CHICAGO, IL —The “Triangle” of the Lower Wacker section of Chicago’s Loop, the labyrinth of streets beneath streets where homeless people have found refuge at least since the 1920s, was a relatively rare place where the homeless were able to camp and not bother even the esthetic fussiness of neighboring non-homeless people. As with many homeless people’s encampments, local, city government was not terribly concerned with the safety of its residents and utterly unconcerned about their “quality of life”. Law enforcement was to protect the surrounding, housed neighbors, not residents of the encampment. As always happens with such policy toward the homeless, drug dealers, gang bangers, pleasure seekers and other opportunists were allowed to exploit and even terrorize the homeless there. Soon the encampment became a dysfunctional community that the homeless found hellish.
The homeless are usually not eager to call the police when something happens or when they are victimized. Not only are they completely vulnerable to retaliation from the thugs they call on but the police and local authorities, unconcerned about the safety and life quality of the homeless, only see the homeless and their communities as a gratuitous nuisance. The homeless thus know that ANY complaints to the police and authorities, whether from the surrounding neighborhood or from residents of the encampments themselves, will only be seen as an irritation to those authorities and further reason, in addition to pressure from intolerant, housed neighbors, to evict their encampment en masse.
Thus was the plight, typical of homeless communities, of the Lower Wacker Triangle. Drug dealers and gang bangers exploited and terrorized it until it became a place for the homeless as well as visitors, even from out of town, to find drugs and prostitution and for violence from the controlling, gang banger outsiders.
Last February, gunshots were fired between two vehicles traveling in opposite directions near the Triangle. Several days later, an investigative police detail headed by a local area commander tried to stop for questioning a well known drug dealer and gang banger, who was a great bully terrorizing the homeless of the area. He had different plans and ran away, leading the police commander on a long chase.
Just as River North Area Commander Paul Bauer caught up to and was about to apprehend him, the suspect drew a gun and shot Commander Bauer multiple times. Commander Bauer died later in the hospital.
In June, the city effected a sweeping eviction of the Triangle area encampment, closing it off with wrought iron fencing so homeless people could not find refuge there in the future, implementing the usual policy of sweeping a community of homeless people away like so may insect pests when they become too bothersome, in very apparent retaliation for the Bauer shooting.
The homeless of the encampment moved to another, less hospitable area of Lower Wacker where they are tolerated. Areas which, since evictions of encampments and fenced closure of their sites began there years ago, are ever shrinking while the homeless population keeps rising.
