by Reggie Yates
Hungry and super-smart, Becky spoke quicker than I did and had so many ideas about how to make the film even stronger than the pitch the channel had already commissioned. Totally genuine in her opinions of my previous work, Becky was straight up about what she thought I could do better and I bloody loved it. A sign that things would go well with any team I worked with usually came in the god-given ability to give and take insults using profanity with poetic flair. Becky was from Croydon; she could hold a master class on insults. Quickly realising we’d probably attended the same club nights in our younger years, my tight shoes and loud Moschino shirt combination matched by an admission of her flat cap and Chinese patterned slippers gave us no choice but to click in our embarrassment. Becky and Toby quickly felt like old mates. Like Diana, Becky had a talent to get anyone on side and her way with people would go on to prove invaluable.
Becky had learned about an event called The Blessing of the Bikes and we drove out to one of Chicago’s nicer suburbs to see it. It was a huge motorcycle meet and ride out, which excited me as I’d been taking motorbike lessons at home and had my test set for when we got back. However, the closer we got, the more my excitement faded. As I rolled the car past a churchyard packed with hundreds of gleaming motorcycles and massive blokes with beards, leather vests and patches, I realised that these weren’t Hells Angels. They were off-duty cops.
Growing up, I didn’t have the best experiences with London’s police. Getting pulled over in my car on a regular basis wasn’t fun but it almost became an expected part of being on the road. It sounds incredibly clichéd, but my interactions with the law have been either cordial or the total opposite. The fact that I’d left home, had a mortgage and a decent lifestyle by the age of eighteen didn’t prevent me being stopped and asked, ‘Why are YOU in this car?’ nearly every time I got behind the wheel.
Arriving at the Blessing of the Bikes I didn’t feel particularly comfortable. A welcoming committee most likely wasn’t on the cards and with personal experience teaching me that healthy interaction would be thin on the ground, I was apprehensive. I was essentially ambushing a sensitive off-duty event attended by hundreds of officers. I look at that in hindsight and think how easily things could really have gone left. Cheers Becky.
The church’s surrounding streets and its own parking lot were lined with motorbikes. Predominantly Harley Davidson hogs, the sun pinging off of polished chrome was almost as difficult to compete with as the sounds of the engines.
Wives sat and scrolled social media while their husbands ogled each other’s machines. We were unannounced and the off-duty cops weren’t pleased. I started to try to talk to some of the guys regardless and the few that didn’t walk away were friendly and chatty. Sat on a huge Harley in a leather vest peppered with badges commemorating fellow officers who’d lost their lives, Al Francis opened up about the dangers of their job.
Al was the president of Wild Pig, a police-only motorcycle club. He described policing Chicago as being dangerous depending on the area. We were sat in a beautifully manicured neighbourhood where a lot of officers lived but Al was adamant that bad guys were everywhere.
We started to discuss the criticism the force was facing regarding the police shootings, but were promptly shut down. A stern-looking biker in wrap-around shades approached, shook my hand firmly and warned Toby not to point his camera at him. My time at the event was clocking no more than ten minutes and already it was looking like we were done. The organising officers wanted to know what we were shooting and, more importantly, our angle. Becky clicked into full charm offensive mode and assured him the film we were making was grounded, bound to my journey and aspired to a balanced view.
Granting permission to continue, Mr Wrap Around Shades pulled Becky to one side to ensure she understood our continued access was dependent upon steering clear of sensitive subject matter. By that he meant everything I instinctively wanted to ask the officers about.
The Blessing of the Bikes event was a memorial gathering and ride out for cops killed in the line of duty as, in the last decade, nine officers had been fatally shot. A priest walked the street and car park splashing holy water on the motorbikes from a bucket using a large broom. Yes, it was as strange as it sounds, but I seemed to be the only one who found the whole thing a little odd.
One attendee who was happy to speak didn’t come on a bike; she was with her son and wanted to pay her respects. Sandy Wright lost her father in the line of duty to a bullet from a young African-American man. Sandy’s father had been a neighbourhood officer on the South Side who would always stop and chat to local shop owners, kids and passers-by. One day, as he talked to a young gang member, he was hit by bullets fired by two kids from a rival gang who had just been to a friend’s funeral and were seeking revenge.
Having lost her dad, Sandy’s feelings on policing would never be the same. Sandy believed no one was supporting the police, and she saw their efforts as misrepresented: ‘They don’t go to work saying, today I’m gonna shoot somebody.’ Growing more emotional with every statement, she went on, ‘The police are outgunned right now’ – referring to the amount of weapons officers encountered on the streets.
Then the lot fell silent as a mic was handed to a young woman. From a piece of paper she read a list of officers who’d lost their lives on duty. A bundle of blue balloons were released and Sandy started to cry.
As the loud and endless queue of motorcycles lined up and rolled out, the buildings either side of the street felt like they were about to collapse with the noise. I watched them leave while digesting Sandy’s frustrations. But with Catherine Brown and that table of elders from the South Side still fresh in my mind, I couldn’t help but see the similarities. People were dying on both sides of the debate yet everybody believed they were the victims. The biggest problem I could see was that no one was asking what role they played in the problem.
