Original subtitles

[atmospheric music]

[lively piano notes]

[low thrumming music]

- There is breaking news from Chicago's southwest side.

A 17-year-old boy is shot and killed by police,

and an investigation is now underway.

- They say that the teen closed in on them,

weapon in hand,

so they shot in self-defense.

- He is a very serious threat to the officers,

and he leaves them no choice

at that point but to defend themselves.

- But more questions are being raised about the events

surrounding the moment in the police shooting

that has sparked days of protest in Chicago.

- Chicago.

No matter how far work takes me,

I will always be a son of this city.

Chicago is the truth.

I grew up not far from here,

but it might as well be a different planet.

The South Side is invisible from downtown

until something punches through the lights on Michigan Avenue

and can no longer be ignored.

[crowd chattering indistinctly, camera shutter clicks]

- Of course, we're in Chicago, and Common is Chicago.

- Yeah. - What is it about you

keeping that connection to home?

- Well, I mean, home has shaped me so much.

Chicago provided me

with a wonderful foundation of knowing who I am.

Here inside the downtown loop, everything seems fine,

but you can already hear the rumor of a police scandal

that will shake my city to its core.

- Right now it's critical that

we got all the voices talking about what's happening,

and your voice added to this is important so thank you.

- You know I want to be part of, you know, the solution.

I wanted to be able to help.

- Absolutely and it really takes solutions

coming from people outside.

[police siren wailing]

- Anyone who grew up in Chicago knows that Laquan McDonald

is not the first 17-year-old boy to be killed by the police,

but actually seeing the video

after a year of police denials

suddenly changes everything.

[mysterious music]

??? ???

16 shots in 15 seconds.

The initial police reports

made the shooting sound like self-defense,

but Officer Van Dyke emptied his clip into the boy

while he lay dying on the ground.

16 shots.

- Right now I'm technically homeless.

I used to live here.

I'm staying with a friend of mine.

We were pushed out of this building,

increasing rent rates,

and the landlord just decided

that he was not renewing leases.

Get out in 30 days.

She kept saying, "Why can't we go back home?

What's going on?"

But I just explained to her that home is family.

As long as we are together, you're home.

- These days I'm hearing

there are more homeless people in New York City

than at any time since the Great Depression.

A record 60,000 in the city's shelter system,

including 23,000 children.

I can't fucking believe it.

The homeless are a city within a city.

Many got that way simply because

they can't afford to live here.

Today there isn't a single neighborhood

in the five boroughs

where someone working full-time on the state's minimum wage

can afford the average rent.

- The problem is our income.

It's too low for private development.

It's too high for city housing.

- Why don't you take a cut in wages

and move into the slums?

[laughter]

- Back in the '70s,

I tried using humor to call attention

to some things that were plaguing America.

New York was my canvas.

Now I'm back here,

on a mission to find out what's changed,

how tough the struggle for a home can still be,

and what we can do about it.

[wheels squeaking]

- Okay, stand her up.

- One at a time.

- If you can't get no clean water,

then you're in trouble.

We're all in trouble.

Just about there.

Start pumping it.

I mean, it works.

You can take a shower just like anybody else.

- I hate taking showers with that.

- We just have to do what we have to do.

It's not so fun but, you know.

- It's probably the worst thing about the water crisis.

[water splashing]

- And it's going to take a while for them to fix the pipes.

- Yeah, I think they said 10, 15 years.

I'm going to be about 27.

[somber music]

??? ???

- It's the summer of 2016 in Flint, Michigan,

two years after the water crisis began.

The news crews have largely moved on,

but the people are still here,

and little has changed.

[determined music]

??? ???

- It's a system that effectively

sweeps millions of poor people

into second-class status.

Did we invest in those communities?

No, instead we declared war.

[determined music continues]

??? ???

- What we have today is a wealth gap that is huge.

- We are dying with undrinkable water.

We are dying with undrinkable water.

- The working class have been hammered.

- These are human beings. These are people.

What can we do to get that point across?

??? ???

[siren wails, police radio chatter]

??? ???

- The constant telling us that we're not doing enough

is causing us to explode.

- It is not, sir, a matter of opinion anymore.

It is clearly exposed.

- What do we do? - Stand up, fight back!

??? ???

- They can only win by dividing America.

- We know that the way things are working

aren't working at all.

- That's right.

- If you just keep pushing,

if you just keep trying,

if you refuse to let the nightmares have the last say,

eventually, the dawn will break,

the Sun will come out,

and you will be in a brand-new day.

??? ???

- If there is no struggle, there can be no progress.

[percussive music]

- Mic check! All: Mic check!

1, 2, 3, 4, 5,

6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12,

13, 14, 15, 16.

16 shots!

16 shots!

- In the long history of the Chicago Police,

no officer has ever been charged

with first-degree murder

for shooting someone while on duty,

but fearing riots, the city has done just that.

- The officer who pulled the trigger on Laquan McDonald,

he's charged with first-degree murder.

- The protests continued,

demanding deeper reforms

and the resignation of Chicago's police

superintendent, Garry McCarthy.

What is happening in my city?

I've seen Chicago weather scandals before,

but something feels different now.

I decide to meet with an organizer

at the forefront of the protests,

Janae Bonsu, from BYP100.

Laquan McDonald, God bless his soul,

is not the first situation

where we've seen a young black teen

shot down by a police officer.

Why do you feel like that particular case

really sparked something different in the city?

- I think when that video was released,

it was just, like, enough was enough.

- Yeah.

- The city was sitting on this tape for a year.

That was just confirmation that black lives

don't actually matter in practice in this country.

It's, like, when will this stop?

Not just the killing,

but the impunity that goes along with it.

- You all are part of the solution, for real,

but you're up against

some powerful institutions in Chicago,

some history of really strong politics

and even corruption in this city.

Why do you think that you can win?

- [sighs]

I believe that we can win

because what we're fighting for is so much bigger,

and we, I think, all have this just, like,

"we ain't got no choice," mentality.

Like, we got to do this.

I feel like if your heart is in the right place,

and if you really have the faith

that what you're fighting for will manifest

and will come to fruition, then it will.

[cheers and applause]

all: We ready. We coming.

We ready. We coming.

We ready. We coming.

We ready. We coming. [inaudible]

We must love each other and protect each other.

??? I believe ???

??? That we will win ???

??? I believe that we... ???

- Momentum keeps building for Janae and BYP100.

One short week after Van Dyke's murder charge,

superintendent Garry McCarthy is fired.

- Top Cop Garry McCarthy is forced to resign.

- The former superintendent says

he believes Mayor Rahm Emanuel

made him the fall guy for the Laquan McDonald shooting.

- Hey. - Thanks for coming through.

How you doing today?

- I'm doing good today. - Yeah.

- But it's a day-by-day existence, right?

- Yes, sir.

So, man, I mean, obviously, you know,

we here to talk about a lot of stuff going on in Chicago.

I really want to hear your perspective.

At the core of it, what is the issue?

- I don't want to sound defensive,

you know what I'm saying?

Course, you got to realize where I'm coming from

and what just happened to me.

I just got held accountable for something that

I didn't have any ability to do anything about.

You know, the Laquan McDonald video is a terrible video.

Police can do better. That's obvious, right?

We know that.

But I think that we have to do

a better job of diagnosing what's going on.

You know, last year in Chicago there were 3,000 people shot.

3,000 people were shot.

- Wow.

- There were 19 police-related shootings.

0.0063% of the people shot in Chicago last year

were shot by police officers.

- For real.

