That's the Chicago way...

One of the oddest things about living in Chicago is the incredibly strong ethnic politics. Thanks to its unique history of immigration and social upheaval, Chicago is a really divided, eclectic place. It is “multicultural” in the most literal sense of the word – you’ll cross a certain street and everything around you will change. Skin tones completely shift. English slips away, replaced by languages like Spanish, Korean, Polish, Tagalog, or Urdu. Whole industries only exist in a few corners of the city – santeria, saris, soul food, dim sum. Or, I guess, pet manicurists if you’re in Lincoln Park.

The huge diversity of cultures in this city is amazing, but it’s also unnerving because it’s so divided. You can live in Chicago for years and never see anything but people who look, think, and act like you. You actually have to push yourself across borders – sometimes very real and dangerous borders (depending on who you are) – to experience the full city. In fact, Chicago is still one of the most racially segregated cities in the country.

This is not new. The division is part of the standard experience of living in Chicago, and it’s influenced nearly every point of the city’s history. The two most famous examples of this division in the mythology of the city (although people outside the city may not realize it) are the connected areas of crime and politics.

Politics in this city has always involved jockeying between coalitions of different migrant groups. This city has seen more waves of migrants than probably any other American metropolis. Starting with fur traders, moving on to German/Northern European immigrants, migrants from the East Coast cities, Irish fleeing the potato famine, Eastern Europeans, Italians, Poles, African-Americans fleeing the South, Jews fleeing just about everyone, and continuing to the present day in which immigrants from all over Asia and Latin America settle in the city. Chicago also has one of the largest refugee populations in the country, meaning we have a growing number of East Africans, Iraqis, Afghans, and other ethnic groups developing into important communities as well. Politics in the city has always had to react to this constant cultural flux, and the successful pols have usually won by promising big favors to a few ethnic groups and using ethnic loyalty to rack up big wins.

Over time, it became clear that one of the biggest favors City Hall could hand out was protection. If you were in charge of the city, you could depend on the police – not only to protect you, but also to make sure your competitors knew their place. But with the unreliability of the police force, people started forming their own organizations to keep themselves safe and secure. This was the force behind the Chicago street gang.

UIC Professor John Hagedorn’s awesome Gangresearch.net website has an amazing history of Chicago gangs, which documents the rise of both the minority gangs which tend to dominate the headlines and the white ethnic gangs who formed much of the city’s current political landscape. (Desi aside: check out his article comparing Mumbai’s gangland culture to Chicago’s). One of his most interesting points is that much of Chicago’s political history can be told in terms of a struggle between rival ethnic gangs.

Different groups have prevailed at different times. But it’s amazing how much of Chicago politics from that period has remained constant throughout time. The same neighborhoods that sent white gangs to rip through Chicago’s ghetto in 1919 were ready to riot again when King came to town, and were the driving force behind the Council Wars under Harold Washington. Most of these residents decamped to the suburbs after it was clear Chicago’s intense segregation was finally dissipating, but their racial politics still influence the region. The North Shore reformers who once rallied for Prohibition now support bans on foie gras and smoking. The ghetto is still the ghetto – at best, the end of high-rise segregated housing just returns it to the pre-Great Society status quo. The Catholic immigrant neighborhoods southwest of the Loop are now filled with Latinos rather than Poles, Bohemians, and Slavs, but they are as "Catholic" and "immigrant" as ever. Richard M. Daley presides over a kinder, gentler machine, with vassals on the South and West sides providing more pigment, but everyone is still expected to bow their heads towards Bridgeport five times a day.

And the police? Well, they’re obviously doing much better than they were in the 20s and 30s. I truly believe that most Chicago cops are honest, hardworking people being asked to do a very difficult job. But assholes like this don’t help:

When Cruz asked what he’d done, the man said, “You’re illegal—that’s why you don’t have anything.” Cruz would later learn that the two men were actually Chicago police officers and that a city ordinance bans police and other city employees from asking about a person’s immigration status.

Cruz says the second man, who never identified himself, handcuffed him, put him in the car, and drove to the 17th District police station at 4650 N. Pulaski. As they got out of the car, Cruz says, the man told him, “Because of illegals like you we have to pay more for everything. I have to pay more for insurance. That’s why we’re taking as much as we can from you.”

Cruz’s girlfriend, Jessica Monzalvo, who’d come out of the house in the meantime, watched the car drive to the police station just a few blocks away. She walked there and called his 19-year-old brother, Juan Cruz. Juan, a political science major at Northeastern, went to the police station and called the Albany Park Neighborhood Council, a community organization he and Ernesto volunteer with. He told the group’s executive director, Jenny Arwade, he didn’t know why Ernesto had been taken to the police station, since the men who took him away had been wearing border patrol hats. Arwade called immigration lawyers and was told that immigration agents had started using police stations as temporary holding facilities. (APNC staff made it clear they wouldn’t talk to me for this story unless I promised not to ask Cruz whether he’s in the U.S. legally or not; they said it wasn’t relevant.) About 40 minutes after arriving at the station Ernesto was given tickets for driving without a license and without insurance, then told where he could find his bike. After paying a fine he retrieved it from a nearby lot.

Cruz had found out that the two men were plainclothes police officers, not immigration agents, and he let Arwade know. Early that evening she and an APNC board member, Diane Limas, went to the police station. Limas says the officer at the desk knew which officers had detained Cruz, telling her they were two tactical officers with the police department.

The two women asked to meet with a supervisor, and Limas says the man they talked to told them that officers are always trading caps with people from other law enforcement agencies. Border patrol caps aren’t hard to get—Arwade later found one on eBay. She and Limas also asked to speak to the district commander, Charles Dulay, and he called the APNC office later that evening. Limas says he told her the officers had made some inappropriate statements and it wouldn’t happen again. “He was very understanding,” she says. “He was basically apologizing and hoping we would drop the issue.” (When I tried to reach Dulay an officer at the station referred me to police news affairs. In early October spokesperson Monique Bond told me the department had opened an internal investigation and as a consequence she couldn’t comment or release the names of the officers. Several calls to her for updates weren’t returned.)

These cops parents or (at least) grandparents would almost certainly be considered "illegal aliens" if their cases were looked at under today's standards. But the elements of this event -- the abuse of power, exploitation of legal fears, and appropriation of power -- are elements of a classic shakedown. Capone's police couldn't have done better.