| What | This collaborative series is a peek into the issues facing law enforcement and community relations within our urban communities. |
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| When | We will begin Part I of this collaborative series with a snapshot of the early origins of modern day policing, setting the stage for a deeper dive into the present day issues in Part II of this series. |
| Who | This Source Card overview begins with a look at a man named Robert Peel who may not be a household name to many of us, but as it turns out, in many ways he may well be the founding father of today’s modern day police force as we know it. |
| Why | To facilitate a collaborative process that promotes just a little more understanding from all sides on a complicated set of issues facing our country’s urban centers. And along the way, with your help and input, incorporate some of these themes and issues into our Back of the Yards comic series. |
With this Source Card collaboration, we will be covering various topics related to law enforcement & community relations. We’ll start this ongoing collaboration with a peek at the origins of our modern police forces, eventually transitioning to some of the many challenges our police forces face today.
And as we cover these various topics, we will invite you to the same, either on your own or collaboratively with others. And we hope to not only collaborate with urban youth and their academic administrators, but also other subject matters experts along the way, including police officers themselves.
That’s the hope anyway. But we’ll see exactly where this collaboration goes together. For now, we’ll simply kick things off with a peek into the early origins of our modern-day police force and some guy named Robert Peel...
As we cover in the brief introduction above, much of the credit for establishing the modern-day state police framework that exists today can be attributed to an English politician from the early 19th century named Robert Peel. And on that score, one can’t help but wonder what our man Peel would he be thinking if he were alive today…
Of course, to say a lot has changed since Robert Peel’s day would be just a bit of an understatement.
In Peel’s day, the newly formed police (nicknamed “Bobbies” in honor of our man Robert Peel) would patrol metropolitan areas carrying only wooden batons and their most common encounters would be drunkenness and street fighting, with the hope all along that their mere presence would significantly reduce such crimes …
In the summer of 2020, total Chicago shootings that July were at a 75% increase as compared to previous July. And as I write this blog entry, just over the last weekend alone here in Chicago, at least 49 people were shot, seven fatally.
Violence in our cities is nothing new. And to be fair, the fact of the matter is that violent crime within the United States has actually been on a steady decline over the last 15 years. But that shouldn’t in any way diminish the very real challenges within our urban centers today, as further evidenced by a murder rate that was up 16.1 percent in America’s 25 largest cities in 2020.
And it is this volatility that police officers walk right into the front lines every day. As Chicago’s former superintendent David Brown put it just after a shooting of 3 Chicago officers, “when they leave home, they leave their loved ones and put their stars on and risk everything. They risk everything protecting us all.”
All of this exacerbated by modern day drug enforcement laws that the police are, of course, further tasked to enforce on the front lines. All of which tends to put our officers in the position where they must “produce” in order to comply with their job requirements, but in so doing, often an adversarial relationship is collectively formed within the very same communities they are assigned to patrol and protect.
In his book Justice Without Trial, Law Enforcement in Democratic Society (1967, latest edition 2015), sociologist Jerome Skolnick maintains that any job description that calls upon a person to exercise decision-making authority in the face of physical danger may simply be asking too much of the practitioner.
Combine that danger with the systematic pressures police officers feel from above and from within, it would seem to be a wholly undeniable understatement to say that the job of a police officer is a profoundly difficult one.
But as we will try to further explore as this collaboration develops, the same systematic pressures that our police officers feel from above and within, as they also put their lives on the line daily, may also be contributing to the widely disproportionately negative impacts within our black and brown communities that exist today, which are equally undeniable.
As part of this collaboration, and to help inform the creation of two new police characters for our Back of the Yards comic series, our plan is to facilitate an open dialogue between participating youth and both active and retired police officers. Excerpts from this open dialogue (with supplemental comic illustrations) will be shared in the Supplement of Issue 3 and may even find itself in the actual dialogue of Back of the Yards comic scenes.
You can help us facilitate this collaboration by considering the prompts below. In addition, we have created a workbook that you can access by clicking the yellow button below, which will provide additional context for the prompts below, as well as space to take your notes if helpful.
And once you have taken your notes and given consideration to the prompts below, you can submit your suggestions to us through the "Let's Collaborate" form at the end of this Studio Card page.