- But what's the biggest problem in Chicago?

It's the police.

I don't think so.

- Yeah, but the communities don't feel safe,

that the police are going to keep them safe.

- You're describing something called legal cynicism.

It has to do with the fact that they don't trust that bad guy,

but they know that the police can't do anything about it,

and there's no reason to trust the police.

You know, you have to look at this

through the prism of history,

and if you go back 300, 400 years,

it starts with slavery,

which was written into the Constitution

of the United States,

and you move from slavery to black codes

to segregation to Jim Crow.

Now, who was it who was doing the enforcement

of all of those racist policies?

It was the white policemen.

- Right.

- So there's a narrative

that's well-deserved.

The anger that exists

in some of the disenfranchised communities

comes from a number of places,

and the police are definitely part of that component.

Don't get me wrong.

But poverty, lack of opportunity,

right, lack of education,

rampant narcotics, families getting broken up,

all contribute to a community

that doesn't trust the system, right?

And the most visible component of that system is the police.

Right? You don't see a prosecutor every day.

You don't see a judge. You don't see a sheriff.

You see a police officer on the street,

but we're missing the iceberg, right,

because only the tip of the iceberg is showing.

- It's hard to believe.

Chicago's former police superintendent just told me

that the police don't have a race problem.

America has a race problem.

The police are only the face of it.

I was looking for answers

about Laquan McDonald's killing,

but McCarthy is right.

It's the tip of the iceberg.

Police violence and street violence,

they're often posed as separate problems,

but McCarthy tells me they're both symptoms

of a broken criminal justice system.

[mysterious music]

[together] Three, two, one.

??? ???

- In April 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan,

was drowning in debt.

In an attempt to save $5 million,

it switched its water supply from the Detroit system

to the Flint River.

- Here's to Flint. - Here's to Flint.

- Hear, hear.

- I've been acting ever since I was a teenager,

but when I'm not on set,

my life is dedicated to activism.

[cheers and applause]

- Rosario Dawson in the house!

[cheers and applause]

- In fact, I come from an activist family.

We have evolved on the issue.

My mom was one and so was my grandmother.

- She's a global citizen,

she's an American citizen,

and she's my daughter,

and I love her, and she's awesome.

- I was raised to believe that the people united

will never be defeated.

[cheers and applause]

[somber music]

And I can't fathom the idea

of an entire city

having its water system poisoned.

How can that be possible

in the United States of America?

I've come to Flint to find some answers,

to connect with people on the ground

who are fighting for their rights,

because in my book,

there's no right more basic

than the right to safe drinking water.

I'm starting with Ken McCloud

and Tammy Loren and their children.

They're among the thousands of families

who have been living with the crisis

for the past two years.

Software engineer demolition expert.

Oh, my goodness!

So cute.

When was the moment that you started to see an effect

or that there might be something wrong with the water?

- Ken was walking with the boys,

and all the fire hydrants were running,

but the water was brown coming out,

so he knew something was wrong.

- Right.

- So we immediately, right then,

we stopped drinking the water right then,

but we had already consumed so much.

- And then I heard something happened with your dog?

- He had gone mad. - Literally.

- He had just gone mad.

So I'm changing water bowls, like...

- Every ten minutes,

- Every ten minutes, and it's turning into Jell-O.

- Yeah. - Yes.

After that, they had checked him for lead,

and his lead levels were extremely high.

- He was at a level 32. - Yes.

- 32.

If it were a human,

that would be six times the EPA's safety threshold.

This was alarming enough,

but then the kids started to change.

- We have completely different kids.

They went from straight-A students to failing.

Jeremiah, he's been to school 44 days this year

because he's so sick.

- Yes.

- Elijah has been fighting

a bacterial infection from the water

for two years.

He has days he can't even get out of bed.

Sorry, I'm getting all teary.

- It's okay.

- You know,

it's devastating knowing

we're going through this as well,

But to have to see our kids go through it,

it's heartbreaking.

If a neighbor poisoned and killed his wife,

he'd be in prison. - Yep.

- And we have an entire city that's been poisoned.

- But how did lead get into the water

in the first place?

I need to find out.

- Hi, Jenny. How are you? - Hello. How are you?

- I'm thrilled to introduce you to Norman Lear. Jenny Lenz.

- Hi, so nice to meet you. - Good to meet you also.

This is the place.

- $23 million.

You'll see why in a second.

- It was all redone.

It's all beautiful marble floors,

gold leaf on the ceiling.

We have four bedrooms and a library.

You see the George Washington Bridge.

You see the palisades.

The views here are fairly protected.

Under current zoning, they can never be changed and the Plaza,

which is better to look down on then be in.

- This is Dolly Lenz and her daughter Jenny.

Dolly grew up poor in the Bronx.

Her dad was a factory worker,

and now she's one of Manhattan's

top real estate brokers.

- When I started 30 years ago,

my clients were mostly doctors and lawyers.

Today my clients are centimillionaires,

billionaires.

It changed dramatically 'cause the complexion of the city

in that period changed dramatically.

- I was reading about some extremely expensive apartments

that stay empty.

We're gonna see a hell of a view here, I suspect.

- In this building,

it's almost exclusively foreigners.

So they're buying a $90 million apartment,

literally, $100 million apartment,

a $53 million apartment.

They're from China.

They're from every part of the world,

and they're looking at it as a safety deposit box.

How can I get money out of my country

into a safety deposit box here?

- They're sold. - Yes.

- They're occupied. - Yes. Well, they're sold.

- And they stay empty 90% of the time?

- Yes.

- This situation is depriving people of places

to live where average people used to live.

- I think it's a disaster,

and I think it's gonna get worse

before it gets better.

How do you save the money for the down payment?

You know, when the average price of a one-bedroom is

in excess of $1 million, that's a one-bedroom.

That's not a family.

See, I felt 30 years ago, I had a chance, right?

I don't feel that young people

have the feeling they have that chance.

- But this is America, equal opportunity.

What do you mean, there isn't a chance?

- There isn't a chance for upward mobility

the way there was for my generation.

We can talk about it, but it doesn't exist.

[upbeat hip-hop music]

- If it don't say Foxx, it ain't the right box.

[inaudible] Kim Foxx.

- Superintendent McCarthy has been fired

in the wake of massive protests,

but the fallout hasn't stopped there.

With rising murder rates

and building anger over police abuse and impunity,

Chicago's top prosecutor faces

a challenge from a newcomer, Kim Foxx.

Kim Foxx is an insurgent candidate

who grew up in Chicago's public housing projects.

If she wins, she'll face another daunting challenge,

to oversee every prosecution in the city

while staying true to where she came from.

??? ???

- This is Black T. - I'm Black, yeah.

- Black T. - Yeah. All right, Black T.

- Clemenza. - Clemenza.

- Yeah, the Clemenza, the most loyal.

- A'ight. From "Godfather?"

- Yeah. You see? See, see? She into it.

- No, no.

- You know I'm running for state's attorney,

and I can't fix the state's attorney's office

without the public helping me.

How do I convince you to work with me,

and to work with the police?

'Cause they're part of the problem.

They're part of the solution.

- The trust is down for the police, though.

Don't nobody trust them and politicians.

They just let you down.

- So we got to do something, right?

I mean, we got people getting locked up.

We got people getting killed.

- Yeah, the violence in the city is real crazy.

- How many people do y'all know

who've been shot or killed in the last year or so?

- Oh, man, that count over 30.

- Me personally, I know, like,

13 people done been shot,

like, four that been killed.

One of them was a family member just came home.

