Day 22 – Red Bud to Waterloo, IL

The town of Waterloo is in mourning. From one side of town to the other, some three or four miles in all, half-masted flags and homages to Illinois State Patrol’s Nick Hopkins made the sense of loss palpable. “It’s really crazy,” a woman at Bootsie’s Coffee told me. “He was Waterloo born and raised, a young family, just all based around here.” Hopkins was shot and killed in the line of duty on Friday. The weekend was supposed to be a homecoming celebration for Waterloo’s high school, but instead it became a wake. Hopkins’s body was returned to Waterloo for burial yesterday.

A reverential tone surrounds Hopkins’s life and work in every article written about him. The ISP’s acting director said, “Nick Hopkins was a bright light in this world.” His church pastor recalls, “His problem, I always told him, was that he said yes too much. He was involved with everything… “He found joy in small things… He loved helping.” A local shop owner shared that, “He loved his family. Spoke a lot about them. He was very proud.” Hopkins, married with four-year-old twins and an infant daughter, was an alderman in Waterloo, a talented carpenter who donated his talents to his church, and a successful businessman on the side, flipping houses in Waterloo.

Hopkins served on ISP’s SWAT team. His squad had been delivering a warrant before 5:30am on Friday morning in East St. Louis when he was shot. Details to this point are sketchy; WTSP summarizes it as “there was an exchange of gunfire and he was struck.” A 45-year-old East St. Louis resident has already been arrested and charged with the killing.

Hopkins is the fourth ISP trooper to be killed this year, the first time that this has ever occurred. The US Attorney for the Southern District of Illinois declared that, “At a time when law enforcement is under attack, the U.S Attorney’s Office is here to say enough.” He added, “We also condemn in the strongest possible terms the despicable, cowardly act that took his life.”

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I return to East St. Louis tomorrow, having been there once before. Many years ago, on band tour, we paused briefly in ESL to call our show booker before crossing into Missouri. I rang him up from a payphone. “Hey,” I said, “we’re in East St. Louis now–just wanted to check in.” After a pregnant pause, our dude replied: “You’re in East St. Louis… and you’re alive?” Recognition dawned on me, and I nervously joked, “maybe I shouldn’t be wearing this red bandana?” (Note: I was indeed wearing a red bandana.)

I have twice today been warned by concerned locals about me walking through East St. Louis. The events of the last few days, I’m sure, haven’t helped, but these fears are decades in the making. East St. Louis is a town steeped in decline, so far removed from better times that the youngest generations have never known them.

Hopkins’s squad delivered its warrant to a house on the 1400 block of North 42nd Street. How much are those houses worth? Zillow doesn’t offer much help, but the best estimates one can glean range from $21,000 to $28,000. What is most striking, though, when perusing houses in the area is just how many of them are in pre-foreclosure, with the owner under water. These are neighborhoods in the process of total collapse.

And so you have Officer Hopkins, rebuilding his community with his own hands, profiting off of the flipping of houses in Waterloo, killed in the neighboring community of East St. Louis, a place easily dismissed from the outside as beyond repair.

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There’s a thread running from Carbondale to Chester to Waterloo. The cries of Justice for Molly in Carbondale carry an explicit condemnation of the police–some for a suspected conflict of interest, others for incompetence resulting in the failure to bring the killer to justice. The prominent cases in Chester of innocent men rotting in Menard prison speak to the other end of the spectrum, overzealous police and prosecutors placing punishment over justice.

It’s easy to look at Molly’s case and bemoan the insufficient attention devoted to the case, translating that into a call for more police, more resources, more funding. It’s equally simple to stack Molly and Menard and demand better training, better staffing, and higher standards, attacking the Blue Wall and the capricious nature of some investigatory practices.

Add in the case of Hopkins, and the lines are drawn ever more indelibly. It’s a war on police, the US attorney asserts. The life of a police officer is ever more dangerous, made even more perilous by the heightened calls for police accountability. The counter-argument zooms out from Hopkins, arguing that this isn’t about individual figures but rather about long-term trends, most notably the breakdown of trust for police on communal levels. Why is an armed force dropping in to deliver a warrant under the cover of darkness, so early on a Friday morning? To what degree are police officers getting caught in the middle of bad policy, poor management, and social dissolution–and then, in turn, lacking the training necessary to manage those high stakes conditions?

The politicization of policing is shameful, as the failure to acknowledge the causal link between the very real challenges facing police officers today and the policies of law enforcement over the past five decades precludes any sort of effective reform. And the pandering call to get even tougher on crime only further endangers on-the-ground officers. 

Want to honor Officer Hopkins and promote safety in East St. Louis? Start by trying to figure out a) why houses cost $20,000 and b) why it seems like nobody there can afford them.