IL - Protesters march on Dan Ryan highway, shut down all northbound lanes
I'm curious...what do these people want, and what do they expect government to do?
Guns? Guns are already heavily restricted in Illinois.
More money for schools? The US already spends more than any other nation on schools. Chicago spends more than any other midwest city, and is in the top ten of per pupil spending across the nation.
More jobs for colored people? Trump has, regardless of whether credit is due or not, reduced black and Hispanic unemployment to record lows. Yet he is universally hated, pilloried and excoriated at every turn by the colored community.
More cops? We all know what the response would and should be to that.
The feds do something? Do what? Send in the National Guard? Trump threatened to do that as well, and the autistic screeching that followed could have been heard on Mars.
So, just what the $#@! do these people want to have happen?
Here's a radical solution: You want to reduce violent crime in Chicago?
Deport yourselves.
Originally Posted by Zippyjuan
https://www.realclearscience.com/jou...us_106602.html
Thus, the homicide rate among black youths is nearly 400% higher than the overall youth homicide rate; the homicide rate among Hispanic youths is similar to the overall youth homicide rate; and the homicide rate among white youths is 72% lower than the overall youth homicide rate. Indeed, this indicates that homicide disproportionately affects black youths.
Additionally, in August 2012, the Wall Street Journal reported:
Homicide victims usually are killed by people of their own race and ethnicity. The pattern goes back at least a generation.
Bureau of Justice Statistics data show that from 1976 to 2005, white victims were killed by white defendants 86% of the time and black victims were killed by blacks 94% of the time.
Protesters march on Dan Ryan, shut down all northbound lanes
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/l...06-story.html#
Anti-violence march at Dan Ryan Expressway
A protest march organized by the Rev. Michael Pfleger of St. Sabina Catholic Church in Chicago has led to a partial shutdown of the Dan Ryan Expressway.
The marchers want to call attention to the pervasiveness of gun violence in the city.
Patrick M. O'Connell, Jeremy Gorner and Megan CrepeauContact Reporters
Chicago Tribune
Anti-violence demonstrators marched on the Dan Ryan Expressway on Saturday morning, eventually shutting down all northbound lanes after reaching an agreement with police on the scene.
Marchers initially occupied only the right lanes, with traffic able to travel past in the left lanes. But demonstrators stopped near 75th Street, where the Rev. Michael Pfleger and other organizers pressed the Illinois State Police for access to the entire expressway.
About an hour after the march began, at 11:30 a.m., police allowed protesters access to the entire expressway. Pfleger and Jesse Jackson spoke with Chicago’s top cop Eddie Johnson and commanders with the Illinois State police on the expressway near 75th Street, stating their desire and intention to shut down the entire expressway. The march morphed into a stationary protest as they waited for word on a resolution, chanting and banging drums.
Eventually, the line of Illinois State police and Chicago police officers allowed the marchers access to the entire expressway, completely blocking northbound traffic.
Pfleger and Johnson then marched together, at one point arm-in-arm, as demonstrators walked north toward the city’s skyline.
Just hours before the planned protest was to begin, Illinois State Police announced that they would work with protesters to grant access while also keeping some lanes open to traffic.
Pfleger, a priest at St. Sabina Catholic Church, and other anti-violence protesters are marching in an effort to press city officials to better address gun violence, joblessness and access to quality education.
Initially, state police allowed the marchers access to only the right side of the expressway. State police officials said in a statement they would work alongside those from the Chicago Police Department and the Illinois Department of Transportation to provide “a safety barrier between the motoring public traveling on the interstate and the marchers.”
Demonstrators began their slow march onto the expressway shortly before 10:30 a.m., entering the Dan Ryan at the 79th Street ramp. Thousands of marchers walked slowly on the grassy shoulder beside the northbound lanes of the Dan Ryan. Some ducked under the Chicago Skyway sign.
“The blood of Jesus!” shouted Delores Bailey, the mother of 15-year-old Demario Bailey who was fatally shot in 2014. “Put the guns down, keep the Bible up!”
“Teenagers get up front!” someone else shouted.
A contingent of Chicago police officers and Illinois state troopers stood in a line facing the crowd. Several Illinois Department of Corrections vans also blocked the roadway.
Before the shutdown, cars were allowed to pass through using the two outer-most lanes and in some places, the single outer-most lane.
Protesters were expected to march on the highway for about a mile and a half to 67th Street but as the demonstrators marched north in the right lanes of the expressway near 75th Street, they came to a stop about 11 a.m. and expressed a desire to shut down the entire roadway.
Earlier, demonstrators gathered near 79th and State streets. Some hoisted signs that read “NO MORE DRUG WAR” and “NO GUNS,” with an illustration of a handgun crossed out. Another sign read “They Don't Care About Us: with pictures of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Gov. Bruce Rauner on each side. Some of them held up signs with the names of murder victims. One person banged a drum.
The crowd also consisted of several elected officials, including U.S. Rep. Danny Davis, whose 15-year-old grandson Javon Wilson was shot and killed on the South Side in 2016.
They stood inside a fenced area along 79th Street east of State Street while representatives from St. Sabina got on bullhorns are implored protesters to step inside.
Rev. Harolynn McIntosh, dressed in bright white robes, sat in her wheelchair in the lot near the expressway, waiting for the march to start.
“Every time I turn on the news and a child has caught a bullet ... that hurts my heart because they’re not going to fulfill their dreams,” said McIntosh, who worked at Chicago Public Schools for about 30 years and serves as a reverend at a South Side church.
