More Than A Protest: Chicagoans Fight City's Knee On Their Necks

CHICAGO — If you want to better understand the mayhem overtaking the streets of Chicago, ignore the preachy politicians, turn off the TV news and listen to the police scanner.

By Sunday afternoon, as the National Guard protected downtown wealth and looters struck small businesses in poor, minority neighborhoods, constant chirping on the police scanner told a story that didn't match the narrative pushed by an out-of-touch news media linking local civil unrest to the protest of a black man’s murder in Minneapolis.

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In quick audio bursts that sent police officers scrambling to restore an unattainable peace, you can hear whispers of something closer to truth — the madness happening here was Chicago born and bred.

The Sunday morning scanner chatter sounded to me like "they" were tired of being poor and forsaken by City Hall because of the color of skin, the size of the paycheck and the ZIP code they live in.

At 8140 S. Ashland: “They are breaking into Fifth Third Bank.”

At 111th and Michigan: “They are trying to break into the ATM with a sledgehammer.”

“They are trying to shoot open the vault at the Currency Exchange.”

Too many people live hungry: “They are looting the chicken store.” And “Looting at Fairplay Foods.”

People want to escape reality: At 86th and Commercial: “We have mass chaos going on over here. They’re robbing the pot dispensary.”

At 74th and Halsted Street: “They are breaking into the liquor store.”

People don’t trust city government to protect them with the same vigor they protect the rich part of town. At 81st and Ashland: “The guy at Cosmo Beauty is defending his business. He has a gun with an extended magazine.”

The dispatch of police calls seemed to echo the frustration of people living in "the most American of American cities” that has forsaken, jailed and brutalized them, and ignored cries for equality, again and again and again.

For generations, city leaders turned a deaf ear to the same chants of “No Justice. No Peace” that echoed during the 1968 riots that leveled the West Side following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and again in 2015 on the Magnificent Mile after a judge ordered former Mayor Rahm Emanuel to release video of a Chicago cop firing every bullet in his gun — 16 Shots — at Laquan McDonald until the black teenager was dead.

“Right now, all this has very little to do with police killing George Floyd. Maybe it was the last straw. You know what’s happening. These are people in neighborhoods deprived of resources, good health care and jobs that historically have been the target of police brutality. It’s all this stuff bottled up,” Ald. Anthony Beale said. “People have been bottled up for two-and-a-half months because of the virus. They ain’t got jobs. They have no hope. And all this stuff boils over.”

There's no excuse for lawlessness. There’s no rational justification for madness.

But it's worth saying that this isn't just a protest of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police.

Politicians can't blame so much destruction on organized anarchists with an extremist agenda and "thugs" pillaging for designer clothes and Nike shoes.

What's coming over the police scanner is an echo of people fighting against a city that has held a knee to their necks for generations.

Chicago has never been so ugly, and so real.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series, "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN, and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots.

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