About 3,000 people a year accuse Chicago police officers of using excessive force, but rarely do those charges light the kind of fire that is burning through a swath of Chicago’s West Side.
The case of Jeremiah Mearday, an 18-year-old who contends that two officers cracked his jaw without provocation, has spawned an inquiry by the U.S. Justice Department, raucous community meetings and protest marches, including one over the weekend that drew the state’s top black political leaders.
As Mearday, an African-American, continues to recover and the controversy simmers, questions left in the wake of the Sept. 26 incident include why it, among so many others, has caused such outrage and action.
The answer might be found in a combination of factors, personalities and political agendas. Key among them was last year’s Operation Broken Star investigation, in which seven officers from the nearby Austin District were accused of robbing drug dealers. That federal authorities took action in the case after years of talk about bad Austin cops has emboldened residents to lodge complaints, community leaders said.
The reactions and accounts of witnesses and the victim in the Mearday case also played a part, as did the longstanding belief among many African-Americans that police target them for unfair or brutal treatment.
And the media-savvy response by Mearday’s father and a local pastor who worked for Rev. Jesse Jackson, one of the masters of community organizing and media attention, all have helped to make Mearday a symbol.
Together, those forces have severely strained an already tenuous relationship between black citizens and police officers.
“They are turning on the people they are supposed to protect,” said Rev. Reginald O’Dell, pastor of Way of Holiness Church. “They use Gestapo tactics and show us no respect.”
Chicago police union officials and the attorney for the two officers involved in the Mearday incident contended the two officers have been treated unfairly–being put on desk duty and having their police powers stripped while the case is investigated–because the Daley administration is bowing to public pressure. The attorney for the officers, Paul Geiger, contended Mearday resisted arrest.
“The State of Illinois gives the police the right to use the amount of force necessary,” said Fraternal Order of Police President Bill Nolan. “When you are in the academy, you are told you don’t have to stand there and be a punching bag.”
In fact, it was disclosed late last week that the officers involved had a reason for confronting Mearday and his friends: There is a warrant out for the arrest of one of them, Tyrice Harkins, because he allegedly violated his probation on a 1996 cocaine-dealing conviction by failing to pay a $1,100 fine and being arrested last summer on suspicion of possessing heroin, according to court records.
In one indication of how politically hot the situation has become, U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), a likely mayoral candidate, and Roland Burris, a Democratic gubernatorial contender, marched with protesters Saturday and spoke at what became a political rally. Demonstrators yelled “Daley stinks!” and “We want a new mayor!”
Just as important in understanding why Mearday’s case has not faded away are factors of local history and geography: The whole affair is playing out in a part of the city where police officers have become the enemy for many residents.
The residents, most of them black, accuse police of intimidation, harassment and brutality.
“They have no respect for us. They treat us like animals,” said Joe Moore, a 34-year-old construction worker from the West Side who said that he, too, has been roughed up by police. Standing outside a convenience store with a group of people who related their own stories of alleged mistreatment, Moore added: “As a black man in Chicago, I’m afraid of the police. We see them as the enemy.”
Those feelings of anger aside, other recent allegations of police brutality have not had the same resonance.
A month before the Mearday incident, another West Side man was shot and killed by a police officer when the officer tried to stop him for routine questioning. Police said Andrew Durham, 21, was shot when he struggled with the officer over the officer’s gun. Durham’s relatives alleged he was slain for no reason.
The Mearday incident may have been a more attractive case to rally behind because at the time of Durham’s death, it was widely reported he was on probation for aggravated battery involving an attack on another police officer. Mearday, according to his father, had been arrested, but that it was a relatively common drug case.
Also in the Mearday case, two of the friends walking with him appeared at a meeting and spoke with reporters. In the Durham case, one eyewitness spoke to reporters, but her version of events was quickly disputed by evidence supplied by the Cook County medical examiner’s office.
In any case, many West Side residents, elected officials and pastors said the Mearday case was simply the last straw.
“It got to the point where we were sick and tired . . . of how we are treated by police officers,” said state Sen. Rickey Hendon (D-Chicago), who has been involved in protesting both West Side cases.
A day after Mearday was injured, his father, Lee Carter, called a television station. That evening, he said, he helped a TV reporter sneak a camcorder into his son’s room at Cook County Hospital. The next day, he held an informal news conference at the hospital and showed photographs of his son’s severely battered face.
“I had to stand up for my kid–how could I not have?” Carter said. “I had to stand up for him and for everyone in the neighborhood.”
Mearday was charged with four misdemeanor counts, two of battery and two of resisting arrest.
But after word spread of the incident, elected officials and community leaders said they were immediately flooded with calls from residents expressing outrage and demanding something be done.
Within a few days, community activist Joe Banks organized a neighborhood meeting that took on a revival-like aura. Pastors spoke as if they were preaching from the pulpit. Residents stomped, clapped and shouted, “Vote, vote, vote.” And elected officials promised action.
Rev. Paul Jakes, who did not know Mearday or his family before the incident, spoke and has become the lead organizer of Mearday-related events and the spokesman for the newly formed Chicago Committee Against Police Brutality.
“It was the spirit of the Lord that led me, not myself,” explained Jakes, who made his first foray into activism decades ago as a staff worker for Operation PUSH, the civil rights group started by Jackson.
The affair began the evening of Sept. 26 with the following events, according to Carter and two witnesses:
Mearday, suffering an allergic reaction to shrimp fried rice, left his home about 9 p.m. to go to a drugstore for medicine. Along the way, he stopped and picked up three friends.
As the four young men walked on Pulaski Road, a police car raced up and pulled in front of them. Two officers exited the car; one had his gun drawn.
“They got out and said, `Freeze before I blow your brains out,’ ” recalled Andre Moore, 17, who was walking with Mearday. “Jeremiah asked, `Why you got your gun pointed at my head?’ They said, `We didn’t ask you no questions,’ and then they started beating him with their flashlights and stomping him.”
Moore and another witness, Laron Betts, 16, ran to Mearday’s home to tell his father. Harkins fled the scene.
Geiger acknowledged that “there was a physical struggle, no doubt about it, but (Mearday) was fighting them.”
Ani Russell, associate director of the Chicago Alliance for Neighborhood Safety, noted that recent police corruption investigations have encouraged residents to come forward. “If people feel they have recourse, they’re going to take it,” she said.
But despite the progress of community policing, distrust remains, she said, because of the perception that cops single out minority males for mistreatment. At the same time, there is little confidence in those communities that police push hard to investigate their own.
“People should at least feel that their cases are being heard seriously, and that this recourse is legitimate,” Russell said.
