YouSaid · the spoken record

Jamie Kalven

lines on the record

70

first

2016-04-04

most recent

2016-04-04

sittings or episodes

1

sources

podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

1. “Everywhere I go, people are trying to figure out how to think about this and in a personal way, what's my responsibility and what's my relationship to it. So it's going to take that kind of engagement from people across the spectrum in Chicago and the country. And it's going to take it over time. But there are lots and lots of concrete interventions. I think the challenging thing in building a process and building public understanding of that process is this feels like, and I think it may well prove to be a transformative moment, but there are no transformative remedies. Know there's nothing that in itself is going to be sufficient. Well, that's one thing.”

   2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “All of us right now, and I say all of us because that image of a broken city, we all live in a broken city. We all own part of this. And I'm encouraged as I go around because of my relation to these issues. Speak four or five times a week in different settings from church basements to downtown civic groups.”

   2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Is completely current. And what it describes. So these have been intractable issues in American life that we are now beginning to engage. I think this is both the good news and the bad news. I think the good news is we know what to do. You know, we've long known what to do. Addressing these patterns and these problems and these intolerable conditions for some of our fellow citizens is not going to be a matter of some great innovation, some great new ideas, some technological fix. I mean, we know much of what needs to be done. And I think that is the heart of the matter in terms of this kind of blood knot at the center of American life around race. We know and we don't know at the same time. We're capable of knowing these things and not knowing them at the same time. And so the great challenge for all”

   2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “I hope, I mean, I think the challenge is you go back to Ralph Medcalf 40-odd years ago. I was in New York for an event a few weeks ago and met Jack Rosenthal, who was editorial director of editorial page, editor of the New York Times, and early in his career, young lawyer, young journalist, wrote the Kerner report. Read the current report. Well, you know, about the aftermath of the king. Oh, that's right. That was the”

   2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “But what's exciting, I want to leave people on a positive note I work on this stuff all the time with a great sense of possibility. I never expected to see an opening like this that has occurred. I think it is...”

   2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “So, two things. I mean, one is, and I think this has been a motif through our conversation, but it's worth saying explicitly, that what we're dealing with now and what we're confronting and what we're contending with are forms of structural violence that are built into American society. This is the society we've created. You know, the press, all of it, myself included, you know, tends to describe things within a frame of crisis. Things are crisis. Well, crisis is a departure from the norm. This is the norm. This is the norm. And that's what we're reckoning with and what we're trying to confront. That's why the narrative of cover-up, and it just doesn't capture what we're really dealing with here. In this extended post-Ferguson moment we're living through this period. There's been no.”

   2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Everybody now reports that police officers are reference to holding back. Nobody wants to be first on a call, you know, to be put out there to be the next video that goes viral. So, you know, a broken city where the police don't want to interact with the community. The community doesn't want to interact with the police. And there are a lot of bodies falling in between them.”

   2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “And we have to assume that lots of people had relevant information. The same time we now have a police department. And remember, you know, in a matter of months, police officers have gone through a kind of Copernican revolution in their world where what they thought they understood about the job and the culture and the de facto job description as well as the literal job description has now changed drastically. They're really bewildered and are in fact There are all sorts of symptoms of that. There's been a significant spike, I'm told, in police officers taking earlier than usual retirement so they're fully vested in their pensions at 20 years and usually stay on beyond that. But now people are taking good police officers, good frontline police officers, the kind of men and women you want in your community asking to be put behind desks.”

