Guards on Chicago Trains Love Their Booze and Loud Music!
By Jessika Bialik, one of our reporters in Evanston
What kinds of things went on this week with the random guards stumbling onto the trains? What kinds of things do the random guards say and do and perpetuate?
Suffice it to say life is a party for the guards.
This week saw a lot of great parties indeed—“Inter-Con” guards on the Red Line train congregating together and laughing on any car of the train where there were no thieves or criminals hanging out. The guards hang out together on the safest cars—thereby avoiding conflict, getting shot, or having to deal with young people tougher than the guards.
The pattern is for the guards to stick to their group of 5-10 co-workers and enter and “take over” a train. People returning home late after work or a party get drowned out by the loud music, telephone conversations, and other loud noise from the guards.
The expression “f*ck in the crib” is yelled all night long by most all of the guards, and the obnoxious and sickening attitudes of those guards is incredible.
People may NOT ask the guards to please be quiet or to please consider the people who are trying to talk or sleep or relax on the train. The guards will answer with statements like “Those mother*ckers not supposed to be sleeping on here!”
This is apparently very funny to the other guards, all of whom laugh uproariously, waking up more people, and that does not include the guards who are screaming into their phones—which are usually on “speaker” feature so that we can hear their friend or spouse or mother who is laughing and telling some story about people who were doing such and such while “f*cking in the crib.”
The guards belong to a different pack of security than the K-9 employees who bark orders and bump seats (presumably to show their power and wake people up and show how high class and important they are).
The K-9 employees commit their own crimes against humanity—bringing old dogs onto the cars and making them bark and scare the living sh*t out of the people who are relaxing of asleep.
Said one K-9 employee, thinking it was terribly funny, “Free wake up call!” There were others in the entourage who thought this was terribly funny also. They laughed and barked and had a lot of fun, making lots of noise.
The goal of the guards and K-9 is to keep people safe. As we often wonder, is the goal to keep the homeless people safe from the young people running through the train, shooting riders with pellet guns? …kicking people in the face if they are asleep? …strong-arming older people and taking their wallets? …threatening to “f*ck up” riders if they don’t surrender their backpacks?
Or perhaps the goal is to keep “citizens” safe from homeless people? A recent article by Katie Prout in the “Chicago Reader” reminds us that having more police around just makes more problems by harassing people about unimportant crimes like putting one’s feet on the seats. The Brown and Black persons on the train are the ones who get bothered most… and of course the whole encounter just leads to police brutality and violence (https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/why-you-talking-to-a-bum-cta-unhoused-police/).
During this time, violent crimes like beatings, murder, rape, and theft of wallets and backpacks get ignored at one end of the train, while people are getting into trouble for eating a sandwich at the other end of the train.
Chicago, crimes, harassment, trains, theft, and violence are all Google hints that will read you to the Red Line catastrophes every time you type them in.
Chicago Police Department (CPD) officers have been seen increasingly on the Red Line too. We think this is a good thing, as they give tickets for people smoking cigarettes, round up young people who have no business stealing, threatening to kill people, and just generally raising h*ll by waking up people who are exhausted and hoping for a few hours sleep.
More CPD presence on the Red Line has been mostly a positive thing, since officers who hate, who harass, and who injure (and much worse) the homeless have pretty much retired from the force at this point in time.
What about the Blue Line? Thursday night, one guard told a homeless person he would get “thrown off the f*cking train while it is rolling!” The guards seem to have no supervisor and seem to not have to answer to the CTA train driver—who of course does everything possible to avoid having to talk to the guards anyway.
That same night, Inter-Con guards entered a train car and passed out cigarettes. Most the guards smoked.
Some passed around pints of vodka…
Beer also surfaced on another car, and it was guards from that same community partaking of the party drinks.
Loud music, loud phone calls, and cold beer made all the riders safer—but not from the drunken security guards.
Recently, the Blue Line has been harder to control—shortages of employees, parties for the guards, and interrupted service with shuttle lines, long waits before trains “going back the other way” and homeless people riding the trains.
Those random homeless fools! Riding a train—hoping to be safer than they would be sleeping on a sidewalk.
The Blue Line drives right into the basement of O’Hare. If you go up the stairs and into the kitchen, you realize you are in the heart of O’Hare. In the same article, Ms. Prout explained some of the recent plan to lift up O’Hare and shake the homeless people out of it.
Why shake the homeless people out of O’Hare?
Ms. Prout reminds us what was said recently. “They can’t be in our airports,” said Mayor Lightfoot (Ms. Prout’s emphasis) at a press conference shortly before February’s general election, after city police swept unhoused people from O’Hare. Ms. Prout also reminds us “Especially around election times, “public safety” gets thrown around by politicians and government officials as a buzzword. Who gets to be a member of the public in public safety, and who doesn’t?” (https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/why-you-talking-to-a-bum-cta-unhoused-police/)
Ms. Lightfoot will be remembered for dealing with the homeless in O’Hare by taking their home away. And then not finding them a home elsewhere.
Ms. Prout is very wise, and asks a very important question indeed about the safety that needs to be secured regarding the CTA trains, the O’Hare overnight visits and settlement, and the Blue Line: “Safety for who, and from what? What are we talking about here, exactly? To my knowledge, no evidence exists that shows unhoused CTA riders are more likely to commit crime or exhibit “unruly behavior” (whatever that is) than their housed counterparts, and yet this narrative linking the presence of unhoused people to dangers and discomforts for housed riders has been repeated over the last couple years” (https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/why-you-talking-to-a-bum-cta-unhoused-police/) and that is the news that the CTA is committed to working with certain agencies to help with the homeless and their mental illness issues and the kinds of services they need and all people in Chicago really hope they will get because we are kind people who wish only the best for the homeless…
How all the guards have been helping with the issues on the trains is unclear.
People are still getting their *sses kicked and their wallets stolen and their b*tts threatened by the young people running through the trains. There are K-9 officers, Inter-Con security guards, and sometimes even CPD officers getting on and off the trains.
And a very important question is: Will this situation get better soon?
Mayor Johnson has a rather extensive plan and new mission for the trains and busses and the safety and operation of them.
We salute him—and congratulate him—and we hope things will go as well as he intends (https://www.brandonforchicago.com/issues/transportation).
For now, we have a potentially very dangerous weekend coming up. We will see how the new mayor’s plan works…
Brandon Johnson, Mayor of Chicago
.
We are pulling for him, praying for him, and believing in him.
He mentions, in fact, the importance of assisting the “most vlunerable” Chicagoans in his transportation mission (https://www.brandonforchicago.com/issues/transportation#:~:text=Brandon%20Johnson%20will%20implement%20reduced,use%20the%20CTA%20without%20restriction.).
One component of the plan is to put “more officers on public transit” and in fact cancelling officers’ days off to keep more cops visible during the Memorial Day weekend (https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2023/5/25/23737341/brandon-johnson-memorial-day-weekend-violence-safety-chicago-police-department-fred-waller?utm_source=Newsletter_Daily-Rundown-Non-Member&utm_medium=WBEZEmail&utm_campaign=Daily_Newsletter_Daily-Rundown_Sponsored_20230526&utm_content=5/26/2023&DE=WBEZEmail).
We hope, we pray, and we support our new mayor. However, those of us who have homes plan to stay in them as much as possible this weekend.
In the meantime, we have just reported on the kinds of things went on this week with the random guards stumbling onto the trains.