James Deanes remembers the moment when he first realized that a drug-dealing street gang-one small squad in the ruthless army that has invaded neighborhoods in Chicago and several suburbs-had arrived on his block.
It was a cold afternoon in the winter of 1988, and Deanes, a machinist and family man who lives in a tidy brick cottage on West Gladys Avenue in South Austin, was walking home from the grocery.
Deanes noticed a boy, no more than 12, standing on the corner of Gladys and Lotus Avenues, a few doors west of his house.
The boy had been there, shivering in the bitter cold, an hour earlier when Deanes set out on his errand. Stoic in his mission, the youngster hadn`t even brushed away the rivulet of frozen mucus that ran from nose to chin.
”All of a sudden it hit me,” Deanes said. ”This kid, this child, was out there selling drugs.” Further inquiry confirmed the boy had been stationed there as a curbside drug dispenser for a dealer who had moved into an apartment building on the corner.
”So it wasn`t just the South Side,” Deanes said of his moment of discovery.
”It wasn`t just down on 16th Street. It was right here on my block.”
All across Chicago and in suburbs as diverse as Evanston and Cicero, thousands of ordinary citizens-people like James Deanes-are discovering that gangs and drugs are no longer someone else`s problems.
The problem isn`t entirely new, many neighborhood leaders say, but the arrival of relatively cheap crack cocaine, added to the familiar problems of poverty and joblessness, has made the problem more visible and more violent.
So, like James Deanes and his South Austin neighbors, grass-roots organizations are rising up to fight back.
In Evanston, volunteers have set up a program called COE Pops and COE Moms, the initials standing for Council of Elders. Adults with two-way radios patrol the streets, looking for trouble before it starts and steering gang-age youths toward constructive activities.
In city neighborhoods like the one around Humboldt Park, the Northwest Community Organization is researching who owns drug houses and urging the state`s attorney to prosecute owners for violating public-nuisance laws.
Farther west, the Hansen-Riis Park Neighborhood Organization has scheduled for Wednesday night a meeting with police brass because, as one organizer put it, ”People no longer feel comfortable walking the streets of a neighborhood they`ve lived in for 30 years.”
A group from the nearby Cragin neighborhood plans to meet with some of the same police officials Monday night.
On the South Side, the Englewood Community Development Corp. is building a list of suspected drug houses and periodically marches to them in an effort to flush out dealers.
Yet from Rogers Park to Roseland and from Waukegan to Joliet, the neighborhood war against gangs and drugs is not going well.
Body counts are one indicator of how the battle is going, and Chicago is in the middle of one of the most deadly years in civic history.
As of Thursday, city police had recorded 468 homicides this year, or 65 more than occurred during the first 207 days of 1989. That`s more than two killings a day, and the trend appears to be worsening. The 90 homicides recorded last month made it the bloodiest June in Chicago history.
Police officials are emphatic about what`s behind the bloodbath.
”Gangs and drugs are responsible for 90 percent of the violence,” said Lt. Edward Kijowski, commander of the Grand-Central violent crimes unit that covers South Austin.
”Let a gang take over a corner, and they will take over a block,”
Kijowski said. ”If they take over a block, they will take over the neighborhood. Do away with gangs and drugs, and Austin would be a decent place to live again.”
That may sound like an impossible mission, but community leaders in South Austin and elsewhere say they have no other choice.
”This is the hardest issue we`ve ever gone up against, but we`ve got to confront it,” said Michael Rohrbeck, executive director of a South Austin housing group called People`s Reinvestment and Development Effort, or PRIDE.
Groups such as PRIDE and the South Austin Community Council, or SACC, jumped into the fight last year when gangs and drugs began undermining hard-won progress made in housing, employment and health care.
The surge in drug dealing comes just as South Austin-the square mile east of Oak Park and north of the Eisenhower Expressway-was beginning to recover from the disinvestment that accompanied the rapid racial turnover of the 1960s.
For instance, PRIDE raised a quarter of a million dollars to rehab the apartment building at 36-50 N. Menard Ave., only to see tenant families move out rather than suffer harassment by drug dealers operating out of Chicago Housing Authority apartments across the alley on Mayfield Avenue.