- Facebook is becoming a big obituary for Chicago.

- It's true, though.

- This city just full of haters, man.

- Big graveyard.

Like, you stay here, it's like you waiting to die,

because it's messed up here.

- You can't even raise your kids here.

They can't go on the front and ride a bike or jump rope.

- Not like you used to. - The ice cream truck

don't even come down the block no more.

- It's messed up, man,

and the police ain't doing nothing about it,

so you got to protect yourself.

- It's sad to say that people in Chicago,

they'd rather get caught with they gun than without it.

I mean, I can't really blame them

due to all the violence that's going on around them.

- The police ain't gonna protect you.

- What keeps you safer than using the police?

- I mean, I don't feel safe around them

'cause it's too much bad history.

- I have never in my life called the police on anybody,

and I've been in so many jams.

I mean, jams.

- Why?

- I don't trust them.

- If you know a group of people, right,

and all they do is harass you,

and you need help 'cause there's a situation going on,

you gonna call them same group of people?

- As I embark on my research,

I learn an important and basic piece of information.

Much of Flint's water travels through lead pipes.

No one knows exactly how much,

and I discover that there's a local

who's an expert in metals

and can explain how the pipes connect to the crisis.

She agrees to meet

and has some things she wants to show me.

Wow.

Rusted, corroded pipes... - [laughs]

- In your trunk.

- It's lead.

You can tell it's lead

because you can just make a fingernail mark in it.

It's just really soft.

- The problem with lead pipes, she tells me,

is that they can corrode on the inside,

with toxic lead leaching into the water,

but lead pipes can be made relatively safe,

as long as the water is treated.

- So phosphates are added to water,

and phosphates bind to the lead at the surface

and form a protective coating on the inside,

a hard protective coating,

and once it's there, no more lead

will leave the inside and go into the water.

In order to add the phosphates,

you had to have a piece of equipment

that would put the phosphates in the water.

- And since the Flint River is especially corrosive,

after the switch, it was crucial

that the Flint water treatment plant use

this specialized equipment to treat the river water.

- That piece of equipment was never purchased.

It wasn't even there.

They couldn't add any phosphate.

If you look on the inside here,

you can see that the coating is not complete.

Can you see? It's kind of disrupted.

- The damaged pipes tell the story.

After the switch to the Flint River,

the city simply failed to treat the water,

and as a result, the water was poisoned.

[sighs]

So, wow, like,

basically, this is crime scene evidence?

- Crime one, destruction of our infrastructure.

Crime two, in the process of destroying

the infrastructure, poisoning people.

Two crimes. - Right.

Dr. Sullivan wants me to see the river itself.

- Well, this is our Flint River,

and it goes all the way around Flint, wraps around.

It's got a rich

but also very sad history of being polluted.

There was a perception that there was no way

it could be safe, from the get-go.

I was working with a lot of activists,

and there starts to be this creeping worry

about the quality of the water

'cause it was coming from the Flint River,

and I'm the college, you know,

professor in the group, and so I'm the one

that's saying, "No, you know what?

It's being treated,

and water treatment makes water safe to drink."

- And that's what you were being told.

- That's what I was being told,

and that's what I believed, because theoretically,

that would be true, right?

- Right. - People are starting to,

you know, have hair loss,

they're starting to have rashes,

and everybody in Flint gets a notice,

and the notice says,

"We've reached an unsafe level of disinfectant byproduct,

and, oh, by the way, it's a carcinogen,

and you probably want to talk to your physician about

whether or not you should drink bottled water."

- What happens after that moment for you?

- The person who was in charge

of the public works department said,

"Well, you know,

we're gonna have to send another notice out."

He and others just rolled their eyes and said,

"And the residents are gonna have rashes again."

And I said to him,

"You're in charge of more than just water."

I mean, if you're gonna roll your eyes,

that tells me everything I need to know

about how much you think about the people

you're supposed to be serving.

- You know, that this is what, you know, to that a degree,

like, this is what evil can look like.

It's not always, like, some guy in the corner, like,

swishing his mustache, going, "Ha ha, I'm gonna get you guys,"

but more like,

"You're inconveniencing me,

or this bureaucracy takes so long, so I have time,"

and, you know, just prioritizing,

and even being a part of the community

with which you're serving,

so that that actually becomes a priority for you,

because it's not an us-versus-them

and-other kind of situation,

but it's a "we" situation which you were a part of

because this is your community that you're talking about.

- It was really about "How can we calm them down?"

Rather than "Oh, my gosh, what might be causing this?

What could we do to make it go away?"

So we had asked friends to have their water tested,

but when they got their results, to share them with us.

So we return two weeks later, and they said, "You're wrong.

There's lead in the water, but it's not to the level

that you think."

And I said,

"Do you think that maybe

"if the entity that's in charge

"of collecting these specimens, the city,

"and the entity that's in charge of testing these specimens,

"the Department of Environmental Quality,

"if they both benefit from good data,

"if they both benefit from something that says

"there's no problem,

maybe there's something wrong with that?"

I still kick myself for not saying,

you know, "Listen to me.

This is not possible."

Right? It's not possible.

Sorry.

- No, don't be. Don't be sorry.

I can't believe that Dr. Sullivan

and others undertook a kind of people's investigation

and were still shut down.

It went way beyond

the officials in power not listening.

It really seems like they tried to cover up the truth.

- Since the middle class is being forced out of Manhattan,

landlords in the outer boroughs

have plans to capitalize.

- The noise can be unsettling. As you can hear,

I have to raise my voice even louder.

[tea kettle whistling]

[jackhammer rumbling]

Oh, Jesus.

I don't want to stay out here too long.

Okay.

[jackhammer rumbling]

- [indistinct speech] - Yeah.

You should ask them to secure your door

and when the children come home.

- Yeah, because they're coughing a lot now.

- Yeah, I know.

- You see I have a little baby. - Yeah, I know.

I hear them coughing.

Don't let them come out.

If you don't like it, you can move.

If it's too much noise, you can move.

This dust didn't cause it, we are not working that long,

so whatever you're going through

is not because of us.

They care nothing about my life.

The only thing they want to do

is get three times as much money

for this apartment than I'm paying now.

They care about their construction.

I care about my life.

[somber music]

??? ???

- This is one of the buildings

that's on my worst landlord list.

He, unfortunately,

is engaging in tactics

which amount to harassment of tenants.

He claims that he's renovating the building,

but he's renovating the buildings

in violation of the law.

He's doing the work without permits.

There's dust. There's debris. There's rodents.

- Why is he doing that? - Because he wants them out.

He wants to raise the rents.

- But these people wish to stay where they are,

and they have leases. - That's right.

And he's creating hostile conditions,

so that some of them just give up and move out.

And he is displacing those residents

who happen to be black.

You will be replacing them with individuals

who can pay the rent who in all likelihood,

in all likelihood, are white.

- Yeah. I guess I am not old enough to understand

how a man can be breaking the law

so thoroughly

and not be arrested or not stopped from doing it.

- Most landlords just pay the fines.

It's the cost of doing business.

- So is the next stop for some of these people homelessness?

- Some of them will wind up in our shelters.

Some of them will wind up with their families,

doubled and tripled up.

- Oh, my goodness. - And I know landlords

are going to say,

"You know, it's just not fair.

You purchase a piece of real estate."

- In a free enterprise system,

you have every right to do what you're doing.

- Exactly. The question is process.

Are you engaging in illegal activity,

and are you doing it in a way

that disproportionately affects people of color?

- I've lived here for 38 years, me and my mom.

