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CHICAGO, Dec. 23 (Xinhua) -- A group of young black men stand on the sidewalk in Chicago's West Englewood neighborhood, and watch as a Crown Victoria with four white plainclothes police officers in it drives up, slows down, pokes their heads out of the window, and speeds off.
Bulletholes are scattered randomly across houses on the street. A broken basketball rim sways in the wind, dangling from a single bolt. The jagged sidewalks are in various states of disrepair and garbage litters empty lots that used to contain houses.
Quentin walked from his employer's administrative office to the service office, wearing the company T-shirt. Suddenly a police car jumped the curb in front of him, and an officer sprang out. Grabbing him, the officer put Quentin in handcuffs.
After sitting him in the back of the cruiser for half an hour, police released him and drove off without an explanation. This is life in West Englewood.
For many Americans, the police killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown triggered feelings of shock and outrage. For this West Englewood neighborhood, it was a routine tragedy, part of a very familiar reality.
The city seems to have abandoned this neighborhood; homicides and violent crimes happen frequently. The poverty rate in the West Englewood neighborhood is twice the national average, and unemployment is at 34.7 percent, nearly six times the national average.
Chicago Police Department statistics show 373 homicides in 2014, more than any other city in the United States, many of which happened in South Chicago.
Tension exists even with the older residents. Wayne Flowers is a private security guard who works for a company that secures construction sites. He grew up on the West Side of Chicago, but moved to Englewood in 1973.
Flowers freely admits he was involved in gang activities as a young man, but has since changed his path.
In his youth, Flowers was taken into a police station for questioning, in an attempt to ""flip"" him against a friend who had committed a crime. Instead of capitulating, Flowers resisted.
He says this infuriated the police officers, who he alleges began beating him, using the phone book as a ""softener"" to prevent bruises from appearing on his body, potentially defusing a possible complaint.
Recently, Flowers was pulled over for driving around a city bus that had stopped to pick up passengers. After taking his license and registration, the officer ran Flowers' name and saw his criminal record. This aroused the officer's suspicions of Flowers, who walks with a cane. Flowers told Xinhua, ""He asked me, was I in a gang? And I told him, I'm 63 years old, that was when I was a young kid, it's obvious that I wasn't participating in gang activity right now.""
The year of 2013 marked the 50th anniversary of the Great March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.'s ""I Have a Dream"" speech. Fifty years later, the National Urban League still painted a complicated picture for African Americans in its 2013 State of Black America report.
The report showed that in the past 50 years, the black-white income gap has only closed by seven points at 60 percent; the unemployment rate gap has only closed by six points at 52 percent; and as in 1963, the black-white unemployment ratio was still about 2-to-1, regardless of education, gender, region of the country, or income level.
The report also noted that 10 percent of African Americans were unemployed in 1963, compared with 12.6 percent in 2013. For most of this time, unemployment among blacks has remained almost double the national average and that of white Americans.
On the surface, the unrest in the United States recently was about local police killing unarmed young man. But on a deeper level, it reflected the increasing poverty and economic decline that affects ethnic communities all over the country.
Tameka Lawson is the director of I Grow Chicago (IGC), a non-profit organization formed to provide a safe, inter-generational haven to children and at-risk community members. Through sustainable farming and educational programs in nutrition, movement yoga, and the arts, the IGC aims to foster creativity, wellness and empowerment for individuals and the community as a whole.
Lawson has seen the interactions between police and community members. ""They automatically profile them, they watch them, they treat them as suspects, or as detainees, they treat them as if they're already in the system, and that hurts me to the core,"" she said.
As part of the reaction to events in Ferguson and Staten Island, the IGC held a healing ceremony on the weekend before Christmas, and expects to continue their work of developing the West Englewood community.
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