Photograph by Dilip Vishwanat
San Francisco shut down cellphone service in subways. Philadelphia imposed a curfew so early, it wasn’t even dark yet. Chicago closed its North Avenue Beach on Memorial Day (claiming it was too hot to go to the beach anyway). And the Illinois State Rifle Association, never one to ignore an opportunity, issued a release describing flash mobs as “terrorist sleeper cells.” Belleville’s flash mobs have been smaller than those in other cities, less violent than those in St. Louis. But without effective police response, Chief Bill Clay knows they’ll evolve.
Did you ever expect to be dealing with something like this in Belleville?
Yes and no. I knew this was happening in Chicago and Philadelphia, and I knew there was a lot of migration between Chicago, Philly, St. Louis, and this area. But Belleville is not the size of those cities. We might have 150 or 200—not 1,000 like they had in Kansas City in less than 15 minutes.
Does the size of the crowd increase the chance for violence?
It can. And then, it’s how the police respond. Maybe I have 12 officers on the streets. Twelve officers cannot arrest 250 people. So once we get behind the power curve, we’re at a disadvantage.
What tactics do you use then?
Back off, monitor, pull out our video cameras and start recording every face. We can go back to the schools with that information and identify most of the kids.
Will they start disguising themselves?
They could, but I don’t think they’re thinking about that. It’s mostly emotion and impulsivity that get them going. They don’t think about what Chief Clay said.
And what if you’re ahead of the curve, informed in advance?
I don’t let the crowd get started. I send six or eight cars, all marked units, into the area and have them start making aggressive traffic stops. If the kids come in, they see the police, and they start Facebooking and texting and telling everybody to disappear.
So you’re monitoring Facebook and Twitter 24/7?
Obviously I never wanted to say that, but yeah, that’s what we do. We just…become…friends.
What else do you do?
This summer, they put the word out that they were going to have the biggest fight in history, at 9800 West Main. Well, our department trains and certifies all the Metro East canines, so we had 30 canine officers in town. Guess where I sent them for training!
Nicely played. Anything else?
Well, we set an earlier curfew. And when moms and dads are dropping them off at the flash mob, and they’ve had problems in the past, we issue the parents tickets for failure to supervise. [Chuckles.] One of the kids said, “Oh my God, my mom got a ticket! You don’t want to piss off the people who pay for you to live!”
Is this just teenagers being wild?
Here’s the dirty little secret the media is not reporting: The majority are black males, some black females, and the people they attack are white. In Belleville, though, the fight is amongst themselves; they’re settling scores, bringing groups to watch.
What’s been the community’s response?
At first, people got their panties all bunched up: “How come you are not arresting all these people?” I had to explain, “Folks, there’s a dynamic to this. When we are in front of it, we can control it. But when I move into a large crowd of young males all wired up on a hot night and four or five police officers decide they are going to make an arrest and somebody pulls out a taser and the crowd hears it pop, now you’ve got a stampede. And you know who you are going to blame for that? The police.” The way we deal with them is to suck the oxygen out of the room. Just stand there and look at them, let ’em see the cameras, keep following them, but don’t bother them. They just slowly start to walk away.
How have Belleville’s flash mobs compared to St. Louis’?
We have not seen the same venom. In St. Louis, it’s morphed. There are mobs that can be only 15 or 20 people, but very, very violent people; it’s a knockout gang. You are riding a bicycle or walking on a bike trail, and you see 10 or 15 juvenile black males coming at you. They don’t appear to have any animus, and then all of a sudden somebody hits you as hard as they can.
So is this racial?
The media doesn’t want to talk about race. But if 15 white kids jumped a black guy walking down the street with his wife and kicked him, we’d have the FBI looking for the big hate crime. You have the same kind of behavior orchestrated by black youth against white people, and it’s minimized. That emboldens people to continue to act that way. My cry has been for the black leadership in the Metro East to condemn the violence black males are committing, and stop making excuses and saying everything is caused by racism. It is about leaving your community and going to an affluent area and attacking people.
Belleville’s had its share of racial tension—why aren’t you seeing violence toward whites?
My thinking is, that has evolved in other cities. These kinds of groups, you have some hard-core people who want to use this to do harm, but 80 percent of the kids really don’t want to do anything criminal. They just want to see it, like a big accident on the highway. Over time, if the police are somewhat ineffective, the folks who want to do harm get bolder. You will eventually have some gangster who comes in and introduces folks here to what they’re doing in Chicago—and it’s really scary up there. That’s what’s so dangerous about flash mobs. If you take them lightly, they can evolve.
