As the wind chill dipped below zero and the snow piled on last week, small teams of youth hit the streets of the 37th Ward. They fanned out across unplowed residential blocks of Austin, West Garfield Park, and West Humboldt Park to tell locals not to reelect incumbent alderman Emma Mitts. The teens, some of whom have been involved with the #NoCopAcademy campaign to prevent a $95 million police and fire training facility from being built in the ward, have organized under the hashtag #AnybodyButMitts. Just as when, in 2016, the #ByeAnita campaign energized Cook County voters to give state’s attorney Anita Alvarez the boot without specifically endorsing Kim Foxx, so too this youth-led effort against Mitts isn’t an endorsement of either of her opponents—CPS teacher Tara Stamps (who’s challenging Mitts for the second time) and newcomer Deondre’ Rutues.
Lavon said he votes “every now and then,” but not because he truly has faith in any candidate. He’s not thrilled with the job Mitts has done for the ward, but he said the unemployment and crime in the neighborhood aren’t just her problems to solve.
As the group hustled to knock on doors one block to the east, Bell argued that it doesn’t matter that she happens to live in the Sixth Ward on the south side. “I care, even if I don’t live over here, I still care. ‘Cause it’s still my people,” she said after speaking to another resident through a glass front door. “If you’re alderman you’re representing your community, you’re supposed to get them what they need, not just what’s gonna make you look good or help your campaign. . . . And I feel that Emma Mitts—she’s not doing that. So that’s why I’m here.”
Securing an interview with Mitts proved to be a challenge. After days of back-and- forth phone calls and text messages with her media and legislative affairs coordinator, A.L. Smith—which included an invitation to see Mitts at a community meeting that arrived nine minutes before the start of that meeting—I finally got 20 minutes on the phone. Smith was also on the conference call and, though she didn’t want her comments to be on the record, chimed in so frequently to help Mitts make her points that the alderman finally told her: “Let me speak.”
Mitts’s opponents certainly disagree.
“I don’t like the fact that there isn’t a plethora of black businesses or small business ownership in our community, which in other communities are staples,” Rutues says. He’s trying to start a Rotary Club in the area to stimulate local business development. If he were elected he said he’d work to pass a property tax freeze in poor neighborhoods, restructure the city ticketing program that leads to high levels of bankruptcy among African-Americans, and fight TIF deals that funnel money away from public schools and other local government services. He’s against the police academy. “There’s no reason that $95 million should be spent in this ward and it not be spent on mental health resources first,” he said.
