“The first we gotta do, is these guys are going to learn, we’re going to go for coffee or we can’t do anything,” explained Deputy Chief and Seventh District Commander
, as we pulled into the Dunkin Donuts at 59th and Halsted at the beginning of a two-hour ridealong.
“Nothing matters more than coffee,” answered Sergeant
, who was driving the Chevy Tahoe. A 20-year veteran and former paramedic with dark hair, large hands and a firm handshake, he received his promotion last September.
“Fill the car, fill yourself,” Schmitz said in a thick Chicago accent before entering the store. An Englewood native, he is blond, blue-eyed and stocky.
I started to chuckle, but the black bulletproof vest I had put on at CPD heaquarters with the help of a muscular policeman with a nearly shaved head and tattoos on both bulging biceps wouldn’t let me.
Videographer
and I had donned the vests in a side room at 35th and Michigan.
I had struggled to follow the policeman’s instructions to think of the Velcro straps as a cumberbund, so he helped me release and then attach them so that they fit snugly around my stomach.
The policeman told Sam his vest needed to go higher up.
“If a bullet hits you in the belly, you’ll survive,” he explained. “If it hits you in the heart, you’ll die.”
Seventh District Crime Decrease
The officer had a point.
The Seventh District, which covers much of the Englewood neighborhood, has for years been one of the city’s deadliest areas.
We ran the numbers and found that 462 in the district had been killed between 2002 and 2011, the city’s second- highest total.
The numbers were so high that top cop G
tapped Schmitz, a longtime gang enforcement leader, to lead the district in early 2012 in launching the
.
Piloted in the Seventh and Eleventh districts, two areas of the city that former News Affairs Director Melissa Stratton said generated 25 percent of the city’s violent crime despite having just 5 percent of the population, the strategy is now moving to other districts.
Based on “intelligence-based policing,” the strategy seems to consist of having high numbers of officers on the street, of using data to identify where to place them and of responding instantly and forcefully to any crime that might be happening.
In short, it means to have an active, vigilant and responsive presence in the community at all times.
The tactics appears to have garnered results.
At a time when Chicago led the nation in homicides and consistently
and
for topping 500 homicides for the first time since 2008, the rates in the Seventh District went the other direction, falling 30 percent from 59 homicides in 2011 to 41 homicides in 2012.
In fact, taking the Seventh District out of the citywide totals meant that the homicide rate went up by 25 percent.
Violent crime went down in the district, too.
Based on these accomplishments, McCarthy took the unusual step of
promoting Schmitz in December to Deputy Chief
. For his part, Schmitz credited the 400 officers he supervises-he calls them his “guys and girls” and asserts repeatedly that the Chicago Police Department is the best in the world- for the change.
Little Heat on a Cold Night
We got a chance to see the philosophy in action on a bitterly cold Tuesday night in late February.
Beyond the many boarded up buildings, the streets looked empty and lonely, like the days after Kennedy’s assassination or a devastating blizzard.
This gave Schmitz and Perez,enough time to begin their cup of coffee. During the summer, they explained, they might not have time to finish that errand because things get so “hot”, or busy.
The two men had different perspectives on heat.
Perez likes it.
For him, it’s why he’s doing the job, makes the time go faster and helps him feel that he’s making a difference in the community.
“I love it when it’s busy, as long as they’re not murders, Perez said. ” II do like a little action; find some dope, maybe get a guy with a gun. All the officers. We like it busy. I would venture to guess that every officer likes it a little busy.”
, a six-year veteran who we spoke with in the interrogation room after returning from the streets, agreed. She and Kelly Bongiovianni, her policing partner of the last four years, added that the amount of activity helps bring the officers closer together.
“It’s a camaraderie,” she said, noting that officers in other districts “don’t talk as much. There’s not the back up, there’s not the interaction that we have. There’s more bonding”
This attitude is what makes working in the Seventh District enjoyable for Perez.
“If you got good police officers that work under you and do the job, I’d rather do that any day than go to a district where I have lazy police officers and people that just complain about dumb stuff like the dog barking,
“I’d hate it. That would be too slow,” Perez said.
Schmitz, on the other hand, used to like it hot, but now, as a commander, wants things quiet so that his charges are safe.
