As I read through the articles about community informatics, I was reminded of a series of events that took place several years ago in my old neighborhood (surprise, surprise). As I drove down Damen one day, I encountered a police roadblock. There really was nothing too unusual about this, as the cops frequently terrorized community members. In fact, just the week before, a roadblock had been set up at one of the busiest intersections. Ostensibly, it was to conduct seatbelt checks, but everyone in the neighborhood knew the real reason for the roadblock: the cops were trying to ferret out undocumented residents (more commonly referred to as “illegal aliens”) for deportation.

Anyway, on this particular day, I got angry as I was forced to sit through the backed up traffic in order to deal with Chicago’s version of the Gestapo. As I neared the front of the line, I readied to berate the cop and give him a piece of my mind. However, this time, it was a different story. The cops were handing out flyers that featured a drawing of a man who had just raped two neighborhood middle school girls. I was horrified that something so brutal had occurred just two blocks from my apartment. I was also thankful (for the first time) for the police presence on my street. On the other hand, I was still pissed off because this was the first time in two years that I had seen the cops do anything close to “serve and protect” this community. I remember saying something to the officer along the lines of: “Oh, wow. I didn’t realize you guys actually did anything good for this neighborhood. Usually you just mess with the residents. What a nice deviation from the norm. I hope you catch the guy.”

I suppose I started thinking about this in regard to Community Informatics after I read the piece “Crisis, Framing & Community.” I began thinking about how information in my neighborhood was disseminated and how we could have responded to a crisis. The official response of authorities in the incident above were problematic in several ways. First, it seemed ridiculous that the same institution that had been oppressing the people was now attempting to assist them, and the total lack of trust between the community and the police made this a difficult stretch. To me, this indicates the absolute necessity of good working relationships, which might be why Pentlak was able to assist the farmers as they did. Second, much like the farmers in the article, most of the people in my neighborhood did not own computers. In fact, most of the people in my neighborhood did not speak English. So, while the idea of handing out flyers in a neighborhood in which people were not computer literate seemed a good one, the results were not as good as they could have been because the flyers were printed in English.