Many of Lane’s tenants seem to agree. If the issue is framed as a contest between the sanctity of the Fourth Amendment and the life of a human being, most would rather let the Constitution slide. The argument gains force when the body count goes up, as it did in late March around the Robert Taylor Homes, a 28-building high-rise complex that is home to 15,000 people. Over a 72-hour period beginning on March 24, police say, gang members exchanged hundreds of shots that wounded five innocent bystanders, including 13-year-old Abshalom Nawls, and killed two teenage boys. Neighborhood leaders like Lula Ford, principal of an elementary school near the Taylor Homes, say project residents want to force the gangbangers out. “I realize that [may violate] the Fourth Amendment, and I want [the amendment] protected,” Ford says. “But if it’s going to save a life, sometimes we have to be in contempt” of the court’s ruling. Or, as 78-year-old Artensa Randolph put it, “A dead person don’t have no constitutional rights.”
The ACLU and its allies, of course, reject this trade-of. Their arguments are partly based on the familiar pieties of constitutional law and partly on the realities of bigcity politics. ACLU officials maintain that Lane’s much-publicized sweeps are little more than a political ploy, and that the CHA and the city have consistently failed to provide adequate protection for project residents. They say none of the recent sweeps occurred within 48 hours of a shooting, and claim that none of the guns seized at Robert Taylor Homes was actually found inside an apartment. “What we want is not these high-profile, flashy, politically attractive sweeps that make it look like they’re doing something-we want everyday security,” says the ACLU’s Harvey Grossman. “The clearest indication that the sweeps don’t work is that [housing police] keep dealing with the very same buildings and the very same problems. The guns come back in right after the sweeps.”
The ACLU’s victory on principle may turn out to be a defeat in practice. That’s because a Washington-based conservative group called the American Alliance for Rights & Responsibilities organized tenants to support Lane’s weapons searches and oppose the ACLU’s claim that it represented all CHA residents. With former U.S. attorney Thomas Sullivan of Chicago as its lawyer, the pro-sweep faction convinced Judge Andersen that the ACLU could not claim to represent CHA tenants as a class. Father George Clements, who runs a drug program sponsored by the alliance, says that the ACLU’s position was “a lie” and that “95 percent of CHA tenants” want the sweeps to continue.
The irony is that both sides now seem to agree that the legal dispute is obscuring the real-world issue which is how to provide security for CHA buildings and their residents. “What I learned was . . . that these sweeps are just like putting a Band-Aid on a serious wound,” Sullivan says. “The real solution has to be securing the lobbies of the buildings.” But there are 1,500 buildings in the CHA empire, and very few were designed with security in mind. Sullivan said it could cost up to $40 million to renovate the lobbies to limit access and probably $140 million a year to provide 24-hour patrols by CHA police.
The answer to the CHA’s crime problem, in short, is money. The CHA is almost completely dependent on subsidies from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and its operating budget, $180 million a year, is not much larger than the estimated cost of the additional cops it needs. Lane says the projects “are going to fall down around the tenants’ ears” if he has to transfer funds from building maintenance to security, and he testified that he is reluctant to press HUD for much more federal aid. But last week he gave ground, telling NEWSWEEK that he “would certainly support” a budget increase to improve security. The questions now are whether HUD can find the money -and whether all the bickering lawyers will just pipe down.
