Foxx’s presence in Cook County has reassured advocates for bail reform. While prosecutors often undermine the implementation of criminal justice reforms, she has staunchly defended the law against its critics. First elected in 2016 on progressive promises, Foxx reduced her office’s use of cash bail well before the Pretrial Fairness Act took effect last year, even as local defense attorneys pressed her to make even bolder changes. 

But Foxx chose to retire this year rather than seek reelection, leaving the nation’s second biggest prosecutor’s office open for the taking. Voters will now decide who oversees the abolition of cash bail in Chicago for years to come. 

In this staunchly blue county, the Democratic primary on March 19 will likely decide Foxx’s successor, and reform advocates are wary of what this means for the future of pretrial detention. 

“Cook County previously elected a state’s attorney that championed these reforms,” Matt McLoughlin, an activist and cofounder of the Chicago Community Bond Fund, told Bolts. “There are real concerns about who takes control of the largest prosecutor’s office in the state and what role does that individual play in policymaking in the capital.” 

The two Democratic candidates vying to replace Foxx—Clayton Harris III, a former assistant prosecutor, and Eileen O’Neill Burke, a former judge who also worked as a prosecutor—have both expressed broad support for the Pretrial Fairness Act. They’ve both praised the law, and neither is trying to win the election by fearmongering over its effects, a marked difference from other prosecutors’ backlash against bail reform elsewhere in the country, and elsewhere in Illinois.

But O’Neill Burke has also blamed Foxx for being too lenient in some cases, signaling she’d turn the page on the incumbent’s reform priorities. Harris has comparatively aligned himself with the outgoing state’s attorney, whose tenure has seen a considerable decline in the local jail population. Local progressive leaders and the county Democratic Party recently coalesced around Harris as the candidate more likely to continue criminal legal reforms in Chicago.

In responding to Bolts’ questions on pretrial detention, Harris outlined a different philosophy than O’Neill Burke when it comes to how systematically he’d try to keep people behind bars. O’Neill Burke’s campaign declined to respond, but her public statements paint a more punitive picture of how she’d wield the considerable power that the Pretrial Fairness Act gives prosecutors. 

Under the new law, courts can still order someone detained pretrial—but only if prosecutors ask for it. This sets up a new decision point for them: It puts the burden on prosecutors to file detention requests with judges, and then prove at a hearing that the defendant poses either a danger to the community or a flight risk. 

“In effect, the state’s attorney has now become the gatekeeper,” O’Neill Burke told WGN Radio in January. “So it has become exponentially more important that the state’s attorney knows what they’re doing and that they put structure, training, criteria in place.”

Outside of Chicago, some state’s attorneys have taken a hard line in response to the new law, vowing to petition judges to order pretrial detention in every case that’s legally eligible for it, regardless of the circumstances. Patrick Kenneally, the state’s attorney of McHenry County, northwest of Chicago, says his office will ask for anyone charged with an eligible felony to be jailed. 

“We are filing all of those cases because we believe that based on the nature of the charge, that person is self-evidently a danger to the public,” Kenneally, a Republican running for reelection unopposed this year, told Bolts.

For reform advocates who championed the Pretrial Fairness Act, this approach goes against the spirit of the law. “Just because someone is facing an eligible charge, it doesn’t mean prosecutors actually have to have that person detained,” said McLoughlin. “They’re supposed to be using some discretion to determine if that person is a danger to the public.”

McLoughlin added, “At the end of the day, that isn’t about keeping the community safe so much as it is about projecting a tough image of law-and-order.”

For proponents of the Pretrial Reform Act like McLoughlin, the law wasn’t just about ending cash bail, but also reducing the number of people who are locked up in jail. Staying free while awaiting trial allows defendants to keep their jobs, continue supporting their families, and freely meet with their attorney to prepare their legal defense. Pretrial freedom also removes jail as a point of leverage prosecutors often use to pressure someone into taking a plea deal. 

“​​Jailing people awaiting trial increases the rate at which people will be rearrested in the future,” said Sharlyn Grace, senior policy advisor for the Cook County Public Defender’s Office. “It decreases their employment prospects and their earnings potential, and generally contributes to the opposite of what everyone wants for the community.”

O’Neill Burke has partially mirrored Kenneally’s blanket approach for some categories of cases. She has pledged to seek pretrial detention for “each and every” case involving a violent crime, as well as anyone charged with possession of a gun that’s covered by the state’s Assault Weapons Ban. (Gun possession is among the most common felony charges in Cook County.)

Harris has promised an aggressive approach to detaining those accused of violent crimes, but he told Bolts via email that he doesn’t share that blanket approach. The office under his leadership would decide on a “case-by-case basis” whether to seek a detention hearing over violent offenses, he said in a statement emailed by his campaign. 

For gun possession cases, Harris says his office would petition for detention if the gun was used to commit a crime, or if the defendant has a “record of violence.” Elsewhere, echoing a point made by some Chicago public defenders, Harris has expressed concern about the fact that gun possession charges disproportionately fall on Black men, saying they are likelier to carry guns for self-protection. 

For Madeleine Behr, policy director of Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, prosecutors should consider their options rather than automatically seek pretrial detention, even in cases of domestic abuse and sexual violence. “For some people experiencing gender-based violence, they often call law enforcement to get the violence to stop in the moment,” Behr said. “But that doesn’t mean they are interested in pursuing charges or a commitment to moving forward with a case for weeks or months or years.” Prosecutors, she said, should “consult directly with the victim for what they would like to see.” 

Whether a prosecutor seeks pretrial detention is only the tip of the iceberg—while it may be the most visible part of their discretion, by that point they’ve already made a suite of other decisions that steer a defendant toward either jail or release.

Prosecutors have always leveraged their power to decide what charges to use in a case. For instance, they may stack charges or start by filing severe ones to pressure a defendant into pleading guilty on lower charges. Under the Pretrial Fairness Act, these charging decisions are also a decisive factor in whether prosecutors are allowed to request pretrial detention at all.

The new law states that courts cannot jail defendants who face some lower-level charges. The provision is meant to limit prosecutors and judges from using the elimination of money bail to increase pretrial detention.

But reform advocates are nervous that prosecutors who want more leeway to detain may respond by filing steeper charges for which pretrial detention is still eligible.

“Differences in charging decisions may be tied to the prosecutor’s desire to have the defendant detained pretrial,” said Ben Ruddell, director of criminal justice policy at the ACLU of Illinois. “If the prosecutor really wants to detain someone pretrial, then they might opt to charge someone” with a stiffer offense than they would have used under the previous system.

James Kilgore, director of advocacy and outreach for FirstFollowers Reentry Program, shares Ruddell’s worry. “One of the things they may do is stack charges and create felonies out of misdemeanors,” he told Bolts. “Whereas before people were going to be kept in jail anyway because they didn’t have bond money, now they have to have a serious charge in order to be kept in jail or on electronic monitoring.”

Here too, O’Neill Burke’s statements signal that she would take a more aggressive stance than the incumbent and her leading competitor. 

For instance, Foxx has set a policy to prosecute retail theft as a misdemeanor, rather than a felony, whenever the value of stolen goods is below $1,000. Harris has said he would continue this policy but O’Neill Burke has denounced it. “Just not prosecuting crime doesn’t deter it, it promotes it,” she told WGN. She says she would charge all retail theft cases where the value exceeds $300 as a felony, as state statutes allow. 

Retail theft charges are not eligible for pretrial detention even at the felony level, so that policy alone would not change the jail population. Still, it provides a window into O’Neill Burke’s interest in dialing up the range of charges her office uses. “I do not believe that they promote a thriving, safe city,” she told the Chicago Sun Times about the Foxx administration’s policies.

Harris, meanwhile, has said he’d give Foxx an “A” for what she’s done during her tenure, saying she has mostly erred in not communicating the benefits of her reforms. 

The next state’s attorney will also steer office policy on electronic monitoring. When they’re not seeking pretrial detention, prosecutors can still ask for release to come with certain conditions, like ankle monitors.

Illinois’ ankle monitor system has been rife with errors; 80 percent of alerts received by local law enforcement as of 2021 were mistaken, a University of Chicago analysis found. Still, a violation may allow prosecutors to ask that the court detain someone. “Given the inaccuracy of these devices and their propensity to create false alarms, this can also be an opportunity to send people back to jail for violating their release conditions,” Kilgore said.

So far, the new system hasn’t resulted in more Chicagoans placed under house arrest as they await trial.

The winner of the Democratic primary between Harris and O’Neill Burke will move on to the general election to face Republican Bob Fioretti, a former alderperson unopposed in his party’s primary. Fioretti has attacked bail reform as dangerous and says Foxx’s office is “erring on the side of letting criminals walk free.”

Fioretti faces long odds in November because Cook County is overwhelmingly Democratic. But sitting prosecutors elsewhere in the state are using similar rhetoric to say the new law is forcing them to release people who should be locked up. They’ve often spread incorrect information to make their case, like Kankakee County State’s Attorney Jim Rowe’s claims that courts can no longer jail fentanyl dealers and carjackers, or McLean County State’s Attorney Erika Reynolds’ statement that misdemeanor domestic violence cases are now ineligible for detention. 

In fact, defendants can still be detained over drug sales, carjacking, and misdemeanor domestic violence, depending on the circumstances.

Opponents of the law have also argued against any bright line that shields some categories of charges from pretrial detention. In 2022, the Illinois State’s Attorney Association, a group that represents prosecutors in the state and typically advocates for more punitive policies, pushed for a bill that is no longer active to allow the court to jail people on lesser charges.

Kenneally, the McHenry prosecutor, wants to make more charges eligible for pretrial detention. 

“My fundamental critique is that, very often times, when people are being charged with these non-detainable offenses, they are in a position to commit more crimes,” Kenneally said. “If their criminal history suggests they will continue to commit crimes, it has taken the discretion of prosecutors and judges to hold those people.”

“We can’t hold somebody on concealing a corpse or concealing a murder, but we can hold them for pushing their boyfriend or throwing a piece of pizza at their boyfriend, and it’s fundamentally absurd,” he told Bolts. (The charge of concealing a homicide is eligible for pretrial detention if prosecutors demonstrate a flight risk.)

This continued conflict over the law’s future would be resolved in Springfield, but the identity of the next Cook County state’s attorney may still shape those developments.

In championing bail reform, Foxx provided a counterweight to the positions of the Illinois State’s Attorneys Association, a role similar to what reform-minded prosecutors have done elsewhere in the country. Cook County alone makes up 40 percent of the Illinois population, and its lawmakers enjoy a lot of clout in the legislature. 

This made Foxx a punching bag for more punitive Chicago officials and other prosecutors, but reform advocates say her pushback against misinformation was essential for the law’s survival. 