Police brutality was rightfully a huge story and in the national spotlight, but the overall numbers of shootings showed a much bigger problem. In 2015, twenty-three people were shot by the police, nine fatally. At the same time there were almost 2,500 black-on-black shootings, of which over 350 were fatal.
The body count in the city since 2001 has surpassed that of soldiers killed fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet attitudes towards death in the two dramatically different scenarios had become similar. Chicago residents were chalking up loss of life on a weekly basis but outrage was minimal. The people dying weren’t soldiers who knew what they were signing up for; these victims were predominantly kids sold a dream by gangs that ended in caskets.
In 2016, someone was shot in Chicago on average every two hours. This frightening statistic delivered a continual stream of content filling column inches and TV reports, but how could somebody report this relentless stream of misery and not be damaged by it?
Responsibility? Where do you begin?
I threw Becky and Toby around the back seats of our cheap rental SUV. Empty water bottles and half-eaten cereal bars rattled around the foot wells while Becky told me off for my shit driving. We were in a typically enormous car park for a local supermarket waiting to meet a young journalist who was taking me out on his night shift.
Peter arrived shortly after I parked the tank and everything about the man was non-descript. He drove one of the most popular cars in America, a black sedan, and dressed and spoke in a way that didn’t encourage attention. This was a man who didn’t want to stand out and considering the environments and people he reported on, I totally understood why. Peter was a journalist who spent his evenings searching for the story, looking specifically for gun crime. Essentially, Peter made a living diving head first into the kind of situations any sane person would run from.
That night he had no plan outside of reacting to what he heard and following the story. He used police scanners and Twitter to stay on top of stories as they happened. His set-up was simple: a hand-held radio that looked like a walkie-talkie allowed him to listen in to police and fir
e services. As they used public airwaves, it wasn’t illegal to hear their interactions. Talking in plain English, not the ten codes you’d hear on TV, Peter would listen for shootings. Should one occur, he’d know about it as it happened.
The sun began to set and I was rolling with Peter so I jumped in his car as he spun us out of the parking lot. Toby was in the back desperately trying to get balanced and comfy with his camera, but the increasingly crappy roads the further south we went didn’t help. Peter pointed out previous crime scenes on almost every corner, as we drove deeper into Englewood.
The amazing irony is that Chicago has some of the strictest gun laws in America. There are no gun shops in the city at all, they’re not allowed. Yet in 2015 the police seized over 6,000 illegal guns smuggled in from neighbouring states.
We were driving for a few minutes when the scanner sprung to life. ‘Shots fired!’ A panicked officer called for an ambulance and Peter put his foot down. We were off and headed to the crime scene at speed. I was worried about getting arrested before we’d even arrived as he drove as if we had blue flashing lights on the roof. We broke several laws on the journey over I’m sure, but this was his business and getting there while there was still a story to report was a skill he’d perfected.
The code ‘Fire Rollin’ was repeated over the radio, explained by Peter as shorthand for sending paramedics to the scene. A young man had been shot in an alley between some residential buildings and the train tracks. We arrived at a busy police scene as ambulances and police lights painted the dark street a glowing blue and red. A group of officers separated from us by yellow tape stood together quietly talking. The victim had been rushed to hospital in critical condition while several men in blue combed a nearby grassy area looking for something.
The yellow police tape protected the scene and Peter and I could only get so close, but the little access we had was reduced even further as an officer moved us further back extending the area covered by tape even more. Peter pulled a cop to one side fishing for information while the detectives tried to wrap up the crime scene and get away as quickly as possible.
Back in the car, the police radio carried reports of shootings all over Chicago. Peter wrote off those cases too far to get to, knowing something would eventually pop up that night on his patch.
We pulled into a twenty-four-hour diner after some sort of sustenance post-adrenaline burnout from the crime scene. As Peter brought the car to a stop, the radio announced that the victim of the shooting we’d got to had just died. He was eighteen.
The yellowing walls and ceiling of the diner could have been put together for some sort of American crime drama. The crabby, hairnet-wearing older waitress and cigarette-smoking chef went about their jobs as we flopped into an empty booth.
It was the first time in hours I’d seen Peter in full light and I noticed just how tired he looked. He carried dark circles around his eyes and stubble that didn’t look deliberate. It looked like his night job – consisting almost entirely of poverty and death – twinned with his day job where he’d write about it, had started to take its toll. To absorb so much pain, then be expected to articulate and share it as a written record on a daily basis would quickly break me.
Just like me, he loved the city he called home, but I wasn’t sure how he could happily function in it as his mental mind map was littered with crime scenes. I’d struggle to walk certain streets or even eat at certain establishments knowing just how many people had died in or around them. ‘You can’t let violence define a location,’ he said, which was an admirable outlook, as he’d made an effort to revisit places where incidents had occurred, in an effort to rebrand them in his mind.
Peter knew certain blocks by crime scenes or victims and as much as he said he hadn’t been majorly affected, his face told a very different story. He wanted to slow down, but the fact it was only May and there had already been over 1,400 gunshot victims that year, he knew the niche he’d carved for himself meant he wouldn’t stop working.
