I dunno about you but I’m one of those guys who detest the sight of armed guards everywhere I go.
I know, I know, we humans can be a bunch of rowdy jerks on too many occasions and somebody has to flash the artillery at us to keep us from tearing the building apart. Still, I don’t like being under the watchful eye of pistol- and taser-packing lugs.
Here in Bloomington, we don’t experience too much of the random violence and threats thereof that people in, say, New York or Chicago have to endure every day. Back when I was living in Chicago, I used to frequent a 24-hour taco joint on Blue Island Avenue, deep in the heart of disputed gang turfs. Around that neighborhood, the La Raza (Folks), Latin Counts (People), and Party People (Folks) gangs wrestled for supremacy, all too often firing automatic pistols at each other in hopes of convincing the other guys of the error of their ways. Notice the Folks-People descriptors? Pretty much all American street gangs identify with one or another uber-organization. In Los Angeles, gangs are either Bloods or Crips. In Chicago, they’re either Folks or People.
Anyway, I’d often go into that Pilsen-neighborhood taco joint at, say, two in the morning for an after-carousing, late-night snack. At the door, I’d have to stand with my arms and legs spread and get patted down by a couple of heavily-armed, uniformed guards to make sure I wasn’t packing. I understood why it had to be done but I didn’t have to like it.
Similarly, when I’d go to Roosevelt High School basketball games up in the Albany Park neighborhood, I’d have to remove my vintage 1908-style Cubs baseball cap because caps weren’t allowed in the gym. Again, armed guards enforced the rule because the gangs in that neck of the woods wore caps of different colors and at different angles on their heads to demonstrate where their loyalties lay. Should, for instance, a blue-capped punk run into a red-capped punk in the gym, fists might fly.
Again, I hated being told what to do by armed guards even though it had to be.
The Kroger at Seminary Square here in Bloomington is being patrolled by armed guards. Now I know every big supermarket has one or two undercover shoppers lurking around, keeping an eye on likely shoplifters. I get it. Some people filch steaks because they’re hungry. Others, because they’re hooked on the thrill of it. Either way, the store doesn’t want to lose too much to shrinkage (and not the “Seinfeld” definition of the term, either).
The Seminary Square store is commonly referred to as the Kro-ghetto, a pejorative I hate. Especially as it contrasts with the moniker for the Kroger on the east side of town, known as the Kro-gucci. Ick. Ick to the point of retching.
What’s the need for armed guards at a grocery store that’s not stuck dab in the middle of a gangbanger shooting war? Is shrinkage there so pervasive that shoplifters must be subdued with lethal force? Have there been mass rumbles in the potato chip aisle? Have innocent bystander grocery cart-pushers been mugged and molested repeatedly?
I don’t know.
A woman I know who lives in McDoel Gardens around that Kroger in question tells me the neighborhood association is planning to meet sometime next week to discuss the matter. She asked me what I think they should do. She fears the n-hood assoc. will drag its feet and not do anything of consequence about the situation. I told her she, as a private citizen, should write letters to both the store manager and to Kroger’s corporate offices in Cincinnati asking why the troops have to be deployed. She seemed to like that idea.
The Kroger at Seminary Square sits right next to a small strip of parkland between Walnut and College avenues that’s been a locus for homeless encampments for years. Every once in a while, the Bloomington police sweep through the little park and roust the squatters, sometimes even confiscating what few possessions they own. I went through the park a few years ago, looking to interview people for a radio story I was doing about homelessness. I came to understand that the folks who squat there are a hard bunch. There’s enough drugs and menace and, frankly, mental illness to go around. Every once in a while, one or another denizen will take umbrage at something and start swinging a knife or an old hammer at somebody else. Blood is drawn, the story makes the Herald-Times, and everybody tsk-tsks about the homeless problem. Two days later, the incident is forgotten.
Perhaps the Kroger store manager wants to make sure the Seminary Square park milieu doesn’t migrate into the frozen food section.
This being a college town, there’s no shortage of earnest young critics who demand something be done about and for the homeless. As if there’s some acknowledged solution to a problem that has bedeviled every society since, I assume, the first cities sprang up in Egypt or the Fertile Crescent or what is now China.
Maybe the armed guards at Kroger are necessary. I’d be interested to learn how the store and its corporate parent justify it all.
Even if they do, I won’t like it.
