groups of 100 – 200 kids are causing businesses to close early.  I wonder what the mall management has to say about the loss of revenue?

“It’s chaos,” Wallace said. “This atmosphere, it doesn’t make sense. They come out of their neighborhoods, ’cause they have nothing to do, to make havoc here. They’re disrespectful. They’ll cuss at you in a minute … acting like they have no damn home training.”

Chaos and havoc sounds more accurate than nuisance.

At 38th Street, eight or 10 teens from that group surrounded and attacked the 15-year-old, whom they knew from school, according to police. “It looks like somebody’s down, we need an ambo,” a police lieutenant said as he walked up to the boy.

“I can’t feel my ribs,” the 15-year-old said. “I can’t feel my ribs.”

A friend walked up. The boy asked where he and his other friends had been. “I tried to fight them all, it was too many,” the 15-year-old said.

His groans were picked up by the lieutenant’s radio and broadcast across the city. “They jumped this guy pretty bad,” the lieutenant said. “He’s gonna need the ambulance.”

The group who beat the 15-year-old ran toward a Mariano’s store, while a larger group walked in the street down King Drive. The lieutenant walked toward the larger group as the 15-year-old was helped to his feet and placed into an SUV.

“I’m in the intersection of 38 and King where the ambulance should come,” the lieutenant told the dispatcher. “I’m OK, I’m with a couple people over here, but that group that’s at 37th, some of the guys were a part of it.”

Paramedics parked on King Drive and walked up in blue pants, blue T-shirts and orange gloves, tapping the window of the SUV. They offered to help, but the woman in the SUV sped off. The boy arrived at Comer Children’s Hospital a short time later.

After the SUV left, someone sucker-punched an adult who tended to the 15-year-old victim and provided information to the police.

So another kid was beaten and had to go to the hospital and a witness was punched.  How were these kids dealt with after that?

The teens continued west from Mariano’s to the Green Line station just south of Pershing Road. Confused officers noticed a sign that said no service the rest of the night, and they had to ask the CTA to run a special train to move the teens out of the neighborhood.

They were given a free ride home courtesy of the tax payers.

A boy on the platform threw a garbage can toward squad cars below. A supervisor told officers to put their cars under the station.

What a sweetheart.  Good thing the cops move the cars.  It’s not like a trashcan being thrown off a train station platform won’t crush your skull if it hit you in the head.

Two other aldermen suggested police could have taken a harder line downtown.

Ald. Roderick Sawyer, 6th, chairman of the Black Caucus, said police should have made more arrests downtown, if there was criminal activity, rather than sending the troublemakers to another part of the city. “I think we need to send the message that we won’t tolerate it anywhere in the city of Chicago. Not just, ‘We won’t tolerate this near the Magnificent Mile,’ but we won’t tolerate it in any neighborhood.”

Ald. Brian Hopkins, 2nd, whose ward includes parts of the north end of downtown, agreed making more arrests might have been better. “I think that when you have people committing assaults, disorderly conduct, criminal trespass to property when they’re entering the parks after they’re closed for the night, we need to take another look at the tactics and consider making more arrests … I think the pendulum has swung a little too far in the direction of leniency.”

No.  Fucking.  Shit.

These roving mobs of kids are going to kill some people by the end of the summer.

This shit should be nipped in the bud.  But that is the way with law enforcement now.  Can’t crack down on bad kids.  They have to be shown leniency, especially if they are “disadvantaged,” until they open fire on a crowd with a semi automatic weapon.

The winners here are the kids who now know that if there are enough of them being rowdy, the can get away with almost anything because the police can’t and won’t deal with them all.

The losers here are the good citizens and tourists of Chicago and the Burbs who will be driven from shopping centers, malls, beaches, parks, and any other place of social gathering by the throng of violent youths.