His campaign is centered on bolstering the city’s most struggling neighborhoods with added police protection. He also advocates for police training that takes into account cultural factors and “de-escalation” strategies to prevent violence.

He also calls for steering new business development to areas where it’s most needed. While it’s a common view that crime has to be brought under control for neighborhoods to flourish, Boyd says a reverse approach also should be considered. “If we rebuild these neighborhoods, crime goes down, automatically.”

Boyd has lost friends and relatives to violence here, including a 23-year-old nephew gunned down in 2015. He has been arrested twice himself here, he says, once for walking into the crime scene of a friend who had been shot and once for taking video of police as they dealt with a homeless man.

“As an African-American man and an alderman, I have been handcuffed twice and put in the back seat of a police car unfairly. My nephew, in this neighborhood, was shot and killed, and the police have not solved that crime,” says Boyd. “I support our police department, but I can understand how people feel when they say they’ve been mistreated. I know it’s real, that it happens.”