   2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “So, as I mentioned a moment ago, I'm doing actually a series of articles based on a couple of sources who are whistleblowers within the department. And one of them said to me the other day, and really stayed with me and the words have stayed with me, she said, we live in a broken city. We live in a broken city. And what she was referring to is their whole neighborhoods and broad populations in the city who are alienated from the police and don't want to interact with the police and don't cooperate with the police. To the point where we saw”

   2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “And I think it's a really interesting phenomenon. I think it's part of the challenge in changing it because I think like a lot of malign things in life, it sort of arises out of admirable sentiments. So that kind of loyalty you've got my back, I've got yours. At some point metastasizes into something. Just terrible. And we see, I mean, a casebook example is the Laquan McDonald case, but there are many, many other cases. And I think part of the challenge of reform right now and leadership is creating the conditions in which good police officers can help weed out bad officers wholly.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Van Dyck gets out of his car within seconds, this incredible execution. I have no trouble assuming of those officers, you know, the other officers there, that they responded humanly as any of us would to what they saw. And to the way millions of people have responded to the video. They go back to the station house, and I'm imagining this, but we know the outcome, and I imagine they're sorry General Lieutenant. Gives them a statement that they're going to sign this story we're going to tell about what happened. That's not a question of interpretation or perspective. These are outright lies as we've now seen in the statements. I cannot imagine worse working conditions than that. Well, it's also, I mean,”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “The greater Chicago Food Depository that was on the river. So they did the right thing. They did the right thing. So then everybody come, you know, everybody comes to 41st in Pulaski.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “But some sympathy has to be extended to officers living under this sort of regime of fearing one another and fearing reprisal. Think about the other officers at the scene. Van Dyck was the only shooter. There were eight or nine other officers there. The two officers, the initial responders, responded in exemplary fashion. They found the boy several blocks away from where he was ultimately shot. They asked him to drop the knife. He didn't, but he wasn't aggressive. Nobody else is around. He's kind of disassociated. They don't know quite what's going on with him. They ended up following him for several blocks, just walking with him. One of the officers walking alongside, I have surveillance video that shows this from...”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “According to an FBI source, the expectation was that he was going to indict before everything blew up on civil rights violations. Now it seems to me that the political context is such that I'll be very surprised if the US attorney doesn't also indict other officers for participating in the kind of code of silence stuff. And I should say one thing about that because, you know, we talk glibly about the code of silence. I'm doing a big investigative piece right now on the consequences for a couple of whistleblowers within the department. So it's real, it's significant. It's a major thing that has to be addressed going forward.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “You know, it's hard to know, probably not, probably not, and this has been such a complicated in many ways sordid process. It's important to note, though, that there have been some important benchmarks in this. Murder charge brought against Jason Van Dyck, the shooter, is the first time in 50 years that a police officer has been criminally charged for homicide. It's the first time in history, so far as we know, that a police officer has been charged in a shooting case. And that's significant, even though we got there in this bizarre.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Infinitesimal. I mean, you know, the number of cases that end with a sustained finding and any kind of meaningful punishment are minute. And so people have great skepticism about Why would I complain when this is Do”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “For the I think that's the point we want to go back to is that the Whether we're talking the US attorney, the state's attorney, the city itself, I think part of what this has illustrated, part of what the Lequan McDonald case has illustrated is a, and it was in fact policy, but I think it also is sort of cover-up. It's investigation as cover-up. As long as you can say you have an open pending investigation, you can withhold public information from the public. And I know cases.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “I think what's emerging nationally as in the process of emerging, so it hasn't fully crystallized, but what's emerging as a sort of policy on this is that videos should be released in a timely fashion, and that's a matter of days, not weeks or months, unless there's an exceptional investigative reason not to. There was an instance in Cincinnati of an officer shot, a campus police officer shot a motorist. And the policy in Cincinnati is to release video within 24 or 48 hours. They took a week or 10 days, the reason being that they wanted to check out and possibly impeach the stories of other officers and the kind of classic code of silence thing. So I think there's much more to be gained, especially in this climate of distrust that we live in now for early timely release of this kind of emotion.