For the past eight years, residents of Marquette Park have been paying about $70 a year in extra property taxes to have private armed security guards patrol their streets, watch their children walk home from school, and keep an eye on seniors as they wait for the bus. Marquette Park was reportedly the first residential neighborhood in the country to have a private security force, and it’s still the only neighborhood in Chicago to have one.
It wasn’t just whites who were afraid. By then the demographics of Marquette Park–the all-white enclave where Martin Luther King Jr. was pelted with rocks during a 1966 march, the place where Frank Collin set up his Nazi Party headquarters in the 70s–had shifted. The 1990 U.S. census shows the population as 43 percent white, 28 percent Hispanic, and 26 percent African-American. Ewa Ewa, who’s African-American, moved into the neighborhood in 1992. “There was a movement of people of color coming in,” he says. “People were concerned that it would turn into a ghetto. It was a neighborhood of transition.”
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That’s when the loose coalition of neighbors decided to pool their money and hire a private security firm to take over the neighborhood watch. “Whoever wanted to kick in did,” says Anksorus.
The idea worked for a while, but only a few people volunteered to pay. “A lot of people didn’t want to put money in,” says Anksorus.
Other people noted that workplaces, government buildings, and condominiums all use private security guards, so why shouldn’t the residents of Marquette Park? “They’re no different than people who live on the Gold Coast who pay for private security,” says Tracey Meares, a University of Chicago law professor. “Why is it perfectly normal to be surrounded by uniformed security guards in a downtown building and then go home and get fewer people devoted to protecting you?” Wesley Skogan, a political science professor at Northwestern University, points out that there are three times as many private security officers as public police officers in the country.
The 15 guards who rotate the part-time shifts cruise the same streets patrolled by police, and they regularly respond to reports of suspicious activity–though they have no more authority than ordinary citizens and in serious situations are supposed to call the police. They’ll break up gangs of teenagers hanging out in front of a grocery, and they’ll check out an unusual noise in an alley. Occasionally, they’ll answer a call asking them to keep an eye out for someone who’s late getting home from work, and they’ve helped police capture escaped convicts.
“They’re picking up part of the workload for Chicago police and saving the city money,” says Skogan, pointing out that having more patrols makes people feel better. “There’s a lot more fear than crime. They’re mostly buying a feeling of security.”