- My name is Gertrude [inaudible].

I moved here in the '60s.

I don't remember, you know, the exact year.

- My name is Judy Lewis.

We've lived here since 1973.

- My name is Prenella Rathwaite,

and I'm living here 38 years now.

- My name is Norman Lear, and I've been in this building,

oh, about 20 minutes.

[laughter]

- In 2014, that cold winter,

they renovated the apartment next door to me,

and the one above me.

No walls, no ceilings, no floors, no windows,

and it was 10 degrees outside,

and we had no heat and hot water.

Those are the tactics they use to displace you.

- A lot of people are here who are sick.

All this dust and everything,

I have to keep the windows down,

and the noise is mind-boggling.

It makes you want to scream.

- I brought it all to the attention of the landlord

and his agent, and nothing has been done.

He looks at me and asks me, "Do I want to move?"

So that's bullying and harassment.

He not only asked me once, but he's asked me three times,

and I told him, "Do not ask me anymore."

- There's no respect.

"I want you out because your rent is low.

"You pay a $1,000.

"I can get $2,500 dollars for that apartment.

I'm going to make your life miserable."

- My concern is not only for myself,

but it's for the seniors in here.

It's for the people who are sick in here,

people who are on pensions and social security in here.

We were here during the crack epidemic.

We were here when the Crown Heights riots.

We looked out for this building.

But who's gonna look out for us now?

- 3,000 shootings in a year, 70% of the victims are black.

Over 90% of their cases go unsolved.

If you shoot a black man in Chicago,

the odds are that you'll go free.

And everyone I talk to tells me the same thing.

No matter what happens,

they will never call the police.

How could things possibly be this bad?

Investigative journalist Jamie Kalven

had to sue the city

to try to answer that question.

He tells me to come by his office

to look at what he found.

- This is the city's data.

This isn't anything that we created,

and it's pretty extraordinary.

It's gotten a lot of attention.

These officers feel like they can act with impunity,

like nobody is going to identify them,

discipline them, punish them.

- Kalven fought the city for a decade

to win the release this data,

15 years of civilian complaints

against the Chicago police,

56,000 records.

I'm shocked by the numbers.

99% of complaints by blacks are dismissed.

Some officers racked up 40, 50,

and even 60 complaints

without so much as a reprimand.

- That's a heat map of the city,

and the most concentrated colors

are the areas of the city

from which most complaints come of police abuse.

It won't surprise you that it's the black South Side,

the black West Side, overwhelmingly.

- The pattern is clear,

but there is something else about the map.

It looks almost exactly like the map of Chicago homicides.

- It's also the areas where there's the most violent crime.

It's the areas where there are

the lowest clearance rates of the police,

you know, closing cases.

Imagine if you had sort of layers of the map,

and you had socioeconomic information,

school outcomes, public health information,

vacant lots, boarded-up buildings, foreclosures.

It's all gonna line up.

- Yeah. - We have abandoned whole parts

of the city

and the folks who live in them.

- The street violence that's happening

amongst the communities and the police violence,

is there any connection?

- When people can't trust the police to protect them,

to seek justice when something's happened,

they create their own public safety system

because you want justice,

and you want to be safe. Everyone wants to be safe.

- Everybody wants to feel safe. - Everybody wants to be safe,

so it's, like, this thing that keeps snowballing.

- Individual stories of police abuse

are easy to dismiss,

but here are 56,000 data points

from the city's own files,

confirming what everyone

growing up on the South Side knows.

There is an epidemic of police misconduct in Chicago,

and it directly correlates

to the neighborhoods worst hit by street violence.

- First, I want to thank everyone for coming tonight

on the actual birth date of Dr. King.

I got to believe that he would be both outraged,

and he would be in tears about the violence

that runs rampant in America today.

- Yes. - And that is violence

whether it is done by a corrupt cop

or whether it's done by somebody in the neighborhood.

Nobody has a right to have our communities under siege

and have people live in fear,

and so we're here tonight to say,

one, we condemn the violence.

- Yes. - We condemn the violence.

- Yes. - Whether it's by cops,

or it's by somebody on the street,

we condemn the violence.

- Yes. - It is not acceptable.

We're going to have a silent march tonight.

There's some things you can't even talk about anymore

you just have to pray about while you're walking.

- I've seen the numbers and the maps and the graphs,

but nothing is clearer than this,

the people of Englewood taking to the streets

on a frozen January night

to break the cycles of police and street violence

that feed off each other.

- We end up here because this is

a wall of those who have lost their lives.

Annette's son is on this wall.

Pam's son is on this wall.

My son is on this wall.

I'm going to ask Pam to close us out.

All: ??? Amazing grace ???

??? How sweet ???

??? The sound ???

??? That saved a wretch ???

??? Like me ???

- Last year, 500 people were murdered in Chicago.

The papers only count the dead.

Out here, we are far from the lights of downtown,

but this is also Chicago,

and these lives also matter.

- Most holy and gracious God, source of compassion,

source of justice,

we invoke Your holy presence here this morning

on behalf of all those struggling

to obtain truly affordable housing.

- What do we want? [together] Affordable housing!

- When do we want it? [together] Now!

- What do we want? [together] Affordable housing!

- When do we want it? [together] Now!

Get up! Get down!

There's a housing crisis in this town!

Get up! Get down!

There's a housing crisis in this town!

- I have a sense of gentrification,

but if I were asked to explain it, I couldn't.

How do you explain it?

- I think everyone can agree on a definition

of what gentrification is.

What people can't agree on

is whether or not the changes that occur in a neighborhood

that's gentrified are good or bad

and what is causing them.

To us, we believe that gentrification

is caused by landlords

and bankers and real estate speculators,

working together to drive up the cost of housing.

- Today I'm hanging out with Cea Weaver,

one of a new breed

of housing activists

who are contending with the new,

faceless breed of landlords.

- We see private equity companies

who are buying rent stabilized buildings in Crown Heights.

- They're not thinking about the people

who want to live in New York City.

They're thinking about parking money here.

- Yes, yes.

I mean, landlords are buying buildings for profit

and profit alone.

The private equity landlord is backed by investors.

They want huge returns in a short period of time.

You know, you think of a landlord as somebody

who you can call to get your ceiling fixed

or who's gonna help you get your apartment painted

or help you get a new apartment

if you're trying to move, you know.

Landlords like that are rarer and rarer in New York City.

- Cea wants to show me what all of this looks like

from a tenant's perspective,

and she takes me out to Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Hi. How are you?

- Hi. I'm Natasha. - Hi.

I'm Norman. It's good to meet you.

- Good to meet you. - Hey, everybody.

- Hi. How are you? - What's your name?

- I'm Aliya. - Hi, Aliya. And you?

- My name is Radell. - I am Norman.

All of these guys were born here.

- Yes all of them has b... yes.

It was like, 200 or something dollars

when we started to pay rent here,

and now I pay 992.

- And now he wants to do what?

- Now he want to raise it to 2,139.

- He wants to go from 900 to 2,100 in one leap?

- Mm-hmm. - And his reason?

- He said Crown Heights is the new Manhattan.

- Can you just afford the $2,100?

- No, I cannot afford the $2,100.

I have a 19-year-old in college.

I'm self-employed.

- My head goes immediately

to your little one there, you know,

a world that treats her fairly.

- If I sit back and allow him to do what he do to me,

well, what's going to happen to them when they get older,

where are they going to live? - Mm-hmm.

Cea tells me none of this would be happening

if big corporations weren't taking over

so many residential

buildings in poor neighborhoods

and expecting such high returns.

