Chicago is a city that too often operates with immunity and immortality. That it exists in its current state–corrupt, oblique, yet shiny in all of the right places and without larger temperament for political and structural change–shows the city needs this dismantling more than anywhere else. If any city should take on the responsibility of righting the wrongs of police brutality and corruption, it should be Chicago. It must be.



Chicago represents all of the things that make police brutality commonplace. Hyper-segregation keeps us separate. The things we don't see don't matter. It becomes accepted that the police who keep the "strange" bodies out of the nice neighborhoods can also shoot to kill so quickly without regard for protocol or humanity.

There is no money here, at least not where it matters. Inequality not only makes the rich richer and the poor poorer; it also gives us permission to accept inequality as a true fact of life and something we hope happens to other people. Our population bleeds away more each year, but the core remains, split almost evenly between races. We are all parts of the cluster of cultures that makes up America, even if we don't see so from day to day.

Two weeks ago, the city of Chicago released a police dashcam video of Laquan McDonald's murder. Like the rampant summertime violence that makes national headlines, McDonald's death shined another unflattering light on the city. The fallout has been unlike anything seen in the city for years.

Chicago has been, and will continue to be, a city of protest. Social reform is a slow-moving but consistent pursuit. Lack of coverage in the mainstream press does not mean it has not happened. Activists young and old took to the streets downtown, to the wealthiest neighborhoods, to disrupt business as usual.

Within a week of the video's release, Mayor Rahm Emanuel fired Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy for his handling of the case. It was an obvious, correct move even if it also displayed Emanuel's willingness to throw anyone besides himself under the bus. As the city's mayor, Emanuel appoints the police superintendent. McCarthy was thrust upon us, not him. To pretend otherwise displays a level of hubris in his position that has finally come into question.

In the latest development, prosecutors, including Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez, released video of the shooting death of Ronald Johnson III. Police claim Johnson pointed a gun at officers before he was fatally shot by a police officer. However, Johnson's family claims Johnson was not armed and a handgun was planted. On the heels of this announcement, Attorney General Loretta Lynch launched a federal civil rights investigation into the conduct of the Chicago Police Department. The investigation will look at "racial, ethnic, and other disparities" on a systemic level.

Leadership in Chicago means that we rely on business as usual. McDonald was shot in October 2014. In 2015, the city paid a settlement of $5 million to the family of McDonald. The sum was not a fluke. The settlement was reached during a year that saw a contentious and close reelection campaign for Mayor Emanuel.

And in the past decade, Chicago paid more than half a billion dollars in police brutality settlements. Imagine a government that has $500 million dollars to spend on things other than the flippant degradation of the human body by those enlisted to serve. Imagine a city without the legacy of the John Burge trials. Imagine a city without a list of things to ignore.

Chicago weighs me down, and yet I still live here because I can't think of anywhere else to go. The sticky, messy, complex things that matter to me only exist here. For many of us who make a home on these streets, who walk briskly on these extra-wide sidewalks, the city is a manifestation of the type of things we believe in, the sort of people we want to be. I'm thinking of my mother, the retired Special Education teacher who still protests and stands with her fellow teachers. I'm thinking of my friend Robert, an activist, a bleeding heart and a good man.

What was not seen was not heard. What was not heard did not exist. As Chicagoans, we see this in the crumbling infrastructure, the damaged main streets, the severely underperforming school system. In the moments before the truth, we saw faux benevolency.

Our leaders, the ones who keep the machinations in "running order," the ones who determine what is news and what is not news, do not get to run through the same movements of shock and anger as we do, as if they do not have a hand in any of this. Their theater of change is under notice, not just by us, but by the world at large.

Theater of change means little. Theater is performance. Each actor plays a role in order to move the narrative forward. In Rahm Emanuel, we see the ubiquitous leader who embodies multiple meanings in one person. Emanuel wields the chess pieces and moves the bodies (literally and metaphorically) around so as to not disrupt the role he's taken. We all wait for the next moves. Some of our lives depend on it.

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