“I liked it busy my whole career,” said Schmitz, whose 27 years have seen him work in gang enforcement, gang investigations and the Eighth District before assuming the commander’s position in the Seventh District. “Now that I’m in charge, I want it slow’
In between sips of coffee and an explanation of the Violence Reduction Strategy, Schmitz said that he divides the community of Englewood into two types of people-good people and criminals. In essence, his philosophy is simple; make things harder and harder for the gang bangers so that the good people can enjoy life in their neighborhood.
“We’re trying to help all the good people in Englewood. We’re trying to take the people that are causing the crime out,” Schmitz said.
While Schmitz wants to drive people who commit crime out of Englewood, he emphasized that he doesn’t simply want to push them to another police district.
Instead, he said, sometimes they move.
Sometimes they go to jail or prison.
Sometimes they see the error of their ways and want to do the right thing.
Schmitz didn’t provide specifics about the numbers of criminals in each group.
Called into Action
A call came over the radio about a robbery on a nearby street. The dispatcher said the suspect was a black male in his 20s who was wearing a Cubs jacket and heading westbound on Ashland.
Perez pressed a lever that started the siren’s roar, and the dark, unmarked Tahoe sped down the street.
He took a left toward Paulina and saw two other police cars in pursuit of the suspect, who was wearing a Cubs hat.
Veterans with at least two decades experience, Schmitz and Perez both have highly trained powers of observation-at one point, Schmitz saw a mother and children walking down an alley, while I saw nothing-but this time they could not find the perpetrator.
Later in the evening, Schmitz expressed confidence that would eventually get the guy. Robbers tend to be repeat offenders, so the information they had gathered from this incident would help them later, he said.
For now, though,nothing.
We continued to drive around to the district’s hot spots, from the district’s east end to 55th and 57th Streets between Princeton and Shields to the intersection of 74th and Racine.
As we drove near Robeson School on Normal Ave. between 68th and 69th Streets, a young black man with a beard, black hat, dark sweatshirt and a cigarette did a double take when the Tahoe appeared.
Perez and Schmitz rounded the block, followed by a back up car, then returned to the street.
“We saw a guy that gave a funny look to us; e might have just bought some dope,” Schmitz explained. “We’re going to stop and say, ‘Hello.'”
Perez stepped out of the car and toward the man.
Without being told, the man put his arms up as if surrender and then placed them on the hood of the car.
Perez patted the man down and found nothing on him.
But one of the three officers in a back up car discovered a small bag of marijuana nearby.
Since the man did not have the drugs on him, the police did not arrest him.
But they did take the marijuana.
Doctrine of “Reasonable Suspicion”
Back in the car, Perez explained that an officer’s ability to determine what constitutes
draws on observing body language and is honed by years of experience The tip can be something as little as a startled glance when a police car turns around a corner, walking away from a crowd of people, or starting to walk where previously they had been standing, he said.
“When they stop like they just saw a ghost, something’s wrong because any normal person who saw a police officer should keep on walking,” Perez said. “That little split indecision that they have cues you into their suspicious activity,and then we stop them.”
Civil libertarians could have a problem with these tactics, and activist
said several days later that officers in these districts often treat residents’ culture as criminal.
But Schmitz maintains that they help to reduce the crime by stopping it before it gets going.
For her part, Jawor made the point that many Englewood residents grow up with a negative image of the police, either from relatives having been arrested or from their own interactions. As a result, she said, trust between the police and community is very low. Schmitz acknowledged that he had no basis for comparison since he had only been in the district for a year, but said he had been told people had been more forthcoming since the strategy had been enacted.
Later in the evening, Schmitz and Perez came across a man who started walking away after they saw the officers.
Hey man what’s up,” Schmitz called from the car.
“Chilling” the man answered, not looking in his direction.
“Everything good?” Schmitz asked. “You all right?”
“Go slow,” he told Perez.
A woman in a tan sweatshirt with long hair came near the man on the street.
Perez and Schmitz had also noticed a car with its engine running on the street. This aroused their suspicion.
“But nobody, but nobody, leaves a car running, in certain parts of the city, without being in it,” Schmitz said later.
Schmitz got out of the Tahoe, greeted and frisked the man. He also walked down the street and talked with the people near the car.
A female officer searched the woman.
Schmitz’s ears were bright pink when he re-entered the car. He said that he and the other officers had already run the names of the people they had stopped on the street in the CLEAR computer that sits between the driver and passenger in each police car. This had allowed him to see information like their name, birth date and any prior arrests or gang affiliation.
