CHICAGO READER: The cop who wants to fight crime with the community - From a troubled corner on the west side, Chicago police captain Roger Bay sees the promise of preventing violence one storefront and milk crate at a time.

Captain Roger Bay: "We could ticket and arrest all we want, but the problem remains in the way people treat this community."

JOHN STURDY

Captain Roger Bay has been making arrests in tough neighborhoods for almost three decades, but in the last few years he's come to believe that's not good enough.

He was thinking about this again one evening recently as he pointed to an inch-wide bullet hole in the wall outside an empty storefront at Chicago and Ridgeway—the mark left by a shooting a year ago that killed a 29-year-old.

Police believe the violence was likely the direct result of a gang or personal dispute. It didn't happen in a vacuum. Like so many other parts of the west side, that corner had been troubled for decades. "People just felt this was a spot to be out and do whatever you want," Bay said. He nodded toward the empty storefront. "This right here used to be Titanic Subs. The sign says, 'Best gyros in town,' but in five years I never saw them sell one gyro."

Instead, the store was selling cigarettes brought in illegally from out of state to avoid local taxes. "People from all over came here for cheap cigarettes, and this place was open 24 hours a day. That causes chaos, because then a person can come out here and buy that pack and sell it as single cigarettes, and so it creates an open-air market that looks like a drug market. And when [the driver of] the car wanted something different, they would point to somebody else"—the heroin dealer down the block.

At the same time, the liquor store next door made its sales through a walk-up window. Customers would drink on the sidewalk.

"There used to be guys sitting on milk crates on almost every corner," Bay said. "You don't know if they're waiting for drugs to get delivered, you don't know if they're selling, but they don't like being around when the police are there. We could ticket and arrest all we want, but the problem remains in the way people treat this community."

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