Becky found a website tracking the deaths and shootings in Chicago which regularly updated its figures as the numbers were growing daily. It was 25 May and there had already been 54 homicides that month alone. With six days left, how many more people would lose their life before the counter reset for June?
Let’s take our frustrations out on him
In 1933, Reverend A R Leak opened his own funeral home with $500 earned as a bathroom attendant. His aim was to help local black families who couldn’t afford to bury their loved ones. Still going and bigger than ever, the Leak family business continues to provide free and heavily discounted funeral services. With so many victims of gun crime becoming their responsibility, the Leaks were seeing the effects of the city’s problem with violence first-hand, so I visited the funeral home to learn how they managed the numbers.
Toby told me to walk down a long corridor and through a huge metal door at the end. He didn’t tell me what was on the other side. As soon as I went through it, a sharp smell I didn’t recognise hit me. It was chemical and totally foreign to me. I turned into the room and the sight of eight dead bodies covered in white sheets stopped me in my tracks.
Dressed in scrubs and a hairnet, Naidra introduced herself. I was in her place of work and her job was to get the dead ready for their families to view and then for their funerals. Explaining my confusion at the smell, she referred to it as the smell of death that she’d disturbingly become used to. I can’t really explain the strange feeling of those embalming fluids mixed with bodies temporarily prevented from decomposing. Seeing so many bodies outlined by the white sheets was haunting. I’d never been around so much death.
She was working on bodies that had already been embalmed and was seeing victims shipped in from the medical exam room daily who were riddled with bullets. What she found most difficult wasn’t the amount of gunshot victims; it was how they’d been shot. Naidra explained the shock she’d feel in opening the body bags to see faces broken up by huge bullet holes.
The levels of violence happening in Chicago made her fear for her son. Her three-year-old would be on her mind all day while working, as her biggest fear was to open a body bag and see his face staring back at her. Through first-hand experience, Naidra knew avoiding gang life or culture didn’t always exempt you from its reach. So many of the victims she’d deal with were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. She spoke about her son getting caught up in the violence regardless of how good he grew up to be. ‘It may not have been for him being in a gang, he just could be on the wrong side of town and they decide, let’s take our frustrations out on him.’
I had to step out of the room as it started to become all a bit too much. I sat in the hall gathering my thoughts as the professional part of my brain began to turn off. I’d said yes to making the film months before the shoot was scheduled and as fate would usually have it, life didn’t slow down around me. About a week before I boarded the flight, a good friend of mine had died and his funeral was promptly scheduled for a day in the middle of the shoot.
As a teenager, music was a huge part of my life, not just as a DJ, but as an MC as well. By the time I was in my early twenties I’d recorded close to a hundred demos with one of my best friends, producer Kevin Mcpherson, and was offered a publishing deal by living legend Guy Moot at EMI records. My music lawyer and friend was Richard Antwi whose honesty and incredible professionalism helped me walk away from the money and pursue my growing career in TV. He refused to let me damage what I’d built at that point by starting an entirely new career, even though I’d be walking away from a six-figure sum.
Richard’s funeral was happening while I was in Chicago and suppressing my sadness in that moment sat in the Leaks hallway was impossible. Death was on my mind and after literally being surrounded by it while talking to Naidra, I finally cracked. Losing a friend only a few years older than me filled me with feelings of mortality. Missing the chance to say goodbye to Richard and being around so much death in the funeral parlour t
ook the role I filled at the centre of the film and twisted it.
I stepped outside and couldn’t help but let the tears out, as making sense of the loss I felt on a personal level and the unrelenting death I was talking about every day in making the documentary had reached boiling point. It had to come out and boy did it. It was a snotty ugly cry and I’m glad Toby was completely unaware, as I needed that moment on my own. I eventually got my shit together and headed back inside to carry on shooting.
If I can survive Chicago, I wanna give my family a better life
Most of the victims of gun violence in Chicago are under the age of thirty, and parents on the South Side were living with the very real threat that their children may not make it to adulthood. Ja’mal Green, the young father and activist I’d met at the police review board, was performing at a community peace event. He sang on stage receiving huge applause and, after his performance, I was invited to join him and his fiancée at their basement apartment.
The young couple were raising a constantly giggling baby boy and seemed far more mature than their years would suggest. Ja’mal couldn’t hide his frustrations at what he called a lack of male leaders in the community. By having a son, Ja’mal believed he’d raise a man who’d give back just as he’d done. His fiancée Ayana Clark was also just as frustrated with their living conditions but didn’t see their current home as one they’d be in forever. Her southern accent was broad, making the weight of her words lighter on the ear.
Ayana was scared to take their son Ja’mal Jr to the park: ‘You’re limited in this city about what you can do with your kids.’ Ja’mal believed he didn’t live in the city, he was barely surviving it: ‘If I can survive Chicago, I wanna give my family a better life.’ Explaining that everyone was in survival mode – from the gang bangers right the way through to normal guys like him – even if they went about their survival in different ways, he understood the motivations.
