Related items:

• Don Brown Letter of 4/9/04
• Mission Statement, Margate Park Safety Committee
• Don Brown Letter of 1/12/04

The members of the Margate Park Safety Committee would like to address the following illegal activities that we believe take place in our neighborhood parks on what appear to be a large and ever increasing scale, especially during the summer months. These illegal activities include:

• Camping overnight
• Camping overnight for several days at a time
• Camping overnight for several weeks at a time
• Health violations including:
  • public urination
  • public defecation
  • the use of the public drinking fountains as bathing facilities

We are concerned that these activities are going on unimpeded, and that they appear to be increasing in magnitude. We believe these activities are a health problem for all who use the park, including the violators. We also believe that these activities could possibly provide a conductive environment for other parties to begin using the park to carry out illegal activities such as drug dealing and prostitution. Furthermore, our neighborhood seems to have this problem to a far greater degree than other city neighborhoods along the lakefront.

The Margate Park Safety Committee would like to set the following goals for the coming year to address the problems listed above.

• To ask the Chicago Police Department to provide nightly sweeps of the park area to discourage and stop the overnight camping.
• To work with the Chicago Police Department to help us improve our ability to accurately describe in the parks where the violations listed above are occurring, so that a police response can be implemented.
• To ask that area shelters provide a safe environment for those who want and need to use the shelters.
• To ask that more effective and coordinated delivery of City services and social services aimed at both prevention and intervention for those in need be provide in our area.

We plan to work with and ask the help of Alderman Smith's and Alderman Schiller's offices, the City of Chicago Park District, the City of Chicago Health and Human Services Department, the Chicago Police Department and the Mayor's office to implement solutions to these ongoing and increasing problems in our neighborhood as soon as possible.