July 07, 2018, 03:29 PM
SigmundAre there any sane people left in Chicago???
http://www.chicagotribune.com/...-20180706-story.htmlMayor to governor in war of words about Dan Ryan march: 'Delete your account'Patrick M. O'Connell, Jeremy Gorner and Megan CrepeauContact Reporters
Chicago Tribune, July 7 2:18PM
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 crawl past in the left lanes. But a few minutes into the march, demonstrators stopped near 75th Street, where the Rev. Michael Pfleger and other organizers pressed the Illinois State Police for access to the entire expressway.
Pfleger and fellow activist the Rev. Jesse Jackson spoke with Chicago’s top cop Eddie Johnson and commanders with the Illinois State Police on the expressway, 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.
After a flurry of negotiations, Illinois State Police and Chicago police officers allowed the marchers access to all northbound lanes. The protesters marched north until 67th Street, where a barricade of officers, highway trucks and emergency vehicles funneled them off the Dan Ryan.
Pfleger and Johnson then marched together, at one point arm in arm, as demonstrators walked north toward the city’s skyline.
The full shutdown of the northbound lanes in that section of the expressway lasted about an hour, with hundreds of demonstrators chanting and toting signs as they marched on the pavement.
Pfleger, a priest at St. Sabina Catholic Church, and other anti-violence protesters organized the march in an effort to press city officials to better address gun violence, joblessness and access to quality education.
“We came out here to do one thing: to shut it down,” Pfleger said, as the march wrapped up at 67th Street. “We came here to get their attention. Hopefully we got their attention. … Today was the attention getter, but now comes the action.”
Gov. Bruce Rauner posted a message on Twitter expressing his displeasure at the expressway shutdown, saying the full northbound lane closure was not what had been negotiated.
“This is unacceptable,” Rauner tweeted at noon. “We had clear parameters that allowed the protestors to be heard while respecting law and order. Instead, they chose instead to cause chaos.”
In a second posting, he criticized Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
“I’m disappointed in the Mayor. There was an agreement in place,” the governor wrote. “I am calling on the Mayor to take swift and decisive action to put an end to this kind of chaos. I will work with him in good faith and urge him to do his job so that the people of Chicago feel safe.”
But after the march ended about 12:30 p.m., Pfleger disputed there was an agreement in place for only a partial expressway shutdown. Pfleger said Rauner “tried to be an obstruction.” Pfleger said Johnson served as an intermediary between march organizers and the state police, negotiating for protesters to have access to all lanes.
“He stepped up,” Pfleger said. “… We gave them three weeks notice of what we were doing, figure it out!”
The war of words continued as Emanuel responded to Rauner on Twitter.
“It was a peaceful protest. Delete your account,” the mayor posted about 50 minutes after Rauner leveled criticism.
The northbound lanes came to a standstill during the march and southbound traffic slowed to gawk at the march. About 12:45 p.m., with the march complete and the roadway cleared of people, police began to reopen northbound lanes to traffic.
Just hours before the planned protest was to begin, state police announced they would work with protesters to grant access while keeping some lanes open for motorists.
Initially, state police allowed the marchers access to only the right side of the expressway. State police officials said in a statement that 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, 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 outermost lanes and in some places, the single outermost lane.
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 homicide 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 and implored protesters to step inside.
The 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 marchers were young and old, and the crowd was made up of a diverse blend of races and ethnicities.
“The violence has to stop,” said demonstrator Natalia Barrera, who attended the march with her son. “We need to spread love, not blood. It doesn’t matter if you live on the North Side, South Side, West Side, East Side, the point is this is our city at the end of the day.”
The state police statement issued in the morning said 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 the notice was sent Saturday.
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.
The Illinois State Police, the agency in charge of patrolling the expressway, warned Pfleger and other activists they risked arrest if they proceeded with the Dan Ryan shutdown. Pfleger and the Rev. Jesse Jackson 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.
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. Two people were killed and six others were wounded Friday and early Saturday in shootings across the city, Chicago police said.
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.
Saturday’s march on the expressway is not 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.
Chicago Tribune’s Katherine Rosenberg-Douglas contributed.