Park District Adds Homeless Specialist, More Surveillance As It Struggles To Address Encampments

ALBANY PARK — The Chicago Park District has hired a homeless support specialist as it copes with encampments at parks across the city and as debate over the best way to address the situation has dominated public comment at park board meetings this year.

Officials said last week that Dannette Salaam was hired for the newly created position, which will work with other agencies and the district’s front-line staff to provide and expand housing and support services, including psychiatry and harm reduction.

She already has met with more than 60 residents at the dozens of encampments in parks around the city and participated in 13 cleanups. Her duties also include responding to concerns of community members.

The district is also looking to expand its use of mobile surveillance units, which have been placed near homeless encampments at parks on the North Side as well as at a South Side park that was the site of a mass shooting. The district currently has two of the units, costing nearly $76,000 each, plus a $282 monthly service fee.

The district told Block Club it is acquiring two more solar-powered trailers, which are equipped with cameras, speakers, strobe lights, floodlights, law-enforcement-style emblems and constantly flashing blue lights. Footage from the cameras is shared with police, but not immigration agents without a warrant.

A park district spokesperson on Friday said the district hopes to have the additional mobile units online by the end of the year. It hasn’t yet been determined where the two new units will be placed, they said.

The two existing surveillance trailers are currently stationed in the areas of “highest need,” Park District Supt. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa said at a meeting of the parks board last week.

Those areas, he said, are at Ronan Park, 2900 W. Lawrence Ave., and Washington Park, in the 5400 block of South Cottage Grove Avenue, where one person was killed and 14 injured in a mass shooting last month.

The shooting remains unsolved, and “the danger has not necessarily gone away,” Ramirez-Rosa said, because “there can be a desire for retaliation.”

The district has said the cameras were placed at the 12.5-acre Ronan Park, which is part of a busy bike route along the Chicago River, because of a high number of emergency service calls. The area has seen fires and multiple drug arrests this summer and was described in a Chicago police arrest report as “an area where numerous methamphetamine users frequent.”

One of those arrests took place at 8 p.m. June 5, when officers were waved down about an argument at the encampment involving an armed man brandishing a weapon. After a brief foot chase through the park, police arrested a 38-year-old man who allegedly ditched a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun with a laser sight, silencer and extended magazine in a tent. The man was charged with possession of five grams of methamphetamine and four gun charges, including carrying on public land, failing to register and armor-piercing bullets, records show.

Another arrest, on July 16, was of a 29-year-old man wanted in connection with an earlier burglary attempt. The man had a large machete strapped to his back, a knotted plastic bag containing suspected methamphetamine and $3,056 in cash, police said. He was charged with methamphetamine manufacturing, possession of burglary tools and a weapons offense.

The cameras were placed at Ronan Park in August.

Earlier this year, the district removed a surveillance trailer that had been monitoring tents near Gompers and Eugene Field parks near Foster Avenue and the Chicago River, to the dismay of neighbors. 

Neighbors at last week’s park board meeting asked that those cameras be reinstalled, blaming the encampment for crime, including a break-in and vandalism at two nearby nursing homes that has frightened staff and residents. Police declined to comment on those incidents.

When neighbors previously requested at a June board meeting that the mobile unit be reinstalled at Eugene Field, Ramirez-Rosa said, “We did not capture anything that would necessitate us keeping it there.”

Neighbors countered that concerning activity — including public drinking and drug use, and residents leaving behind garbage dumping and human waste — was continuing.

Ramirez-Rosa said the surveillence trailer, which he described as the district’s only one at the time, was needed more on the South Side. 

Tico Valle, park board vice president, responded that the cameras could potentially stop crime from happening. 

“When we use those tools that deter bad actions, perhaps that was one of the reasons why you were not seeing [illegal] activity” at Eugene Field, he said. “So there is a need for more.”

Debate Over Issue Dominates Public Comment At Parks Board Meetings

In addition to the meeting last week and the one in June, debate about homeless people being allowed to live at the parks has been the subject of public comment at every one of the monthly meetings so far this year, according to a review of recordings of the meetings posted online. Ramirez-Rosa has said there are some 60 homeless encampments in the city, mostly in parks.

Those in favor of letting the encampments remain — which advocates say can have as few as one to three tents — have also been vocal.

Homeless advocates disrupted the March meeting, shouting “we need a place to sleep, not another sweep,” to protest the city clearing the Legion Park encampment. The commotion led Park Board President Marlon Everett to halt the proceedings. 

The April meeting lasted nearly three hours after spirited exchanges from encampment neighbors and park officials. At that meeting, Lynn Burmeister, a leader of the Restore Gompers Park Coalition, noted she helped shut down an encampment at Gompers Park, only to see it move across the street to Eugene Field last year.

Neighbor Mildred Rivera compared the park board to a negligent landlord allowing homeless residents at Eugene Field to blatantly ignore rules that she said “exist only on paper.”

In May, Burmeister called the area “a public health risk.”

“As summer approaches, trash and rodents come with disease,” she told the board.

A Ronan Park neighbor submitted a video to the board showing rats running along the edge of the encampment.

At the June meeting, Ronan Park neighbor Jeanne Kracher complained that a tent resident had pleaded guilty to two counts of attempted assault with a deadly weapon involving a park security officer and a neighbor of Legion Park before that encampment was shut down following fires, explosions, violence and internal conflicts.

“How is it possible that he now lives in Ronan Park with your knowledge and consent?” she asked.

Kracher’s spouse, Laura McAlpine, noted that the homeless residents had simply “moved down the river” to Ronan Park.

“Same group, same violations,” she told the board.

Ramirez-Rosa responded that when the city clears an encampment in one park, the residents generally move to another park.

But the parks chief said it was mutual-aid volunteers and other neighbors — “not us” — who helped move homeless residents from Legion to Ronan. 

“It happened organically [at the] grassroots level,” he said.

Bottom Line: There’s Not Enough Housing, Parks Chief Says

Park board Commissioner Robert Castaneda has echoed concerns raised by neighbors. At the April meeting, while looking through photographs submitted by residents, he questioned whether “it is humane to live in this garbage.”

He also said he struggled to understand why people living in city parks are not banned if they repeatedly ignore rules, such as those prohibiting furniture, gear and other belongings from being stored outside tents.

Ramirez-Rosa said well-intentioned people sometimes drop off bulky items like furniture in a misguided attempt to help.

But throwing away possessions belonging to homeless residents is “a very difficult situation,” he said. The district addresses such cases with the Chicago Department of Family and Support Services, sometimes negotiating removals with a social worker to comply with state law and avoid “causing more harm,” such as by discarding important documents or a Social Security card, for example.

The bottom line, Ramirez-Rosa said in April, is that Chicago lacks adequate housing resources to accommodate people experiencing street homelessness.

______________________________________________________________________

Support Local News!

Subscribe to Block Club Chicago, an independent, 501(c)(3), journalist-run newsroom. Every dime we make funds reporting from Chicago’s neighborhoods. Already subscribe? Click here to gift a subscription, or you can support Block Club with a tax-deductible donation.

Listen to the Block Club Chicago podcast: