For the last few days, I’ve been trying to think up a worthwhile way for Chicago to commemorate the life and legacy of Pat Hill, the great citizen activist, who died of cancer on September 3. She was 66—way too young.
Born and raised on the south side, Hill graduated from Harlan High. She was a high school track star, coming close to qualifying for the 1968 Olympics in the long jump. In the 70s and 80s, she taught physical education at several public high schools. She became a Chicago police officer in 1986, at the age of 35—in order to, as she put it, “fight the repression in the force.”
“Joe’s cool,” Hill once told me. “He always calls me Patty. And I send him a Kwanzaa card every year. I also gave him a red, black, and green liberation flag to put in his office.”
“Police can’t do it all,” she told me. “There’s a thing called ‘integrated paradigm.’ That means you take all the agencies—police, health care, social service—and have them work in an integrated manner. In the case of Englewood—which I know a lot about ’cause I’ve worked here so long—you have lot of health issues, like mental illness, that become social issues ’cause they’re not treated.
She said Chicago didn’t deserve the games because of its unresolved history of torturing suspects in police custody: “You dishonor the spirit of the Olympics by bringing it to the torture capital of the Western world,” she once told me. Pat Hill was unafraid to tell it like it is. Perhaps adopting her ideas about sane and compassionate policing would be the greatest tribute of all. v