I need to talk to someone who's on the inside of that.

??? ???

- I started out by looking at a police killing

and a movement bent on changing the city of Chicago,

but Garry McCarthy is right.

The police are just the tip of the iceberg,

and real change means a lot

more than appointing a new superintendent.

Police shootings are only the most visible symptoms

of a violence that runs much deeper,

infecting the entire criminal justice system,

and so I've come here to the network of tunnels

beneath America's largest

single jail, Cook County.

- We move 1,000 people per day to their court hearings

and back through this tunnel system.

It connects the entire compound,

so we're below Cook County Jail right now.

- Wait. You said sometimes

it's thousands of people. - Per day.

- Per day? - Per day, yeah.

- Coming through these tunnels? - Coming through these tunnels.

[indistinct chatter]

So what we're walking into now is morning intake.

Everyone you see around you, they're not inmates yet.

They've all been arrested last night in the city of Chicago,

so the next stop for these guys is bond court.

That's the moment of truth,

where could be walking out the door,

could be here for two, three, four years with a bond

that they simply can't afford to pay.

- Damn. You could be here just because you can't pay the bond,

for that amount of years?

- We have a couple hundred people in our jail right now

who could walk out if they had $500.

People are here because they're poor,

and it's a perpetual cycle.

Even a day,

a week of incarceration can destroy everything

if you have a fragile job.

- Yeah, if you had a job. But even mentally,

that, mentally, it still mess with you.

- Exactly.

- 9,000 people, numbered,

organized, and warehoused.

They haven't been convicted of a crime yet,

but they can spend years here waiting for a trial.

Ben introduces me to their jailer, Sheriff Tom Dart.

- Thanks for coming out here. I appreciate it.

- Thank you. - This is, you know,

unlike any other place you'd ever not want to be at.

It's just a really tough place. - Yeah.

Sheriff Dart tells me that nationwide,

2.2 million Americans are behind bars,

more prisoners than China,

more than all of Europe combined.

Somehow American democracy

has produced the largest prison system

in the history of the world.

- Do you see cases, and you're like,

"Why is this person even here?"

- Mm-hmm, all the time, all the time.

On any given day we'll have 150 or so people being held here

with their most serious charge... most serious charge

is retail theft.

They stole some food and no violence in their background,

and yet, on average,

that person would sit in this jail

for 100 days, for 100 days.

- Wow, for stealing some food. - For stealing food.

They don't belong in here,

certainly for crazy amounts of time.

It doesn't make any sense, but you sit in a jail

because you're poor.

And then when you look at just the hard numbers,

the disproportionate impact of people of color,

it's off the charts.

I mean, our numbers virtually never change here.

It's almost always 75%

of the population is African-American,

15% is Latino,

and then you have about 10% that's white.

I mean, it doesn't change.

It's been that way for as long as I... definitely

as long as I've been Sheriff and well beyond that.

- So what's it like for you

to be the jailer of all of these people?

- Oh, it's horrible.

I mean, it's absolutely horrible.

You have a real human, a real person,

and, by and large, a good person,

and I talk to these guys all the time.

If you were to have lived the life

that they live, strongest possibility

you'd be sitting right next to him.

But as a Sheriff,

I was only supposed to get a sheet of paper

from a judge saying hold this guy,

then I get a sheet of paper saying release him,

and in between, I feed him.

I take him back and forth to court; that's it.

I'm really not supposed to care why he's here.

I'm not supposed to care how many times he's been here.

I'm certainly not supposed to care what he's gonna do

when he leaves here.

- For many with a criminal background,

there aren't a lot of options.

So today we're visiting

St. Leonard's house on the West Side.

It's one of the few halfway houses in Chicago

that helps returning inmates find jobs

and re-enter society.

- How are you doing? - I'm doing great.

How about yourself? - I'm fine.

Well, welcome to St. Leonard's House.

So what we're going to do today

is best find out how to help you.

- Coming out from prison, do you face, like,

not being able to get a job because you have a record?

- As soon as they check that box saying

that they have been incarcerated,

most of those applications find its way in the garbage.

- How many times have you been incarcerated?

- I've been to prison eight different occasions.

Out of the last 36 years of my life,

I have did 25 years inside of someone's prison.

- You're in room 24.

So here's your key, Rice.

- Thank you.

- All right, welcome to St. Leonard's House.

- Thank you.

- What does it mean for the neighborhood

to have so many people in and out of the system?

- Of the 15,000 to 20,000 people

that are released every year,

about 70% of them

go to six zip codes.

If you drive through these neighborhoods,

down one block,

you'll see empty houses boarded up, vacant lots.

And these are the neighborhoods

where you have the highest crime rates,

the highest drug usage, the worst schools, no jobs.

With no money in the community, nothing's gonna get better.

[somber music]

??? ???

- While I'm in Flint,

I'm trying to connect with as many people

as I can,

and today I'm going to see Gina Luster.

She told me on the phone that she

and her daughter Kennedy moved here in early 2014,

just before the switch.

- Initially moving here, it was exciting,

a new job, new place.

You know, I felt so good,

and then everything changed within 30 days.

- Wow. - And I heard people

starting to complain about rashes early on.

My daughter was complaining about her bones aching.

Her asthma was getting worse.

Her behavior was starting to change.

She was starting to have these panic attacks.

What's going on with my daughter, you know?

- Partly to get away from Flint for an evening, Gina tells me,

she took Kennedy to a Detroit Tigers game,

where she got into a conversation with a stranger.

- I'm sitting there next to this guy,

and he's like, "Oh you're from Flint.

Oh, I heard you guys are having some water issues."

He's like "Well, I work for General Motors,

and we don't use the water."

I'm like, "What?"

And he's like, "Well, yeah.

"There was a letter sent out from General Motors

"to your governor

"saying that after the initial switch,

the water was rusting out the parts."

The whole time, they've been telling us nothing is wrong,

and we've been drinking this water now for almost a year.

- Yeah, so if it's messing up their parts,

than you can imagine what's going on in your bodies.

- This is huge. I'm doing like 100 back home.

I can't wait to get on the phone and get on Facebook

and tell people what I just heard from this guy

who works at GM.

And everybody is scrambling trying

to figure out what's in the water.

How did it start?

How did our infrastructure get ruined?

- Englewood, 60620, one of the handful of zip codes

that are home to most of the state's prisoners,

and where Father Pfleger's St. Sabina church

has been an anchor for the community

for as long as I can remember.

- These are young brothers who have dreams,

who have things they want to do,

things they want to achieve, things they want to accomplish,

and we've got to give them the opportunities.

Secondly, you keep saying to people,

"Well, value yourself,"

but every day you look around your neighborhood,

underfunded schools, highest unemployment,

boarded up buildings, most foreclosures,

most coming back from jail.

How do you value yourself if everything around you

tells you you ain't worth nothing?

[buzzer sounds]

- I did my research on you, bro,

so I already know where you from

and what environment you come from,

and you know Chicago always been,

like, a real segregated city, you know.

- Yeah, yeah. This city is beautiful in itself,

but it is two cities.

Like, so you see that.

Any human being will see that.

Like, where the solutions come in,

like, in an ideal way to change Chicago?

- It's not going to change. It's not.

- We hope, but, I mean, you see what's going on.

Yeah, 'cause what you gonna do as a man

when you can't get no job? You got kids.

"Daddy, I'm hungry." What you gonna do?

You gonna feed your baby, any means necessary,

any means,

even if it end up putting you back in that can,

and you stuck in this trap. You feel me?

