Simon Balto - Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

Chicagos black neighborhoods are the most overpatrolled and underprotected in the city, testified Howard Saffold, a black police officer with the Chicago Police Department (CPD). An assemblage of community members, experts, and activists looked on from their seats inside the Everett Dirksen Federal Building in downtown Chicago. To them, the departments primary failings were twofold: first, black people were constantly subjected to abuse, harassment, and hypersurveillance (overpatrolled). Second, they were continuously at risk within their neighborhoods anyway (underprotected).

The black neighborhoods that Saffold talked about were suffering badly from neglect and violence. As the by-product of numerous socioeconomic and political processes, and as the more intentional result of others, Chicago was roughly as segregated a place as one might find in America. The Dirksen Building where Saffold testified sat only five miles north of the heart of the black South Side, and even closer to the largest concentration of black communities on the West Side. From the chain-link-enclosed balconies of the Robert Taylor Homes and the Cabrini Green projects, people could see the towering majesty of the downtown Loops skyscrapers material prosperity, embodied in steel, glass, and concrete. But the Loops residents rarely looked back in a meaningful way. If they had, they would have seen their fellow citizens living in terror. The blood of more than seven hundred murder victims soaked the citys streets that year the vast majority on the West and South Sides. Before the decade closed, more than eight thousand Chicagoans, most of them black, would be registered on police homicide ledgers.