“It was hugely important that State’s Attorney Foxx was a supporter of the Pretrial Fairness Act, an advocate and a defender of the law, and a thought partner in its development,” said Grace, of the public defender’s office. “It absolutely matters that we have a state’s attorney who is engaged in good faith efforts to protect this historic transformation of our pretrial system.”

Correction (March 4): The article has been corrected to reflect that the bill to enable pretrial detention for low-level offenses is no longer active.

The post As Kim Foxx Exits, Chicago Is Choosing the Next “Gatekeeper” of Its Bail Reform appeared first on Bolts.

James Orr was in his apartment in the Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side one Wednesday morning in 2013 when he heard his phone buzz. “James, you have 30 days to move,” an Illinois state police officer on the other end told him. The 62-year-old, who had moved into the apartment with his wife in 2006 after finishing a three-year prison sentence, was incredulous. “What do you mean I have to move?” he asked. He had lived there for seven years.

As part of a previous conviction, Illinois required Orr to appear on the sex offense registry, one of five public conviction registries in the state. The sentence came with a litany of other restrictions that will follow him for the rest of his life. Orr can’t visit parks, forest reserves, schools or playgrounds and must pay a yearly $100 registration fee. He’s also prohibited from living within 500 feet of any school, playground, day care or childcare facility. 

That’s why state police came calling in 2013. “You have to move, sir,” the officer repeated. “A day care moved [within] 500 feet.” Orr says he panicked and started calling around, trying to find a place to go. But each time he found an available apartment, police shot down the address saying it wasn’t compliant with Illinois’s dense web of housing restrictions. 

Orr estimates he checked on more than 20 places but still couldn’t find a legal place to live by the time his month-long window to move drew to a close. He could continue to stay at an illegal address. But if he were caught, he’d be sent back to prison. He and his wife packed their belongings into a storage unit and moved in with his sister, but when he called police to update his address, they told him it was too close to a school. His only other option was to register as homeless—but in all his interactions with police, he says no one told him he could.

It often plays out like this: A person can’t report their address because it’s not legal. Without a legal address, they can’t register. When they don’t register, police pick them up and charge them with a new crime.

It took police another year to come knocking after Orr failed to find a legal address or register as homeless. A judge ultimately convicted him of failure to report a change of address, a class 3 felony, and sentenced him to seven years in state prison. It was the second time he’d been imprisoned solely because he couldn’t find legal housing; police once arrested him in his home during an address check after determining his apartment was in a banishment zone, despite them previously allowing him to register the address.

“How do you get out of it? How do you get out of the cycle unless you build you a house on a dirt road somewhere?” Orr told Bolts.

The expansive nature of so-called housing banishment laws in Illinois, in addition to a laundry list of other restrictions, make it nearly impossible for people with past sex offense convictions to find a place to live. Few available housing units exist that aren’t within 500 feet of playgrounds, schools, and day cares. As a result, Orr and more than 1,400 other people like him, predominantly Black men, are forced into indefinite homelessness across the state, cycled in and out of prison and relegated to an underclass with lifelong stigma.

Orr and hundreds of other unhoused Chicagoans with sex offense convictions have spent years organizing against housing banishment laws and registry requirements with the Chicago 400 Alliance, a coalition of housing, reentry and victim advocates as well as social service agencies. The group’s most ambitious challenge to date is a bill pending in the Illinois legislature that would ease residency restrictions and expand housing options. The legislative session, which begins this week, ends in late May.

The bill would shrink banishment zones around schools and playgrounds from 500 to 250 feet and remove home day cares from the list of residency restrictions. Once a person finds stable housing, under the proposal, they also couldn’t be forced to move if their home later becomes part of an exclusion zone.

“The reality is that our current policies are not working,” Senate Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford, who is the bill’s chief sponsor, told Bolts. “They’re not serving who they should serve. It’s creating a crisis of homelessness and it does not make our communities safer.” 

As an employee at the state department of corrections in the 1990s, Lightford helped create Illinois’s sex offense registry. But now, after years of enhanced penalties and restrictions, she said, “What we’ve done is disenfranchised a whole population of people.”

Orr still didn’t have housing the last time he got out of prison in 2017. His wife’s apartment wasn’t compliant with state residency restrictions, so at first he tried a shelter a few blocks from a police station. But when he stopped by the station to update his address on the registry, he heard a familiar refrain—no good, it turned out the shelter was too close to a playground.

With no other options, Orr opted to sleep in his wife’s car while he saved for one of his own. Within a few months, he’d scraped together enough to bounce from one hotel room to another. Seven years later, he says it’s an endless cycle. “I’m still doing the same thing I was doing when I first got out in 2017—sleeping in my car, staying in a hotel.” 

Orr stays with his wife just two nights a year. He can’t stay anywhere for longer than two days a year, or else it’s legally considered a secondary residence. Orr and others who register as homeless must check in with local law enforcement on a weekly basis. Even if a person on a registry manages to find legal housing, exclusion zones are constantly in flux. People can be forced out at any time, regardless of whether they own or rent their home. Ubiquitous and often impossible to identify from outside, home day cares pose a particular challenge. 

If a person’s housing becomes illegal, police generally offer a 30-day window to find a new place within the scope of the law—though that’s a courtesy, not a legal right. Two options exist for people still without housing at the end of that period: live homeless or return to prison.

Steven, who asked that his full name not be used for fear of retaliation, finished his prison sentence in 2007 and moved to Riverdale, a Chicago suburb south of the city. Housing was easier to come by there, since it’s less densely populated than the city. For years, he managed to find a legal place to stay with relative ease. 

That all changed in 2019. He and his wife had been living in their apartment for five years. The pair dated in sixth grade, reconnected years later, and have been married for more than a decade. One mid-July day, police arrived to measure the distance between their apartment and a new day care that was opening up down the block. Steven says they told him his apartment was 28 inches too close. “It just got harder, and harder, and harder to find a place where I could stay. So I became homeless,” he told Bolts.

Every afternoon, after he finishes work as a peer counselor at an addiction treatment center on the city’s west side, Steven visits his family’s home. Each evening, after he says goodnight, he leaves again. Sometimes he stays with his mother, sometimes his sister, sometimes a friend—always couch surfing and never staying anywhere longer than two days. When his grandchildren ask why he leaves at night, he tells them he works the night shift.

“It hurts. I want to lay next to my wife,” Steven said. “I want to play with my grandchildren. I want to have fun with my children not just part of the day but, sometimes, all day. I want to wake up to them. I want to hear the noises, and the arguments, and the fussing. That’s what I miss most.”

The impact of Illinois’s housing banishment law extends far beyond people with convictions and shapes generations of families in lasting ways. 

As the primary caregiver to an adult son with an intellectual disability who must comply with the abundance of housing restrictions and residency requirements, Cheri worries what will happen when she can no longer look after him. Those rules, coupled with a dearth of skilled nursing facilities with beds available for people with sex offense convictions, leaves her with virtually no viable options.

“It definitely puts pressure on the family,” said Cheri, who asked that her real name not be used to protect her family. “What are we going to do with these people? Just throw them away when their families are no longer able to take care of them? I mean, it kind of feels like they’re throwing all of us away.”

Cheri says the judge in her son’s case gave him three days to move after he was convicted and sentenced to probation, community service, and ten years on the sex offense registry. Her house was 11 feet too close to a home day care, so the family put it up for sale and spent the next ten months searching for a place to live. She says she lives every day “in constant fear that someone’s going to open up a day care, someone’s going to put in a park, wherever you live.”

The conviction, and the stigma that comes with it, creates instability in nearly every aspect of their lives, Cheri says. The punishment is lifelong. “We can’t go to museums. We can’t go to forest reserves, we can’t go to parks. There are family reunions that we can’t attend because he can’t be present.” It creates, she said, “a class of people who, no matter how hard they try to do the right thing, are just pushed down constantly.”

Over the past four decades, Congress ushered in a series of federal mandates that pressured states to vastly expand policies targeting people with sex offense convictions. This includes the Wetterling Act, named for an 11-year-old boy from Minnesota who was abducted in 1989. The measure, part of the infamous 1994 crime bill, required states to establish a registry for people convicted of sex offenses and other crimes against children. Megan’s Law, which followed the murder of seven-year-old Megan Kanka in New Jersey, mandated that states make their sex offense registries public. 

Illinois lawmakers, for their part, passed into law a cavalcade of measures targeting people convicted of sex offenses. In 1986, the state began requiring people convicted of two or more sex offenses against children to record their information in a private law enforcement database. Lawmakers expanded the registry to include people convicted of any sex offense against a child in 1993, then again to include anyone convicted of any sex offense in 1996. Later that year, lawmakers made the registry public. 

Each year, as legislators returned to Springfield, they tacked on new conditions. By 2013, people on the registries were prohibited from living within 500 feet of any facility “providing programs or services exclusively directed toward persons under 18 years of age,” working at businesses that photograph children, or participating in holiday activities with children outside their families, like handing out Halloween candy.

Every state maintains some form of public conviction registry and 27 have residency restrictions of some kind. But another 23 states have resisted such housing restrictions, which are not recommended by federal agencies and are opposed by numerous advocacy organizations, like the Association for the Treatment and Prevention of Sexual Abuse, the professional organization for researchers and treatment providers in the field.  

A large body of evidence shows these measures do little to prevent—or even respond to—sexual violence.

According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, eight out of every ten perpetrators of sexual violence know the person they harm. In cases with children, that proportion climbs to 93 percent—and the perpetrators themselves are often children. A 2009 U.S. Department of Justice bulletin states that youth under 18 comprise more than a quarter of all people who carry out sexual violence, and more than one-third of perpetrators when the person harmed is also a child. Four of ten survivors under age six are targeted by another child, according to a 2000 Bureau of Justice Statistics study. The report also finds that the most common age of sexual assault perpetrators is 14. 

Yet survivors report sexual assaults to police in fewer than one-third of all cases. Police make an arrest in just 5 percent of assaults, and fewer than 3 percent result in a felony conviction. Cases that do make it to trial—and result in a lifetime of punishment—represent only a small fraction of the perpetrators of sexual violence and, reflective of the legal system at large, disproportionately target Black men. In Illinois, roughly one out of every 139 men is on a public conviction registry—which include sex offenses, murder, gun convictions and crimes involving violence against youth. When accounting for race, the divide is even starker: one out of every 39 Black men in the state is on a registry. 

Madeleine Behr, policy director at the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, says politicians have long weaponized survivors in order to appear “tough on crime,” all while pushing registries and increasingly restrictive policies that create more harm than they address. “Survivors and victims know who harmed them. It’s something that I think gets so lost in this conversation,” Behr told Bolts. 

