Mayor Lightfoot had threatened to lock the teachers out as of Tuesday morning if they did not show up for class in person. The teachers have been continuing to teach classes remotely despite increasing pressure from the city to return in person. Monday evening, right on the eve of the lockout and possible strike, Mayor Lightfoot backed down yet again and announced that the lockouts would not happen today and that for the next 48 hours talks would continue to happen and classes would remain remote. This represents another victory for the teachers who have repeatedly refused Mayor Lightfoot’s ultimatums and pushed the date further back through collective action.

CTU President Jesse Sharkey has said repeatedly that the teachers don’t want to strike, and do want to keep teaching, but need to do that remotely until there is an agreement that would allow schools to reopen safely. President Sharkey said, “We are not locked out today or tomorrow because of our members’ unity, their commitment to their school communities and their fearless solidarity.” Sharkey went on to say, “None of this is easy. The uncertainty and risk our educators, our students and our families confront all take a toll. And all of the progress we’ve made to date in winning real gains at the table is possible because of the tireless work and dedication of our rank-and-file members, our strike captains, our delegates, our parents, our allies and ordinary Chicagoans who trust us to do what’s right by our schoolchildren.”

The Chicago Teachers Union has gone on strike against CPS twice in the last ten years and has voted to authorize a strike if needed in order to keep students, staff and teachers safe during the pandemic. Talks are now set to resume for the next 48 hours, during which time teaching will continue to be done remotely.

#ChicagoIL #PeoplesStruggles #ChicagoTeachersUnion #TeachersUnions #MayorLoriLightfoot

Many classrooms appeared as if they had not been cleaned since the district’s initial shutdown last March, while in others, window treatments remained covered in dust or with windows that would not stay open at all, despite CPS’ claim that “we worked to ensure every classroom has a working window or a mechanical ventilation system to dilute air particles that may have viruses or bacteria and allow old air to move out of the classroom.”

One school was asking workers whose rooms had no portable HEPA filters to sign a release saying they would not hold the school “liable for any health consequence of been [sic] in the building.”

A common concern was the Intellipure Compact air purifiers provided by the district, which work “best if used in spaces below 500 sq. feet,” according to the company website, but are being deployed by CPS to ‘protect’ much larger classrooms.

“CPS and the mayor are saying that they desperately want to open schools, but in many buildings, they’ve done nothing to make conditions any safer – and that’s without the threat of a pandemic,” Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Jesse Sharkey said. “Parents, students, teachers, community groups and elected officials aren’t demanding that CPS and the mayor keep buildings closed; they’re demanding that they exhaust all resources in making schools as safe as possible before reopening.”

More than half of the teachers scheduled to start teaching directly from unsafe school buildings on Monday chose to work remotely.

#ChicagoIL #PeoplesStruggles #ChicagoTeachersUnion #ChicagoPublicSchools #PublicSectorUnions #TeachersUnions #MayorLoriLightfoot

Previously, Mayor Lightfoot told press that she’d asked for a direct meeting with Young, saying, “I’d like to have that conversation with her in person, and I will see whether or not my request is granted.”

According to attorney Saulter, Young sought a private meeting and public forum with Lightfoot, Police Superintendent Brown, and seven alderpeople from the Black Caucus and Progressive Caucus. After receiving pushback from the mayor’s team on the inclusion of only those alderpeople, Young and Saulter invited all 50. The forum would take place with select members of the press immediately after the private meeting, in a socially-distanced event at Progressive Baptist Church, which has a capacity of 1500 to 2000 people.

But in a December 28 meeting with city of Chicago Acting Corporation Counsel Celia Meza, Saulter was reportedly told that Lightfoot would agree to the private meeting, but not the public forum. Meza advised that Lightfoot would instead speak to the press after the meeting, addressing reporters while Young and the alderpeople stayed inside to engage in the public forum.

“To be clear, this means that the mayor declined Young’s request to meet with her in the manner that Young had requested – a manner that was best for her, her healing and transparency,” said a statement from Saulter.

No more raids: The people demand justice for Anjanette Young

In a December 17 virtual press conference, leaders of the movement against police violence demanded justice for Ms. Young, expressed the need for an entirely new accountability framework, and called for passage of the Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC).

Now, the mayor’s rejection of the public forum for transparency represents another denial of justice for Young, and a refusal to let the victims and the community dictate the terms of their own healing process. Saulter states the lawsuit against the city will proceed. The movement, too, is set to proceed with its fight for change and for CPAC.