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “They're trying to line them up with a police account, and they said, and I have this quoted from one of my sources, They said to these, and this is to one of the witnesses, you can't have seen what you say you saw. We have video that contradicts it. So within hours of the shooting, they're invoking the video to try to kind of re-educate these witnesses. There is the immediate falsification of, as we all know, because of the...”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “So the circling of the wagons and the intervention at every level of government and to the highest levels to contain this from the first moment, I mean in the first moments, officers are shooing away witnesses to the shooting without taking statements or getting contact information. They are destroying evidence. There's an effort to intimidate witnesses who have said strong things about what they saw. Two witnesses, three witnesses, one of whom I've talked to taken down to a nearby police station and subjected to a kind of badgering. It's not even right to call it interrogation because they weren't trying to find something out.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Well, that, but it's also not in terms of the police, it's not the norm, right? But it happens, and it happens too much. But everything that happened after that, while the boy starting while he's bleeding out on the ground, is the norm”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “But my position on this is that I wish it was a cover up. I wish it was a conspiracy. I mean, I think that's a, given what we're really contending with, that's a kind of sentimental narrative, but it'd be a lot easier to fix than what we're looking at. I don't want to suggest, I don't want to suggest that the execution of a child on the streets of Chicago is the norm. It was an exceptional event. What happened?”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “That's the prevailing narrative, the hostility towards the mayor and his administration is extraordinary. And the prevailing narrative is of cover-up and conspiracy, basically.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “They work slowly. And I think one of the things that I tend to agree with you that cover up is the wrong way to characterize what happened here. And I think in a way, although that's...”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “The notion. Well, and there was just no way there was absolutely no way to square the autopsy, which was definitive. Now there is a body of factual information. There was no way to square it with the city's account. And so, you know, on the basis of the autopsies and the witness, I publish an article in Slate magazine detailing what I'd learned.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Well, the autopsy, so having talked to him, the next sort of critical piece of information was the autopsy report. And the autopsy had been performed the morning following the shooting at 8.30 in the morning. He was declared dead at 10.45 or something, 8.30 in the morning. There was an autopsy, and the autopsy is conducted with an investigator from the agency that investigates these incidents in the room. I actually reached out to sources within the Cook County government. Which oversees the medical examiner's office. And they were able, before the report itself was available to be FOIA.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Significant force and presence, and they have him contained, nobody else is threatened, and a police officer gets out of his car within seconds as the boy is moving away from him, shoots him, he wasn't sure how many times initially boy falls to the ground, is completely immobilized, kind of in fetal position, writhing in pain on the ground, and then shoots him a total of 16 times, essentially empties his clip. He didn't have the number 16, but a barrage, a barrage. And he's witnessed this appalling, appalling thing.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “No, and so, but it was so carefully phrased. I mean, this was an exercise to convey an impression that all the agency was with the young man and the police were just doing what they had to do. So my witness gave a very different account. He had been driving on Pulaski, stopped by the action, and had an unimpeded view of what we have now all seen, or many people have seen in the video that was ultimately released. And he described an incident, you know, a situation where the police had complete control of the situation. They've corralled the young man. He's in no way aggressive. He's shying away from the police officers, but they have...”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “In the distance, you can see the skyline. So it sort of feels like the center of the city. And at the same time, like the most desolate place on Earth. And at night, 9.30 at night when this incident began, it's completely deserted except for the heavy traffic on Pulaski, the sort of major north-south artery. The basic story is, or I should start with the story that was told by the police department and the official, I mean, this was the official story of the police department. There's a press release that was released several hours after the incident that basically said, you know, young man with a knife lunges at police officer Although they didn't use this word, the burden of it was and causes his own death. Police officer has no choice but to shoot him, shoots him in the chest, he dies sometime later at a nearby hospital. This time.