Studies have consistently shown housing restrictions and exclusion zones don’t make communities safer—and, in fact, can even weaken public safety. When the Minnesota Department of Corrections studied cases in which someone was reincarcerated for a new sex offense after being released from prison during a 16-year period, researchers couldn’t identify a single case in which residency restrictions would have prevented a new crime. A 2012 study from Connecticut’s Office of Policy and Management found that only 20 of the nearly 750 people released from prison in 2005 with sex offense convictions were convicted of a new sex offense. That’s in line with research from the Bureau of Justice Statistics that found people with prior sex offense convictions were far less likely than people convicted of other offenses to be rearrested or to go back to prison.

Even an Illinois task force created to study registration and residency requirements and composed of state lawmakers, law enforcement, policy advocates and state prison officials found that housing banishment laws were ineffective. In a 2017 report, the group said the homelessness and loss of family support caused by housing banishment policies put people at a higher risk of recidivism. “In sum, residency restrictions do not decrease sexual reoffending or the sex crime rates in the areas where they are used,” the task force concluded.

Patty Casey, a retired Chicago police commander who oversaw her department’s registration unit, calls the status quo a “lose-lose situation” for both police and people who have to register. Officers, she says, are tied up verifying the legality of place after place, while people with sex offenses are trapped in an endless loop of homelessness.

Casey singles out the restriction against living within 500 feet of home day cares as “absolutely ludicrous.” Home day cares can pop up practically anywhere—licenses are free and require little more than a background check, an inspection, 15 hours of training and a medical exam. “It creates a large number of homeless registrants,” Casey said. “They’re restricted [from living] almost everywhere.” 

Casey told Bolts she plans to testify in support of the bill to ease residency restrictions and expand housing options during the upcoming legislative session. If signed into law, she said, “we would have so many less homeless persons, and it would be easier on law enforcement and easier on the registrants.”

It remains to be seen whether the support from folks like Casey and Lightford, the Senate majority leader, will be enough to muster the legislature to shirk decades of sensationalized, “tough-on-crime” policies. Four other legislators, including two more in Senate leadership, have signed on as bill sponsors and numerous others have committed to voting for it. While supporters expect some GOP opposition, a previous version of the bill even had a Republican sponsor in the House.

Notably absent from the conversation so far is Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who is rumored to have presidential ambitions and has touted the state’s efforts to make Illinois a national leader in criminal legal reforms. Advocates with the Chicago 400 Alliance have questioned the governor’s silence on the issue. (Pritzker’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.) 

“Why aren’t they telling the lawmakers they should pass this bill?” said Adele Nicholas, a civil rights attorney and director of Illinois Voices for Reform, one of the groups advocating for the bill. “I guarantee you that if they did, it would become law.” Nicholas has challenged numerous state sex offense policies in federal courts and before the Illinois Supreme Court, leading to three separate injunctions against the state.

The state’s “own commission looked at the evidence several years ago and concluded that these laws are counterproductive,” she said, referring to the 2017 task force. “The evidence is out there, but they’re not taking any action to stand up for evidence-based policy.”

Chicago 400 members have for months visited Springfield to educate legislators and build support for the bill. Steven says he’s confident they’ll ultimately prevail, but he’s often shocked by how little policymakers know about current law and its impacts on people with sex offense convictions. “You’ve made laws because people are uneducated; they’re afraid,” he said. 

For the time being, hundreds of people with sex offense convictions continue to live in precarity, forced into homelessness by a system of the state’s design. “There really is no way of knowing the degree of punishment until you’ve lived it,” said Cheri, the mother of someone on the registry. “There’s no end. You just can’t ever get past it.”

Orr says he’s still trying to rebuild from the last time he went to prison because he couldn’t find a home. His sister died about a week before he was released in 2017. Orr remembers going to her home and finding the freezer brimming with containers of catfish, his favorite meal. “She was gonna throw me a surprise homecoming,” Orr said. “That was like another broken heart.”

The instability, fear and stigma lived day in and day out take a toll. “It can be so scary and shameful at the same time,” Orr said. “There’s so much politics in this particular crime. They break up a lot of families. A lot of people couldn’t survive this.”

“It’s very disappointing and hurtful,” he added. “I try to tell myself it’s gonna get better.”

The post How Illinois Housing Banishment Laws Push People into Homelessness and Prison  appeared first on Bolts.

It had been a year since a federal judge ordered the city of Chicago to overhaul its police department. The requirement was to address discriminatory policing and misconduct that had decimated public faith in law enforcement, and progress was slow. But in summer 2020, the recently appointed Superintendent David Brown announced a new direction in public safety that promised to strengthen the bond between police and the communities they serve.

At the core of this community-centric policing strategy was a newly minted unit, the Community Safety Team. Brown said their mission would be getting to know neighbors, partnering with local churches, block clubs and businesses, and empowering residents to guide law enforcement’s crime priorities and solutions to neighborhood safety issues.

“The only way to create safer communities is one neighborhood at a time,” Brown said at the July 2020 announcement of the new team. 

But rather than police encounters aimed at building community trust, data show the Community Safety Team, which quickly grew to over 800 officers in less than a year, focused instead on interactions known to harm community relations: hundreds of thousands of traffic stops. 

The Community Safety Team was responsible for nearly a third of all traffic stops citywide by 2021, more than any other police team. Community Safety officers overwhelmingly stopped drivers in Black neighborhoods on the South and West Sides, contributing to massive racial disparities in traffic enforcement, data show.

Police accountability watchdogs say the Community Safety Team’s conduct reveals a pattern of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) hiding aggressive tactics beneath a veneer of community policing. In the past, CPD’s most aggressive units made heavy use of stop-and-frisk encounters to search people for drugs and weapons. But since a 2015 lawsuit led to major reforms of the practice, CPD replaced stop-and-frisk with stopping exponentially more motorists.

Now, despite a new progressive mayor’s outspoken stances against such notoriously harmful policing practices, and a newly confirmed police superintendent signaling a decisive shift in public safety strategy, many doubt whether the department can course-correct to an earnest community policing model. 

“The city has a horrific history of these roving, violent citywide teams…that racially profile people and terrorize and physically brutalize people,” said Alexandra Block, Director of Criminal Legal Systems and Policing Project for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. “The Community Safety Team is just an outcrop of that pattern.”

When drivers believe they are stopped and searched by police without reason, the feeling of harassment only deepens the divide between police and the communities they patrol, said Joseph Williams, member of the Englewood Police District Council, one of the civilian oversight bodies recently created to enhance community partnership and accountability. 

“There’s no way you can do community policing while you’re doing all those stops,” Williams said. “You make them feel like less than a human being. They leave feeling worthless, like they’ve been targeted. I know what I felt like when I went through that.”

When Williams, 34, was pulled over most recently in July, the stop was relatively uneventful, and officers let him go without a search. But each of the countless traffic stops he endured still reminds him of a traumatic incident when he and a group of friends were pulled over as teens.

As the officers searched the group without their consent looking for illegal guns, they violated and humiliated the teenagers, Williams said.

“I’ll never forget them pulling me and my friends right out of the car and searching us,” Williams said. “They reached down into my private parts, went into our boxers, and they didn’t find anything. …We were young and glad we were let go, but ultimately that was a traumatic experience.”

The Community Safety Team

As the department poured resources into the Community Safety Team, Brown pledged their work would be driven by long-term relationships with residents, businesses, religious organizations and neighborhood groups.

By the end of 2020, the Community Safety Teams logged over 200 of those community interactions, according to a Bolts analysis of data from the Office of Emergency Management and Communications’ dispatch system, which generates a unique record each time officers radio headquarters to document civilian interactions or routine activities. Those community interactions included food drives, youth sports events and community input meetings, according to a Chicago police spokesperson. 

But those interactions were dwarfed by the 48,000 traffic stops the team conducted in 2020—nearly all of that unit’s documented activity that year. In 2021, when the Community Safety Team was at its largest, its officers logged over 150,000 traffic stops—more than twice the number of community engagement activities, the data show.

Although the Community Safety Team was called a “first-of-its-kind approach designed for officers to get to know the people and places within each of the unique neighborhoods," Brown’s promises were reminiscent of a different community policing initiative launched in the 1990s, the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy, or CAPS.

The CAPS approach was a hyper-local, bottom-up strategy that hinged on residents working with officers to identify both the issues in the community as well as potential solutions. The strategy worked to increase trust in police because the same officers had a consistent beat in a particular geographic area where residents could get to know them personally and officers could get familiar with the safety challenges in a small area, proponents said. 

In the Englewood neighborhood on the city’s south side, CAPS officers have helped by listening to people’s priorities and focusing on problem-solving rather than numbers, Williams said. For instance, when a group of abandoned cars on a city-owned vacant lot became a magnet for drug dealing and other crime, Williams told the local CAPS team that it was a serious problem for neighbors. Officers then quickly dealt with the issue, he said.

"They ticketed those cars and got them towed. The community's been trying to get that done for a year almost," Williams said. "Our CAPS department is phenomenal."

But the Community Safety Team turned out to be a somewhat opposite approach: rather than officers building relationships in consistent beats, it was a roving citywide unit with no direct ties to specific neighborhoods. And they employed the same tactics as the notorious strike forces and saturation teams— squads of officers used to flood areas with police activity.

The legal backlash

After Chicago police shifted away from widespread use of stop-and-frisk tactics in 2015 following an ACLU Illinois lawsuit over the practice, the number of traffic stops conducted across the entire department soared. Between 2015 and 2023, officers made over 4.5 million traffic stops, mostly in Black and Latinx neighborhoods, CPD data show. Nearly 900,000 of these stops were made in 2019 alone, and by then the Illinois chapter of the ACLU had again raised the alarm that the stops may be violating drivers’ civil rights. 

This work culminated in a class action lawsuit filed in June 2023 against the city on behalf of Chicagoans claiming the traffic stop strategy routinely violated the rights of Black and Latinx drivers. It singled out the Community Safety Team for the tremendous volume of traffic stops it conducted, amounting to what the suit called Chicago Police's "mass traffic stop program."

The lawsuit claims this program relies on illegal quotas, and flooding Black and Latinx neighborhoods with police encounters to deter unrelated crime, using the pretext of traffic enforcement to search drivers for contraband—often without their consent. This racial profiling of drivers of color resulted in police "harassing hundreds of thousands of Black Chicagoans" annually, Block said. 

Twenty-five-year-old West Side resident Mahari Bell joined the lawsuit after being stopped over 10 times in the past eight years. While some of the stops seemed harmless, others left him fearing for his life, Bell said.

