Chicago has never really reconciled its complicated relationship with drill and the unabashed youth culture that feels seen by it. A subgenre of rap, and arguably one of the most culturally significant and imitated exports out of Chicago, teenagers from some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods turned a generation’s daily bouts with gang violence, death, divestment and segregation into gritty and cool hooks for the masses to rap along to. Instead of acknowledging their pain, adults wagged their fingers. Most notably, former Mayor Rahm Emanuel banned a 19-year-old Chief Keef, the movement’s biggest voice, from performing in the city; ultimately setting a precedent for city leaders to ostracize drill from the city’s cultural canon.
Emmanuel Andre moved to Chicago in 2009, right around the time a gruesome video capturing a fight between two rival groups that killed 16-year-old honors student Derrion Albert went viral. Around this time, the early beginnings of drill emerged with guerrilla-style music videos. Street anthems, like PacMan’s “It’s A Drill” and Chief Keef’s “Love Sosa,” amplified drill into the mainstream, giving way to negative perceptions and nicknames for the city, like “Chi-raq.”
“We [adults] struggled with that,” Andre, critical of Emanuel’s decision, told The TRiiBE. “We struggled on how to take that in and how to listen to the stories that were being told to be able to help inform [the city’s response]. I think that was a missed opportunity, to be very honest with you.”
Last week, Andre invited The TRiiBE to his new digs on the fifth floor of Chicago’s City Hall. He’s less than a month into his role as Mayor Brandon Johnson’s new deputy mayor of community safety, an office created in 2023 to execute the Johnson administration’s vision to eradicate the root causes of crime and violence. Andre arrives with years of experience as an attorney and restorative justice leader who’s built community-centered approaches to safety.
A nation that couldn’t hear its own kids
Not only does Andre see the correlation between drill of the 2010s and today’s youth culture, but he also sees the way society still reduces Black youth to the “superpredator” trope, a criminological theory popularized by First Lady Hillary Clinton in the 1990s. The theory holds that Black youth are uncontrollable monsters who innately commit crime, and it incited nationwide panic and support for laws to try juveniles as adults.
“Even now, to this day, we see the ramifications of that,” Andre said.
That’s why he supports youth-centered ideas like GoodKids MadCity’s Peacebook: “It is not just the adults in suits that have the monopoly on safety,” he continued. “Safety is not just the absence of violence, but it’s the presence of belonging. And what does that mean, to really belong? Oftentimes that’s what young people gravitate to. When you put something in music or whatever other artform there is, you have a lived reality [and] somebody who understands your current reality, and that creates a sense of belonging, which we need to do a better job of.”
Andre, 47, grew up in Harlem in the 1980s, a time when New York City was buzzing with a street culture, namely hip-hop, proliferated by Black and brown youth, while marginalized communities simultaneously were decimated by the crack epidemic and the War on Drugs. Andre witnessed the impact of addiction and mass criminalization firsthand.
“I’ve had family members that struggled through addiction, so that affects you in a very different way,” Andre said. “There’s an isolation that comes with it as you’re trying to navigate and figure out resources.”
Combine that with the case of the Central Park Five, a group of Black and Latino teenagers wrongly convicted of raping a white woman in 1989. At the time, businessman Donald J. Trump called for the death penalty. Andre’s brothers knew some of the teenagers who were arrested.
“In a society where you can convince five young people to say some of the most heinous things one can think of, but that they weren’t a part of, what in the environment created that? How did we get there?” Andre said. “The idea of narrative and identity is so key… so when you talk about a War on Drugs, you start to feel like it’s an actual occupation, it’s communities being occupied, and then our responses start to be consistent [with] that.”
Andre developed his philosophies about community safety while in law school at the University of California, Berkeley. The Bay Area exposed him to restorative justice practices and, of course, the history of the Black Panther Party, which was founded in neighboring Oakland in 1966. “This idea of constantly looking back in order to look forward, you know. It’s that Sankofa bird,” he said.
After law school, Andre went back to New York for a couple of years before moving to Chicago as a defense attorney. He applied his restorative justice knowledge to Circles & Ciphers, a youth development organization he co-founded in 2010 with Ethan Ucker. The program focused on young people of color who had been impacted by the juvenile justice system. They used “peace circles” and hip-hop cyphers, led by youth, to build power, mentorship and conflict resolution skills.
In 2021, Andre joined the Office of the Cook County Public Defender under the leadership of Sharone Mitchell, Jr. There, he served as deputy of policy and strategic litigation.
Where good ideas come from
“We really focused on what we call Freedom Defense Centers, one of which is in Roseland and in Austin,” Andre said. “When I came to Chicago, that’s when I really wanted to be knee-deep in this idea of representing young people who are accused of the most serious crimes, but from that different lens of what’s needed to heal.”
He keeps a picture of Cheryl Graves and Ora Schub on his desk, within eyeshot. Both are considered the standard-bearers of the restorative justice movement.
“I mean, that’s why they’re constantly looking at me right there,” he said. “It’s sort of fundamental to who I am, trying to make sure I pay homage to some of the philosophies that they help instill.”
Andre’s appointment to deputy mayor of community safety came amid some controversy. Garien Gatewood, the first-ever to hold the position, was terminated in March. According to media reports, Gatewood was not given an explanation for his firing. Johnson announced Andre’s appointment in April. Notably, Chicago witnessed historic lows in crime during Gatewood’s time in office.
Andre said he couldn’t speak to what happened with Gatewood. However, he plans to continue with successes Gatewood brought to the community safety office.
“The office is not one to just want to lay on its laurels. One homicide is too many. One robbery is too many,” Andre said. “We’re responding to decades of disinvestment in certain communities, and for crime to be down, as much as I want to say a lot of it has to do with the leadership and vision, it’s really a comprehensive approach. It’s not just CPD [Chicago Police Department]. It’s not just members of the mayor’s office. It’s those community organizations that we’re able to allocate appropriate resources to. It’s several different community partners. I do think that has a big impact on [crime].”
For Andre, executing the mayor’s community safety vision looks like exploring the possibility of establishing an office of gun violence prevention. It looks like putting resources into victim services and gender-based violence work to help communities address grief. It’s expanding this idea of belonging and doing so from a lens that centers history.
“In Chicago, when you think about the Great Migration, what people were running from, and what they were coming to, how has that impacted how the legal system looks currently?” Andre said. “If we’re serious about root causes, we cannot not look at history.”
Therefore, he’s not aligned with punitive measures that only lead to the incarceration of youth. He stands with Johnson’s position on the “snap curfew” debate; instead of the curfew, Andre likes the mayor’s multifaceted approach of involving community groups and parents in preventing teen trends from taking a violent turn.
COVID generation looking for a place to belong
“We’re talking about survivors of COVID,” Andre said about a generation of youth directly impacted by the pandemic and remote learning. “This is a lot of young people whose baseline was through the digital age in terms of their communication, and now they want to be able to come together in this sort of organic way. As elders in the community, it is our responsibility to maintain safety, but young people wanting to get out of their neighborhoods, that’s a real reality of Chicago that sometimes we don’t talk about.”
One of the most important elements of his safety ecosystem is people understanding the roles they play in this public safety conversation.
“You’re The TRiiBE, so you’re part of the media, but what does that look like for people who get to frame the narrative? What would it look like to be victim centered? When are the times we’re recreating trauma by how we report things, by what we push forward [on] social media platforms?” Andre said. “There’s a good opportunity to go back and look at what does belonging look like? How do we be accountable to each other, whether that’s in our personal life or in our professional life. We all have a big responsibility to play in that.”
