CPD officer Steve Lamar was not surprised to hear that there were people who avoided police officers. He had encountered many of them back when he patrolled a beat in a particularly rough part of the South Side. A good share of them, in fact, were the young people that Andre claimed were so troublesome. The problem, as he saw it, was partly the media, which devoted so much coverage to police misconduct cases that regular citizens were afraid of people like him. The other part came from simple misunderstandings between him and people in the neighborhood.
Officer Lamar gave an example from when he was on the beat. He was in his patrol car when a man came up to him and told the officer that he had been robbed at gunpoint, showing Lamar a case report of the incident. This man knew where the person who had robbed him lived and wanted Lamar to go arrest him. Officer Lamar told the man to get in the car, and together they drove to the address. As they pulled up, the man identified the suspect standing outside, and Officer Lamar put him under arrest. But as Lamar went to handcuff him, the suspect pulled away. Lamar went to grab him and soon the two were wrestling. At the same time, three young women started screaming from a nearby window. They had just seen a CPD officer pull up on a stranger and start fighting with him. Meanwhile, the man who had asked that police officer to make the arrest, being a witness to a crime, sat hidden in the police car behind tinted windows.
Now, Officer Lamar worked an administrative job at CPD headquarters. On his Instagram, he scrolled through pictures of him in uniform giving haircuts to little boys in the neighborhood. When the CPD was put under a consent decree after the Laquan McDonald shooting, he sat through public meetings to gather community input on how the police department should be reformed. He believed the outcomes of those reforms have put police accountability is at an all-time high in Chicago, even though he knew a lot of officers had much less glowing reviews of the new system. Police-community relations were strained, and had been strained for a long time, but there was a way to change that, and Chicago was on the right track.