"A lot of us are just tired. People don't want to be harassed by Chicago police," Bell said. "I was profiled, harassed, my rights are violated consistently. Nobody wants to live like that, especially in the city that they're from."

While driving for UberEats in May2022, Bell was pulled over downtown when officers accused him of cutting off another driver—a claim he contests. Just moments into the encounter, officers put Bell in handcuffs without any explanation. When they asked to search his car, Bell felt like he had no choice but to agree.

"It all happened so quick. There wasn't any need for a search or for handcuffs. The officer, he was very accusatory, so it was clear that it wasn't about traffic," Bell said. "I feel like if I would have said no, the stop could have been completely different. I could've spent the night in a holding cell."

But even when police encounters don’t escalate, being constantly pulled over makes Bell feel "belittled, degraded and ultimately disrespected," he said.

"It made me realize, I think a lot of officers in Chicago just don't care to be a part of the community. They don't care to offer their public service," Bell said. "Despite my intentions, despite who I am, I'm still just a statistic to CPD. Just another traffic stop that has to be done for their numbers."

The lawsuit is still in early stages, but its goal is to end citywide units dedicated to traffic stops so Chicago Police can reel in the harm to community trust inflicted by the Community Safety Team and affiliated units, Block said.

"We are hoping CPD will rethink its reliance on the mass traffic stops strategy as its go-to supposed crime fighting technique, because it just doesn't work," Block said.

The ACLU's class action lawsuit builds upon an existing complaint about the Community Safety Team that came from within the unit itself. In 2021, Franklin Paz, a former lieutenant on the Community Safety Team sued the city over illegal traffic stop quotas. Paz, who was also a 20-year department veteran, claims he was demoted and punished for resisting the quotas. 

Police sergeants on the Community Safety Team testified that when they were assigned to the unit, leadership told them their primary mission was to stop masses of drivers and proactively initiate police encounters, court records show. Officers were required to meet stop quotas unrelated to crime levels or traffic safety, according to Paz, who was instructed to demand that each officer in his platoon conduct at least 10 traffic stops daily, the complaint shows.

The ACLU lawsuit references emails where CPD’s then second-in-command, Deputy Superintendent Ernest Cato, urges commanders to raise traffic enforcement numbers and "utilize traffic stops to address violence."

The lawsuits share common claims that the Community Safety Team was simply a rebrand and reshuffling of CPD's infamously aggressive saturation teams.

Though Brown promised at the launch of the Community Safety Team that "this is not a roving strike force like what CPD had in the past," officers testified that unit was staffed with personnel from tactical teams, gun teams, saturation teams, and other groups trained to aggressively stop residents, often while patrolling in plainclothes and in unmarked cars. 

Bolts’ analysis of CPD attendance and assignment data supports this, showing that at least 45 of the sergeants leading the Community Safety Team in its first year were assigned to the community policing initiative immediately after leaving tactical teams.

A new administration, a new era for policing?

Amid the legal backlash, CPD quietly sunsetted the Community Safety Team by reassigning officers to other units en masse by the start of 2023, leaving fewer than a hundred officers on the team. After becoming police superintendent in September, Larry Snelling said during a police budget hearing that he has since “broken that team down” and reassigned the officers back to local districts. 

But even as the Community Safety Team waned, the unit’s aggressive traffic stop tactics continued to be enforced by other officers, including those assigned to neighborhood districts where Snelling emphasized he would focus police resources, data show. The most recent dispatch data show the units stopping the largest numbers of drivers are now those assigned to local districts, including beat officers, tactical teams, and rapid response officers.

Snelling is one of the first major appointees of Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former teacher and union organizer who ran and won on a historically progressive platform, and has promised to chart a new course for public safety centered on community investment, not solely law enforcement power. Since taking office, Johnson has had to balance expectations from the progressives who put him in power with those of the police union which has been antagonistic from the start. One of Johnson’s first acts as mayor established an Office of Community Safety, charged with “dual responsibilities of leading a full force of government, rapid response to safety issues and developing community-driven strategies for addressing the root causes of harm,” a spokesperson for the mayor told Bolts. 

With a progressive mayor at the helm, mounting pressure from newly created civilian oversight councils, and the weight of the consent decree bearing down, the pressure is also on Snelling to set policing policy that can move the dial on community safety without sacrificing public trust in law enforcement.

Historically, incoming CPD leadership inevitably launches a signature crimefighting initiative, like Brown’s Community Safety Team or former Superintendent Garry McCarthy’s use of the CompStat strategy that resembled broken-windows policing. And Snelling will likely follow the example of his predecessors with a signature community policing initiative, said CPD expert Wes Skogan, professor emeritus of political science at Northwestern University.

"My guess is Larry Snelling will invent a new acronym with a promise of a reinvigorated community policing program," Skogan said. 

But like the exchange of officers between tactical teams and the Community Safety Team, a new name doesn’t guarantee any fundamental change in how residents are impacted by the policing tactics. 

Unless new leadership focuses on safety "outcomes" like crime reduction rather than "inputs" like traffic stop numbers, the aggressive policing tactics will likely continue, said former interim Superintendent Charlie Beck, who in 2020 dramatically restructured the department by shifting officers out of citywide units and into neighborhood police districts. 

"You get what you ask for. If you emphasize traffic stops as what you want, then you'll get them. Unfortunately, if you cast too wide a net when you do that, you can make people feel like they're under siege,” Beck said.

There is also broader skepticism over whether Johnson’s administration can effectively steer the department away from the domineering policing tactics that have landed the city in hot water time and again. Johnson has faced continued pressure over his increase of the police budget, his administration’s contract agreement with the Fraternal Order of Police that doubles annual pay raises and may weaken accountability processes for disciplinary cases, and his continued funding of the ShotSpotter gunshot detection technology despite prior vows to drop the controversial surveillance system. 

But Johnson’s budget does offer a preview into the community investments aimed at tackling the root causes of crime, with $209 million going towards efforts like anti-violence programming, restorative justice, re-entry programs and gender-based violence prevention and intervention, a spokesman for the mayor said. The plan vastly expands staffing for public mental health clinics and mobile crisis response teams, which include social workers and addiction specialists who would respond to 911 calls in lieu of police during mental health emergencies. Johnson’s budget would also expand the city’s youth job programs, and includes investments to address the housing and homelessness crisis brought to the forefront by the influx of asylum seekers. 

Johnson and Snelling have both touted plans to replace up to 400 officer roles with civilian positions, such as domestic violence advocates and workers assigned to the officer training academy. 

“Having those civilian employees amongst us, it creates a better environment for the officers,” Snelling said. “It’s officers working with civilians, so we have a better understanding of the community and the community has a better understanding of us. It shows we can work in partnership with people who are not sworn members.”

Community policing

In spite of the Community Safety Team, some prior community policing efforts have forged strong connections between residents and officers, leaving some hopeful for the future. Snelling’s earlier efforts at building connections with Englewood residents made Williams optimistic about future community policing efforts, he said. 

"He brought his tactical officers out—the ones who do a lot of the crazy stuff sometimes—he brought them out so they could get to know the community in a different way,” Williams said. “He's coming in, he's walking those streets, trying to build the relationships.”

A 2019 community policing project, the Chicago Neighborhood Policing Initiative (NPI), emulates CAPS by dedicating a group of officers in each district to build long-term relationships with residents and neighborhood groups and coordinate city resources to solve problems in the area. Unlike the Community Safety Team, these officers don’t do the typical emergency responses, traffic stops, and patrols. 

The program has "reimagined what police officers can do," said Deondre' Rutues, a council member for the 15th Police District in Austin, as well as the Community Engagement Specialist for the Chicago Neighborhood Policing Initiative.

"We're supposed to lead the charge and tell them what we need from them," Rutues said. "It isn't a process where police just come and lock somebody up. The officers follow the lead of the community to determine what to do."

Changing police leadership, staffing shortages and the interruption of the coronavirus pandemic halted the NPI from being fully implemented, a Northwestern report found. But the success of the NPI shows that one arm of the city's agenda may be dedicated to an earnest attempt at community policing. 

But as long as the other arm is focused on mass traffic stops conducted by roving strike teams, Chicago's community policing agenda will be at odds with itself, says Rutues.

"You created the Community Safety Team to enhance relationship building...But it continues to undo everything that is supposed to be contained in the Consent Decree, and also the work people on the ground are trying to do." 

The post “I’m Just Another Traffic Stop” appeared first on Bolts.

On April 4, Chicago progressives cheered when Brandon Johnson won the mayoral race by defeating Paul Vallas, who was backed by the city’s police union. Vallas, who predicted a less safe Chicago if voters picked Johnson, promised to beef up policing in the city while Johnson, by contrast, spoke about strengthening other public services to not rely on the police as a catch-all solution for public safety. 

During his inauguration on May 15, Johnson called for new investments in housing, mental health, and youth employment, with special attention to outlying neighborhoods that have long experienced divestment and violence. 

“We don’t want our story to be that Chicago became so traumatized by violence and despair that our residents felt no other choice but to leave us,” Johnson said in his speech to a joyous crowd of supporters at the Credit Union 1 Arena. “A safe Chicago means a safe Chicago for all, no matter what you look like, who you love, or where you live, we’ll do it together by investing in people.”

Since that celebratory day, Johnson has had to tackle the realities of governing, which have tripped up other progressive politicians who tried to deliver on their campaign planks while navigating the ire of cops. Chicago’s police union has already vowed to retaliate against his reforms, and similar threats have cowed many officials over the years. But the city’s activist community, whose support propelled him into office, now expects him to deliver on his ambitious plans. 

Over the last few months, several key policy and personnel decisions have already tested whether Johnson can chart a new course on public safety in the city, offering an early case study for how left-leaning officials try to sustain their commitments in the face of police opposition. Since May, Johnson has created a new “community safety” office, which is tasked with coordinating the mayor’s “root cause” approach to public safety.

But he also raised progressive groups’ eyebrows with his pick for an interim superintendent of the Chicago Police Department (CPD)—a member of the top brass who’s been critiqued for perpetuating a culture of protectionism and coverups—and when he left in place a controversial police surveillance contract that he’d pledged to end during his campaign. These were both temporary moves that he’ll get a chance to revisit soon. 

And Johnson is just now facing what may be his greatest test yet—summertime in Chicago, when gun violence has historically spiked, especially on the South and West sides, and when supporters and skeptics alike will be looking to see if the new mayor turns his lofty campaign promises into substance. 

“Johnson is quite right that dealing with jobs, social services, and mental health are things that can dramatically lower the crime problem that we have in Chicago,” Dick Simpson, a former alderman and professor emeritus in political science at the University of Illinois Chicago who is a longtime commentator on local politics, told Bolts.