McIntosh was joined by Charles Taylor, a 17-year-old from Evanston who met her by chance as the protesters gathered. Taylor agreed to push her wheelchair down the Dan Ryan.
“I’m really just showing support and making sure change comes,” he said.
The state police statement says the agreement on the expressway patrols was reached through “ongoing discussion,” but also states the decision was made on Thursday. It wasn’t immediately clear why notice was sent Saturday.
Even with state police’s latest announcement, the protest has the potential to cause massive headaches for law enforcement and thousands of Chicago motorists, especially those trying to travel through the South Side on a busy summer weekend.
To demonstrators, disrupting a Saturday morning is part of the point. To others, it’s an unnecessary and unsafe intrusion on one of the city’s busiest arteries. City officials have been trying to persuade organizers not to proceed with the expressway protest plan.
Pfleger this week said civil disobedience is what makes authorities and governments take notice and listen. He emphasized the march is only the first step “to draw the attention to the urgency of the problem.”
The next move, Pfleger said, is for concerned citizens from communities most beset by violence to sit down with Mayor Rahm Emanuel and other officials to discuss how to get more jobs and other resources to these neighborhoods.
Tribune Graphics
Anti-violence protesters to shut down the Dan Ryan Expressway on Saturday: 5 things to know »
How to get around Saturday if anti-violence protest blocks the Dan Ryan »
The Illinois State Police, the agency in charge of patrolling the expressway, warned Pfleger and other activists they risk arrest if they proceed with the Dan Ryan shutdown. Pfleger and the Rev. Jesse Jackson have remained defiant, on Tuesday ripping up a statement from the state police.
“When people keep ignoring you, you take it up a notch,” Pfleger said earlier in the week.
The state police, meanwhile, warned pedestrians “not to enter any expressways in Illinois, or they will face arrest and prosecution.” The Cook County public defender’s office said it will be making lawyers available Saturday in the event of arrests. Public defenders will be able to help at Chicago-area police stations and at bond court at the Leighton Criminal Court Building.
The Rev. Jackson said Friday that the inconvenience to motorists will be temporary, while the conditions plaguing communities near the march site — job loss, shuttered schools and the collapse of manufacturing and industrial facilities — has been permanent.
“Nonviolent demonstration is sometimes the only way to get the attention that will help change things,” Jackson said. “I’m perfectly willing to be arrested to bring attention to this crisis. … Stopping traffic is less damaging than the shooting and the killing and the jailing.”
Jackson said the protest is designed to help spark more reinvestment in struggling South Side neighborhoods plagued by gun violence and “huge deserts for jobs and education.”
“We have an obligation to address those who have been abandoned,” Jackson said.
Chicago police said they are prepared to provide only crowd safety and traffic control functions.
“CPD will not participate in any physical arrests of those peaceful(ly) protesting gun violence,” police said in a statement.
On Friday, Chicago police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said the department will be playing a supporting role for the state police. Several hundred Chicago police officers will conduct crowd and traffic control on the peripheral streets outside the Dan Ryan and its overpasses, Guglielmi said.
He said those officers will ensure that buses carrying protesters will be able to safely get in and out of the area.
Pfleger said it should not be a tall order for the state police to plan for a disruption on the expressway considering such highways get closed down for presidential visits and other special occasions.
“This is not rocket science,” Pfleger said. “They need to figure it out.”
Gun violence in the city remains a stubborn problem, although the number of shooting victims in Chicago has dropped since reaching a 20-year high in 2016.
As of Monday, at least 1,378 people have been shot so far this year in Chicago, data compiled by the Tribune show. And at least 61 of this year's shooting victims have been children 15 and younger.
If the march makes it on to the expressway, it will not be the first time a Chicago highway has been disrupted by demonstrators. In July 2016, protesters marched on the southbound lanes of the Dan Ryan Expressway for about five to 10 minutes in response to the deaths of two African-American men who were killed during confrontations with police in Minnesota and Louisiana. Last year, activists and homeless protesters briefly halted traffic on Lake Shore Drive to protest the city’s decision to clear areas beneath viaducts in Uptown. There also were a few Lake Shore Drive shutdowns by protesters after grand juries decided not to indict police officers in the police shootings of men in New York and Ferguson, Mo.
Activist Jedidiah Brown spent time getting the word out and encouraging people to be a part of the protest, but by Saturday morning, he said he was disillusioned by what it turned into.
“We’re desperate for solutions, but I think it’s time we start having real conversations about what’s going on,” he said by phone as the protest was in full swing.
Brown took issue with Pfleger thanking Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel for extending his support, but when Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner tried to lend his, on Twitter Pfleger said Rauner was lying.
“You don’t thank your oppressors, first of all. And the resources they’re fighting for are controlled by Democrats. If Rahm Emanuel wanted to provide funding, he could. If you want Democrats in power, that’s fine. But to thank one and call the other a liar, it’s disingenuous,” Brown said. “I have angst against them both but if you’re going to lead our people, lead them in fairness.”
Brown said if he could say anything to protesters he would apologize for rallying behind it and helping it gain momentum. Noting the way state police reversed course from threatening arrests to making sure the protest went off safely, Brown said the move was meant to ensure traffic continued moving and to mitigate the struggle that act would inflict. The point was to call attention to difficult conditions and absent that, Brown said he couldn’t support the event.
“It turned a protest into a parade,” he said. “It’s shameful.”
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