”The time has come for ordinary citizens to stand up and reclaim their neighborhoods,” said Marcus Walker, a recovered drug user who works as point man in SACC`s anti-drug campaign.
In recent weeks, SACC has convened several workshops to coordinate its effort with those of the police, the state`s attorney, the U.S. attorney and the alderman. They`ve set up a telephone hot line and distributed ”hot spot” postcards for reporting drug activity. They`ve identified special ”narcotics enforcement areas” for extra police surveillance.
Other neighborhoods are beginning to fight back. Just across Roosevelt Road from South Austin, in suburban Cicero, problems with gangs and drugs are relatively new, but no less worrisome.
Cicero is still a predominantly white blue-collar enclave of sturdy brick bungalows and close-clipped lawns. But in recent months, gang graffiti has begun to appear on hundreds of garage doors, sprayed there by newly active white and Hispanic street gangs.
One month ago, a group of Cicero neighbors called a meeting to vent their anger about the graffiti and drug-dealing on the streets. More than 1,000 people showed up.
”We hit a nerve,” said Marlene Loonsfoot, who helped convene that first meeting of the Cicero, Berwyn, Stickney Leadership Project, or CBS.
Steve Zales, deputy police superintendent in Cicero, described the process by which gangs go suburban.
”What happens is that parents in the city find out their kids are in a gang, so they move out to the suburbs,” he said. ”But the kid is still tied with the gangs, and he brings his friends into our area.”
Cicero`s newly formed anti-gang project is adopting some of the methods pioneered in South Austin, and Zales welcomes the effort.
”We only have 93 officers,” Zales said, ”so the people have to be our eyes and ears. We patrol, but the neighbors are there all the time. They know what`s going on.”
Rev. Jack Hurley, a Catholic priest working with Cicero`s growing Hispanic community, is helping organize a citizens` march against gangs and drugs.
”There`s always leadership out there,” said Hurley, ”but people need to know that they are not alone.”
In South Austin, neighborhood marches against drugs have become morale boosters for the silent majority. One march-which aims to drive the dealers from a 12-block area east of Columbus Park-steps off every Saturday at 4 p.m. from Prince of Peace Baptist Church, 5450 W. Van Buren St.
The pastor, Rev. W.L. Upshire, joined the fight last spring after a street gang set up shop on his church steps and began offering drugs to the congregation.
”You couldn`t drive down the street for all the drug-dealing going on,” Upshire said. ”They just moved in and took over. I had no alternative but to declare war.”
On a recent Saturday afternoon, about 30 neighbors showed up, huddling before the march to recite their motto: ”I`m tired of being tired! I`m scared of being scared!” As they filed out of the church and headed north on Lotus Avenue, Sister Thelma Minor, armed only with a small bullhorn, began the chant:
”Drug dealers got to go! . . . When they gotta go? Right now! . . . Down with dope. Up with hope . . . Drugs, drugs just won`t do. Drugs, drugs are killing you . . . Save our com-mun-i-ty. Save our chil-dr-en . . . If you`re tired of drugs, join us! If you`re tired of drugs, join us!”
A regular in the line of march is Austin District Police Commander Leroy O`Shield.
”As long as they`re willing to come out, we`ll be here to protect them,” said O`Shield, who with a small police detachment guards the marchers. That Saturday the procession detoured from its usual route to ”visit” a run-down cocktail lounge on Madison Street that O`Shield described as a drug hot spot run by a gang leader.
”We`re moving in the right direction,” said James Deanes, who delivered a pep talk before the march.
”When I left my house,” Deanes told the marchers, ”my wife and my little girl were sitting on the front stoop. Four months ago they couldn`t sit out front, what with the dope dealers. So when people ask us: `Is it worth it? Don`t the dealers just move from one spot to another?` I say `Yeah, they change spots. But now they`re not in my spot.` ”
”If enough neighborhoods fight back,” Deanes said, ”the gangs will have no place to go but out of business.”
