Chicago, IL – 60 people observed the latest meeting of the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability (CCPSA), January 26 at Olive Harvey College. The agenda included a proposed policy stopping the Chicago Police Department from creating a new gang database; selecting members for the Non-citizens Advisory Council established by the Empowering Communities for Public Safety ordinance; and setting goals for the Chicago PD, the Police Board, and the Civilian Office of Police Accountability.

A dozen Police District Council candidates were in attendance. Two, Cherli Montgomery from the 7th District and Eric Russell from the 6th, spoke in the public comments section of the meeting.

“This day is historic because someone voted early for District Councils today,” Russell exclaimed. “The District Council elections were not promoted by the city or the police department. We got here because of the will of the people.”

Commissioner Oswaldo Gomez introduced the nominees to the Non-citizens Advisory Council, whose purpose is to represent immigrant communities who are targeted by police violence but would otherwise be excluded from the electoral process. The nominees are Glo Choi, Ariana Correa and Mayra Gomez Santana.

CCPSA President Anthony Driver spoke on the Chicago police department’s attempts to relaunch the gang database, a tool which has been used to harass Black and brown people based on dubious or outright false claims of gang affiliation. Chicago PD announced the new gang database as a special order to dodge the authority of the CCPSA, which has the power to approve or deny general orders. All previous gang databases have been general orders.

“The gang database is a racist policy. My father is in it and he's never been in a gang a day in his life,” Driver stated after telling his experience of how his father was more responsive than the police after Driver was robbed at gunpoint.

“It's disgusting that we've spent four months debating a policy that nobody wants in the first place,” Driver continued, before introducing a new policy mandating that any attempt to implement a system for tracking organized crime must be reviewed by the CCPSA. The policy was unanimously adopted by the commission.

The bulk of the meeting was spent announcing the goals set for the Chicago PD, Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) and the Police Board. The goals for COPA are focused on increased hiring, more community outreach and more efficient investigations into police crimes. The Police Board goals include better documentation and more public meetings, and the goals for the police department include greater transparency and consent decree compliance. The goals will be released in full before the next CCPSA meeting in February.

COPA Chief Andrea Kersten was present at the meeting and accepted the goals set for her department. Police Board President Ghian Foreman sent a statement to express commitment to the goals as well.

Attendees were fully expecting to come into the meeting without an agreement from the police department, and Commissioners Cliff Nellis and Beth Brown explained that the police department repeatedly disputed the authority of the CCPSA to set its goals. However, the department ultimately ended up agreeing to adopt the goals on the morning of the CCPSA meeting.

Police Superintendent David Brown claimed to be in full compliance with the Empowering Communities for Public Safety (EPCS) ordinance and blamed the resistance to the goals, which the Chicago Police Department is mandated by ECPS to follow, on the city's Law Department.

“Lies! Lies! Lies!” shouted Eric Russell, before walking out of the meeting.

The Chicago Police and the Law Departments’ resistance to the goals set by the CCPSA is another example of the ruling class in Chicago fighting against democratic control of the police, and a preview of the challenges the CCPSA and District Councils will face in trying to hold the police accountable. Overcoming these challenges will require the consistent participation of the masses of Chicago's working and oppressed people.

The next CCPSA meeting is on Thursday, February 23, less than a week ahead of the District Council elections on February 28.

#ChicagoIL #CommunityCommissionForPublicSafetyAndAccountability

Chicago, IL – Monday, November 21 marked an important day in the fight for community control of Chicago’s police on two fronts.

First, Monday was the last day for candidates running for District Council to file to be on February’s upcoming ballot for election. The newly created positions, established by the ordinance for Empowering Communities for Public Safety (ECPS), are a central part of the mechanism to move towards community control over the police in Chicago. Once elected, the District Councilors will represent their communities on policing issues and implement public safety initiatives.

