Proposed: A meeting to stop the bleeding in Chicago

Englewood, Gresham, West Lawndale, Humboldt Park, South Chicago. Where have I heard those neighborhood names before?

Oh yes, I do remember some of them. I was born and raised on the Far South Side of Chicago between Englewood and Gresham, which was similar to a Beverly Hills-style area, while Englewood was a working-class neighborhood that was both neat and stable. The others, I have forgotten.

But they all came back into play on the Fourth of July weekend when, at the last count, 10 people were killed in the "Third City," with 65 wounded. Funny, we were all focused on ISIS on the Hudson, but the Islamic State killers probably decided America was too dangerous for them.

Even stranger was the press coverage here. The major newspapers gave no space to the actual people who were murdered or did the killing. It is almost as if so many Americans are wiped out in our big cities while we "holiday," or while our children sit quietly in school, or when some illegal immigrant who shouldn't be here at all shoots and kills a beautiful girl in San Francisco taking a walk with her father, that we treat them as mere statistics.

Now I'm going to be honest about something Americans don't want to be honest about.

We have witnessed months and months of utterly unforgivable police killings, almost entirely of African-American youths and men by white cops. Nobody is in any way excusing such irresponsibility and lack of discipline (to say the least).

I have thought, from the beginning of this sad and profoundly unfortunate phase of the black/white civil rights fight, that there was another part to the tragedies. Judging by anecdote and intuition, I can only believe that the "good coppers" are troubled by the violence in our big cities and that it is influencing them in their police work.

This Fourth could be their attempt at an answer. Thousands of extra police swarmed the Chicago neighborhoods. Yet, in the end, the response of Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, far from confident or accusatory, was closer to pathetic. "We have to repair a broken system," he begged the city.

Actually, in the specific case of Englewood, the formerly white working-class neighborhood that has been a center of crime for at least the last 10 years, 2015 has been enormously better. The good neighbors of the area devised every kind of program, from grandmothers sitting out on their lawns greeting everyone to more threatening male street guards, to keep the murderous gangs under control - and it worked. Amazingly, nobody was killed over that weekend in Englewood.

This is important because many observers say that Chicago's most recent "Murder, Inc." problem started in the 1960s when Mayor Richard J. Daley decided to replace Bronzeville, the "Harlem" of Chicago, with row upon row of inhuman high-rise housing projects.

"Daley decided they would be beneficial for the Democratic machine," Richard Friedman told me after the weekend. Friedman ran for mayor of Chicago in 1971 as a Republican and suggested instituting a Civilian Conservation Corps in the city. "Each building became a voting precinct controlled by a precinct captain who controlled distribution of welfare checks, etc. ... Two-parent families became economically disadvantageous. ... Add to this, the drug culture. We now have three generations of single families where mothers are without education and have a high rate of drug addiction. The unemployment rate among young black males is treble that of the population as a whole. Turf are all that they possess. ... Shootings are economic sport."

Have you heard one word of any of this in all the recent cases of white cops shooting or killing black youngsters?

What I am suggesting is that the appropriate people set up a kind of mediation in which African-American leaders, rightly enraged about the killing of their young men by white police, negotiate potential answers to these problems with the police and city authority figures, who are rightly enraged about the killings committed by black youths.

One outcome of such a conference might take the form of police promising to install specific training for officers on respecting human rights, shooting NOT to kill and employing effective neighborhood policing tactics, while neighborhood leaders promise to promote efforts to build black families, control the disease of guns on the streets and slow the breakdown of inner city communities.

Americans don't seem to realize that the two go hand in hand. Let us somehow link them up. We might even get this black-and-white country singing together again.

Georgie Anne Geyer can be reached at gigi_geyer (at) juno.com.

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