Community Meeting

On October 10th, 2006 I attended the 8th district’s community outreach meeting at the Eastern Patrol Station of the Chicago Metro Police Station at 7:00 P.M.. The room where the meeting was being held was half of a larger room which is divided into two by a movable wall in the center. When I arrived there were about 8 or 9 other individuals, all of which were black females over the age of 60. Right away I felt out of place in the room and they knew I wasn’t part of the district. One of the women even joked that I was here maybe because of the redistricting of the city. As the meeting grew nearer more people showed up to the meeting. By 7:00 PM there was about 25 people at the meeting, everyone was black and 95 percent of the individuals in the room were fifty and above. The exceptions to this age group were two women in their 40s, one of which was the daughter to an elderly woman attending and a girl in her teens who was the granddaughter to the mention elderly woman. The meeting was lead by three people, one community police officer, one president, and a vice president. The officer was a black male in his late 30s or early 40s. The president was in her 60s and the vice president in her mid 50s. The people in the meeting asked why I was there which I explained to them that I was a student from SLU working on a project for school. They seemed excited that someone was taking an interest in their meeting.
The meeting began with a prayer which was delivered by one of the women in the meeting. The president then introduced the officer named Officer Jones. This meeting was going to be used in order to finJonesze the plans for the Christmas dinner given in honor of the police officers by the community. Officer Jones then updated the members that a officer had passed from cancer and that the department has been busy deJonesng with that situation internally. Next, the department shared the crime figures with the meeting for the 8th district. It seems normally that the