A weekend of downtown revelry tied to Mexican Independence Day turned into a nightmare for downtown residents, who fought their way to designated checkpoints only to be turned away by Chicago police officers.
Downtown Ald. Brian Hopkins (2nd) said his inbox was flooded with emails from angry residents. Social media and websites like “Next Door” filled up with complaints from residents who followed all ground rules outlined by Chicago police, but still couldn’t reach their homes in Streeterville, River North or the Loop.
After last year’s gridlock, the city promised to do a better job of “screening downtown residents and medical employees trying to get to their jobs at Northwestern and Lurie Children’s Hospital” and to make it easier for those people to “get through the roadblocks and checkpoints,” Hopkins said.
But it didn’t happen. One resident, turned away from a checkpoint on their way home, said they slept in their car.
“It’s hard to get to those checkpoints. … You have to fight your way through congestion and gridlock. And when you get there and show your ID and the police officer simply says, ‘I don’t care who you are. I’m not gonna let your through,’ you can imagine how angry people are,” Hopkins said.
“It happened last year. We complained about it. It happened the year before. We complained about it. And it happened again. We have to fix this. This is completely unacceptable.”
Hopkins said the Chicago Police Department was “supposed to have ranking officers — sergeants or lieutenants” at every designated checkpoint on a list distributed in advance to local residents and employees.
“I don’t know if that happened. I don’t know if they were properly instructed on how to make these judgments on a one-off basis. I was listening to police radio traffic and there was contradictory information about when people should be allowed through and when they shouldn’t. … It was not clearly communicated. … It was a complete failure,” he said.
Hopkins acknowledged some things worked to well to mitigate downtown congestion.
With police helicopters and surveillance cameras monitoring their movements, some car caravans that descended on downtown Chicago were “forced onto the outbound expressway system in the way that they couldn’t turn around” and re-circulate.
“We were able to determine where the large pockets of car caravans were and to effectively close off their options to keep driving randomly through the downtown district, channel them onto the outbound expressway system, then close off the exits,” Hopkins said.
That really helped reduce the number of active car caravans at any given time. It didn’t eliminate it. There were still enough of them to cause chaos and gridlock. But we definitely reduce the number and we reduced the length of time that downtown was under control.”
As for the El Grito Chicago festival in Grant Park, Hopkins said it both helped and hurt.
It reduced the number of caravans, but when the festival ended at 10 p.m., there was a “significant spike” in caravans in the Loop. Festival-goers who “didn’t want to go home” opted instead to “flood the streets,” said Hopkins, chair of the City Council’s Public Safety Committee.
The city must decide whether to continue El Grito as it grapples with finding “a better way to manage this,” he said.
But some problems are “unsolvable,” Hopkins added. There’s only so much to be done, for instance, when 15,000 to 20,000 vehicles converge on downtown — some from the suburbs and collar counties — with the “intention of driving around in random patterns for hours.
“Once those vehicles arrive, you’ve got chaos and gridlock. It’s just inevitable. And that’s what happened,” he said. “And we haven’t figured out a way to stop these caravans from coming downtown.”
Downtown Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd) did not return phone calls, emails or text messages seeking comment on the celebrations and police management of the crowds.