Listen to the story I did for WBEZ right here. A quiet, soft-spoken parking garage attendant who was born in Somalia sues the Director of Homeland Security and the head of the FBI, in an attempt to gain U.S. citizenship. He came to Chicago with a dream and never imagined it would get so complicated…
Listen to my WBEZ story right HERE. Thousands of Chicago area kids are arrested at school each year. Some of those arrests are for offenses as serious as carrying guns to class. Other times, they’re for incidents as minor as lobbing apples across the lunch room in an overzealous food fight. But even an arrest that is never brought…
Altgeld Gardens is an unlikely place to put a farm. It’s a public housing development 130 blocks south of downtown Chicago. The community’s also surrounded by landfills, an expressway, a sewage treatment plant and the polluted Little Calumet River. This is the place where a community organizer named Barack Obama got his start. Reporter Linda…
One Chicago community we come back to experienced joyous highs and violent lows these past couple of years. In November 2008, when he was just at the start of his transition from candidate Obama to President Obama, Chicagoans were bursting with expectations. And the place where Mr. Obama worked as a community organizer got special…
The retail theft class you just heard about is run by the probation department in partnership with the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office. On the day reporter Linda Paul was there, Assistant State’s Attorney Maryam Ahmad captivated the young people and adults with some frank talk on legal theory and real life stories. Ahmad gave a presentation designed to…
There are many more black and brown young people in our jails and prisons than you’d predict, if you just look at their percentages in the population at large. The numbers are simply out of whack. And that’s got a fancy name. It’s called D-M-C: disproportionate minority contact. Juvenile justice experts say it’s not rocket…
Stories by Linda Paul 