A republication of our Wirepoints article.

“I was not traumatized by the cross-burning, and I would be a rich man if I had a dime for every neighbor on our block who came out of their houses to say how disgusted they were that this had happened and who helped put out the fire,” said Calhoun, who is involved in the Black Lives Matter movement.

“A lot of our tutors are people of color and don’t feel comfortable (assisting police officers),” she said. “The general consensus was not feeling comfortable with people that make them feel unsafe and are part of a larger institution that upholds racist and white supremacist values.”

In May, the university announced furloughs for about 250 workers, suspended contributions to employee retirement plans and dug deeper into its endowment.

“Violence metastasizes in neighborhoods when opportunity, or even the hope of it, ebbs away. It’s not enough to put more cops on the streets or revamp gang intervention strategies. Communities on the South and West sides have been withered by decades of indifference by the rest of the city — by mayors who disproportionately channeled tax dollars and attention to downtown and the North Side and by an ecosystem, including banks, that dropped investments in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. “

Ald. Chris Taliaferro (29th Ward), the chair of the Public Safety Committee, said he was saddened to hear that city officials had decided after 14 years “of somewhat of a failure” to start from scratch. “I don’t see a bright future. If we can’t get it right, how can we expect our youth to get it right?”

Cook County Public Defender Amy Campanelli joined a coalition of local activist and legal groups in filing the lawsuit Tuesday, alleging that police have denied Constitutional rights to arrested protesters. The plaintiffs also include Black Lives Matter Chicago, the #LetUsBreathe Collective, Stop Chicago, UMedics and GoodKids MadCity.

The cancellation of municipal fireworks shows as well as boredom over the last few months as people have been cooped up because of coronavirus may have led to the increase of “backyard fireworks,” said Julie Heckman, executive director of the American Pyrotechnics Association.

She believes the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s killing are necessary. “As an African American, I’m in complete agreement with it. But I think they lost a lot of the rationalization and why it exists when you have people come in and tear up and destroy the businesses that have also been servicing us in the same communities.”

Evanston resident Sharon Kushiner, along with others, has been holding “Defund the Police” signs in front of the Evanston Police Department for the past three Sundays. “Rather than having a protest that just brought in a whole bunch of people from surrounding communities. We would build it slowly and have it really be Evanston-focused.”

There are nearly 200 census tracts in Chicago and suburban Cook County that qualify as Opportunity Zones. But even before the pandemic there weren’t a lot of local projects. And there’s no oversight or tracking of projects on the local or federal levels.

“This community has been drained of resources for almost 50 years now,” one West Side activist said. “If you pull everything from people and give them nothing and then this is all we’re left with, then people will start to do things that are desperate.”

So many wealthy people are rushing to move away from the big cities that it is creating a bit of a “real estate boom” in many suburban areas, small towns and rural communities.

The Ethics Act applies when state employees engage in prohibited activity during any paid time, regardless of whether they directly solicit co-workers or use state equipment, according to the report, which added that because 15-minute breaks are paid, the rules still apply.

“There are too many violent offenders not in jail or on electronic monitoring, which no one is really monitoring,” Brown said Monday in the wake of the shootings.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s reaction was, “When something stupid like that happens to basically tell officers to abandon their post, that is the height of dereliction of duty.”