How one movement is fighting to stop disadvantaged Americans being killed

SALLY Sara was filming in Aghanistan the last time she was so close to gunbattle. She found things were just as scary in Chicago.

THE last time Sally Sara found herself around so many shootings was when she was ABC’s Afghanistan correspondent.

This time Sara was not in a third-world war zone but in the south side of Chicago, a city where more people are murdered each year than in the whole of Australia.

Sara was working on a story for ABC’s Foreign Correspondent, which airs tonight, about the Black Lives Matter movement that’s fighting to stop racism and killings in places such as Chicago and Baltimore.

And it was as Sara was talking to Chicagoans about the deadly toll of gang violence that more deadly shootings unfolded around her. By the end of her weekend, more than 50 people had been shot, with eight dead.

“We had our plans for Chicago but Chicago had its plans for us,” Sara told news.com.au

“We ended up being there on one of the worst weekends for shootings for the year. It seemed that every which way we turned something else had happened.

“You’d see cars go round and round with young guys making gang signs out of the window and you’d think, well, if people are shooting 14-year-old kids, what makes us safe?

“It was really quite confronting. You really could understand the perspective of parents and young people about just how tense it is for them, how it could happen at any minute and just for nothing.

“But it was also really important to dig down and understand why, to understand what was happening in that community that there was so much violence.”

A young man poses for the ABC’s cameras in Baltimore.

ONE VICTIM EVERY THREE HOURS

While Baltimore has become a flashpoint in tensions between citizens and police, communities on Chicago’s south side were terrorised by their own gang-infested neighbourhoods.

Here, children are banned from playing outside and a baby was recently gunned down in his mother’s arms. More than 2600 people have been shot in Chicago this year: that’s one victim every three hours.

Social disadvantage is a huge problem. Forty per cent of kids grow up in poverty, and it’s easier to buy a gun than land a job.

In 2013, the area bore the brunt of the largest single shutdown of schools in US history, which forced panicked local mothers into hunger strikes.

It has been estimated that for every homicide in the area 70 people will move out, leaving neglected and downtrodden neighbourhoods in their wake, Sara said.

“How can you keep schools open when your neighbourhood is dying from the inside out?” she said.

“These are pockets of violence in what is already a violent society and deep pockets of inequality in what is already a deeply unequal society, regardless of who you are.

“We interviewed Father Michael Pfleger from St Sabina Church in Chicago, and his view was that when young people have lost hope and have no value on their own life, they don’t put any value on anyone else’s life. He was saying that lack of hope was a really big thing.”

Mothers in Chicago grieve for their children killed in gun violence.

One of the young victims gunned down during Sara’s weekend in Chicago was a 14-year-old boy who lived next door to one of her interview subjects, Nortasha Stingley, whose teenage daughter Marissa was shot dead in a drive-by shooting.

And even though it happened all the time, no one got used to the horror, Sara said.

“The boy who was shot, Tyjuan Poindexter, was 14 but his mother was saying he was a young 14 — still playing with his toy wrestling dolls, that kind of kid,” she said.

“She had not let him outside but he had begged and begged and begged just to go for a walk only a few blocks away with his friends. And then it happened, just a chubby-cheeked little kid shot dead.

“We were next door at Nortasha’s place having dinner and we could hear all of this commotion outside and Nortasha’s little son, Levell, knew what was going on.

“The main thing I took away was that I really felt for the mothers. A lot of those communities are predominantly single-mother households. They’re women like Nortasha, who has already lost one child, and is so desperate to keep her son alive and get him through college so he not only does well but he’s out of that neighbourhood.”

Sally Sara with the Levell, the brother of Marissa Stingley who was killed in a shooting in Chicago.

CRISIS IN BALTIMORE

It’s a similarly grim reality that faces Baltimore, where Freddie Gray, 25, died as a result of injuries sustained in his arrest on April 12.

Gray’s death sparked days of violent protests and looting, which lead to a state of emergency being declared within the Baltimore city limits. At least 20 police officers were injured and about 250 people arrested. The city’s police commissioner was later sacked.

Sara said there was still a palpable tension in Baltimore as locals awaited the trials of six police officers charged over their part in Gray’s arrest.

Baltimore is considered one of the most dangerous cities in America and will end this year having reached its highest-ever murder rate.

But it’s the public’s mounting mistrust in the police that has really fuelled movements like #BlackLivesMatter there.

