A few months ago, the crackle of gunfire rang out down the street. That’s very usual for my Chicago neighborhood. I’ve lived here for more than twenty-five years, and I’ve never heard gunfire before.
So, in response, I made the mistake of joining my local neighborhood watch group on Facebook. I’ve always been skeptical of the zealous neighborhood watch types; they strike me as vigilantes looking for trouble, ready to halt different-looking people they don’t know and demand to see their papers.
It was a refuge for people who were paranoid about people whom they considered to be lesser than them being in too close proximity.
But I joined the Facebook group anyway. I guess I figured my neighbors would be different, being that this is a hip and liberal urban neighborhood and all.
I should have known how things would go when someone posted a picture of a tent pitched in nearby Grant Park and drew a red circle around it. A lot of homeless people in Chicago are living in tents these days. Under more and more bridges and viaducts there are tent cities popping up.
Well the woman who posted the picture also wrote a comment about how city parks close at 11 p.m. but obviously the police aren’t enforcing the curfew for this tent dweller. She said there was an unfair double standard going on here since she’d been asked by police to leave the park at 11 p.m. before.
I hit reply and asked if she thought the solution was for the police to take down and haul away the tent at 11 p.m. Someone else replied that the solution was for the police to not let homeless people pitch tents in the park in the first place.
Others on the list were all worked up on Mexican Independence Day in September. Because of the pandemic, the city would not issue permits to the annual parade’s organizers. Consequently, hundreds of people held their own unauthorized, roving parade. A long caravan snaked throughout the city. People beeped horns, revved engines, and waved flags from windows, sun roofs, and the backs of pickup trucks. Fireworks were set off.
Some of the neighborhood watch people moaned about how it took them hours to get home because of the subsequent gridlocked traffic and seethed about how neither the police nor the mayor seemed willing or able to maintain order. There were videos posted, taken from the windows of condos in high rises in this neighborhood, of the raucous but peaceful parade proceeding down the street below, as if it were a tank invasion.
I was rather envious of the unauthorized parade; I wished I could organize and mobilize so many people.
When I read “Fearing Your Neighbors,” Michael Kuhlenbeck’s article on neighborhood watch groups in the December 2021/January 2022 issue of The Progressive, I learned about how these groups are created in cooperation with law enforcement, in ways intended to increase law enforcement's reach. Now they have been given enormous new surveillance capabilities through technologies like doorstep cameras and facial recognition.
The article noted situations in which concerned neighbors make frivolous calls to police about Black people in their midst,”placing the lives of people of color at risk.”
I don’t know if the neighborhood watch program I joined has tight ties to the cops. It seemed to me like an impromptu thing, But it was a refuge for people who were paranoid about people whom they considered to be lesser than them being in too close proximity.
After a few weeks, I dropped out of my neighborhood watch group. I joined hoping it would make me feel safer, but I ended up feeling less safe. I always thought the law and order hordes were way far away in distant corners of red states. I never knew there were so many of them right next door.