Teen Trends a PsyOp? From Belmont Barricades to Springfield Gaslighting
PsyOp Definition
Someone or something used by the government to influence the population's opinions and attitudes.
If you follow local or national Chicago news you’ve heard about Teen Trends™. The conversation and footage that accompanies are always the same. It shows chaotic scenes of young Black people and police engaged in choreographed chaos. There have been some recent interviews with one of the organizers that were unwatchable, as they came across as nonsensical and sad. It’s the kind of content you can see on YouTube accompanied by acerbic commentary from a man with a permanent bad hair day, who is wearing a baseball cap to draw attention to how much he doesn’t care about his appearance or the quality of his jokes.
The hysteria around Teen Trends™ and Snap Curfews has been swirling for some time now, with the likes of local ABC, CBS, NBC affiliates, all the way to FOX News, and it seems to be designed to keep us trapped into thinking that there's a problem with Chicago, AND that Chicago IS a problem that needs to be fixed. Just as the crime numbers are going down and economic measures are going up, we are being told over and over and over again, that it is dangerous here and we need a strong leader to fix it.
Watching the corporate media balancing act designed to tell us to be afraid of Chicago, but not too much and only in some parts, because they also want us to hear the good news on the economic front. And there is plenty of good news. More businesses are starting in Chicago. Tourism keeps growing year after year, even as the overall number of visitors to the US is declining. Home values are outpacing recent boom towns like Austin, TX. In some cases, the rent has almost doubled in our neighborhood in just the last five years, much to our dismay. By every economic measure, Chicago is growing. People WANT to live here. But if you listen to our governor Pritzker and his corporate dem caucus associates - Chicago is some kind of problem child that needs to be disciplined. And it's hard not to see the patronizing, racialized tone behind it.
Chicago produces the wealth for the state of Illinois. Chicago produces the cultural output. Chicago produces clout that the rest of the state relies on to be taken seriously in political, economic and cultural terms. We contribute more to the economy of Illinois than any other part of the state, and yet, we have to beg to have our schools and our community investment programs funded, as any source of progressive revenue that Chicago is legally allowed to raise is being blocked by corporate caucus dems on the city council and in Springfield. With one notable exception that never seems to be short on funding - the Chicago Police Department. Which brings us back to the dystopian Public Safety™ experience that was planned, funded and executed without our input or consent here in Lakeview on Pride Sunday.
What was the point of this display? Who made the decision to barricade our streets and deploy hundreds of police officers? What was the goal of this post-parade display of force? Was it to have a visual of choreographed, orchestrated chaos for the benefit of corporate media, with Black teenagers, Queer folx, other parade goers of all ages, and locals, being corralled and prodded like cattle in artificially narrowed sidewalks, lined with chain-link fencing in places, and blocked by police vehicles and metal barricades at each intersection? To be pushed against the wall, to be carded on the way home, to be blocked from entering or exiting the CTA?
What justifies this level of cruel stupidity? The primary complaint we’ve heard from prior years, which were always heavy on police presence, was about damage to parked cars. If this is ONLY about cars, our ward office could have easily solved it by collaborating with Wrigley Field and other parking operators, to provide free parking for residents for 24 hours during big celebrations like the Pride parade. But instead of sorting out parking, our basic rights are being violated in the name of SAFETY. Our streets are literally occupied by a massive police deployment. Our neighbors and friends are barricaded and unable to move freely in our own neighborhood.
Lakeview is a multipurpose neighborhood. We have an entertainment district built around the historic Wrigley stadium. We have Clark, Belmont, Halsted, Broadway and Southport corridors, all of which offer a variety of entertainment, dining, shopping and transportation options. And we have very residential areas, some with suburban size lots. This creates competing priorities and agendas in the ward, which means we need to have leadership that can actually hold these multiple concerns and negotiate on our collective behalf. For example, the entertainment district wants to see a lot of foot traffic, tourism, people spending money. Which leads to car traffic, noise, and activity that people who live in the neighborhood find annoying. Those are competing priorities that are always present, and not a shocking plot twist, to which our Alderman Lawson reacts like a deer in the headlights. Is this his first rodeo? Absolutely not, he worked for this ward office for 15 years before he got promoted for loyal service to an office in “The Machine”. Instead of hosting ward nights, he is running away from the only democratic forum we have in our world, which is the monthly 19th Police District Council meeting. He cannot handle a question about post-Pride security. He cannot handle a question about him not funding CARE and Treatment Not Trauma, which was included in his election “platform”, for what it’s worth.