USA, Baltimore: Security officials line up in Baltimore, Maryland on on April 27, 2015. Baltimore declares a state of emergency. The national guard is moving in as the city blazes with active fires across multiple sources after protests turned to riots. (AAP Image/NEWZULU/ERIC KRUPKE). NO ARCHIVING, CROWD SOURCED CONTENT, EDITORIAL USE ONLY

“There’s a real lack of trust in the police because of the incidents of brutality that have gone on, but there’s a disconnect back the other way where people don’t co-operate with the police, even in murder cases, because they fear the killers will get payback,” Sara said.

“That relationship just doesn’t function at all. A lot of the kids are scared at the police or angry towards them.

“We didn’t get to include it in the story, but a lot of mothers who lost their children to gun violence end up actually being unofficial detectives in their own child’s murders because nothing happens with the police. The murder clearance rate at the moment is about 25 per cent so they completely give up on that relationship and go and do it themselves.”

Two decades after the beating of Rodney King was videotaped on a balcony and the footage sparked the Los Angeles riots, mobile phone-filmed interactions between police and local civilians have become the norm in places such as Baltimore, where suspicion on both sides runs deep.

“Everyone’s got a cell phone in their pocket and things are getting filmed and captured, and things that would be denied but which actually happened years ago now can be documented,” Sara said.

Boys in Baltimore with a tribute mural to Freddie Gray.

“But a police officer we spoke to in Baltimore was saying sometimes it’s one way traffic — why isn’t the community using their cell phones to film crime happening in their neighbourhood and handing those videos to police?

“The police also say in what would be a routine arrest or traffic stop they now have 10 or 20 cell phone cameras on them and it escalates quickly.”

#BLACKLIVESMATTER

The movement at the heart of Sara’s story was sparked by a viral hashtag in 2013 that followed the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of teenager Trayvon Martin.

The movement gained prominence as the body count grew of following police encounters — Michael Brown in Ferguson, Eric Garner in New York City, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Eric Harris in Tulsa, Sandra Bland in Texas, and so on.

Lately they’ve been demanding answers over the death of Jamal Clark after he was shot by police in Minneapolis last month.

Sara spoke to people involved in the movement, which they described as America’s greatest civil rights movement since the 1960s. Sara believes Black Lives Matter has learnt lessons from the Martin Luther King era, adopting a decentralised structure with no formal hierarchy.

Sara spoke to Timuel Black, an educator and civil rights activist from Chicago.

In the US, one third of black men are likely to be imprisoned at some time in their lives and unarmed black Americans are twice as likely as white Americans to be killed by police.

“The Black Lives Matter campaign is talking about wholesale changes the policing system and more accountability,” Sara said.

“On the issues of poverty and inequality, those are things that have been very, very slow to move. Black unemployment is still double white unemployment, black household wealth is still only a tenth of white household wealth. Even though racist policies of the past died decades ago it’s still a very slow process of catch-up.

“And it’s an oversimplification, too, to think of just black and white America — Asian populations, Hispanic populations, they have their own grievances and issues of inequality as well.

“No matter who you are, if you’re born into the bottom 20 per cent in the US there’s only a seven per cent chance you can make it to the top no matter who you are.

“One of the statisticians found a really interesting thing looking at social mobility from the bottom 20 per cent to the top 20 per cent — looking at the figures the best way to achieve the American dream is to move to Canada.”

Black Lives Matter protesters who marched from City Hall to Elsie Thursday, Dec. 3, 2015, where there was to be a police fundraiser demanded answers in the death of Jamar Clark. (Richard Tsong-Taatarii/Star Tribune via AP)

Sara found examples of many trying to reclaim and repair their communities.

“In Baltimore, we really struck this huge sense of pride and determination to stay and to make things better, even among people who were living in areas where 30, 40 per cent of houses were boarded up,” Sara said.

“And if you think of the south side of Chicago, that’s such a historic place where people came from the deep south of America to make a new life and for many years it was a place of great hope and people are hoping it will become a place of hope again.”

The report also manages to shine a light on the vibrant street culture that thrives in both cities, along with the “absolutely incredible” people who live there.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been made to feel so welcome,” Sara said.

“For some reason they just adored our Australian accent, which broke down a lot of barriers. They were incredibly friendly and really opened their doors for us.

“When we said we were a documentary crew they’d ask what the documentary about and we’d say, ‘Black Lives Matter’ and they’d say ‘Hell yeah!’ and raise their fists in the air. The response was amazing.”

Sally Sara’s special one-hour report, #BlackLivesMatter, airs on Foreign Correspondent tonight at 8.30pm on ABC.