At the same time, the man he had first stopped had told him that he was a Gangster Disciple from the West Side. The two had met 21 years earlier, Schmitz said, when the man had been arrested for murder. He had just gotten out after 17 years in prison.
Schmitz explained that police and residents go through an elaborate dance of information exchange. The police sharing what they know about the people they stop provides an incentive for them to leave before engaging in criminal activity. The people being stopped disclosing who they are in full detail conveys that they have nothing to hide.
Perez explained that the man had used a number of nicknames when he asked the man who he was visiting in the neighborhood. He didn’t believe the man, who said he lived in Dalton, knew anyone in the community.
“He was there to do something,” Perez said.
Schmitz said they would not do anything that night:
“We know who they are, they know we did that, they’re going to move on,” he said. “Those are the kind of things that stop a crime from occurring. If they were thinking of doing something, they’re moving on.”
The interaction illustrated the paradox that police can encounter when trying to build trust and reduce crime. On the one hand, an active and aggressive presence helps establish authority and provide the safety necessary for law-abiding citizens to walk on the streets. On the other hand, those very tactics can contribute to the lack of trust that is a common element in low-income neighborhoods.
Schmitz declined to respond to my asking about a resident’s statement that the police’s code of silence contributes to equivalent behavior by the residents, but Perez emphasized the importance of residential cooperation in order to solve major crimes like murders.
“If we could just break that fear, if we could get them to talk a little more, just give us a hint at least of where to go, I think it would be a lot easier for us and we could prevent a lot of these crimes,” he said.
The consequences for this silence can be deadly, according to Schmitz.
“They’ve got to ask themselves a question: If they choose not to get involved and their kid’s the next one that gets shot, who they got to blame?”
The question hung in the air for eight seconds as Schmitz shifted in his seat.
Gun taken from Resident Tip
Residents may not be speaking up about homicide, but at least one called about a black SKS rifle with a 30 round magazine and a scope that had been attached.
We saw it lieing on the white table like a long black lobster in the Tactical Operations room that buzzed with activity after we returned to the office.
Well built officers in blue jeans and sweatshirts walked around the room. One of them offered us donuts.
A sergeant who did not want to be identified explained that his officers had recovered the weapon wrapped inside a garbage bag that was in a garbage can.
The assault rifle, a cousin of the AK-47, came from China, according to Schmitz. He said that the scope on top of it had been attached, rather than been part of the original gun, and probably cost about $600 since it was unmarked and harder to trace.
Its placement was deliberate, the sergeant explained.
The garbage can was located on the boundary between two warring gangs, the Black Disciples and Gangster Disciples.
The gun had hollow tipped 7.62 x 39 mm bullets that have a range of at least 500 meters and that could exact serious damage, according to Schmitz.
“These are the type of guns we don’t want to go up against because it goes through body armor,” he said.
Those bullets did not hit their target, but other ones did.
Before we left, we passed by what Schmitz called a somber part of the station.
Behind the front desk was a case that held a picture with the name and dates of every Seventh District officer who had been killed in the line of duty.
Alejandro Valadez and Thomas Wortham IV were the most recent.
Jawor said that a day when an officer is shot or is involved in an officer-related shooting is one of the most difficult, and most memorable, she experiences. Bongiovanni added that she and others cope by doing what is necessary to be done, but the impact is real and substantial. The cumulative toll of extreme events like officers killing or being killed with more routine events of stabbings, shootings, sexual assaults and other crimes can wear on the officers.
Jawor said she both can get snippy with family members and loved ones, but also can become desensitized to working in such a violent environment.
Being a female officer presents challenges, too, she and Bongiovanni said, as residents are more likely to flirt with them than their male counterparts. They have to navigate how to set limits while not being so firm that residents tell them they want to be men.
Perez said confidential counseling exists for officers who need it, while Schmitz said it is part of his job as commander to listen to officers who mention that a colleague appears to be struggling emotionally and take the necessary steps to support them. But others said that the officer’s code of silence about not speaking negatively about other officers extends to seeing an admission of coping with the job’s demands as weakness.
Nearly four hours had passed and we were getting ready to leave.
We shed our bullet proof jackets and Schmitz asked how we were getting back to the office.
We’ll take LSD, Sam replied.
Everyone laughed.
Sam and I clarified that his answer meant we were driving on Lake Shore Drive, not ingesting a psychedelic drug.
We walked out of the station into the dark cold, night and headed for home.
