When Rickey Allen was fatally shot Thursday by a Hoffman Estates police officer, it was a clear-cut case of a cop doing what was needed to protect another person, according to police.
But friends, relatives and neighbors of Allen`s saw something police insist wasn`t there-racism.
That Allen was black and Patrol Officer Marylu Redmond was white played no part in her action, police said. They asserted that it was Redmond`s duty to protect the man being threatened by Allen, who Redmond said was armed with a knife.
Michael Daniels, a resident of Hoffman Estates, saw it otherwise. ”It could have been any black man running in rage out that door,” he said. ”It`s an innate fear that whites have of Afro-Americans. The shooting was racist.” Police angrily deny the accusations of Daniels and others, and if Redmond`s version of the shooting is accurate, she performed her duty correctly, according to her supervisors and law-enforcement experts.
But the fact that some residents of Hoffman Estates immediately deemed the incident racist exposes a perception in some quarters of the village that the predominantly white police department discriminates against minorities.
And, valid or not, many blacks and Hispanics in other Chicago suburbs where minority populations are growing share a similar perception about their own police forces, according to observers.
”Many times, something like this is a precipitating event that reflects some underlying concerns about the day-to-day activities of a police department and race relations in general in a community,” said Phil Nyden, a Loyola University sociology professor who is studying race relations in the Chicago area.
The tensions can be subtle but persistent.
”It doesn`t have to be stones through windows and cross burnings,”
Nyden said. ”It can just be that people assume burglaries are committed by black people and things like that. It can be very damaging.
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”The real problem now, and it`s nationwide, is this idea that crime equals poor and poor equals black and therefore criminals are black,” Nyden said.
Even if race is unequivocally dismissed as a factor in Thursday`s shooting, the incident has heightened tensions that some say have been brewing for years.
”On a Friday night, police stop kids up and down here, young blacks just sitting out here,” said Forrest Grace, who is African American, as he motioned to the street below his Hoffman Estates condominium.
”I don`t like the idea that they pick on a lot of blacks, especially the younger generation,” Grace said.
”They harass them about the way they wear their clothes and their hats. They think it`s gang-related.”
There seems to be a difference in the way white officers handle minorities and the way they handle whites, according to Rev. Jimmie Daniels, president of the northwest chapter of Operation PUSH, a Chicago-based civil rights group.
”I`m told by families that (police) seem to be a lot more heavy-handed toward minorities and make more traffic stops and searches against them,”
Daniels said. ”That`s true whether it`s Rolling Meadows, Schaumburg, what have you.”
Freddy Claros, a 20-year-old Hispanic from Chicago, was visiting friends Friday in Hoffman Estates. He said police pulled him over 21 times during the years he lived in Itasca, Schaumburg and Hoffman Estates.
”They always gave me a ticket . . . as soon as the cop recognizes your accent,” said Claros, 20. ”I moved because I don`t like the stuff they give you here.”
Bernard Kleina, executive director of the HOPE Fair Housing Center in Lombard, said that in Du Page County and north and northwest Cook County,
”minority families stand out.”
”We`ve had complaints of minorities being stopped by police to ask where they`re going-as though they don`t belong in the suburbs-while they`re really just driving to work or shopping,” Kleina said.
Thursday`s incident in Hoffman Estates began when Redmond was called to an apartment building in the 900 block of Grand Canyon Parkway on a report of a fight in progress.
Police said Redmond shot Allen, 31, in the neck after he brandished a kitchen carving knife while chasing another man, who was white, and after she yelled at him three times, once to stop and twice to drop the weapon.
Lt. Robert Boynton of Hoffman Estates said several witnesses saw Allen with a knife in his hand. But others who saw the shooting asserted Allen had no weapon.
”The only thing Rickey`s mother can see is a white officer shot her son because of another white man,” said Rev. Daniels, who has worked with Hoffman Estates police over the last four years, said he knows that Redmond ”is not the type of individual who would have done what took place unless she felt someone`s life was in danger.”
Daniels said the situation was worse in Hoffman Estates before he started working with police to change the way they dealt with minorities.
For example, blacks and Hispanics were regularly videotaped in public places while whites were not, Daniels charged. At one point, Daniels charged, police were ordering minority youths out of Barrington Square shopping center at Higgins and Barrington Roads while letting white kids stay.
”They had to sit on the grass across the parking lot,” Daniels said.
”Or the police wouldn`t allow them to approach the movie theaters until 10 or 15 minutes before the theaters let out.”
All those practices are now abolished, Daniels said, and Hoffman Estate Police Chief Donald Cundiff ”has tended to bend over backwards to make things work and make them fair.”
While Daniels` efforts have paid off in Hoffman Estates, similar approaches are being tried in other suburban departments, such as Naperville. Naperville Police Chief David Dial has, over the last six months, brought in black professionals from nearby Bell Labs to talk to his officers about being sensitive to the needs and concerns of minorities.
”Not everybody is going to react to police contact in the same way, and we wanted to enhance our people`s knowledge about how to deal with all members of the community,” Dial said.
The chief also has talked with a minority student leader at North Central College in Du Page and made an effort to add to the three black officers he now has on his staff of 118, he said.
”We`ll be able to judge our success next month when we have our test,”
Dial said. ”We`ll see how many minority students we`ve been able to recruit.”
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In south suburban Harvey, Police Chief Nikolas Graves holds periodic cultural awareness classes for his officers.
”It`s good for whites, good for blacks,” said Graves, whose staff is 65 percent black in a community that is about 80 percent African-American.
”Blacks have to understand whites, too.”
But working against police departments in their bid for understanding are several factors, including what Rev. Daniels and others see as a general deterioration in relations between blacks and whites.
Another problem, Dial and Graves said, is the fallout from the vicious videotaped beating of a black man in Los Angeles by white police officers.
”That horrible thing . . . has really set law enforcement back,” Dial said. ”We will take a long time digging ourselves from the hole that put us in.”