“As long as things are going more or less in the correct direction, and you don’t have a Laquan McDonald’s shooting,” he said, referencing the 2014 killing of a 17-year-old at the hands of Chicago police which set off a national uproar that permanently marred Rahm Emmanuel’s administration. “[Johnson] has about two or three years to get it right.”

On his very first day in the 5th Floor office of City Hall, Johnson signed an executive order creating the new role of Deputy Mayor for Community Safety, who would be tasked with coordinating the city’s efforts to address the “the root causes of crime, violence, and harm, and to advance a holistic and comprehensive approach to community safety.” Four days later, Johnson appointed Garien Gatewood, director of the Illinois Justice Project, for the role.

Simpson called Gatewood’s appointment “a good step” in turning the mayor’s policy promises into action.

“The mayor needs an appointed person to filter out what comes in the massive [crime statistics] reports, or even the police superintendent waltzing in and saying things are going fine.” 

Johnson has called the “community safety” position a novel one, although Mayor Lori Lightfoot had a deputy mayor for public safety with the similar task of shifting the city beyond “law-enforcement driven solution(s).” Susan Lee, Lightfoot’s pick for the job, did so by directing funding to violence prevention organizations, but Lee was severely undermined by alderpeople who were skeptical of that approach amid rising homicides and shootings after the pandemic, and she eventually resigned. 

Gatewood has a staff of eight, but he admitted in an interview with WTTW that his office does not have the funding necessary to deliver on Johnson’s comprehensive approach to public safety alone and called for help from the city’s business and philanthropic communities. That approach involves pouring money into social services like job training, counseling and mental health services into Chicago’s most distressed areas, he also said.

Alongside key appointments, Johnson is now poised to implement the signature policy proposals for public safety that he touted during his campaign and included in his transition plan. Many of these policies are not entirely new, but have actually been introduced in the city council under past administrations. Before, they were blocked by unsupportive mayors, but Chicago progressives are now hoping that having a career organizer in the mayor’s office will now make a difference. 

Though Lightfoot counted herself as a supporter of the Bring Chicago Home policy to create new housing for more than 65,000 unhoused people in the city using real estate transfer taxes during her first campaign, she held up its passage during her term. Neither did she offer support for the Peace Book ordinance introduced in 2022, which would allocate 2 percent of the police department’s budget to create youth-led gun violence reduction programs.

Another of those stalled policies is the “Treatment Not Trauma” ordinance, which would invest $100 million to create non-police crisis response teams to 911 calls when people are experiencing mental health crises and reopen the city’s neighborhood mental health clinics that were closed under the administration of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Lightfoot’s predecessor. This measure is central to Johnson’s push, as expressed in his transition report, to “define violence overall as a public health issue,” and address it as such. 

Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, alderperson of the 35th Ward who was first elected in 2015, told Bolts the reasons why he and his fellow progressives in City Hall couldn’t get these measures passed before came down to mayoral priorities.

“[Lightfoot] pulled out all the stops to even prevent [them] from receiving a hearing under her administration,” Ramirez-Rosa said. “What we love about this new administration is that progressives don’t just have a seat at the table, but they are now leading and at the forefront of legislating in City Hall.”

While the city council’s Progressive Reform Caucus, which includes alderpeople from across the city like Ramirez-Rosa, Jeanette Taylor, and the driving force behind Treatment Not Trauma, Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez will back Johnson should he bring any of these measures up for a vote, their votes amount to 19 out of the 25 needed for passage, so he’ll need an additional six alderpeople on board before he can get them through the chamber. But Ramirez-Rosa is confident they can muster those.

“Between the number of progressives in City Council and also support from the mayor, I have no doubt that we’ll have the votes necessary to move these forward,” he said.

Critics of Johnson’s approach, like the editorial board of the Chicago Sun-Times, have raised concerns about funding these programs at a time when the city is facing a major fiscal shortfall. Even if he overcomes these hurdles, raises the necessary revenue, and passes all three programs in the coming months, which Ramirez-Rosa expects to happen, it will still take considerable time for them to have an effect, and so they won’t put a dent in the city’s violence until well after this summer is past.

Vaughn Bryant, executive director at Metropolitan Peace Initiatives who previously developed the citywide violence prevention program called Safe Passages, told the TRiiBE recently that the timeline for these long-term violence prevention efforts to succeed isn’t months or years but potentially decades.

“It took [Los Angeles] 20 years to get to a point where they are now,” Bryant said, describing Los Angeles’ current crime statistics, which is about one-third of the number of homicides per 100,000 people that occur every year in Chicago. And the more people are exposed to high-levels of neighborhood violence like in Chicago, the greater their likelihood of getting involved in violence themselves, which is especially true among the young. 

That’s why Ramirez-Rosa sees Johnson’s summer youth employment program as “critically important” in the interim, as a near-term solution. 

The city’s summer jobs program is employing close to 24,000 young people this year, up 2,000 jobs from 2022. But that total represents a little more than half of the 45,000 who applied to the program. Johnson has since vowed to ensure that every teen and young adult who wants a job through the program gets one. 

“We’ve already made some strides this summer in terms of increasing youth employment and youth employment opportunities,” Ramirez-Rosa told Bolts. “We’re going to continue to make progress in the coming years.”

Johnson has also had to address new crises that have surfaced since his inauguration. His first major piece of legislation was not one of the much-touted public safety ordinances but a $51 million package for immediate relief for asylum-seekers who began arriving in the city at a pace of 100 per day in May after being bused north from border states like Texas. 

While the mayor mustered the support necessary to secure its passage, it was not without a fight. Several alderpeople from wards that voted strongly in favor of Johnson over Vallas vociferously opposed this measure, as well as concurring plans to house asylum-seekers in closed-down public school buildings.

Besides navigating sudden crises, and all the routine politicking with fellow elected officials, Johnson will still need to engage with the city’s existing apparatus for public safety—the police. His biggest hurdle will likely be the police union, the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which opposes many of the reforms he has called for, such as strengthening mechanisms for police accountability. 

“It’s not like a wage dispute where one side wants 6 percent increase and the other side wants 2 percent and they agree on 4 percent,” Simpson told Bolts. “The leadership and membership [of the FOP], for the most part, are totally hostile to the ideas that Johnson has.” 

Besides constituting an important voting bloc and marshaling significant campaign funding to their preferred candidates, major municipal police unions have flexed their power over would-be reformers by staging dramatic acts of public disdain, like when CPD officers turned their backs to Lightfoot in 2021 as she was visiting two injured officers in the hospital, or, more seriously, conducting deliberate work slowdowns, like the New York Police Department allegedly did in response to the George Floyd protests that roiled the city even as shootings spiked in the year thereafter.

FOP President John Catanzara warned before the election that there would be “blood in the streets” of Chicago and a spate of resignations should Johnson assume office, and it remains to be seen if the FOP will make good on that threat. In an early effort to warm the relationship with rank-and-file police officers, Johnson expressed firm support for them while attending a recent swearing-in for rookie cops.

Johnson is already making leadership decisions for police. David Brown stepped down as superintendent after Lori Lightfoot was defeated in the mayoral race in the first round in February, and then her interim choice Eric Carter resigned unexpectedly after only two months on the job.

Johnson in early May tapped Fred Waller as a new interim police chief, provoking complaints that Johnson was reneging on his commitments to reform the scandal-ridden department. Waller is known for having promoted Alvin Jones in 2012, an officer implicated in a sweeping police corruption and extortion racket, 10 months after an investigation by CPD’s Internal Affairs Department and the FBI caught two of his closest team members red handed in a sting operation. 

Waller has since claimed he didn’t know about Jones’ misdeeds at the time he promoted him, but critics accuse him of being complicit in the department’s “code of silence,” not just overlooking serious misconduct but sometimes actively covering up for it when calls for accountability arise.

In addition, Waller was suspended in 2020 for saying “grope me, don’t rape me,” in a meeting about the decision to move officers from police districts to other units. He used banked vacation time to serve the 28-day penalty, so he did not miss a day of paid work, but still decided to resign from the force a few months later.

According to Simpson, Johnson likely chose Waller, despite his questionable history, because “he’s not viewed as shaking the boat.”

“Police aren’t going to be unhappy with him, even if he makes adjustments,” Simpson continued. “That’s a pretty good interim solution, assuming that a new police superintendent is appointed long term and that is someone who can actually handle the job.”

Waller’s tenure is likely to be short-lived, though. Johnson will soon make a permanent selection for CPD’s superintendent from the list of three nominees selected by the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability last week. That newly created police oversight body, which includes members directly elected by the public, evaluated the applications of 54 candidates who applied for the position in May, and narrowed it down to a list of three candidates, two from within the ranks of CPD, and one from outside. 

In an initial public meeting after the announcement, some community members were more hopeful in the internal candidates’ abilities to implement reforms, while others remained skeptical of the entire police department’s ability to change, the Triibe reports. The FOP, for their part, commended the selection process.

“This process is 100 times better than when the police board was conducting it,” Catanzara said. “It’s much more fair and inclusive.”

 The mayor now has 30 days to review the candidates, but can also ask the commission to go back to the drawing board and give him new names. Whatever nominee he ultimately picks will also need to be approved by the city council.

Johnson has also faced criticism that he has backtracked on a campaign pledge to immediately terminate CPD’s contract for a controversial gunfire detection technology called ShotSpotter.

Jose Manuel Almanza, director of advocacy and movement building at Equiticity, has been at the forefront of the movement to end the ShotSpotter agreement. According to Almanza, it started in 2021 when a group of organizers in the working-class neighborhood of Little Village convened to develop a response to the police shooting of 13-year-old Adam Toledo. 

In that nationally publicized case, CPD officers responded to the scene after receiving a ShotSpotter notification that a gun was fired in the neighborhood. An officer pursued Toledo into an alley, shooting him as he turned around and raised his hands in apparent surrender.

Recent studies by the MacArthur Justice Center and the city’s Office of the Inspector General found that CPD officers responding to ShotSpotter alerts rarely collect evidence relating to gun crimes but do engage in discriminatory practices of stopping and frisking Black and Latinx folks.

“It changes the CPD’s behavior,” Almanza told Bolts. “They find me walking down the block to my friend’s house, or they find my neighbors hanging out in front of a friend’s house, or they find my cousin walking to the corner store, and because ShotSpotter is telling them that [a shot was fired in the area], they treat us as suspects.” 

When Johnson pledged on his campaign website to “end the ShotSpotter contract and invest in new resources that go after illegal guns without physically stopping and frisking Chicagoans on the street,” Almanza was on board as a supporter, even going so far as to volunteer his time as an unpaid canvasser for Johnson. 

