Hyde Park, the neighborhood around the University of Chicago where Kendall and I live, is a particularly instructive example. Way back in 1952, the wife of a University of Chicago faculty member was assaulted near campus. The university was stung into action, and began to invest heavily in a private security force. It also pushed for urban renewal, in some cases using private police officers to investigate criminal activity in given buildings in order to get the property foreclosed and torn down. Today, the UCPD is, as the university told me in a statement, "a highly professional police force," and one of the largest private security forces in the country. Hyde Park "remains one of the safest neighborhoods in the city," according to the statement sent to me by the University, and, "All of the neighborhoods patrolled by the University of Chicago benefit from the extra service."

Meanwhile, our neighbors nearby continue to get shot, and the university hospital, which does have a pediatric trauma unit, ceased providing trauma care for adults in 1988. In fact, in January of this year, the UCPD got some unfavorable press for having allegedly shoved around protestors at the university’s hospital who were demanding an adult trauma center for the South Side. Then, in March of this year, a plainclothes officer from the UCPD was discovered trying to infiltrate another protest. In the first case, an independent report exonerated the UPCD of wrongdoing, and in the second placed blame on a commanding officer who was fired.

Nonetheless, the multiple police forces in Hyde Park don't necessarily make Kendall feel safer. Instead, as she said to me, they seem to "give a false sense of security to white people, and act as a threat to POC [people of color] who live in the area." Kendall was more distressed than me because she's been in the neighborhood long enough to feel at a gut level that "the little bubble of gentrification that U of C is trying to create isn't bullet-proof." And she's also more distressed because, despite CPD and UCPD insistence to the contrary, from her perspective as someone who's lived all over the South Side, that bubble is in part constructed by policing 14-year-old black boys like her son.

Illinois governor Pat Quinn has recently been talking about sending in the National Guard to prevent violence on the South Side, a solution that one can easily imagine leading to new problems, given the troops’ inexperience with urban policing. It’s also tough for some South Siders to take the gesture of concern seriously in the face of what has felt, this year, like a policy of systematic neglect.

This year Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed dozens of schools on the city's south and west sides with little community input. There have been concerns about students from the closed schools having to cross gang territory, and about the effectiveness of the mayor's Safe Passage program. Wages for workers in the program are low, and high turnover seems both likely and potentially dangerous. Moreover, the extent of the city's commitment to the program is unclear. As CPS parent and education activist Cassie Creswell told me, "My biggest concern about the Safe Passage program is how long is the city really going to have people out there stationed on these routes? All school year?"