So, I mean, like, if they gave us more things to do,

more leaders, stop targeting us, treating us like animals,

I mean, man, like, we'd be able to...

Chicago would be able to be beautiful.

[graceful hip-hop music]

??? ???

- Show me what's going on.

- Brooklyn is crazy hot.

There's a huge wave of new people

coming here, Bushwick,

East Williamsburg, Crown Heights,

those areas definitely are full of people

who are young, creators, et cetera, et cetera.

Brooklyn was a blue-collar borough.

There's no doubt about it. It's no longer the case.

Brooklyn is a brand. It's the new Manhattan.

Hello. How are you? Nice to meet you.

- Nice meeting you too. - Likewise.

Here we have some of our projects.

We have 47 projects in Brooklyn.

We build over... - 47 projects?

- 47 projects, over 1,000 units.

I have German pension funds

speaking with us about investments,

and I'm originally from Israel.

Israeli funds are investing in Brooklyn.

- Your foreign investors.

What return do you have to promise them?

- Oh, "promise" is a difficult word to use in economics,

but we're looking at 20% and north

annual return to the investors.

- Now, that's a figure that I've heard

in a couple of other situations

where the landlords are working as hard

as they can to evict.

- Yes. Yeah.

I mean, I know that world because I'm in real estate.

The economical pressure on the system

and the lack of housing available

in New York City in general

causes people to be aggressive about vacancies

and do illegal things.

We don't do that.

Listen, there's many ways to make money,

and you have to put your head on the pillow

at the end of the day

and see if you feel comfortable with what you did.

I'm not trying to protect that industry,

people who do it not by law, okay,

but when you have international money,

when you have a lot of big corporations

investing in those areas,

they could care less about what you do to get those returns.

They want as high a return as possible.

- I think of it in the most simplistic terms.

Those people who are working hard for a living,

who were never going to make more than a modest living wage,

you know, they're good people. They're raising kids.

They know how to get their kids educated and so forth.

Why can't there be enough affordable housing

for those people who are going to work here

and service those who can more than afford to live here?

- The reality of life

is that financial forces think short-term.

They want to make money.

If I'm selling an apartment for $800,000, okay,

which is the kind of prices I'm selling,

between $500,000 to $800,000 apartment,

and I'm now selling it or $150,000, to be affordable,

someone has to pay for the gap.

Someone has to pay for the cost of my construction,

for the cost of my land,

so if I don't have a financial incentive

to sell the apartment for $150,000,

why would I do that, you know?

Just from, you know, the kindness of my heart, yes,

we could do it once or twice but not as a business plan.

- So if it's not a business plan,

who's going to offer developers

and landlords the incentive to build affordable housing?

??? ???

- It's clear now that the criminal justice system

is failing the black and brown people of Chicago.

It doesn't keep them safe,

and it doesn't get them justice.

Even the former police superintendent

acknowledges that.

It locks them up when they don't belong behind bars,

and it marks them with convictions

that can derail their lives forever.

Even the sheriff of Cook County acknowledges that.

And it's not just Chicago.

Across the country,

racial bias in the criminal justice system is stark,

and it's undeniable.

Blacks are more than twice as likely to be killed

by a police as whites.

We are ten times more likely to be arrested

for a drug offense,

and when we are arrested, we are 30%

more likely to be imprisoned for the same crime.

Everything I read refers me back to the same book,

"The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander.

She says that more black men are under the control

of the criminal justice system today

than were enslaved on the eve of the Civil War.

I'm staggered by these numbers,

but at first, her conclusions are hard to accept.

- The first time I encountered the phrase "the new Jim Crow,"

I remember just thinking to myself, "Yeah, you know,

the criminal justice system is racist in a lot of ways,

but it doesn't help to make

such absurd comparisons to Jim Crow."

People just think you're crazy.

And for the next few years,

I just had a series of experiences

that led to a real awakening for me,

and I came to see that our criminal justice system

now functions much more

like a system of racial control

than a system of crime prevention.

- This situation of mass incarceration,

what's the stem of it?

What's the beginning of it?

Where does it start, really?

- Its most, kind of, recent history can be traced

to the law and order movement.

- I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow,

and segregation forever!

- When segregationists found

they could no longer say segregation forever,

they began calling for law and order

and portraying civil rights protestors

as having no regard for the law.

The law and order movement evolved

into the get tough movement

and a war on drugs in the 1980s.

- I raise the priority of drug abuse by declaring

it a threat to our national security.

- That drug war has been absolutely devastating.

It's a system that effectively sweeps millions of poor people

of color off the streets,

primarily for non-violent, drug-related offenses.

It is a war that helped to set into motion

this whole system of mass incarceration.

You know, we have created,

in a period of just a few short decades,

a prison system unlike anything the world has ever seen.

- From the violence to mass incar...

A lot of people being jailed here,

why is Chicago such a central point?

- Here in Chicago, you have a city

that's suffered as much as any city did

from deindustrialization and the disappearance of work.

In 1970, about 70% of African-Americans

had blue-collar factory jobs.

By 1987, that figure had plummeted to 28%.

Work vanished.

Jobs were shipped overseas,

deindustrialization, the collapse,

literal economic collapse of black communities.

Now, did we invest in those communities, in those kids?

No, instead, we declared war.

This wasn't inevitable.

We had a choice about how to respond,

and when you look at what neighborhoods

have been most affected by the drug war

and mass incarceration in Chicago,

and you look at who is now actually committing,

you know, acts of violence

and where young people are acting out

with enormous fear, rage, despair,

broken-heartedness, right,

these are kids whose family members

have been cycling in and out of the prison system.

These are kids who've grown up believing

that no matter what they do, one way or another,

they're going to jail.

These are young folks who grew up

in the age of mass incarceration,

and, you know, we want to just blame them and say,

"We got to get tough on them."

Tough on them like you got tough

on their daddy or their granddaddy?

Tough on them like that? How did that turn out?

- The state's prisons are filled with the sons

and grandsons of America's war on crime,

and for every one of them, there is a family,

a workplace,

a community that is changing because they are gone.

- At first he told me he was out of town.

- I kept on asking my stepsister,

so she got irritated, and she told me.

She said he was in prison.

I was sad, angry.

He left me

without saying no good-bye.

??? ???

A prison is where you have to stay away from your family

for a long time,

and the cops have to tell you when to wash up,

when to eat, when to go to sleep,

when to wake up, and do everything.

He has to stay in there,

and I'm not able to see him on my birthday,

but he might come back one day.

??? ???

- In Flint, Michigan,

the entire community was soon consumed

with trying to figure out what had happened to the water,

but without any official warning,

the people continued to drink and bathe in it,

with children at greatest risk.

??? ???

I want to understand the dangers to children,

so I'm meeting Dr. Lawrence Reynolds,

a pediatrician who's president

of the local children's hospital.

He's also a longtime Flint resident...

So much beautiful greenery and life,

that's what kids should be experiencing.

- Oh, yes.

- And remembers how he and his colleagues

scrambled to figure out what was happening.

- An associate of mine worked at Hurley Hospital,

and the Hurley Hospital lab did about 60%

of the blood lead levels in the city of Flint,

and she compared 2014, before the change,

to 2015 and on, after the change,

and showed that there was at least a doubling

or a tripling of elevated blood lead levels.

Lead is a neurotoxin, and it can cause damage.

- When you had all those findings,

and you presented them to the state, what happened?

- They implied that her analysis was flawed,

her data was insufficient,

and they basically discounted it.

