I still think about walking up to the Taste of Chicago in 2022.
The first thing I noticed was how planned it was. Somebody had thought through how thousands of people were going to move through that space, and it showed at every turn. There were officers present, and I talked to a few of them on my way in and again on my way out. They were friendly, and they were close enough to see me come and go both times.
The line was long. I waited a while. And I stood in that line laughing with people I didn't know, watching young folks pass a joint and sip their little to-go cups while they waited their turn. Nobody was rushed and nobody was hostile. Then you got to the front, and the process was unlike anything I'd been through at a food festival — full metal detectors, real screening, staff who clearly knew what they were doing.
I never felt unsafe. Not once. It never felt like suspicion. It felt like somebody had planned for us.
I learned later why the screening was there. Four days before I stood in that line, a man climbed onto a rooftop in Highland Park and fired into a Fourth of July parade. Seven people died. Chicago couldn't undo that, and honestly, metal detectors at a gate wouldn't have stopped a man on a roof. They screened everybody anyway. They changed how people walked in, in four days, in response to something the change wouldn't even have caught.
On Sunday three people were killed at the Bite of Seattle. Others were wounded, including a child. A young person is in custody, and our city has spent the last day watching itself on national news.
I know how this story gets told from here. A child becomes a monster and the rest of us become spectators. That version is easier to tell, and it doesn't make anybody's son safer.
I've spent years around young people at risk, and around the tutors and school staff and program leaders who show up for them. I also know these kids outside of the work — in my family, in my friends' homes. What happened is wrong. I'm not confused about that. It just hurts to watch, because I know what they're carrying and how little there is to help them set it down.
So when I see people asking where are the parents — I understand the impulse. But the honest answer is that a lot of them have been asking for help for a long time. Supporting those parents is the work. Family intervention can't keep being the afterthought. A parent who finally gets a call back changes more than most of what gets funded, and that support rarely looks the way people picture it. Sometimes it's a stipend. A ride. One adult who keeps showing up and doesn't disappear.
And I keep coming back to the gate. I've seen Seattle Center fence and screen for other events. I don't know why an event drawing hundreds of thousands of people over a weekend wouldn't get the same. The Bite is run now by a California-based company, three years in. I'd want to hear what they observed and what they'd change. That's not a blame question — it's a planning question, and this city should be asking it out loud while people are still paying attention.
This has already been a heavy stretch, and something like this reaches past the people who were there. It follows the ones who weren't, too. I don't wish that on anybody, and too many people here already know exactly how it feels.
If you or someone in your house needs support right now, King County has regional resources — behavioral health, crisis response, victim services, youth and family programs. Worth looking up, and worth passing along.
