When Jill Hopkins saw a post on the Facebook discussion group Ukrainian Village Neighborhood Watch about a proposal to hire private security guards to patrol a portion of the neighborhood in cooperation with the Chicago Police Department, it raised red flags. Host of the talk show Morning AMp on WBEZ’s sister station, Vocalo, Hopkins lived in Ukrainian Village in the 2000s, and she regularly checks the neighborhood watch group, along with similar pages in a few other communities, as part of the research for her broadcast.
In his post Steinberg said he’s in talks with a private security company about possibly hiring guards to patrol the three-block-square area bordered by Grand, Damen, Chicago, and Paulina, where he resides, at night. He indicated that he plans to coordinate with the Chicago Grand Neighbors Association, the local aldermen, and the police department. Since the specifics of the proposal are still being worked out, it’s not clear whether the guards would be off-duty police officers or civilians, or whether they would carry firearms. Steinberg asked neighbors who might be interested in chipping in to cover the cost of the service to stay tuned for details.
And Hopkins’s family has been profoundly impacted by violent crime. In summer 2016 her younger brother, who’s now 28 and was working for UPS at the time, was shot in the back on the southeast side, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. “I believe it was a gang initiation thing and my brother was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she says.
It’s not uncommon for private security guards to be hired to patrol Chicago neighborhoods and business strips where there are concerns about crime. Gold Coast residents have paid for private guards, and in Lakeview the Southport Community Alliance, a neighborhood group that includes Cubs manager Theo Epstein, has retained a security company to patrol the area. The University of Chicago’s campus police have supplemented the CPD presence in Hyde Park for decades, and in recent years private guards have been stationed along the increasingly vibrant 53rd Street retail corridor. Lately Alderman Hopkins has been pushing for patrols of Wicker Park and Bucktown business strips.
Posts on Steinberg’s thread were split fairly evenly for and against his idea. I contacted ten participants via Facebook to get approval to include them in the article, including five people who voiced opposition and five who expressed support. All of the opponents granted permission, but only one commenter who spoke positively about Steinberg’s idea responded.
Jill Hopkins posted on the forum to ask if Steinberg, who’s white, understands that black and brown residents not only have to worry about street crime like everyone else, but also have to be concerned about being harmed by authority figures with guns, who often go unpunished for killing unarmed African-Americans. “That’s another thing on my plate, worrying about being shot because some people are afraid of my ethnicity,” she later told me. She added that she found it upsetting that many people on the forum didn’t seem willing to acknowledge that issue.