“You have the wrong place”

Anjanette Young, a social worker of over 20 years, was wrongfully raided by Chicago police on February 21, 2019. Acting solely on an unverified tip from a confidential informant, officers rammed through Young’s door and surged into her home in search of a 23-year-old male suspect they believed to be residing there.

Young, who had just gotten out of the shower and was preparing for bed, was handcuffed and left standing completely naked in her living room as armed police swarmed through her home. Bodycam footage from nine male officers shows police refusing to adequately cover her or let her get dressed, ignoring and belittling her as she tells them at least 43 times that they have the wrong home.

The suspect they were looking for, who had no connection to Young, was nowhere to be found. He lived in a different unit in the same building, which CPD could easily have confirmed with prison authorities, because he was wearing an electronic monitoring device at the time of the raid.

Yet the injustice perpetrated against Young didn’t end there. After the raid, the city fought to keep bodycam footage out of public view, with a coverup reminiscent of that in the Laquan McDonald case.

Another coverup

Last year when Young filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the bodycam footage from the raid on her home, the Chicago Police Department denied her request. When the news station CBS 2 filed their own request for the footage, they were denied as well. It was only after Young filed a lawsuit that CPD was forced to turn over the video under orders from a federal judge.

Then, just hours before CBS 2 aired their report featuring the video, Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s legal team filed an emergency motion to block the footage from the public and sought legal sanctions against Young and her attorney Keenan Saulter. A judge denied the city’s motion as the report was being broadcast.

Once the footage went public, Mayor Lightfoot at first denied having known about the case at all before the report aired. When asked why Young’s Freedom of Information Act request was denied, she falsely claimed Young had never filed one, and berated the journalist who asked the question for “reckless and irresponsible” reporting. Meanwhile, the motion for sanctions against Young and Saulter remained in place, eliciting outrage from activist leaders.

The next day, Lightfoot acknowledged she was wrong about the FOIA request, and withdrew the motion for sanctions after considerable backlash. She also admitted she had been made “generally” aware of the case over a year ago but maintained that she hadn’t seen the video and didn’t know about her legal team’s attempts to hide it or sanction Young’s attorney.

The people demand justice

In the wake of the publication of the raid footage, activists in the fight against police violence have made wide-ranging demands for reform and accountability. Many have compared the handling of the incident to that of the Laquan McDonald case, and concluded that a new mayor has not meant a new status quo.

“It’s so very similar to Laquan McDonald, and he was not the first,” said Arewa Winters, a participant in the December 17 press conference. “There are many Laquan McDonalds. Anjanette Young was not the first, there are many Anjanette Youngs. And until we get criminal charges [against cops] things will never change for us in this city.”

On behalf of the 411 Movement for Pierre Loury/Justice for Families, Women’s All Points Bulletin, Black Lives Matter-Chicago, and GoodKids MadCity, Winters read out a list of demands, including a guarantee that people can receive videos they appear in within a week of their request, mandatory charges and terminations after incorrect raids, assault charges for pointing guns at innocent civilians, policies on providing clothes to naked individuals or else the incident is deemed sexual abuse, and compensation for victims for all damages up to and including civil rights violations.

Yet the primary demand was not for more professionalized raids, but for an end to raids on personal homes altogether. Not for individual reforms, but an overhaul of the system.

The city of Chicago does not accept such change willingly. In its first year under a court-ordered federal consent decree to reform its police department, the city has missed 70% of the deadlines issued in that decree. As part of that decree, a community working group spent months drafting recommendations for changes to the department’s use-of-force policies, but CPD rejected all but five of the 155 recommended changes, and 25 of the 34 members of the working group called the process a sham.

As for the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA), which is tasked with handling complaints of police abuse, a report released in September that showed that COPA missed its deadline to publicly release more than 25% of videos of police violence that it is responsible for sharing.

In fact, COPA did not open an investigation into the raid on Young’s home until CBS 2 broke the story nine months later. On November 25, 2020, over a year after starting the investigation and nearly two years since the raid, COPA stated that they were still in the process of serving allegations and hadn’t even finished conducting officer interviews.

Fight for CPAC

Because neither the mayor’s office, nor COPA, nor any existing government body has delivered justice for Anjanette Young, leaders of the movement are renewing the call for an entirely new framework for combating police abuses, as evidenced in the December 17 press conference. Multiple speakers echoed the position that nothing short of community control of the police can deliver the necessary change, and that only CPAC presents a viable path to such a framework.

The Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC) ordinance would establish an all-civilian, all-elected council with representatives from each police precinct. This council would have the ability to hire and fire the police superintendent, head of COPA, and members of the police board; rewrite CPD and COPA policy; investigate abuses and determine disciplinary actions; and negotiate the CPD union contract, among other powers.

“This most recent incident underlines the desperate need that we have in this city for community control of the police. We need a fully-elected democratic body that represents the people of the city of Chicago that will not engage in coverups, but will actually ensure that police officers are disciplined, that there’s accountability when these incidents occur, and that they do not happen again,” stated Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa of Ward 35, who first introduced the CPAC ordinance into the city council.

The CPAC ordinance currently awaits a vote in the Public Safety Committee and has undergone updates with substitute language to improve its viability. It now has the support of 19 alderpeople and would require 26 votes to pass or 34 to make it veto-proof.

#ChicagoIL #PeoplesStruggles #PoliceBrutality #MayorLoriLightfoot #CPACNow #AnjanetteYoung

The real reason the Public Safety Committee met to discuss civilian oversight was made clear with the announcement of Lightfoot’s new bill: the committee is getting ready to do the Mayor’s bidding. Since taking office, Lightfoot has not instructed her handpicked Chairman for Public Safety, Chris Taliaferro – a former police sergeant – to hold a single hearing on the longest-standing demand for truly transformative reform to Chicago’s police accountability system, the Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC) ordinance.

CPAC would give communities the power to control the police department through directly elected representatives. Since 2012, it has been the principal solution to police impunity for tens of thousands of Chicagoans who have demanded it, especially the city’s Black, Chicano/Mexicano and Puerto Rican communities facing police terror – a fact confirmed when a counterfeit proposal began to circulate within the channels of the city’s powerful NGOs in order to undercut CPAC’s demand for community power.

GAPA’s rival proposal to the CPAC was built around the delusion that the mayor would accommodate sticking “community” somewhere within the accountability system she did not already occupy. In response to that premise, the mayor simply swelled in power to crowd out all the available spaces. Today, GAPA is no more. Back in March, Lightfoot gutted the group’s proposal, refusing even to allow its toothless ‘Community Commission’ to have any say over police policy. Since then, she has walked away from the negotiating table altogether, announcing two weeks ago that she is going it alone. That leaves CPAC, but when asked recently what she thought of the demand for residents to exercise their democratic right to control the police, the Mayor stated unequivocally that she has always been against that right, “long before it became fashionable.”

For the October 20 hearing, nearly 2000 written comments in support of CPAC were sent to Taliaferro’s committee. In a repeat of the hearings held in 2018, when the public overwhelmingly rose to the mic to demand CPAC, all of the residents who testified on Tuesday voiced their support for community control of the police. None spoke on behalf of GAPA. Unable to attack the substance of CPAC’s demand to give communities the power to decide the terms of their own liberation and flourishing, the mayor’s city council lackeys tried to bog the hearing down in technicalities.

When it comes to addressing the fundamental issue of who should have the power to control and wield a lethal public institution, the contrast between the two opposing sides just got starker: the mayor on her own against Chicago’s communities, the mayor’s power versus the people’s democratic right to free themselves of police tyranny and abuse. In explaining how she can go it alone on community oversight after rejecting any power-sharing arrangement with communities, the mayor will no doubt utter something to the effect of, “The community, c’est moi.”

In the face of a national uprising against police crimes, the ‘police reform’ mayor has not only refused to address civilian oversight, she’s trying to completely do away with it. How did it come to this?

The uprising in Chicago that began on May 30 with some 15,000 protesters and a 4000-car caravan grew to some 100,000 people taking to the streets of Chicago over the summer to demand community control of the police. That demand has echoed throughout the city’s streets, reverberating its way to marches across the nation, and even into the first presidential debate.

The movement in wards across Chicago – including in the traditional police strongholds of the northwest – have led marches and sent thousands of emails to their aldermen to demand CPAC, including over 10,000 emails in Andre Vazquez’s ward, over 11,000 in Felix Cardona’s ward, and over 14,000 in Carlos Rosa’s. In the midst of the national reckoning occasioned by this uprising, the CPAC coalition has grown to over 100 organizations, including former members of GAPA such as Action Now, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, and Chicago Women Take Action, among others.