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “And we read these stories until recently with the heightened attention that's now been brought to this, you talk about being a police reporter, I read these stories all the time. There are roughly 40 police shootings a year in Chicago. Not all of them ending in fatalities. And mostly, you know, you read it, you feel uneasy, you turn the page. And in this instance, the intervention of the whistleblower sort of set in motion a train of events that I've played some role in I remember as well early in the process, probably within a week of getting the tip, going down and standing at the site of the shooting, the address for those who know Chicago, 41st in Pulaski, southwest side, really an incredible environment in the sense that it's sort of the city of the big shoulders. There are big truckyards and industry. you”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “I did. And as I say, very gratifying. I at the same time wish I'd never heard the name Laquon McDonald. This is not something I want on my resume. And it's one of those paradoxes of the kind of work we do that a story like this breaks and tables. But the point I want to make is that while I'm being acknowledged for this, I wouldn't have pursued this story were it not for the whistleblower. And I may not have pursued it further were it not for a courageous civilian witness, very frightened of police reprisal at that point when I showed up at his door.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “You know, I think it's I think they are sometimes they have agendas, but I think in this case, I have no doubt that the individual is simply appalled by what had happened. And as he conveyed to us, had no confidence that his own agency, you know, the agencies he was part of the larger ecosystem in which they were, he had no confidence that they would vigorously investigate this case. And so he let us know that there was video, and he provided enough leads and shards of information that shreds of information that I was ultimately able to find an eyewitness to the shooting, a civilian eyewitness. So this sort of set me in motion as a journalist, but I do want to stress I've gotten a lot of acknowledgement for this reporting, which is gratifying. Although I would love to love one.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “And sometimes very senior people who reach out and say, look, I'm trying to affect things on the inside. Somebody's got to be making noise about this on the outside. And so we have those relationships and a number of instances over the years. I mean, I've had My kind of deep throat sources within the police department, sometimes quite literally like deep throat in the Watergate instance.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “So, my first involvement in the case was by way of a tip from somebody in government, a whistleblower in law enforcement close to the investigation, who reached out to a colleague, Craig Futterman, here at the law school, a lawyer I work with closely, and conveyed the information to us that, and it was about probably 10 days after the shooting in the fall of 2014, that it was the first time I'd heard the name Laquan McDonald and said that the actual facts of the case were sharply at variance with what you get tips like that.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “But yeah, and I think there's some legitimacy to that. But overwhelmingly, the more powerful phenomena in my experience is distrust of the police because small but significant number of officers who are abusive operate with impunity. And they become the face of the police force in communities like this. And they disable and undermine conscientious officers who are the vast majority from being effective. So, I mean, one instance of this is there was a hold the thought.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “They're not going to cooperate with the police. They're not going to reach out to the police. And in the press and public officials make much of an ethos, a cultural ethos of no snitch in the country.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “In that the failure to hold abusive officers accountable drives whole communities away from not just the police but from civil authority and I witnessed at Stateway and wrote at length about the”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Right. And those two phenomena, which until recently we've treated as different spheres of discourse, you know, we talk about Gang violence and quote unquote gang violence in inner city neighborhoods and then intermittently until it just imploded recently. We talk about police abuse and police corruption. But we've treated those as separate things. They're the same conversation, the same phenomena. And that was part of what Was able to what I was exposed to.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “A police force of 12,000. And they're not evenly distributed throughout the city who get extraordinarily high numbers of complaints, get extraordinarily number of high.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “Yeah, so we have, by virtue of a lawsuit, we won recently, we have a lot of data about sort of complaints of police abuse from citizens and then what happens to them. And it's really important to say, and I'm always at pains to say this, that based on the data we have, we have complete figures for the last four years. Ultimately, we're going to get, the city has agreed to give us data going back to 1967. So these are the disciplinary profiles of every officer to serve. But based on the figures for the last four years, upwards of 80% of police officers get between zero and four complaints in the course of their career from citizens. 90% get less than 10. But then there's a number of officers, let's say it's under 5%, not an insignificant number.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “But didn't feel that way to people at Stayway Gardens. And when they can operate with impunity, without fear of being identified and punished. So this...”