Northwest Side's St. Patrick's Day Parade Is Dedicated To Chicago Police This Year
By Mae Rice in Arts & Entertainment on Feb 24, 2016 5:05PM
This March, the Northwest Side Irish's annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade will be dedicated to first responders: military personnel, veterans, police and firefighters.
The parade, the organization’s thirteenth one, will especially honor police: the founder and retired President of the Fraternal Order of Policemen (FOP), John Dineen, will be the parade's Grand Marshall.
The FOP, the union that represents Chicago police officers, and the city's police force overall, have come under scrutiny in the wake of the Laquan McDonald police shooting case for how they handle such shootings.
Despite a previous report that quoted parade organizer Elizabeth Murray-Belcaster saying that this year's dedication was a "no-brainer" in light of McDonald-related police brutality protests, Murray-Belcaster told Chicagoist that the dedication was settled before the McDonald video was released.
“We made this decision [about the dedication and the Grand Marshall] before all the protests started [here about Laquan McDonald],” Elizabeth Murray-Belcaster, a founder of The Northwest Side Irish, told Chicagoist. “Because in every community, throughout the country… particularly this year, there’s been a lot of hardships with the police, due to the protests.”
Murray-Belcaster mentioned gang violence as another hardship police departments had faced.
The Northwest Side specifically—a region that includes suburbs like Norwood Park and Park—doesn’t struggle with much gang violence, Murray-Belcaster said, though “there’s pockets in every community.” However, she explained that a lot of police officers who live in the areas serve neighborhoods where gang violence is an entrenched problem.
The choice of Dineen as Grand Marshall, she added, was linked to the parade's history as well as the parade's dedication to first responders.
“The Dineen family… was one of the founding families of the parade when we started it,” Murray-Belcaster said.
The other founding family behind the annual parade is her own. She and her father, both of them Irish-American, founded the organization 13 years ago in memory of her mother, Murray-Belcaster said. The parade is always dedicated to a cause, she added.
This year is no different, though it will be bigger than early parades. Murray-Belcaster said in the early years, attendance was about 200; current attendance is closer to 50,000.
The March 13 parade kicks off at noon at 6634 W. Raven St.