Sex offenders worry residents Chicago Sun‐Times – August 12, 1999 Author: Raymond R. Coffey State law prohibits convicted felony sex offenders from loitering within 500 feet of a school or school property. But that law is consistently ignored and unenforced in the case of two schools in the Uptown neighborhood of Ald. Helen Shiller’s 46th Ward, which is home to an uncommonly high proportion of paroled sex offenders, according to evidence gathered by a local school council community representative. As of Aug. 2, there were 51 such offenders registered with the Police Department at addresses on Beat 2312 of the Town Hall District, 30 of whom had been convicted of offenses against children. On Town Hall's Beat 2311, there were 16 offenders listed, 14 of them for crimes against children. On Beat 2313, there were eight, half of whom committed crimes involving children. The sex offenders' presence poses a particular threat to children at the McCutcheon and Stewart Chicago public schools, according to Billie Gibson, a council member at Stewart and activist in the Uptown Residents Coalition of five neighborhood organizations. And the threat arises mainly, Gibson says, from the concentration of three of the shelter and social service facilities that abound in Uptown. The three are the Salvation Army's Drop‐In Center at 1025 W. Sunnyside, the Uptown Baptist Church's R.E.S.T. Shelter at 941 W. Lawrence, and the Harper House Drug Abuse Center at 4725 N. Sheridan Rd. The Salvation Army facility, which claims to feed 600 to 700 down‐and‐outers, including sex offenders, a month, is just across the street and only 31 feet from the Stewart School's playground, according to Gibson. Every day, she said, people from the feeding center gather and sit on the playground wall, and students' parents regularly have to ask them to leave. Already this month, Gibson told me, she has called 911 at least a dozen times asking for police to shoo away a crowd from the feeding center, who also gather regularly on vacant property on Kenmore in front of and just across the street from the school. The "police come and run them off but as soon as the police are gone," the feeding center people come right back and settle in with their grocery carts to drink booze, use drugs and set campfires.
The R.E.S.T. shelter, which has about 100 beds and at which some sex offenders have registered, turns residents "out at 6:30 a.m. and doesn't let them back in till 9:30 p.m.," Gibson said. "Where do they go, what do they do? Nobody knows," she said. Last fall, Gibson said, Mayor Daley held an anti‐crime rally at Stewart and could "look right across the street and see who was there." Gibson also is concerned that while principals and teachers have access via computer to police registration information on sex offenders, students' parents, who might have obvious concerns, do not. Also, she said, the enrollment at Stewart School is overwhelmingly African‐American and Hispanic, and even more overwhelmingly from impoverished families that don't have computers to access the information themselves. Gibson has written to Daley, and written and called schools CEO Paul Vallas about enforcing the law on sex offenders and school loitering. She has had no response. She and others in the Uptown Residents Coalition are now looking into filing a lawsuit against the city and the social services facilities on the sex offenders issue and "the dangers lurking near our children." In the 4600 and 4700 blocks of Sheridan Road alone, where Daley's Department of Human Services has headquarters, Gibson says, there are six shelter facilities for the homeless, jobless, addicted and such. Many of the sex offenders registered with the police also are registered to vote as residents of the single‐room‐occupancy hotels that flourish in Uptown. But many of them also move on soon after registering, and neither the police nor election registrars has a clue as to where they are.