But Chicago is two cities.
The violent city is one that visitors — just like residents of safe Chicago — are unlikely to visit. Last weekend most of the violence, as usual, occurred there.
The stricken neighborhoods, on the South and West sides, happen to be mostly black and Latino; their ethnicity is far less relevant than the fact that in those neighborhoods, jobs are scarce, gangs are seductive and common, and poverty, entrenched through generations, is as pervasive as the grief wrought by the violence.
What scares many people outside the chronically afflicted neighborhoods is that last weekend's violence extended into picture-postcard Chicago.
Evidently, she hasn't been paying attention that past few years. We couldn't make heads or tails of her entire article.
Carlos Sadovi writes a play-by-play of the set-up to steal an iPhone:
- Someone in the group began yelling at the girl, causing her to walk away, then began hitting another teen in the group, the man said Wednesday.
"This was right next to my friend, so I put my arm over her to make sure she wouldn't get hit," said the man, who asked not to be identified out of concern for his safety.The man's wife stood up to get away from the group but left her iPhone on the seat. One of the teens snatched it up and said, "I'll take this." The man said he told the teen to give the phone back, but the teen ran for the door and the man lunged toward him.
"Then I got swarmed by the whole group," said the man. "They were just pounding me. I was just trying to protect my head as much as I could, I knew there was nothing I could do about it. I was stuck. They did a number on me."
Kass does a column, writing about the doctor from Northwestern :
The doctor has a name, but I'm not going to give it to you. He's the victim of a crime and asked that his name not be used, and we're going to keep it that way.
But he did want to tell you his story, because something is happening in Streeterville, the quiet downtown neighborhood of urban professionals who must have once believed that wealth and geography could insulate them from things.
There were similar attacks in Streeterville last year. News organizations at first called them "flash mobs," but that made the police angry. These young people didn't mob up to dance. They mobbed up to hit people.
And, in at least two separate incidents last weekend, the one involving the doctor and another in which a Michigan man's jaw was broken, robbery was not the motive.
They didn't rob them. They beat them for fun.
Kass applies feather-lite touches and dances around the subject, never quite coming into contact with it, but he's close with that last line.
- They beat them for fun.
These are the broken, and quite frankly, we don't see a fix that doesn't involve putting thousands of them in prison and hundreds in the ground. Our opinion of course, but we're the ones on the front lines seeing it each and every day.