As we reach out to police officers (both active and retired) to participate in this dialogue collaborations, what questions would you consider asking a police officer?
From a law enforcement officer’s perspective, what opening questions would you ask a participating youth?
Do you have any other suggestions that may help make this open dialogue collaboration more beneficial / productive for both participating youth and officers?
Societies rely on law and order to ensure safety, stability, and the protection of public welfare. Yet, in a democracy, these needs must always be balanced against the risk of excessive state authority—particularly the power of the police to silence or control dissent. Finding that balance has been a persistent challenge in the United States and beyond, especially within our urban communities during times of social tension and political unrest.
Within Chicago, where this collaborative comic project was born, this tension has long been evidident. The Chicago Lager Riot of 1855 and the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention protests both highlight tensions between maintaining public order and protecting civil liberties.
During the Chicago Lager Riot, working-class immigrants protested strict temperance laws and Sunday saloon closures imposed by city leaders. Police used force to suppress demonstrations, revealing how state authority could be used to enforce moral or political agendas at the expense of public dissent.
More than a century later, during the 1968 Democratic Convention, antiwar demonstrators clashed with Chicago police, whose aggressive tactics—widely televised—sparked national debate over “law and order” and the limits of police power.
The 1968 Democratic National Convention unfolded amid intense social and political turmoil. The Vietnam War, civil rights struggles, and the recent assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy had deeply divided the nation. Protests for peace and justice clashed with demands for “law and order,” making Chicago a focal point of the era’s unrest and polarization.
Both events illustrate the enduring struggle in American democracy to balance the state’s responsibility to preserve order with citizens’ rights to protest and express opposition to government policy. They also reveal the strain such conflicts place on police officers themselves, who are often caught between enforcing authority, maintaining public safety, and navigating the moral and political pressures of their time.
Long before he entered the collaborative scene with us as Creative Director at Made Collaborative, Len Kody worked with other comic artists – including participating project artist, Tony Maldonado – to develop a working comic anthology depicting the tumultuous events and characters leading to the 1968 Chicago convention protests. That comic is an ongoing creative work by Len and other artists (over 150 pages to date), but within the original comic storyline, Len created two fictional characters – both of whom were Chicago police officers.
Jimmy O’Herron and Frank Zomksi are two characters created and featured in Len’s Chicago 1968 comic. Both officers rooted in their own Chicago history, one Irish the other Polish, and both finding themselves caught in the social powder keg that was the 1968 Chicago protests. And it is these two officers that will help to inform a collaboration we will present to you just below.
To help set this collaborative stage below, Len has graciously allowed us to cut three excerpts from the existing 1968 Chicago comic, each of which feature one or both of the O’Herron and Zomski characters, which you can access by clicking the yellow button below.
So now we enter the meat of this initial featured collaboration – the creation of two new police officer characters. And to help facilitate the development of these two new characters, we point you to a digital template that we previously developed. You can scan the QR Code on the right or use the link below to access this Studio Card template;
As you will see, this Studio Card collaborative template walks you through a simple 5 step process to shape your character ideas into a character ready for the Back of the Yards comic series.
The general framework of this digital character template is:
Step One – Creating Your Character’s Background and Basic Traits
Step Two – Developing Your Character’s Personality
Step Three – Developing Your Character’s Archetypes & Core Values
Step Four – You Character’s Biography & Other Interesting Facts
Some special pieces may be selected to appear in the Back of the Yards comic book. iPad/iPhone users, submit images from FILES (NOT from Photo Library).
Some special pieces may be selected to appear in the Back of the Yards comic book.
UPLOAD YOUR IMAGES BELOW
Some special pieces may be selected to appear in the Back of the Yards comic book.
UPLOAD YOUR IMAGES BELOW
Some special pieces may be selected to appear in the Back of the Yards comic book.
UPLOAD YOUR IMAGES BELOW
Some special pieces may be selected to appear in the Back of the Yards comic book.
UPLOAD YOUR IMAGES BELOW
Collaborate with professional artists by contributing some artwork of your own! Some special pieces may be selected to appear in the Back of the Yards comic book.
UPLOAD YOUR IMAGES BELOW
