Members of the organization We Charge Genocide, as well as other activists and community members, gathered Aug. 2 at Roosevelt University, 430 S. Michigan Ave., to discuss targeting, harassment and violence against Chicago residents by members of the Chicago Police Department.
We Charge Genocide describes itself as "a grassroots, inter-generational effort to center the voices and experiences of the young people most targeted by police violence in Chicago."
The afternoon featured spoken word performances and testimonials about police action in the city's neighborhoods, as well as individual workshops. Participants described multiple incidents wherein Chicagoans, most of them persons of color, would be randomly stopped by CPD officers, often being detained, then released, for fitting vague descriptions of suspects recently committed crimes or just happening to be nearby when trouble broke out.
"That's a story that happens too many times …We get stopped and harassed too [often]," said Darius Lightfoot, a youth organizer.
Ethan Viets-VanLear of Circles and Ciphers described harassment that started just as he entered high school. Shortly before the school year began, he and another friend were involved in a bike accident. A few weeks later, he and friends were rounded up by the CPD, he said, and questioned for a crime simply because their information was on file from the time of the accident.
"We were the five brown kids who they knew were around," VietsVanLear said, adding that the harassment of his friends "has not really stopped as they've gotten older."
Veronica Morris-Moore, also a youth organizer, spoke of a protest on the University of Chicago ( UC ) campus wherein she was dragged away and detained by UC police without being charged or arrested. She said she was taken to the emergency room and isolated, with a UC communications official nearby and campus police in the hallway: "I felt uncomfortable and did not receive treatment for my injury," she said.
Jasmine Davis talked about getting a traffic stop that went array—she was harassed by a CPD officer when she was riding in the back seat of a car a friend was driving. She also recalled an incident wherein police arrived in her neighborhood and told her friends and her to "get out of our streets."
Davis noted the irony: "I'm the one who lives there, and they come there for eight hours a day to go to work."
Christopher Pierce said, "It's just a normal thing for a Black person, let alone a young Black male."
Pierce led police on a chase and said he was so brutally beaten by officers afterwards that his tongue was nearly severed. He had some outstanding warrants at the time of the incident and noted that has been difficult to turn his life around from the stigmatization that the incident and a subsequent incarceration brought with them.
"That's not to say that I was right, but what can I do with these labels?" Pierce asked. "I'm not an animal and I refuse to be beat like one. The police don't have any right to do what they are doing."
"Who the hell is supposed to respect people who do shit like that?" asked co-emcee Malcolm Linden after Pierce told his story. "What kind of city allows them to do that?"
Linden them parsed the term "Chiraq" that has often been bandied about in both mainstream and social media recently, to the consternation of many city residents. But Linden suggested that the term may be apropos not because of the savagery of the citizens, but the city's escalation of its militaristic response to crime.
"Every year police budgets go up," he said, allowing the city to purchase weapons and armor that are increasingly sophisticated and deadly. "That's how they treat the citizens who pay taxes—and their [pay-]checks."
We Charge Genocide members meet on the third Tuesday of every month at Grace Place, 637 S. Dearborn St., from 5:30-8 p.m. Additionally, they will be holding a "Copwatch" training on Aug. 21 from 6-8 p.m. For more information, visit wechargegenocide.org .
