Woman calls police on congressional candidate Mike Simmons as he canvassed in apartment building

State senator and current congressional candidate Mike Simmons was reported to Chicago police while canvassing for votes in the North Side Buena Park neighborhood Friday.

In a video, Simmons is in the stairwell of an apartment building while a woman speaks on the phone. Simmons asks if she's on the phone with the police, but she doesn't respond and continues speaking on the phone.

"I'm not going to argue," Simmons says in the video. "I'm gonna let you know that it is against the law to call the police on an elected official who's knocking doors, I know because I passed the law in 2021. So if you'd like me to leave the building, I would leave the building, but I am so disappointed in how you chose to handle the situation at a time when police have been known to get into deadly altercations with people of color. I would expect more from my neighbors."

Simmons had explained that he was canvassing in his campaign for Congress and that he served the building's residents as their current state senator, he said. The woman asked for documentation from Simmons and the volunteers, and she ignored him when he told her to look up his state Senate website, Simmons said.

"She stopped talking to us, she literally just grabbed her phone and started dialing," Simmons said. "She would not say a word to me."

Police responded to the scene and Simmons spoke to them.

"She then called the police and ignored all attempts at a conversation by Simmons and the volunteers with him — all people of color," the release said. "After Simmons left the building on his own, Chicago Police did report to the scene a few minutes later and Simmons spoke to them about the incident."

Simmons sponsored a bill categorizing police calls on Black people as a hate crime when there is no active threat. Simmons said he was inspired to run for state Senate by protests after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. In his view, Simmons says he narrowly escaped a similar outcome because of fraught relations between Black people and police.

"When we got outside, what just flashed through my mind was images of dead Black people in interactions with police," he said in the release. "I spoke up on this because I don't want to be complicit in the status quo that can lead to a Black person being killed and just becoming a statistic."

He's currently campaigning in a crowded field to replace retiring U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky to represent the state's 9th Congressional District. If elected, Simmons would be the first Black representative from the district.

He is the first Black state senator to represent the 7th District, which includes parts of the North Side, including Rogers Park, Uptown and Lincoln Square, and he's the first openly gay member of the state Senate.

Chicago police didn't confirm the report.

No arrests were made.