Judge Asks: Why No Protests for Children Shot Down in Chicago's Streets?

Judge Peggy Chiampas watched as her courtroom, filled with local and national news reporters, protesters and activists, emptied on Wednesday afternoon.

They assembled for Malcolm London, a poet and activist, arrested in the first night of the Laquan McDonald protests and accused of assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest. London blackened a cop’s eye, police said. Charges dropped, the judge told him, “you are free to go.”

Everyone rose to leave, but the judge had something more to say.

“Why don’t we have a packed courtroom for this?” Chiampas asked, staring at their backs.

Because what came next on the docket, what few stayed to see, is the human tragedy that unfolds on Chicago’s streets every day of the year — gunshots thrown with reckless abandon by warring, armed thugs and innocent victims wounded or worse by their stray bullets.

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In the case coming before Chiampas this time, we count an 11-year-old girl among the wounded, shot while walking down South Sangamon Street in Auburn-Gresham with her cousin in August.

“Why don’t we have every single press person in the room for this case? For an 11-year-old child?” Chiampas demanded, her voice rising, according to the DNAinfo Chicago reporter who stayed behind as the others left. “Why aren’t there people protesting outside for this case?”

The man accused of firing those shots, Cordero Harris, 27, went on the lam, but cops tracked him down in Iowa and brought him in on Monday, DNAinfo reports. Charged with aggravated battery and aggravated assault, Cordero already has a record of firearms offenses.

Which pretty much makes Harris just like every other gunslinger in Chicago’s war-torn neighborhoods. Chicago Police officials say there are too many guns on the streets and too many people for whom the courts and jails are a revolving door. Police have made more than 2,200 gun-related arrests this year, and confiscated more than 5,000 weapons.

Every weekend, three, four, five dozen people are reported shot in Chicago. The staccato pop of gunfire throughout the city is as common as the roar of airplanes flying over the cityscape into Midway and O’Hare. Young gangsters who care little for how long they may live open fire without regard for anyone else sharing the street.

And the body count includes an outrageous number of children and innocents, too.

This 11-year-old girl was shot in the arm. She will live. The scars of her childhood will include a bullet wound.

Amari Brown, 7, was shot in the stomach while watching fireworks on the Fourth of July on the corner near his home. A congressman and a senator came to his funeral. The shooting continued without pause.

A 10-year-old girl, Melanie Irving, felt a bullet graze her neck in a Woodlawn drive-by on a Sunday afternoon in September. She was one of 57 people shot that weekend, and the local news media marveled at Chicago’s mounting toll of injured and dead.

One day later, an 11-month-old baby, Princeton Chew, was hit in a flurry of two dozen gunshots, and the little boy’s pregnant mom and grandmother were shot, too, mortally wounded in front of their home in the Back of the Yards. Two Chicago Police officers broke protocol and rushed the infant, bleeding from his belly, to a hospital. Kevin Modzelewski and John Conneelly saved his life. Not even old enough to form a memory, he will live with scars, too.

On Nov. 2, 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee was shot several times at close range in a South Side alley — lured there and executed, shot at close range. The killer put a bullet into the boy’s head, and he met death holding his beloved basketball. Police say his father’s gang rivals are to blame, and his father has done nothing to help bring the killer to justice.

These are just a handful of the many names typed onto the victim line in the police reports and manifest of the dead at the county morgue.

Also on Patch

• City’s Black Leaders Demand Firing of Chicago’s Top Cop
• Video Shows Jason Van Dyke Shoot Laquan McDonald
• Police Union Stands by Officer Charged in Murder of Teen
• Angry Protesters Flood Chicago Streets
• Poet, Four Others, Arrested After Night of Unrest
• 5 Perspectives on ‘16 Shots: The Death of Laquan McDonald’
• No Bail for Chicago Cop Charged in ‘Graphic, Violent, Chilling’ Murder
• Teen Shot 16 Times by Chicago Police a ‘Modern-Day Emmett Till’

The poet-activist left the courthouse Wednesday, arm in arm with his fellow protesters, and returned to the streets to decry the killing of Laquan McDonald at the hands of a police officer who shot him 16 times, a death recorded on video. A horrible, unnecessary death now available for the entire world to see.

And well they should. What happened the night Officer Jason Van Dyke took the teen-ager’s life raises significant questions about the state of policing in Chicago. The shooting stands as a blatant and morally offensive betrayal of strength, justice and compassion, as well.

The strength of character that should represent the thin blue line of men and women who choose to stand between the criminals and the rest of us.

The compassion that leads men who wear the same uniform as Van Dyke to scoop up a tragically wounded baby and speed him to a hospital.

The justice that propels detectives trying to solve the gangland execution of an innocent 9-year-old boy or track down a gunman in Iowa accused of wounding an 11-year-old girl.

The strength, justice and compassion that ought to define the state of policing in Chicago.

But our outraged judge asks a significant question: Why aren’t people taking to the streets for these crimes, too?

Laquan McDonald protesters plan to shut down Michigan Avenue on Friday, Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year on Chicago’s most famous street. On the day after Thanksgiving, when the rest of the nation watches, they should know this, too: Bountiful are Chicago’s tragedies, manifold are the injustices. The problem runs far deeper than blue on black.

Someone should rise to answer her question.