With crime increased citywide, residents in one of Chicago’s wealthiest neighborhoods have been chipping in to hire private security guards to patrol their 16 square block section of Lake View a half-mile west of Wrigley Field. Cubs President Theo Epstein and his wife are among those who have been donating to the cause.
The Epsteins have been among “dozens” of families who have contributed to the Southport Community Alliance, a not-for-profit group formed in June to pay for patrols of homes bounded by West Grace Street, West Roscoe Street, and Southport and Ashland avenues.
Marie Whitney, Epstein’s wife, is one of three directors of the organization, according to state records.
Besides a rise in burglaries and robberies in their neighborhood, the Epsteins understandably have other concerns about safety.
According to a recent ESPN The Magazine story, Theo typically walked the nine or so blocks to work at Wrigley Field. In 2012, a mentally ill Boston-area woman who had developed a fixation on Theo arrived on the Epsteins’ doorstep and chatted up a wary Marie, before heading to the ballpark in search of Theo.
A Cubs spokesman declined to answer questions about the Epsteins’ involvement with the alliance.
At a community meeting on Monday to discuss the program and its progress, Epstein was among those in the audience. He told others that he’d been impressed with how the program has been working. He told the gathering the motivation for the program was “gunshots.” He said, stressing that he was not referring to his family’s home, “We started to have shell casings on the ground near kids’ bedrooms” .
In an email to the Sun-Times, Martin Doyle, an attorney who also has been listed as a director, noted, “Everyone in the area, whether a donor or not, gets the benefit of the added security from the patrols. There is no minimum donation.”
Doyle added that the neighborhood group wants “to do everything we can to ensure that our neighborhood is safe for the families who live here (our neighborhood has a lot of young children).”
By Prakriti Neogi