The mayor went out of town to see the pope

and then to a hockey game

that night, but we told him,

"You have 48 hours to declare an emergency,

or as the health community,

we will do it,"

and so that's what we did.

- This was already September 2015,

a year and a half after the water switch.

- So all during the time,

the leadership of the Michigan Department

of Health and Human Services,

who were supposed to protect the public health,

did very little.

- Right, stalling, stalling, stalling.

- That's right.

The problem is compounded, because as pediatricians,

we tell parents if you're not going to breastfeed,

use formula,

and most parents use the powdered formula

that you mix with tap water.

- Yeah.

- So for the first six months,

we have exposed a group of children

to lead-poisoned water,

while our city, state,

and county government has said,

"Oh, don't worry, everything's all right."

- And Dr. Reynolds says that the damage

lead can do to small children is horrific.

It can impair learning, attentiveness,

basic problem-solving,

and the capacity to control aggression.

Later in life, lead poisoning can make it difficult

to hold down a job or stay out of prison.

You were chosen for the governor's task force

to write a comprehensive report on the crisis,

so these are supposed to be the, you know,

most qualified experts in the state.

So what conclusion did you come to?

- For the first two months, every time we met,

the question was,

"Why are we even here discussing this?

This should not have happened."

Then, three months into the process,

we had a lull in our conversation,

and one of my counterparts said... excuse me...

"How many of you guys are waking up in the middle

of the night thinking about this?"

It was so egregious,

so outrageous that our government would do this,

and everybody raised their hand.

It didn't matter what their political affiliation was.

It didn't matter what part of the state they were from.

It did not matter what their professional experience was.

It's just unconscionable.

- Yeah.

- Brothers and sisters!

[cheers and applause]

Hermanos y hermanas!

[cheers and applause]

We did it!

[cheers and applause]

We now have a law,

a law that says real estate developers

can do their work and build their buildings,

but whenever they come to the city,

you have to guarantee us affordable housing.

- Bill de Blasio's plan to allow new building

but require affordable housing

sounds reasonable to me,

but I hear it's very controversial.

So before I go interview the mayor,

I'm sitting down with a few housing activists

to see what they think.

- We have a saying in the tenant movement.

Real estate in New York is like oil in Texas.

Anyone who loves this city has to see

that the experience of gentrification

is changing what it means to be a New Yorker,

changing what New York is,

and a lot of us are very committed to stopping that

and to instituting a different vision

of what we could be doing in this city.

- That's Sam Stein, an activist and academic

who researches housing issues

at the City University of New York.

Oh, hi, Michelle. How are you?

Michelle Neugebauer runs a housing nonprofit

in one of Brooklyn's poorest neighborhoods.

They try to buy properties to devote to

affordable housing before the private equity firms

can get them.

Guess what the subject was.

- Gentrification. - Yeah.

- How about ethnic cleansing?

Is that too strong of a statement?

- Ethnic cleansing? - It's a little powerful,

and people often will tie it to killing and murder.

In a way, it is. You're killing off people.

- It's long-term killing. - Exactly.

Displacement has an effect,

a long-term effect that people don't often think about.

- That's Rob Robinson.

His ideas may sound extreme,

but he says they're based on lived experience.

Years ago, he tells us, he was living in Florida,

had a long-term desk job when he was suddenly let go.

He ended up on the streets for years.

You ever guess as to how many there are like you?

- In New York City alone, probably about 20,000 people

who have a work history, capable of working,

but the economic situation makes it difficult.

- We have a self-professed progressive mayor

who has been able to accomplish a lot of things,

and yet when it comes to housing,

we haven't had a fresh approach

that really takes the fundamental right

to housing seriously.

Mayor De Blasio's housing plan

is not exactly what it sounds like.

- But more good than bad. - I don't know.

More the same than different.

- We talked a long time.

They threw around a bunch of numbers.

In a nutshell, they say the affordable

housing in the mayor's plan

is simply not affordable

to most people living in the poor neighborhoods

where the plan is being launched.

- We think the housing should match the incomes of the people

that live in the neighborhood now.

- The mayor sees what you see.

Would he, if he were sitting here,

just tell you he does not agree with you?

- I think he thinks that by building

more affordable housing,

regardless of who it's affordable for,

that's going to solve gentrification.

- And you're saying in response to that?

- You're wrong. You're wrong.

It's gonna increase gentrification.

- Sometimes we have to look in the mirror...

I don't care who we are... and reflect

about what we're doing, how we live.

Are we living by principles and values, right,

that values community

and other people and all people?

- We should all be working on changing people's values

and people's minds, but policy is often

where it starts and what drives it.

- So part of our problem, Norman, is political will.

- You met my wife Chirlane back in Los Angeles.

- Hi. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Hi. It's good to see you again.

- Good to see you again. - Oh, we can do that.

- Yes, it's a free country. - So good to see you again.

How are you, sir? - So good to see you.

When an American icon is at city hall,

we stop everything, so you qualify.

[laughter]

- Okay. - You qualify.

- So my interest is discussing housing.

- Yes.

- The homeless. - Yeah.

- I mean, I understand there are some 60,0000 people homeless.

- Almost.

- And 23,000 of them are children.

- Yeah. Even as late as 2002, folks in our homeless shelters

were primarily single individuals.

Today the typical shelter resident

is a member of a family

with something very specific to do each day.

It's a child who goes to school or it's someone

who goes off to work... sadly,

typically to a low-wage job... but

they cannot afford better than a shelter,

and what's happened one part

because of the recession, you know,

knocking so many people

out economically but also because of gentrification.

- You don't want that?

- It's not that I don't want it.

Gentrification is a double-edged sword.

With it comes a lot of investment in communities

and in many ways improvements in a lot of the things

that are in those communities but at the same time,

way too much displacement

and upsetting of the opportunities for folks

who have been in the community for a long time.

- Right. So and what do you do? What have you done about that?

- We have passed a law requiring developers

to create affordable housing.

If they don't create affordable housing,

they do not get a permit to build.

- But there's also an organization,

or perhaps a couple of organizations,

that feel the rezoning,

that your administration

is responsible for is resulting in gentrification.

- If you've got a supply of housing that,

because of the free market,

is becoming less and less accessible,

you can subsidize some to keep it affordable for people,

but you've got to build new housing too.

- But is your plan really gonna

open up the door to speculation?

That's the bottom line.

- Speculation is going to happen one way or another.

I fundamentally believe that.

Anyone who thinks there are neighborhoods

that will be untouched by change is kidding themselves.

So there are some who almost,

I think, suggest better to leave

a neighborhood in tough shape

than to take the risk of development.

I argue that's not fair to the residents

of those neighborhoods.

We can put stronger rules into the process.

We can put more requirements

for affordable housing into the process.

We can put government investment

and subsidies into the process.

That's how we create

some balance and fairness in the equation.

It's the best shot we've got.

- What hope is there for neighborhoods like Englewood,

where thousands of men are missing from their families,

from the economy, from their community?

I'm on my way to find them,

two hours outside of the city in Sheridan prison.

It feels like a different world out here,

but most of Sheridan's population

comes from the same handful of zip codes

in south and west Chicago.

- Good morning, brothers. - Good morning.

- Morning. - All right, for those of you

that don't know me, my name's Benny Lee.

It's an honor this morning to be accompanied

by our brother Common here.

- I Just wanted to say peace to each and every one of y'all,

and I'm just here to listen and check things out.

- By a show of hands, how many of y'all been to prison before?

This is not your first time in prison.