Rather than addressing police violence and syncing herself with the national moment, Lightfoot has unleashed her officers to protect property – including her own – and to brutalize protesters who have taken to the street precisely to protest police brutality. Praising her forces for clubbing, arresting and gassing thousands, she has upbraided them only for sleeping in the office of Congressman Bobby Rush when they should have been out defending property over lives. Her only response to the national movement for justice tremoring underfoot was to convene a working group on the Chicago Police Department’s use of force guidelines. The group concluded its work in October and recently published an op-ed calling the entire process a sham, after 150 of its 155 recommendations were rejected by the department. In the face of such ‘community input,’ CPAC calls for power, real democratic power to control the police accountability system in Chicago, not to have ‘input’ into it.

In celebrating Lightfoot’s role as enforcer during the pandemic and protector of property against unrest, the ruling class that put the mayor in power has sent her a clear message: “Order rather than justice.” Never willing to admit that their regime depends on police violence, exploitation and repression of Black and brown communities, the mayor’s base pushes the lie that policing is a benevolent tyranny that guarantees safety for all. With Lightfoot at the helm, they see an opportunity to revert the city’s political order to its pre-Laquan McDonald settings. After all, it was Lightfoot that Rahm Emanuel put out front to tell a city smoldering from the execution of Laquan McDonald that communities need a voice in policing. After that, Rahm had his Public Safety Committee stall any meaningful change until his exit. Rahm is gone – Lightfoot is the new Rahm, and having her say that the need for community-driven change has passed is the cover the ruling class needs.

There’s just one problem. The movement for the rights enshrined by CPAC has only grown stronger since forcing Rahm Emanuel not to run again and putting Laquan’s murderer on trial. Across the country, millions on the march are waking up to the fact that the police are and always have been a tool of white supremacy, serving the white supremacist ruling class that descends from this country’s founding lineage of slave owners. In connecting police repression to the protection of that wretched class, they see now why real police reform has never happened. In seeing others demanding the means to undo police repression through their own democratic rights, they see something that, though never before thought possible, hits them with the force of every true self-discovery. And once seen, that right is so close and so obvious that it cannot be unseen, only made into a material reality. For once seen, oppressed peoples can never turn their back on the right and the power and the means to destroy the bonds of their subjugation.

#ChicagoIL #AfricanAmerican #CPAC #CommunityControl #MayorLoriLightfoot

Chicago, IL – Close to 400,000 students in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) are in their seventh week of remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through this haze of attempting to teach the children of Chicago one thing is becoming crystal clear: disparity. According to NBC Chicago 52% of coronavirus deaths are of African American people and 25% are Latinos. Working-class African American and Latino neighborhoods on the South and West Sides are being hit much harder than predominantly white neighborhoods downtown and on the North Side.

This disparity is being felt in ‘schools.’ Remote learning is impossible without access to technology and the internet, something lacking for all too many working-class families. Students in residential facilities are expected to complete work without sufficient access to a computer. Before the pandemic it was estimated that CPS served 17,000 homeless students. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is not addressing the needs of working-class families effectively or efficiently. Students are not being educated.

Chicago Teachers Union Area Vice President Sarah Chambers said, “The Chicago Public Schools should not use a ‘one size fits all approach’ to the pandemic. The allocation of resources should prioritize students with the greatest need, including Black and brown students as well as those with disabilities.”

Teachers and staff need training on how best to help undocumented families. Many of these families are facing a deep economic crisis on top of the health crisis facing our communities. Undocumented immigrant workers are ineligible for the stimulus check. Some are hiding from ICE raids that continue in Chicago during the pandemic. Students and families are traumatized by their conditions.

In addition, teachers and staff need training to provide emotional support for students who have lost family members due to COVID-19. Also, despite massive layoffs working-class people are still required to pay rent. “We need a rent, mortgage and eviction freeze,” Chambers demanded. “How can students who are possibly facing homelessness learn in the face of the emotional distress that arises from this health and economic crisis?”

Mayor Lightfoot, Chicago Public Schools, and the city of Chicago need to address these issues for our students, their families and the entire working class if people are going to survive this crisis. The Chicago Teachers Union has joined the Right to Recovery coalition. This is a massive grassroots organizing effort to win the recovery that working people need.

The boss will give us nothing, if we do not demand it. Join the working class and people of conscience making these demands, we need you.

Thomas Leng is a special education teacher at World Languages Academy and a member of the Chicago Teachers Union.

#ChicagoIL #PoorPeoplesMovements #StudentMovement #OppressedNationalities #Healthcare #PeoplesStruggles #AfricanAmerican #ChicanoLatino #ChicagoPublicSchools #PublicSectorUnions #TeachersUnions #COVID19 #MayorLoriLightfoot

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