to meet with police and social workers. Periodically the police tout the numbers, but just when they’re looking good. Other times, when the homicide numbers inch up, they chastise the press for keeping count as if there were some contest at hand. Before Pete arrived, the Tribune often rewrote police statements, and would pick and choose which crime scenes to go to, sometimes a handful in one night. Pete is in some ways a throwback. He employs good old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting. He’s rarely in the office and instead drives from crime scene to crime scene, listening for the next shooting on his portable scanner. He doesn’t have the time for pronouncements from public officials. In fact, he gets angry at what he sees as the city’s cynicism. Last year the police superintendent, Garry McCarthy, released a statement celebrating a twenty-four-hour period without a shooting as if that were a great accomplishment. “This is clearly the result of the tremendous police work of the men and women of the Chicago Police Department,” McCarthy declared. Another time the mayor, Rahm Emanuel, suggested the shooters stay away from the young kids. “Take your stuff away to the alley,” he said. On the streets around many schools, the city has begun erecting signs that read SAFE PASSAGE, a suggestion that these signs act as a kind of shield for the city’s school-age children. “They’re a joke,” Pete told me, speaking of the signs. “What about the rest of the fuckin’ city? It’s not safe there? Are you ceding the rest of the city?”
11:27 p.m. Cops on two different South Side radio zones calling in gunfire now, 79th/Drexel, 1400 W. 66th.
11:29 p.m. This neighborhood is hot right now. Shots fired in the area.
When Pete began this work, in 2011, he found it gripping, heart-racing. Because he’s white, he was usually an outsider in the neighborhoods he covered. He flew from crime scene to crime scene, often with a photographer in tow. He witnessed an arson fire where a family was killed and on another occasion stood over the body of a young man who had been beaten to death with a cinder block, half his face depressed like it was made of clay. But he also saw a kind of grace. He remembers one particular murder, of a nineteen-year-old boy, on the city’s far West Side. When he arrived at the scene, the body was still on the sidewalk. A middle-aged man approached him and, realizing that Pete wasn’t a police officer, apologized: You’re not the person I need to talk to. He found an officer and told him that he was the boy’s dad and that he wanted to see his son. The sergeant pleaded with him: You don’t want to remember your son like this. But the father waited. He seemed almost serene, while his daughter, the victim’s sister, dry-heaved in his white van, parked nearby. When the body removal service arrived (the “body snatchers,” Pete calls them), the father walked to the body before anyone could stop him. He stood over his son and looked to the heavens, offering a short prayer. The boy, it turned out, wasn’t involved in the streets. He worked at Sears and just happened to be in front of the building where the shooter’s intended target lived. In that one moment, Pete felt he witnessed something deeply personal, something deeply private. He thought to himself, I shouldn’t be here. It’s not my place.
FRIDAY, JUNE 14
1:42 a.m. Setting up the scene, 4400 N. Mulligan. Police shot a young man. #chicago. [accompanied by a short video of police putting up yellow tape]
3:00 a.m. “Be advised, we are in a backlog on the South Side.” chicagoscanner
3:58 a.m. 7 people shot tonight, plus police shot someone up in Jefferson Park.
Pete reported that a boy, maybe fourteen or fifteen, swung a two-by-four at a police officer, and the officer shot the boy in self-defense. The boy lived. “There was a time when I was doing the job and I didn’t know what I was soaking up,” Pete told me. “You don’t know what you don’t know. And then when I knew, I thought, Oh, shit.” It took a toll. By this summer, two years into his overnight reporting, Pete has begun to grow weary of the bloodletting. He has tried taking melatonin or Nyquil to help him sleep. He lies in bed, “a perpetual half-sleep” he calls it, hearing scanners in his head. He is easy to anger, even with friends.