A blast of fireworks just went off before this shot. There’s a patch of grey/blue smoke wafting above the stop sign.
Residuals from last Saturday night outside the Jonquil Hotel where they claim they call the police.
Another youth craps game. This space between the school trailers and Gale School create a great place for drug dealing, prostitution, and craps games.
The police never interrupt this nightly alley blocker party because the neighbors never complain. 7600 block of Paulina. Food, booze, in the garage, people in the alley and vans blocking the alley. So what message does this send everyone else? Of course, noise is good, trash is better.
These were genuine kids just hanging out for a change.
2 comments:
Toni, you made an interesting remark on this post:
"But they need 50 more squads to deal effectively."
We really need more like 500 squads to deal with it, and hundreds of communities across the country need to duplicate that effort, or even do much more, because there are dozens of neighborhoods and cities in far worse shape than this one. What's happening in this neighborhood and in Chicago generally is nothing compared to what's happening in other cities like Newark and Detroit and St. Louis- whole cities over-run with drugs and violent criminals
We, as citizens, as a community, and as a country, need to think very, very long and hard about what winning the war on drugs and vice would really mean: it means turning this country into a POLICE STATE.
And even then we would not win. We can jail as many people as we want, and the leaders of the drug cartels will just get richer and more powerful.
Do we want to turn this country into a complete police state? We are already halfway there, and the multiplication of laws against this behavior or that are hardly making a dent in the violent crime. Many people point to the drop in the crime rates over the past ten years, in most cities, as proof that this works, but my personal belief is that the only reason crime dropped in the 90s is because fewer babies were born in the 70s and early 80s, giving us a smaller generation of young people in their late teens and 20s to deal with.
The only way we will clean this up, IMO, is by legalizing these behaviors and using zoning to restrict them to neighborhoods that are non-residential, like old industrial districts that are now empty, and make the areas surrounding them off-limits to residential development. We could tax them the way we tax other vices, such as gambling, booze, and tobacco, and have a multi-tiered regulatory system for drugs that is in keeping with the level of impairment and health damage each drug produces in its users. All the people who wanted to use this drek could go to the 'dope district' to use it.
I feel it's worth a try, because nothing else has worked. It would, I feel, be worth it, just to get this stuff out of residential areas and to render it much less lucrative, giving criminals less incentive to kill for turg and customers. It's better than turning half the country into a gulag- our prisons are already overflowing with drug offenders.
Paradise - Boston tried that years ago, and the Combat Zone was born. It's gone now, a victim of gentrification. Unfortunately, I am sure the vices practiced there are being practiced elsewherem in the city. I don't believe they came up with a new Combat Zone.
We need a multi-step approach that nips this behavior in the bud before it can become chronic, as well as get the leadership off the streets - thus the 50 squads.
Post a Comment