“Past administrations, not just here in Chicago, but in any major city and the federal government, there’s never really been a big effort to address those issues,” he said. “It’s always been addressing the symptoms of crime, reacting to the symptoms of crime, and not really solving what’s really causing these things so they don’t happen.” 

That’s why Almaza was enraged to see that the city would not be canceling the contract early. Instead, Johnson’s signature appeared on a document authorizing a $10 million extension payment to SoundThinking, the organization that runs the ShotSpotter technology. A spokesperson for the mayor’s office told WBEZ that Johnson may have had no choice but to approve the payment Lightfoot had already authorized, but that his automatic signature placed on the document was a mistake. 

Almanza worries about the influence of SoundThinking, whose deal with the city represents 11 percent of their overall revenues.

“They’re co-opting the movement’s language, talking about equity, trying to gain support from community members [by] changing the way they’re talking about ShotSpotter,” Almanza said.

Activists like Almanza feel betrayed about this delay, as well as the mayor’s decision not to remove armed officers from Chicago Public Schools after saying that police “have no place in schools.” But he’s not giving up on Johnson just yet.

“It’s up to us to hold him accountable to those things,” he continued. “That’s not to say it in a negative way, that’s saying it in a coalition, base-building kind of way, where we all have the same goal in mind.Johnson’s only been in office for like, what, a [couple] month[s]. Right now, we’re giving him the benefit of the doubt.”

The post On Policing, Brandon Johnson’s Progressive Promises Meet Their First Tests appeared first on Bolts.

Johnson is, in fact, set to become mayor of Chicago, after winning the election on Tuesday. A former teacher and labor organizer, he rode heavy support from the CTU and other unions to defeat a more conservative Democrat, Paul Vallas, by three percentage points. Lightfoot had already lost in the election’s first round in late February.

The runoff campaign was dominated by the two candidates’ starkly different visions for the future of Chicago, especially regarding crime and policing. 

Vallas, the former CEO of Chicago’s school system, ran what The New Yorker dubbed a “cops and crime” campaign; buoyed with the backing of the local police union and the Chicago business community, he focused on promises to beef up policing as a response to an uptick in crime during the pandemic years. Vallas attacked Johnson over his past statements sympathetic to reducing the police budget, though Johnson walked those back this year. Johnson, meanwhile, seized the progressive lane and vowed to increase public services and community investments in housing, public education, mental health services, and job training, and he criticized Vallas for turning to the police as a catch-all solution.

The race garnered national attention as a sort of proxy for the future of policing and safety in American cities, with many interpreting Vallas’s first-place finish in February as a demand by voters for a more punitive approach to crime. Johnson, who on Tuesday carried the neighborhoods that have seen the most violence, used his victory speech to celebrate the success of an alternative answer.

“Tonight is the beginning of a Chicago that truly invests in all of its people,” Johnson said. “There’s more than enough for everybody in the city of Chicago… We finally will have a City Hall, a city government that truly belongs to the people.” 

Underlying the vast differences between the two candidates’ platforms—and the proxy battle between the CTU and the Fraternal Order of Police—was also a clash between different styles of leadership best suited to carry them out. 

Vallas is a technocrat who has spent decades managing large school bureaucracies from the top down with a goal of making them operate more like businesses, often directly in opposition with teachers’ unions. In his mayoral campaign, proposals to improve city institutions—especially police—revolved around placing competent leaders at the helm. 

“They aren’t confident in leadership,” Vallas said during a recent live forum with Block Club Chicago, bemoaning retirements and vacancies in the Chicago Police Department. “So you restore morale, you slow the exodus.” 

Johnson has a background in labor and organizing and he will be the first mayor that the CTU has endorsed—and the first to come up through the CTU itself. His path into politics began with organizing just ahead of the historic 2012 teachers strike, where teachers advocated for better public school conditions and against school privatization put in place by Vallas and his successors. It kicked off a decade of activism in which the CTU got involved in electoral politics and expanded its demands to include affordable housing, mental health services, public safety, and jobs. 

Johnson participated in these efforts, including taking part in a hunger strike in 2016. The CTU leadership praised his mayoral campaign, which included many of the same priorities, goals, and strategies as his organizing work, as an extension of this work. 

In the eyes of his supporters, Johnson’s background as an organizer is one of his key strengths.

“Brandon Johnson has stood shoulder to shoulder with Chicago movement organizations for decades,” Carlos Fernandez, executive director of Grassroots Illinois Action, a Humboldt Park-based community organization that endorsed Johnson, told Bolts. “He has marched with us, protested with us, and joined with community leaders to develop strategies to win the policies our communities need.”

Fernandez says the candidate consulted with them regularly as he developed his platform. “He also understands that solutions often don’t come from the top but with the people on the ground floor doing the work.” 

This bottom-up model is reflected in Johnson’s policy proposals, which will require his administration to garner plenty of grassroots input on individual and community needs, and which call for strengthening both public services and their partnerships with civil society and violence intervention programs. One plank of his public safety plan is to reopen mental health clinics, and support the “Treatment not Trauma” model introduced by Alderperson Rossana Rodriguez that would send mental health professionals and EMTs as the response to certain emergency calls, rather than police. In rebuffing Vallas’s proposal to add more police to the L trains, he has proposed a violence intervention strategy that involves working with organizations like the Night Ministry, which already provides medical and other outreach services to unhoused people on the CTA. 

He has also committed to funding violence interruption strategies directed at youth in particular, and cites Peace Book, an ordinance proposed last year that would create a directory of violence interruption leaders, resources, and strategies for young people to use. 

Johnson’s first big test at coalition building came during the runoff campaign. After receiving 22 percent of the vote in the first round, he needed to make up a lot of ground to catch up with Vallas, who got 35 percent, and appeal to voters who chose other candidates. On Tuesday, he largely won the predominantly-Black precincts that previously went to Lori Lightfoot, and he split the areas that previously went to Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, who endorsed Johnson, last month. 

The biggest boost for Johnson likely came from a roughly 30 percent increase in turnout among young voters, while turnout among older voters declined compared to February. Turnout overall was low, at about 33 percent of registered voters, roughly the same as in February. 

Johnson now enters the mayor’s office in a heightened moment of flux for Chicago. He will preside over a city recovering from the economic effects of the pandemic, like many other US mayors. But Chicago is set for many more specific transformations. The school board is set to transition from being a fully mayor-appointed body to including some elected positions; the city needs a new police superintendent; and new police district councils were elected for the first time in February to work alongside other city bodies to increase citizen oversight of police. 

All of these changes will happen against the backdrop of the local police union declaring long before the election that it would fight the incoming mayor. 

John Catanzara, the president of the FOP, one of Vallas’s main allies, declared last month that Chicago should expect a mass resignation of police officers and “blood in the streets” if Johnson won. (Vallas condemned those comments, but Johnson was eager to tie his rival to the FOP throughout the campaign due to Catanzara’s ties to Republican politicians.)

Several progressives broadly aligned with Johnson also won aldermanic runoffs on Tuesday, adding to the council’s shift to the left Candidates supported by the CTU and other left-leaning organizations like Democratic Socialists for America prevailed, often against candidates with heavy support from the Democratic establishment, like Angela Clay and Leni Manaa-Hoppenworth in the 46th and 48th wards during the runoff. 

Desmon Yancy, the incoming alderperson for Chicago’s 5th ward covering the Hyde Park and South Shore neighborhoods, is also an organizer who had a hand in creating the city’s new police district councils. This new effort at police accountability through community oversight was the result of decades of activism against largely-unchecked police brutality. The Empowering Communities for Public Safety coalition, which Yancy helped form, crafted the ordinance that led to the formation of 22 three-member councils in each of Chicago’s 66 police districts. These councils will hold monthly forums with members of the community, and also have a role in deciding police leadership. Chicago elected these council members in February, and many candidates who were targeted by the FOP, much like Johnson, prevailed.

“My organizing experience has been a sort of cattle wrangling,” Yancy told Bolts. “Thinking about how all these things are working for the good of the people in the community has been what my career has been centered in, so it’s a natural transition for me.”

Yancy now says he looks forward to working alongside a fellow organizer in the mayor’s office.

“I can imagine going to Mayor Johnson and saying, ‘Here’s the work we want to be doing in the ward,’ and he’s going to ask, ‘Where’s the community involvement in this?’ And having already done the work, we don’t have to explain to him how the community got here,” he said. 

Yancy hopes that a Johnson administration inspires other cities to follow suit in “having a leader who respects, and understands, and supports community voice, and having community leaders as aldermen helping to bring these honest, transparent conversations to transform our communities.”

He added, “To be in this moment today, it’s just exciting.”

The post Chicago’s Organizer Mayor appeared first on Bolts.

The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) recruited election lawyer Perry Abbasi to run in the 25th District and legally challenge slates of progressive candidates in the 19th, 20th, and 24th Districts to get them kicked off the ballots. (Each district elects three members.) The challenges failed, enabling all these slates—made up largely of grassroots activists—to remain in the running.

And on Tuesday they largely prevailed. In all of the 19th, 20th, 24th, and 25th Districts, these progressive slates appear to have swept all three available seats—going 12 for 12. 

Abbasi himself finished last in the West Side district he was running in. Asked for his reaction, Abbasi simply congratulated the winners.

“We made history yesterday and we decisively beat the FOP,” Frank Chapman, an advocate with the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (CAARPR) who helped lead the movement that set up these police council districts, told Bolts on Wednesday morning. Other groups that endorsed these slates include United Working Families and ONE People’s Campaign.

Saúl Arellano, one of the victorious candidates in the 25th District who was backed by CAARPR, is a 24-year old student at Northeastern Illinois University. An immigrants’ rights advocate himself, he is the son of immigration activist Elvira Arellano, who in 2006 drew national attention when she sought shelter from ICE agents in a Chicago church. 

“I am just a vessel fighting for social justice, and I’m just an instrument here to serve the community,” Arellano told Bolts on Tuesday after his win. “The people in the communities are the ones that are in charge of the decisions that are being made, and that we’re not doing no backroom deals, but that this is transparent and this is for and by the people.”

Rev. Dr. Marilyn Pagán-Banks, the director of the nonprofit soup kitchen A Just Harvest and a founding member of the Coalition to End Money Bond, won a seat for the 24th District. She too defeated a candidate endorsed by the FOP.

Pagán-Banks told Bolts that, during the campaign, she had to fight off some voters’ anxiety that FOP-backed candidates would do well. She did not want “that just becoming an excuse to just throw it all away,” she said. Instead, she added, that concern created “the urgency behind making sure that we got the right people in place.”