As petitioning season came to a close, 71 candidates who worked with the ECPS coalition made it onto the ballot, with 122 candidates filing in total.

Second, the Interim Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability (CCPSA) hosted their third public meeting to discuss the Chicago Police Department’s proposal for a Criminal Enterprise Information System (CEIS). This system would replace the police department’s former “gang database, which has been heavily criticized for racial profiling and discrimination. The database was brought under further scrutiny after civilians filed a lawsuit against the police department, triggering an investigation by the Office of the Inspector General. If implemented, CEIS would continue to collect and maintain data on “gang activity” and affiliations.

The Chicago Police Department was set to launch CEIS by this past October. However, the Community Commission stepped in to halt the launch, demanding meetings with the superintendent and the mayor in order to answer pressing questions from both the commission and the public. After several of those meetings went unscheduled, the Community Commission turned their monthly public meeting into a public hearing on the CEIS.

Anthony Driver, the president of the CCPSA, called the meeting, which took place over Zoom, to order shortly after 6:30 p.m. The commission began by hearing public comment on CEIS. 13 people spoke in total, including six candidates for District Council, most of who are running in districts on the South and West Sides of the city.

Jim Blissit III, a district council candidate for District 3, congratulated commissioners and gave kudos on the calling of the meeting and forcing CPD to be more transparent to the public. He urged commissioners to stand against the CEIS database. Speaking on CPD’s classification of residents as gang members via racial profiling, Blissit stated plainly: “There’s no need to continue to trust our enemies to categorize us.”

Krystal Peters, a candidate for district council in the 7th District, also spoke out against the newer version of the gang database. Peters stressed that CEIS would do more harm than good, and that the data does not support that gangs are the biggest source of violent crime in the city.

“The gang database has been widely criticized for years,” said Dod McColgan, a co-chair for the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. McColgan connected the inaccuracy and inefficiency of the gang database to higher rates of family separation, unemployment and “unnecessary interactions with police that lead to trauma, disability and loss of life.”

After public comment, the Chicago Police Department gave a presentation on CEIS and took questions from commissioners and the public. Major points of concern over the database included what criteria made someone eligible to be added to the database, how residents would be notified if they were added to it, and how the use of data gathered by CEIS would perpetuate and further institutionalize racial profiling by CPD.

After two hours of question and answer, the meeting concluded with an agreement from the Chicago Police Department that there is no decided timeline for the database to launch.

The meeting was a culmination of a stage in the fight for community control of police in Chicago. When District Council members are elected in February 2023, they will then nominate new members of the Community Commission and help determine the course of the commissions’ efforts going forward. This will bring the people of Chicago into a democratic decision-making process about who polices their communities and how their communities are policed.

#ChicagoIL #InJusticeSystem #CommunityCommissionForPublicSafetyAndAccountability

Chicago, IL – In true Chicago fashion, Mayor Lori Lightfoot had expected to easily ramrod through a police reform bill this week that would have affirmed her grip on power. If passed, the “Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability” ordinance would have left the entire police accountability system in her control, rendering it at the discretion of the executive branch whether to hold itself accountable for abuses of power committed by its police department, rather than giving communities terrorized by police tyranny the power to defend their rights.

In a stunning turnabout, the mayor’s efforts were stymied by mass pressure and a movement for transformative change that has demanded a profound, far-reaching and necessary alteration of the power dynamic in one of the most racist cities in the nation: the movement for community control of the police. As a result of that movement, and the mayor’s own avarice, the vote for the bill was called off at the last minute yesterday morning by the chair of the city’s Public Safety Committee, which would have otherwise sent the bill on to a full vote in the city council.

That the mayor’s proposed oversight bill is farcical is best judged by none other than Lori Lightfoot herself. In her former role as chair of the Police Accountability Task Force, Lightfoot wrote of the need for a new approach to police accountability, stating, “A coalition of community groups has proposed the creation of a Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC) to establish direct community oversight over CPD. The proposal here strives to honor the principles established by CPAC. We recommend that, as soon as possible, the City Council hold public hearings with the goal of developing the specific details of the Board – based on direction of the community – and selection of the Board members within 90 days of the start of the hearings.”