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “The little daily stuff, you know, the ugliness of the language that was used. And sometimes, you know, the N-word and other language like that over the loudspeakers of police cars, the casual cruelty just toying with people in perverse ways because you had the power to do it. And the openness and brazenness of that kind of behavior was so routine and it was done with such a sense. You know, I now use the word impunity a lot. It was part of my vocabulary then, but not an active part of it. And I feel like what happened in those years was I saw in the most visceral daily way what impunity looks like, what people who are disposed to be abusive, you know, relatively small percentage of the police force.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “And corruption, but also I think for me the thing that was most telling was the beatdowns were obviously striking. And I never saw some of the high-level corruption that I've since written about where there were actual protection rackets where police would exact attacks from drug dealers in order to deal drugs in a building and it would protect them from law enforcement but the residents used to joke about the open air lobbies as being the policeman's ATM machine you know you want to make a quick withdrawal just go and take drugs or money off a young man and say you just bailed yourself out and so but I want to make another point because the thing that was most striking to me was not so much the big stuff as”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “So there's an underpacing. And then there's a police presence that is drawn by the drug trade that is by turns harassing and predatory. The open air lobbies of each of the buildings was a drug marketplace 24-7 drugs are being sold. And the term of art was the police would hit the building. This would involve cars careening on the sidewalk, rushing up guys jumping out before. The young men in the drug trade could run upstairs into the building and disappear. Daily, I would see just routinely instances of excessive force in the interactions between police. Often I would see just brazen shakedowns. There's a mixture of experience.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “And one consequence of that was everybody knew me. I was in everybody's lives. Obviously, I stood out. I was treated with incredible hospitality and friendship. And it was a life-changing experience to learn so much about a community that we tend to see in one dimension. And I have to say, initially it was such an incredible environment, just in terms of perception and what you took in, that I did not initially see some of the police patterns I ultimately came to see, the way in which the community was policed. And it was a spectrum of things. First, nobody calls the police in a place like Stateway Gardens because they don't come in response to somebody broke into my apartment.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “It's a good question. So, you know, I was there for some years, four or five years before I wrote, because I was writing, working with available light, you know, while also having this sort of parallel career.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “So it's hard. There are probably other people who could describe it better. You know, I obviously entered that world by degrees, but ultimately was a daily presence there for years, again, for well over a decade. By the time I got involved in public housing, I had Created a small initiative we called the Neighborhood Conservation Corps that was focused on creating alternatives for young men in the criminal economy and the gangs and just coming out of prison, mostly doing construction related work, physical work and So I had something to offer in terms of Of job possibilities and offered to people then and now who are mostly excluded from everything. So fairly quickly I had a critical mass of former gang members working with me who had a lot of street credibility and I think that sort of validated my presence.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “They became something else, and it's a really complicated story, and we're still contending over that story. So the area in which I most intensely worked was the heart of the Black South Side, both in the old black belt, under segregation, and then the public housing era. And it was a sort of corridor, so-called, that extended from, again, within walking distance of where we are now. To 35th Street and beyond, so a couple of miles of public housing high rises. The biggest concentration of public housing in the country, the biggest concentration of poverty, and it functioned as a kind of a, it was like a South African township. I mean, it was a city within the city.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “An extraordinary phenomenon And it could be walking dist Could be a while. So I have been sort of contesting that. Way of being in the world. For a long time and trying to kind of push past those boundaries and see what was on the other side either quixotic or heroic or reckless depending on your perspective in practice, as with most things, it was a series of small steps and a sense of direction maybe. And for me, it led by way of a number of initiatives around the South Side. you know, kind of barn raising type operations, cleaning up vacant lots, boarding up vacant buildings, unsecured buildings, and ultimately led me to a world that has since disappeared. It was this huge concentration of public housing on South State Street, the so-called South State Street Corridor, Robert Taylor Holmes, Stateway Gardens.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “You can occupy that space on one hand and be utterly oblivious in denial, morally stupid about the conditions of life around you in a sphere where you can have an impact.”

    2016-04-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 38 - Jamie Kalven · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source