by the Halsted Safety Patrol

In an effort to implement a tangible and durable response to the problem of hate crime in the Lakeview community, the Halsted Safety Patrol formed in the Fall of 1998 in the aftermath of the Matthew Shepard murder and locally the violent assault at the Shell station at Halsted and Addison.

Our method is a quite simple one in which we focus on PREVENTION. Our volunteers patrol the neighborhood inconspicuously; when we observe hostile or simply suspicious individuals, we contact police via the 911 system (www.suba.com/~chicago/halstedsafety).

We believe that if 911 is worthy of a call related to the sighting of suspicious persons who may be ‘casing’ a building in preparation for burglary, how much more precious is human life where murder, battery and hate crime are the object?

Just as the city exists in the world, the world’s diversity exists in the cosmopolitan city and it is within our time and corner in this city that we find no greater or less worthy people than did Athens, Rome, Paris and London in the spring of their years. Just as in those places, the spirit of hate has been a curse and a disease with both cause and cure. Hate’s thirst for violence or discrimination is stifled by the caution of its targets and the education or apprehension of its first victims, the haters. Education is the first line of defense; we are a part of the second and nearer line and as such are the necessary cart placed before the horse by virtue of a degree of failure on the part of those leaders, parents or educators responsible for the first line, those who permit or even encourage discrimination, hate language, hatred or violence. Our safety patrol then must deal with the mechanisms of hatred and discrimination in the absence of the more effective ounce of prevention!

One brutal mechanism is apparent in the quite startling statistics for the period 1990 to 1998. (www.lakeviewaction.org) The highest incidence of hate crime in the entire city of Chicago in the 1990s is found in our own backyard in Lakeview. The data enlighten us to the fact that 179 reported incidents occurred primarily along the very segments of Halsted and Broadway where gay people have found one of the few truly hospitable and peaceful communities in the Midwest. We are also told that Horizons’ data suggest perhaps some 400 incidents were unreported or mis-classified.

Fortunately we’ve been joined in our efforts in the past year by a remarkable coalition of local community organizations known as the Lakeview Action Coalition. This fine group of dedicated people, largely non-gay people belonging to local churches and synagogues, have seen a need for an active community effort to reach out to the local gay community and other affected groups such as the Jewish community and African Americans by initiating a process conceived to ensure that diversity, tolerance and goodwill continue to become more completely a daily and living reality for both residents and visitors to our pleasant community with its very unique cross-section of humanity.

We have had the opportunity to work with so many LAC people who have devoted numerous hours over the last year towards investigating the incidence of hate crime in Lakeview as well as devising and proposing local solutions to the hate crime problem.

We would also like to express our support and gratitude to the Chicago Police Department for its effort to immediately implement, to a limited degree, LAC’s recommended bicycle patrol solution. We are well aware that officers set out on the streets of Chicago daily knowing that they may, unlike most, put their lives on the line on the job. It is through their dedication that we 91,000 residents and occasionally 250,000 guests live in relative safety. But keeping in mind that each single hate-crime incident is often a traumatic and life-altering experience for the survivors and that even the physically and mentally strongest among us often suffer the lasting effects of post-traumatic stress, now is the time for those members of the glbt community who cherish our rare enclave to magnify the local contributions of the CPD and LAC by volunteering merely one evening each month for the coming summer and fall with the community-based Halsted Safety Patrol. You will find it both an easy burden and even a pleasure.

One realizes the magnitude of the solution on the map of the area encompassed by the Halsted Safety Patrol in which some 51 street intersections are apparent between Grace, Wellington, Clark and Broadway, 72 if we extend the area eastward to Sheridan. Incidents occur and offenders flee quite rapidly. Even five minutes’ delay between incident, a call to 911 and police response is often too great unless a license plate is recorded. And if an attack has occurred, as opposed to assault (verbal threat), for the victim, the time for action, aside from medical rescue or the undertaker, has passed. Rarely are police themselves witnesses and so able to respond immediately.

Although the Safety Patrol has had limited volunteers and financial resources, last year between June and November we maintained at least one weekend patrol each week. With the help of perhaps an additional 50-100 volunteers, we believe that we, the LAC and the CPD can end hate crime in East Lakeview NOW.

Our focus has been an extremely safe and conservative one in which we have devoted ourselves to relatively safe PREVENTATIVE OBSERVATION, usually in plain cloths; we simply report both hate-crime candidates (verbally hostile individuals of any kind or suspicious vehicles) as well as incidents or crimes in progress, via cellular phone. Prevention is the key and therefore we do not wait until assault (a verbal or physical threat to do harm), battery (an actual physical attack) or murder have been committed. By virtue of our patrol volunteer numbers, preparedness and sobriety, we believe our level of safety to be far greater than that of the average late-night pedestrian.

We also strongly encourage all pedestrians themselves to be prepared at all times with a small pencil, blank wallet-size card and cellular phones to record and report license plates. Download our safety map on which late-night safe sites are indicated. When possible, avoid walking alone and avoid dark streets. But occasionally, please join our coordinated team effort—join with a friend, family member, parishioner or lover and patrol as a group or permit us to help you initiate a patrol in your own neighborhood.

Though we would prefer to see the ideal of universal peace and goodwill, to see the lion lie down with the lamb, until that day comes we call on you, young, old, Black, white, straight, gay, mothers, daughters, strong, frail, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, construction workers, clerks, students, teachers, doctors, waitresses, lawyers, ministers, reporters, businesspeople, professors and all good people to help us make it so.

“Whoever you are come forth, or men or women, come forth out of the dark confinement, you must not stay there dallying in your house, … take your [friends and] lovers on the road with you, … to see the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls, all parts way for the progress of souls along the grand roads of the universe!” — Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

James Fitzgerald McDermott,

Rev. James M. Cwan,

Michael Arthur Blair,

Halsted Safety Patrol 2000

(312) 409-1690