The Watchmen of Rogers Park
Rick Jones and his band of self-appointed community patrolmen keep a close eye on their North Side neighbors, keeping their streets safe of everything from drug dealers to parking violators.
By Emily Withrow
Rick Jones steps into his office, a slab of concrete with a weathered picnic table outside the 24th district police headquarters in Rogers Park. The sun is setting on the sprawling brick-and-glass building, and the reflections of the sparse courtyard mask what lies within. A motorcycle guns by on Clark Street and Jones narrows his eyes as he slides onto the bench.
A group of local residents gathers around him, chatting softly in twos or threes, about a dozen in full. They've just spent an hour telling the police about drug deals, negligent landlords and gangbanging at the monthly Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) beat meeting, and now they're ready to swap stories with Jones, who doesn’t have the longest history with the neighborhood’s community policing activities, yet has become the group’s de facto leader.
"Welcome to the real CAPS meeting," Jones tells me with a cockeyed grin, "where things actually get done." A man echoes Jones' smile from the sidelines, squinting up his magnified eyes behind giant, 70s-style bifocals. He's a neighborhood busybody who works with Jones on a regular basis, keeping him in the loop about the activity on his block.
The group stands and sits around the table, some chatting among themselves, the rest focused on Jones. They take turns talking about buildings near their homes, many lacing the stories with exasperation. A woman sitting next to Jones follows up on what was said in the meeting. She's got a couple of problem tenants, making it difficult for her to rent out the rest of her apartments. Jones encourages her to evict the troublemakers.. As the accounts unfold, Jones listens and nods, often cutting to the chase. "What's that address?" He speaks gruffly and always to the point, drawing out the vowels on stressed syllables, giving his speech a distinct cadence.
It feels like a lot is being accomplished out in the courtyard—like Jones said, maybe more than in the meeting we just left. But for Jones and his closest cohorts in Beat 2432 in Rogers Park, this information-gathering session is just a small slice of the work it takes to have an impact. The group is in touch on a day-to-day basis, exchanging emails and phone calls to gossip about and build a case against crime in the neighborhood.
It’s a pretty intense regimen, but after the success of shutting down a neighborhood crack-and-prostitution house a few years ago, Jones’ crew knows it can work. If anything, they’ve become even more successful in the last few years, and they’ve widened their aim to hit anything from the group of Latin Kings hanging out on the corner to a fruit vendor operating without a proper license. If a landlord is housing unruly neighbors, he or she should expect trouble. As Jones sees it, it’s the forces of disorder in the community versus his volunteers and all the tricks he’s learned about how the city responds best to citizen complaints. He’s willing to do the work it takes to win.
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Watch Rick Jones in the crowd at the regular CAPS meeting, and you won’t get much evidence of his effectiveness. Under the bleak, fluorescent lights of the concrete community room of police headquarters, about 30 people sit in plastic chairs, organized around a central table. The cops standing near the CAPS banner at the back end of the room run through the monthly arrest totals, ask for questions, then open the floor up to community concerns. People line up and tell about what problems they’ve seen in the neighborhood. Jones takes his turn like everybody else. The rest of the time, he listens and takes notes, chiming in occasionally to contribute a building owner's name or street address.
At the district-wide, Spanish-language CAPS meeting two weeks later, Jones’ modus operandi becomes a bit more clear. This meeting is usually more sparsely attended—today there’s just a sprinkling of neighborhood residents, most of them are children. So, even though he doesn't speak Spanish, Jones comes most months. He gets more floor time this way. Near the end of the meeting, the police officers running the meeting tell Jones to stick around; they want to touch base on some things afterwards.