Avenging violence with violence

My final example of anticrime activism in North Kenwood-Oakland is the request made to the University of Chicago to extend its police patrols into the neighborhood. The hearty welcome of the University of Chicago police in 2003 was a strong indication of gentrifiers’ desire to quell disorder by any means necessary. “There’s a new generation now, " said Jonathan Kleinbard, former vice president for community affairs at the University of Chicago. He was surprised to hear of the expanded patrol, which would have been unthinkable during his tenure at the university. “I just resisted [expanding the police boundaries] and I thought it would be like declaring war. And it’s now happened.” Kleinbard’s astonishment at the requests for the university’s police services by “ministers and home owners” in North Kenwood-Oakland is rooted in the tumultuous historical relationship between the university and its surrounding communities, mostly as a result of its aggressive urban renewal efforts in the 1950s. Given this background, the vision of Kirk Clemons, a middle-class home owner who moved to North Kenwood-Oakland in 1997, is nothing short of amazing: [.. . ] My grand scheme, what I would have been pushing for from a political point of view, is: You’ve got three big rental courtyard buildings. I would have loved to have seen the University of Chicago buy one of those, make it a dormitory, forcing integration. Now, that would have immediately added $10, 000 to $20, 000 in appreciation of property values because [before] you didn’t have a mixed income. You also would have had the extra services that would have came with that. The University of Chicago police would have had jurisdiction north of 47th Street. It would have had a higher level of security.