Lightfoot penned this 2016, in the wake of the murder of teenager Laquan McDonald and then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s cover-up of that murder to ensure his re-election. Now that she is mayor, how does Lightfoot’s proposed police reform ordinance “honor the principles established by CPAC”? Simply put, it denigrates them. Under the mayor’s bill, communities remain without representation to decide how Lightfoot’s police force should be controlled. Under the mayor’s bill, everyone with power over police accountability is appointed by, and accountable to, only the mayor herself.

And in stark contrast to Lightfoot’s demand in 2016, not a single community hearing on police reform has been scheduled under her watch. Instead, secret deals between her office and well-funded NGOs are being struck behind closed doors to make sure she stays in control. When asked why he hasn’t scheduled any such hearing, even though he had planned to, Chris Taliaferro, the mayor’s choice for chair of the Public Safety Committee, the body responsible for creating legislation related to policing, told supporters of CPAC that it is not up to him to schedule a hearing. That left them to ask, “Whose decision is it and why was it your decision back in November 2019 – when you said you would – but not now?”

In response to the mayor’s maneuvers, the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression has been waging a steady pressure campaign to demand actual community involvement in determining how communities can have power over the police. That includes members of the Chicago Teachers Union, SEIU Local 73, United Working Families, Democratic Socialists of America, Black Lives Matter, Trinity United Church of Christ, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and Standing Up for Racial Justice flooding Taliaferro’s office with phone calls demanding that he schedule a public hearing in the community to discuss CPAC, which some 60,000 Chicagoans have already demanded that their aldermen pass and which has been introduced into city council three times since 2016. (A newly revised version will be introduced for a fourth time on March 18). In addition, some 20 legal experts from the University of Chicago and Northwestern University law schools are set to deliver to Taliaferro’s committee an open letter of support for CPAC as the solution to ending police abuse. This follows in the wake of an op-ed on CPAC published by two prominent legal experts in the Chicago Sun-Times the night before the mayor’s proposed stealth vote.

It didn’t help that the mayor’s own quest for power got in the way of her plans. Just before the vote was scheduled, the Grassroots Alliance for Police Accountability (GAPA) coalition that has been working with her in secret came face to face with the reality of an enemy with unbridled ambitions, as Lightfoot abruptly decided to strip from their proposed “Community Commission” the power to make police department policy. This was the last holdout for GAPA, as they have otherwise given away every other power for enforcing control over the CPD to the mayor. When the mayor made her move, GAPA cried foul. Together with pressure from CPAC’s supporters, it was enough to grind the vote to a halt.

As GAPA allows Lightfoot to take more power from the community and put it in her hands, more and more of its members have left the coalition, the compromises made weakening their bill to a shell of what it once was. GAPA’s name is now synonymous with the mayor’s naked power grab. Along with the last vestiges of any power the “Community Commission” might have had, so too has gone whatever remained of the Lightfoot of 2016. The only option left for GAPA at this point is to join forces with the oldest, broadest and most militant mass movement for community control of the police in Chicago and the country, and begin demanding real power for Black, Chicano/Mexicano and Puerto Rican communities to hold the police accountable – through CPAC. Faced with a mayor who rode the coattails of a police accountability movement in order to get elected, but who will not abide by any threat to her authority now that she’s in office, what do they have to lose?

#ChicagoIL #OppressedNationalities #PeoplesStruggles #AfricanAmerican #ChicanoLatino #PuertoRico #PoliceBrutality #RacismInTheCriminalJusticeSystem #PoliticalRepression #civilianPoliceAccountabilityCouncilCPAC #MayorLoriLightfoot #CommunityCommissionForPublicSafetyAndAccountability