Albert J. Allen was working as a security guard in the lobby of a Chicago Housing Authority building one evening last month, when bullets sprayed through the front door.
Allen and his partner dropped to the floor until the shooting stopped. About two minutes later, Allen ventured out, his .38-caliber revolver in hand. He spotted a blue Chrysler Cordoba parked about 50 feet away, with three youths sitting inside. Allen fired three shots. One bullet shattered the rear window, hit 15-year-old Terrence Mitchell in the head and killed him.
Allen hadn`t seen shots come from the car, and no one in it displayed a gun. But as Allen later told assistant state`s attorneys, he recognized the car from a previous drive-by shooting at the development, Washington Park Homes, in the 4400 block of South Cottage Grove Avenue.
Allen, an employee of Security Enforcement Services, was charged with Mitchell`s murder.
The shooting of Terrence Mitchell was one of several recent incidents in which the CHA`s private security guards fired their guns upon citizens, seriously injuring or killing them.
In the past year, Security Enforcement Services guards have shot and killed three people while on the job.
Hired originally as a money-saving measure, private guards such as Allen are not given full police powers: They are instructed to call authorities when trouble arises. However, in the city`s often violent public housing developments, the ill-equipped and poorly monitored guards often wind up taking the law into their own hands.
Many of the 350 private guards currently patrolling CHA grounds have criminal backgrounds themselves, police records show.
Although the CHA has been building its internal police and security forces, private guards remain the backbone of its law enforcement deployment. There are currently close to 350 private guards patrolling CHA developments, compared to about 70 in-house security guards and about 150 CHA police officers.
CHA spending on private security firms grew to $15 million in 1990 from $6 million in 1988. Billings have dropped slightly in the first four months of 1991.
Billings are not the only cost. In the last year, the shootings have prompted multimillion dollar lawsuits. A suit that followed one recent killing was settled for $225,000.
In court, where the CHA is opposing three federal lawsuits arising from fatal shootings, the agency has attempted to distance itself from liability for the conduct of the guards. But in a strongly worded opinion last month, U.S. District Court Judge James Holderman said that ”contracting out security services on CHA property does not relieve (the CHA) of its constitutional duties.”
CHA officials and police say they have not kept a running count of shootings involving security guards. But during an eight-month period in 1990 when the CHA did keep such records, there were 17 incidents in which guards discharged firearms, and five in which people were hit, three of them fatally. ”You`re playing Russian roulette,” said Christian Maerz, inspector general for the CHA. ”You`ve got people out there with guns, legally, and they`re not properly trained. You`re taking a big risk.”
”If my son was doing anything wrong, the guards should have called police,” said Beverly Mitchell, Terrence`s mother. ”It was not up to the security guard to be judge, jury and executioner.”
Earlier this month, another guard for SES, Roosevelt Johnson, was also charged with murder after he allegedly fired his .38-caliber revolver into a dark stairwell in the Hilliard Homes, 2031 S. Clark St., fatally wounding Trinity Bowman, 25.
Johnson, 29, told police that on May 8 he was accompanying a CHA maintenance crew down a stairwell of the Hilliard Homes when someone pressed a gun into the back of his head. Johnson, who said it was too dark to see the assailant`s face, disarmed the man, chased him up a crowded stairwell and opened fire. Bowman was killed.
Private security firm owners say that most of their guards are responsible workers who face extreme danger for little money. Most private guards working at CHA make less than $6 per hour.
”The CHA is no Disneyland,” said Anthony E. Cairo, president of Security Enforcement Services, 837 N. Milwaukee Ave., which currently supplies 70 guards to CHA. ”People are shooting at us. In most instances we shoot back.”
But along with their perils, the housing developments offer profits for men like Cairo, who started in the security business 30 years ago after working as a ditch digger.
Cairo would not disclose the exact amount of his CHA billings, but he said it was in the millions of dollars.
The CHA pays private security agencies $8.86 an hour for each guard they supply, $9.86 for supervisors and time-and-a-half for overtime work. But the agencies are only required to pay their personnel at least $5.53 an hour.
”The industry has come a long way since I got into it,” Cairo said.
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”Back then they gave me a uniform and a gun, put my hand on a rock and said, `Now you are a security guard.` ”
Now, with a typical applicant, Cairo said, ”You`ve got a 50-50 chance of getting a drinker. You take a guy who is half-whipped by life and still has to put some bread on the table, and you`ve got the makings of a good guard.”
Police records show that some guards, including some of those involved in the recent shootings, have criminal records.
Allen pleaded guilty in 1985 to a weapons charge and has had two battery arrests since 1989. The dispositions of those cases were unavailable.
Oscar Patton, who was one of four security guards involved in the May 1990 shooting death of Stanley Scott, had two prior theft convictions at the time. Patton and the other guards were not charged in the death of Scott, then 26, who was shot in the back after a chaotic late-night chase through Henry Horner Homes, 2145 W. Lake St.
Police reports and interviews with guards detail the types of tensions that arise. ”People shoot at us just to get us out of the way,” says Alfred Warren, who worked for SES until last year.
”Our officers get shot at on a regular basis,” says Pat Everett, administrator for McCoy Security Services, which has 95 guards patrolling CHA developments.
This month, one McCoy guard was charged with murder and another with aggravated battery in separate shooting incidents.
Cairo said it is the responsibility of the Department of Professional Regulation, the state licensing agency, to determine if a guard is qualified to work as an armed security guard.
Department officials say that two out of three applicants have criminal histories, but that is not automatically grounds for denying a guard`s license.
”We have issued Permanent Employee Registration Cards to men and women who have been convicted of murder,” said a department official, who spoke on condition that his name not be used.
”The minimum standards required by the state are insufficient for guards working in CHA developments because of the high activity and high incidents of violence,” said Maerz. ”A department store is a long way from Robert Taylor Homes.”