Still, some FOP-backed candidates prevailed in police council races in other areas of the city. Of 17 candidates endorsed by the FOP in contested races citywide, seven won in the Eighth, Ninth, 16th, and 22nd Districts. (Those are located around the neighborhoods of Chicago Lawn, Deering, Jefferson Park, and Morgan Park, respectively.)

Lee Bielecki, a retired CPD sergeant, won in the 22nd District despite having a record of 24 complaints, according to the Citizens Police Data Project. That’s more than the vast majority of percent of other CPD officers. Asked about how the police should be reformed by The Chicago Reader, Beilecki said, “The police are doing a good job, and need more resources.” 

The FOP scored its biggest success in the mayoral race, with a major test now looming for the police union in five weeks.

The candidate it endorsed, Paul Vallas, finished first with roughly 34 percent, far ahead of the rest of the field. He will move to a “Top 2” runoff on April 4.

Vallas ran a law-and-order campaign, assailing Lightfoot over the city’s crime rate and calling for hiring more Chicago Police Department (CPD) officers. He did well in the whiter Southwest and Northwest wards, which are also home to large numbers of police officers and firefighters.

Vallas will face Brandon Johnson, a Cook County Commissioner and former Chicago Public Schools teacher who ran with the backing of the Chicago Teachers Union and occupied the progressive lane among the major candidates. In his campaign, Johnson argued for improving neighborhood institutions like schools, housing and public transportation as a means of improving safety. Lightfoot, who attacked Johnson harshly during the campaign for threatening safety, finished third and was knocked out after a single term in office, something that has not happened since Jane Byrne lost her reelection bid in 1983. 

One event for which Lightfoot was roundly criticized during her tenure in office was her handling of the botched police raid on social worker Anjanette Young’s home. After campaigning on a promise to “bring in the light” to Chicago’s notoriously corrupt and untransparent way of doing politics, Lightfoot sought to block the release of tapes from the raid and fought Young’s lawsuit against the city tooth and nail. 

With 99 percent of precincts reporting as of publication, Johnson claimed 20 percent to Lightfoot’s 17 percent. A fourth candidate, U.S. Representative Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, received 14 percent. Five others split the rest of the vote. 

Some of the more than 100,000 mail-in ballots received remain to be counted in Chicago, and could potentially shift the outcomes in a few of the tightest races for police councils.

Leading up to the April runoff, Chicagoans will see to another round of intense campaigning. Bolts reported earlier this month on efforts by local violence intervention organizations to scale up approaches to solving shootings and murders that prioritize alternatives to incarceration and traditional policing, and on those issues the contrast between Johnson and Vallas is stark. Vallas touts his plan to resurrect “broken windows” policing through increased patrols and the introduction of a “robust Public Nuisance ordinance.”

Vallas has said he sees a role for alternative strategies to curb violence but believes that they should operate in conjunction with police, in a model he calls “community-informed policing” on his campaign website. 

“Addressing the mental health needs in the community really requires that you not only reopen the mental health clinics… but you literally need to have one in every police station,” Vallas said at a January candidate forum.  

Johnson has attacked Vallas’s association with the FOP leadership and has expressed much more skepticism about the city’s massive investment in police, but his campaign has committed to keeping CPD’s budget at current levels. His campaign website states that he intends to “work with police and first responders to invest in community-based interventions that de-escalate conflict, reduce violence and make our neighborhoods safer.” For Johnson, this means a focus in particular on youth employment.

Even more than the crowded first round, the April runoff may become a stark referendum on whether Chicagoans support a return to hard-line policing measures as called for by the FOP, or whether they want to pursue alternative strategies like funding violence intervention groups at scale or reopening closed mental health clinics as part of the treatment not trauma campaign. By putting forth their slate of candidates in the police district council races, the FOP bet that voters would agree with their hard-line stance and often lost. Vallas in April will be its next shot.

In the meantime, the candidates elected to the police council districts are already preparing to take their roles, and some are hoping to use their new bully pulpit to shape the conversation on the direction that policing will take in the city.

“I hope that this idea that healing needs to be part of any organizing work and restorative work needs to be part of any type of conversation we have around safety,” Pagán-Banks told Bolts. “You do have to come from a place of love and healing for the community.”

The post In Chicago’s Police Oversight Elections, Progressives Targeted by FOP Prevail appeared first on Bolts.

“This is the first time in the history of Chicago and in the history of the United States that Black and brown people have been given a democratic option to say who polices their communities and how their communities are policed,” activist Frank Chapman said of the new police oversight body. 

Chapman, now 80 years old, led the grassroot movement that prompted the city council to pass the Empowering Communities for Public Safety (ECPS) ordinance in 2021, creating the district councils.

These councils, the culmination of decades of activism for increased police accountability, represent Chicago’s boldest attempt to give residents direct input over policing practices. Councils will hold forums and monthly public meetings to hear residents’ concerns and discuss topics like police interactions with youth and undocumented residents, community policing, and restorative justice initiatives.

Each district council will operate with three positions; a chairperson, a community engagement coordinator, and a member who serves on the nominating committee for another citywide police oversight board. All members of a council must be a resident of the district for at least a year, and none can be active members of the Chicago Police Department (CPD), although former officers can be elected if they left the department at least three years prior to the date on which they would assume office.

While these duties and responsibilities outlined in the ECPS ordinance are fairly clear, much about the members’ day-to-day responsibilities has yet to be determined. “We are building the plane while we’re flying it,” is how Julia Kline, a candidate for the 2nd District police council who is also a voting rights activist and former Chicago Public School teacher, described it. 

Over 100 candidates are now running for the 66 council seats. They come from a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences—young people of color and Chicago Public School teachers to retired CPD officers and practicing attorneys—and many have not held elected office before. 

As the inaugural members, the winners in Tuesday’s election will likely chart the direction of future district councils and have a hand in shaping how they handle common community complaints such as lengthy response times or patterns of misconduct like stop-and-frisk. Although the practice was reined in under a 2015 federal consent decree, stop-and-frisk is nevertheless still occurring to Black and brown youth, according to at least one district council candidate. But if candidates with pro-police and reform-minded views end up on these councils, any nominations, policy recommendations, and initiatives that emerge will be contingent on the ability of these factions—who have historically been at odds—to share power. 

Most crucially, the district councils will help decide who gets nominated to serve on the seven-member Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability (CCPSA), another accountability body with more direct and wide-ranging powers over CPD’s policies and budget. This city-wide oversight commission, which was also created by the 2021 ordinance, can also remove the head of the Citizens Office of Police Accountability (COPA), which has existed since 2017 and is tasked with conducting its own investigations into police misconduct and releasing reports and body-cam footage that result from those investigations. 

COPA has faced public criticism after the police killing of Harith Augustus in 2018, the botched raid on social worker Anjanette Young’s home in 2019, and the fatal shooting of Adam Toledo in 2021. In these cases and others, Chicago residents took issue with the length of time it took COPA to release its disciplinary recommendations, and for its hesitancy to release all available body-cam footage from the incidents, not just those videos deemed most relevant.

The Commission can also cast a vote of no confidence for Chicago’s police superintendent, forcing both City Council hearings and a public response from the mayor which could lead to their possible ouster. It also gets to draft the shortlist of candidates whenever a vacancy arises.

Asked how these reforms were achieved, Chapman said, “We built a grassroots movement in the neighborhoods going door by door, block by block, district by district. And after we built up a big groundswell of support, we actually forced the city to the negotiating table to negotiate this history-making ordinance.”

But the roots of the movement extend back much further than this most recent election cycle. Calls for community control of policing trace back to the Black Panther Party and Illinois deputy chairman Fred Hampton Sr., who brought the first multicultural Rainbow Coalition together in the late 1960s around this very issue. But the reform effort failed, according to Chapman, in the face of concerted opposition from Chicago’s political machine helmed by longtime mayor Richard J. Daley. (Hampton was later killed by Chicago police, in conjunction with the FBI.)

Nevertheless, the 2012 killing of Rekia Boyd by off-duty police detective Dante Servin, and his subsequent acquittal on the charges of involuntary manslaughter, reignited calls for police accountability. It also prompted the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (CAARPR) and other organizers to host a meeting that was attended by around 150 community members, many of whom had previously experienced police violence, who then decided to build a movement demanding elected police councils, according to Chapman.

High-profile police killings and scandals in subsequent years have added strength to the movement and garnered significant public support for substantial reform measures—like the killing of Laquan McDonald, who was revealed to have been shot 16 times after police attempted to cover up details of the shooting; revelations about the widespread extent of police torture committed by former Chicago police commander Jon Burge and his associates leading to a landmark reparations ordinance; and the still-unfolding corruption scandal involving former Sgt. Ronald Watts, which prompted the largest wave of exonerations in the history of Chicago.

Following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May 2020, thousands in Chicago and millions across the United States took to the streets to protest police brutality. This gave leaders of the police accountability movement, backed by alderpersons Jeanette Taylor, Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, and Roderick Sawyer of the Black Caucus, leverage to negotiate the Empowering Communities for Public Safety ordinance with the mayor’s office. The police district councils were the signature policy of that ordinance, which passed the city council with a 36-13 vote, because they extended community input and democratic control over individual police districts. 

For reform-minded candidates running for those district councils, increasing the number of restorative justice and alternative public safety interventions could pave the way to reducing police budgets. “If we can figure out how to keep each other safe in such a way that nobody needs to call the police into our neighborhoods, we will all be so much better off,” Kline, the 2nd District candidate, said. “And then maybe the police can shrivel in the way that they need to do.”

Meanwhile, some candidates have ties to the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which has spent more than $25,000 backing specific candidates in these races, and supports increasing CPD’s budget and hiring more officers, according to the Chicago Reader. On February 11, the FOP endorsed 19 candidates across 11 of the 22 district council races. This move came after the Chicago FOP chapter said on Twitter that the city’s police accountability measures “support criminals over victims.”

Perry Abbasi, a FOP election lawyer who’s been accused of posting misogynist and racist social media posts, was tapped by the FOP to run in the 25th District race after they failed to find a candidate who aligned with their interests. 

Abbasi confirms that he has been paid $15,000 by the FOP since September 2022 for work getting several pro-police candidates on the ballot and for filing challenges against slates of progressive candidates in the 19th, 20th, and 24th District races. Abbasi argued that these candidates shouldn’t be on the ballot because they filed their ballot petitions as a group rather than individually. 

Per a decision by the Board of Elections and affirmed by the Circuit Court that rejected his argument, the candidates remain on the ballot. Abbasi’s argument was once again rejected by the Illinois Court of Appeals, he says, and so the slates of progressive candidates will not be disqualified.