Instead, his office is engaging in a bullying campaign against two unhoused men who keep falling through the cracks of our underfunded, cruel system. The system that alderman Lawson voted to uphold, when he voted NOT to put Bring Chicago Home on the ballot, and FOR the “alternative budget” that stripped our city of the bare minimum of progressive revenue to fund mental health services and non-police crisis response. It seems that Alderman Lawson is counting on our complacency, and our fear of Teen Trends™, which justifies our streets being barricaded and our rights being temporarily suspended on the occasion of Pride, of all days.
Fear-mongering, building barricades on our streets, and dehumanizing Black kids, does not add up to a sound or effective public safety strategy. It’s an expensive and dangerous trap that we all found ourselves in on Pride Sunday literally and figuratively, when we went from the joyous celebration of Pride to this dystopian hellscape in a matter of hours. This hellscape was planned, funded, and orchestrated on our time and on our dime as taxpayers and yet, none of us had a say in it.
None of this circus seems to be about Teen Trends™, even as corporate media is desperately trying to frame it that way. It’s about efforts to hold on to the status quo, the punishment-based structures to de-humanize all of us and see how much violence we will tolerate while being told that this violence is directed at OTHERS in the name of OUR safety. It was all of us who were trapped in this dystopian circumstance, barricaded and cut off from our public streets. All in the name of SAFETY.
That is not the way to go. Our city and our people are valuable and, by all objective measures, we are growing. The post-Covid community investments are starting to pay off and crime is going down, which underlines the fact that we need to continue to shift more resources towards prevention, including non-police response to parking violations and mental health crises. We deserve leadership that can hold the diverse stakeholder concerns at the same time and not use racialized, bigoted, fear-mongering tactics to justify misuse of our public resources, which should be directed to improve people’s lives.
Here is what we observed on Pride Sunday evening in Lakeview:
By 6:00pm, CPD officers with batons were already starting to deploy in force to push teenagers congregating around Kenmore and Belmont towards Clark. Officers refused to allow anyone to disperse onto Kenmore or west on Belmont. Sidewalks were nearly impassable with the crush of people between the barriers and the buildings. Officers wandered in the street while civilian cars tried to navigate through. At Sheffield, Belmont was completely closed and the portable chain-link fence sections were in place including across the entrances to the CTA station and across Clark. The street was empty except for some police vehicles. Pedestrians – local residents and Pride visitors - were funneled into passage ways between the chain-link fence, metal barriers and the buildings with dozens of police standing in lines to further limit movement. Traffic was still moving on Clark, but there was no traffic on Halsted, with pedestrians still corralled by metal barriers. Belmont to Broadway was the same.
By 9:00pm, the situation had deteriorated. On Belmont east of Halsted everything was calm. However, at Halsted and Clark intersections the barricades and heavy police blockade were causing chaos and confusion as locals and visitors were prohibited from crossing either east-west or north-south. trying to get through the narrow sidewalks that were blocked by fencing with police barricades
Locals and visitors alike had no ability to move between closed streets without being squeezed into narrow cattle pens, which was extremely unsafe, the slightest commotion could have caused injury to people just trying to get through. Police were using aggressive tactics crowding people on sidewalks, taking their baton out, yelling at pedestrians; not just teenagers, everyone who was there.
Some teenagers were clearly scared and frustrated as they were trying to leave to go home, and couldn’t get through to the CTA station, as police barricades closed the streets, and sidewalks were blocked by fencing and police crowding at each intersection. Even alleys were closed off. Our efforts to get back to our building were frequently redirected and we were even carded to “prove” that we lived in the neighborhood. Rather than providing an outlet for people who wanted to leave, the whole effort seemed aimed at boxing people into the fenced in areas of Belmont? How was this helpful? How as this safe? How did this help manage the situation?
What is next?
We will continue to organize and petition 44th Ward office, CPD, 19 Police District Council, and CCPSA, demanding a public hearing to debrief, identify root causes of issues, and commit to an inclusive, collaborative post-Pride safety plan. We ask Lakeview neighbors to join us.
· Show up to the monthly19 Police District Council meetings
· Sign on to petition to have a community forum: bit.ly/lakeview4everyone
Join our community here.