You know, it's been proven that over 70%

of the people in Illinois prisons

are repeated offenders.

These are people that's going in and out of prison,

and what I found with my own experience

is that I was ill-prepared to go back into society

and break the cycle.

How many of y'all tired of hustling?

See, I was tired of hustling.

I came out the time before the last time tired of hustling.

Because I ran into some of these barriers, I figured,

well, I got more confidence in my hustling skills

than I do in working.

I was trained as a street hustler.

Also, because I've been to prison so many times,

I was a trained convict.

I had a very strong prison culture value system

that I was functioning with for so many years.

How many of y'all know that there is a part of you

that you've been trained,

and you normally respond like that guy?

- What I am training is my change.

You know, I was so used to doing negative all my life,

my gangbanging, and my drug dealing,

and everything would come out, my hustling side.

It's vicious out there, so I am changing within myself,

what I need to prepare for the danger

that's waiting for me.

- I go back to when I first started my reentry process,

and they told me,

"Okay, you got to go job searching,"

and they gave me a piece of paper and said,

"Put a r??sum?? together."

The only thing I could put on the r??sum?? was my name

'cause I had never worked in my life,

didn't complete school, never had a driver's license,

never had a social security card,

so the message I got from that is,

nobody's gonna hire me.

Right? I've been out of prison 32 years,

and there are still licenses I can't apply for

because of my prior convictions.

Feeling so inferior, giving myself the message.

"Quit. You don't belong here."

But where can I go?

Back in my box.

You know, it was Frederick Douglass that said,

"If there is no struggle, there can be no progress."

I mean, let me hear you say that.

If there is no struggle, there can be no progress.

See, and it's going to be a struggle.

Making your transition from prison back into the community,

it's going to be a struggle.

- After the group meeting,

I sit down with Anthony Hawkins.

Like many of his fellow inmates,

he's here on a nonviolent drug charge.

How long you been in?

- I'm 30 months now.

- So you about to go back home.

How long? - Two weeks, man.

May 6th, man, I'll be back home,

day before my boy birthday.

Son will be 9.

- That's a beautiful thing, the day before your boy...

- It's great, man. It's all he talk about.

- He's like, "Yeah, you gonna be there?"

- Yeah, "You gonna be home for my birthday, Dad?"

Oh, yeah, I'm going to be there, man.

- That's excellent. When you're going back,

like, when you're getting out,

what's your plans? What you thinking about?

- I got probably a notebook of things, man,

that I want to do, man.

Short-term goals, long-term goals, you know,

but my main focus now is just stay alive, man,

stay out of trouble.

Then early, man, you know,

I just want to at least have me enough money

to take care of my family, take care of myself.

I ain't got to revert back to selling drugs

and nothing like that, you know.

??? ???

- If I got a duty and a responsibility,

when I have one,

I like to do it well, so I'm gonna...

- I'm learning that the history of Flint

is a history of people fighting to take back their city,

and a key figure in all this

is a city councilman named Eric Mays,

a former union organizer for the United Auto Workers.

Today I'm going to meet him.

- So this is city council chambers.

It's where we hold our meetings at.

Over here is the wall where all of the past mayors.

- You have a woman mayor now though, right?

- Yeah, her picture will go.

- She hasn't come on here yet. - Right.

That's a nice picture.

Before my time, in 1855.

- I heard that there were residents

that started congregating in your house

to talk about this issue.

- People was complaining of rashes, hair falling out.

The water was discolored and brown.

I kind of just listened to people and listened.

We started thinking the only solution was to switch back

to Detroit,

a source that had been proven and tested.

- You're hearing that your constituents

that are complaining about it.

You're believing it. What is your next step?

What do you do then?

- I invited the head of Detroit Water and Sewers

to a council meeting,

and she let them know

that Detroit was ready to do business with Flint

if need be in an emergency,

and then we passed a vote

that passed City Council unanimously.

- But Councilman Mays says switching back

to Detroit was easier said than done.

The move would need the approval

of Flint's emergency manager.

- Well, even though the council

voted unanimously to switch back

at that period of time,

the emergency manager didn't listen to the people.

He didn't listen to the elected officials.

He said no,

and so that kept us with Flint River water,

even though it was not a good source.

- Okay, I'm confused, though, so take me back a couple years

and explain what an emergency manager is

and how this even came to be.

- The law say when there is a financially-distressed city,

then the governor can appoint an emergency manager to deal

with correcting the finances.

- Okay. - From what we understood,

we was against emergency managers coming in.

We believe democracy is

you vote for people, and they represent you.

We don't believe one man or woman

should be sent into a city by a governor

and take over the duties

and the responsibilities of elected officials,

both councils, mayors.

It's like a dictatorship.

As a matter of fact, he put a order on me.

An emergency manager can issue an order,

and the order on Councilman Eric Mays

tried to tell me when to speak,

who I could speak to,

how our meetings was conducted.

- You're saying that a non-elected official can say

that an elected official can be silenced

for doing what you're supposed to be doing,

what the people of Flint have voted for you

to be doing, and that's all legal.

That's crazy.

- Well, what I'm telling you is factual,

and it's not made up.

And, you know, we want America to know,

because it has divided our community,

and we don't think it's right.

[somber music]

??? ???

- What is happening in my city?

I began this journey

looking at the killing of a 17-year-old boy

and at violence that seems as natural in Chicago

as August thunderstorms.

Let me do one more freestyle over that beat.

But all around me, I see the city change.

??? Land of the free, it's the home of the brave ???

??? I wonder [inaudible] like a slave ???

[cheers and applause]

A girl from the projects grows up

to a defeat a tough-on-crime prosecutor.

- The work is just beginning.

- Real accountability!

[together] Real accountability!

- A movement led by young women of color

brings down a police superintendent

and rewrites the city's script

around race and criminal justice.

??? This is what I'm telling you, I'm not obliged ???

??? I'm here for the South Side and the West Side ???

And even in Sheridan prison,

a father faces the long odds of reentry.

- Hi. Your name, please. - Anthony Hawkins.

- I.D. number.

- Holding on to the hope

that he and his family can escape a future

that seemed like it had already been written.

[engine roars, rumbles]

- What's up, man?

- Daddy.

- Oh, my God.

Where did you just come from?

Where you just come from?

Where you just come from? Where you just come from?

Why you sneak up on me like that, huh?

What's up, boo?

- Nothing. - Don't stop, baby.

- I'm still mad at my daddy.

- What you say?

- I'm still mad at you. - Why are you mad at your dad?

- 'Cause you lied at me. You lied to me.

- About what?

- You said you was out of town. - Two years ago.

- I'm still mad at you.

- Can't possibly be mad that long.

What's up, boo? - Hi, Rasha.

- You want to come have a race with us?

- They're too little for me.

- Mm-mm. - Yeah.

Boy, my head too big. Check it out.

- Mm-mm, it can fit you. - I look cool now?

- Mm-hmm. - I love you, man, okay?

Don't be mad at me no more.

- I'm the king of the world!

I'm the king of the world!

Hi!

[hopeful music]

??? ???

female narrator: On the next "America Divided"...

- Hi. Are you the landlord? - Yeah.

- The way this housing provider does business

is to discriminate against African-Americans.

- Does Flint have a water crisis

because of emergency managers?

[crowd boos]

- What makes Pinellas so particularly egregious?

- The lowest achieving elementary schools.

Pinellas has five.

- There's no school you can just go to that's not a D

or an F school. - It hurts my heart.

We're talking about schools that are now F

and failing schools that were A schools.

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