The View from the Ground, June 26, 2001:
At Stateway Gardens, a gloomy but familiar irony of urban life persists: the place where effective policing might be most productive turns out to be exactly the place where tension between citizens and cops seems to be most firmly built into the social dynamic. [...] most Stateway residents were shocked but not particularly surprised when a small army of Chicago Police interrupted a neighborhood basketball tournament and subjected everyone there to extensive personal searches. The ages and occupations of the approximately 250 people searched varied widely, but everyone there did have two things in common: they were all black, and they were all searched despite the fact that the police lacked a search warrant or any (apparent) probable cause.
Just daily life in the Chicago projects. Which makes Sylvia's Constitutional Rap just that much more pointedly ironic, doesn't it?
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
[Archives: 2001 and after]
Archives before February 5, 2001
Search entries:
12/19/2001: vive la france
12/19/2001: princess, redux
12/19/2001: yemen and rumsfeld
12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now
12/18/2001: interesting donation
12/18/2001: shame on winn dixie, indeed
12/18/2001: saudi princess
12/17/2001: new resolve
12/17/2001: a victim of the attack ... yeah, right
12/17/2001: polluters ho!