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.
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Kenny got involved with CAPS in 2000 because people were parking in his alley on the 1700 block of Albion. Kenny’s block is a fairly typical mix of single-family homes, three-flats and larger apartment buildings running between a Hispanic section of Clark Street at the eastern end to the railroad tracks at Ravenswood Avenue. Typical for Rogers Park, it’s home to a pretty wide range of socio-economic levels and ethnic groups, law-abiding citizens and troublemakers.
A few years later, Kenny and some of his neighbors grew concerned about 1715 W. Albion, a crumbling bungalow with a 72-year-old owner named George Spisak. "When you had a conversation with him, he was very intelligent, focused, knew things," Kenny says. "[But] he had some strange people living in the building with him—permanently. But that front door was a revolving door, 24 hours a day. In and out. Sickly-looking people, dirty, skanky-looking people, and we subsequently found out that a lot of the women were prostitutes."
The building formed an unholy trinity with two other buildings on the block—a six-unit building to the east and a larger 20-unit courtyard apartment building across the street. Kenny and his neighbors were getting sick of seeing the activity on the block. "We would try to bring that up at every meeting," he says. "This is not right. Can't the police do something to stop this?" But the cops said that the building was a private residence; they couldn't just barge in on a hunch. "So basically, the cops said, give us evidence. Document, document, document," Kenny says.
Kenny and four other residents on the block began keeping binoculars and notepads by the window to record license plate numbers and descriptions of people and cars that came by too often. They started to notice patterns, giving nicknames to people frequenting the building and themselves. They called each other the vigilantes, signaling each other with a double backward peace sign drawn slowly over the eyes like Zorro's mask. Kenny’s front porch offered the best view, and he would spend some nights in the dark, peering through his binoculars, waiting for something to write down.
The group, now including Jones, turned up the heat. They began calling in housing violations. Kenny would duck down behind other people in housing court at the trials, not wanting Spisak to see him: One of the drug dealers living with Spisak had already threatened one of the men on the block who'd been conducting surveillance.
Spisak was found in violation and the city boarded up the building for six months. It didn't help. When the building reopened, it was like old times. Then an order for a nine-month vacancy was given. Still nothing. Whenever Spisak returned, his cohort came with him. "We went back to CAPS and brought it up again: 1715, 1715," Kenny recalls. "The cops knew the building. A couple of weeks after [the meeting], they had a roll call where the cops met in front of their house before they went off on their beats. There had to be 40 guys all lined up, right in the front yard. Squad cars everywhere, all in the street, with blue lights going. They did their roll call there just to say, you know, cops exist here."
Then, nearly four years after the core Albion group had started its campaign, one of the sergeants glanced at his watch at the end of the monthly CAPS meeting and said, "As we speak, something is happening over there." Kenny had already invited Jones and his downstairs neighbor, Mary Beth, over to his house—now dubbed the Spy Nest—for wine, cheese and a recap of the meeting. As they went up his back porch, they saw nearly 15 people in the back yard, seated cross-legged on the ground, in handcuffs. Cop car headlights flooded the bungalow in white light. "That was unforgettable," Jones says. "That was so much fun. It was totally unplanned."