“[Police] have a First Amendment right to participate in the political process, and they’re doing so,” Abbasi told Bolts.

By running their own slate of candidates, activists think the FOP is trying to undermine this new oversight mechanism from the start. 

“This is the height of hypocrisy,” Chapman said. “You’re not in favor of this law, so…why do you want people in the district councils? So you can gum them up, so you can block progress. That’s the only reason.”

CAARPR encouraged more than 50 candidates to run for their desire to achieve greater accountability for police misconduct and plan to explore alternatives to policing like sending mental health workers in response to crisis calls. 

Because so many of the candidates are working class, Chapman said that “they can’t afford to buy this election.” For that reason, CAARPR has been assisting them with canvassing, printing campaign materials, and other field operations.

One of those candidates backed by CAARPR is Coston Plummer, a home care worker who’s championed disability rights and is running for the 2nd District council. Plummer brings a different perspective on policing than the FOB-backed candidates as brother of a Burge torture survivor who remains incarcerated to this day, and is an ardent supporter of police accountability measures. He wants to bring an end to stop-and-frisk measures and no-knock warrants, and he sees the recent objection by the interim CCPSA to the new CPD gang database as evidence of how the elected oversight commission can influence policy. 

Carisa Parker, a survivor of domestic violence at the hands of her partner who was a CPD officer and mother of a current officer, has a complex relationship to policing in the city. She is running in the 22nd District and plans to “focus on the systemic issues that cause those disciplinary issues.”

“Are we hiring people with a military mindset and not people who are going in as guardians?” Parker asked. “​​I really see this body as being a really important piece of proactive accountability.”

Organizers from across the country have journeyed to and camped out in Chicago in the dead of winter to learn from the ECPS campaign about the district council model. They came from cities such as New York, Washington DC, and Silver Spring, Maryland, and even places as far away as Dallas and Seattle.  

They are looking to Chicago’s new model of popularly-elected councils with cautious optimism after seeing their own cities’ efforts at police accountability through civilian oversight boards stunted by lack of staffing, inadequate funding, limited powers, or a combination of constraints. In Dallas, for example, where citizen oversight body members are appointed by city council, some have been criticized for having too close ties with police. In Fort Worth, after the city council voted down a proposal for a civilian oversight board, the police chief recently put forth his own proposal for a model in which he’d handpicked a majority of the members.

Chicagoans are also familiar with oversight reforms that raise hope only to be dashed against stonewalling by the police department and foot-dragging from the mayor’s office. But the city does have a track record of success with accountability measures; COPA, unlike its peer institutions in other cities, is well-staffed, adequately funded, and conducts its own misconduct investigations. 

Additionally, the level of transparency is somewhat higher in Chicago given that the public has full access to data from Chicago police disciplinary records through the Citizens Police Data Project, which was unparalleled when first launched in 2015. Two years after New York’s state legislature repealed Section 50-a in 2020, making police disciplinary records publicly accessible in that state, the Legal Aid Society created an NYPD misconduct dashboard.

Chapman isn’t optimistic about reform efforts that focus on persuading the police of the need for change from within: “the sad news is that has never worked.” Nevertheless, he was more sanguine about putting power in the hands of the ordinary citizens: “Once we learn how to mobilize the people and demand the changes that we want…that always works.”

The post Chicago Election Puts Police Oversight in Voters’ Hands appeared first on Bolts.

On a brisk and sunny February morning, 22-year-old Keyon Pass approached a microphone in a packed South Shore ballroom to tell his story of survival. “I’d always been athletic and smart, but society got the best of me for a while,” Pass, wearing matching gray Nike sweatpants and sweatshirt, said to a crowd of hundreds gathered to discuss gun violence prevention. Pass explained how he started stealing cars as a teenager growing up on the city’s West Side, and how as a young adult he had lost close friends and family in shootings that left him traumatized. 

“I found myself numb to death because it was so normal to me,” he said. “I had nothing to lose and nobody to talk to me about it.” 

Pass choked up, and the crowd clapped and cheered him on, as he described how his life transformed when he decided to become a participant in Chicago CRED (Create Real Economic Destiny), a non-profit that prevents gun violence by deploying intensive services, ranging from life coaching, therapy for trauma, stable employment, and a weekly stipend of $125 to $225 over the course of two years. Chicago CRED participants like Pass face extraordinary risks of committing a shooting or being shot themselves, sometimes both simultaneously. Research shows that young adult males living in Chicago’s most dangerous zip codes face substantially higher risks of firearm-related homicide than U.S. soldiers deployed to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. 

“I wouldn’t be here without [the] Chicago CRED family,” Pass told the crowd of violence prevention outreach workers, academic researchers, Chicago business leaders, as well as law enforcement and public health officials from the city. 

Crime and public safety remain top of mind for Chicago voters who will elect their next major during the Feb. 28 election. But the hardships and trauma of the city’s young people have rarely translated into effective political action that creates lasting change for the neighborhoods most directly harmed by gun violence.

In the remaining weeks of the election, Chicago’s political debate over crime and safety is caught between calls for harsher punishment and expanded policing versus addressing the trauma and stark inequality driving crime and violence. In a crowded field of nine candidates, all have given lip service to community violence intervention groups, but few have advocated for more funding for programs like CRED that have been proven to reduce gun violence, while other candidates are calling for additional funds for police. 

If none of the nine candidates win more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round, the two top candidates face a runoff held on April 4. Incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot, whose own record on gun violence is under close scrutiny, could be the city’s first mayor to lose re-election in 34 years. 

“People who pick up a gun and wreak havoc in a neighborhood, they need to be locked up. Period, full stop,” Lightfoot told Politico in a Feb. 2023 interview.

Former CEO of Chicago Public Schools Paul Vallas, running to the right of Lightfoot and endorsed by the notoriously brash police union, promises to address crime by hiring more police officers to patrol the streets and prosecuting more low-level “nuisance” crimes. Candidates running to the left of Lightfoot, like Brandon Johnson, endorsed by the powerful teachers union, argue Lightfoot has failed to address the root causes of violence in the city’s South and West Sides, and says more police does not result in safer neighborhoods. 

“The root of the problem is we’re dealing with young people that are traumatized,” Chicago CRED’s housing coordinator Kanoya Ali told Bolts. “Many of them have lost 20 friends and they’re not 20 years old.” 

Violence prevention organizations, however, are urging politicians to embrace a vision for public safety that goes beyond incarceration. 

“Violence intervention programs are an important harm reduction strategy that has to be funded to scale—full stop,” Stephanie Kollmann, policy director at Northwestern’s Children Family Justice Center, told Bolts. “If you want healthy families, safe communities, and more people engaged in the legal economy, they need stable housing, quality education and healthcare, decent jobs, and good recreational experiences—those are the strongest form of violence prevention policy that we can create.” 

Community violence intervention groups work, in a broad sense, by inspiring hope and a promise of a better life. Research by the University of Chicago and Northwestern University shows that participants in Chicago’s violence prevention groups—like CRED and READI (Rapid Employment and Development Initiative)—experience substantial reductions in arrests for shootings, homicide, and being a victim of gun violence. And because shootings are so costly to cities, programs like READI also generate massive social savings, between $174,000 and $858,000 per participant, researchers estimate. 

“People that are involved in CRED, if they finish the program, they live longer and they stay out of jail longer,” Andrew Papachristos, professor of sociology at Northwestern University who studies violence prevention groups, told Bolts. “The program we evaluated happened during Covid and a national spike in gun violence. By any realistic, non-political standard, that’s a pretty big success.” 

“From a political standpoint, I think it should be a win, too,” Papachristos added.  

Homicides are down nearly 15 percent since 2021, the most violent year in Chicago since the crime wave of the 1990s. Still, the level of homicides remains exceedingly high: Chicago has had more than 400 homicides every year running since 1965—a 58-year streak. 

“Our goals are very ambitious,” Teny Gross, executive director of the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago, told Bolts. “We want to have an 80 percent reduction in the next 15 years.” For that to happen, Gross says that means more outreach workers, more case managers and more clinicians, on top of addressing the damage done by neighborhood disinvestment. “The difference I see in Chicago between the ‘don’t haves’ and ‘the haves’ is unbelievable,” Gross said. “It’s a man-made crisis.” 

Doctor Selwyn Rogers, the founding director of the University of Chicago Emergency Department and Trauma Center on the South Side, witnesses first-hand the brutal physicality inflicted by gun violence on human beings everyday. Rogers similarly described gun violence in Chicago as a “Tale of Two Cities.” On the one hand, gun violence is “hyper-endemic” in some communities while close to non-existent in others.

Just six neighborhoods out of 77—comprising less than one tenth of the city’s population—accounted for a third of all of Chicago’s shootings in 2021. The majority of victims, by far, are Black men and women on the city’s South and West Sides, born into neighborhoods beset by high levels of homelessness, unemployment, substance use, hunger, and crumbling infrastructure, from schools to public parks, resulting from decades of divestment and neglect. The fact that the South and West Sides neighborhoods, where violence is most concentrated, have low voter turnout also complicates the politics of gun violence in the city; research shows that the most policed neighborhoods also vote less. 

These problems, structural and deeply entrenched, touch just about every aspect of civic life, and are a result of decades of de jure and de facto racial segregation that has characterized most of Chicago’s history. But their impacts, Rogers warns, are not relegated to the past nor just these neighborhoods. 

“This is not a ‘they’ problem,” Rogers told Bolts. “This is a ‘we’ problem. Irrespective of your politics, this is all of our problem.” 

When people get shot and are brought to the trauma center where Rogers works, they receive expensive health care. “Who pays for that?” Rogers asked. “We all do.” More importantly than the financial burden for Rogers is the loss of human potential. Without addressing chronic disinvestment in these hard-hit communities, Rogers thinks there’s little chance of solving crime and violence in the city.“ How many people do we lose that could’ve done something different with their lives? How many people lose hope in the morass of violence?” 

All of the mayoral candidates publicly support community violence intervention, no matter their broader stance on crime. But few have offered detailed plans. 

For Paul Vallas, one of the frontrunners in the race, this looks like an increased role for educational systems as an intervening force, as well as more police. 

“We need to embrace violence reduction strategies like CRED, and we need to open our school campuses,” Vallas said in response to a question about his plan to address public safety. Vallas is running a “tough on crime” campaign and continuously calls to rebuild the police force and expand “community policing.”  

Jesús “Chuy” García, who also promises to hire more police officers, said that violence prevention groups are doing “God’s work,” and that more investment in community violence programs is “critical to the well-being of communities.” García, the other top candidate alongside Lightfoot and Vallas, has a public safety plan similar to Lightfoot’s, though he says the city can better implement an effective strategy under his leadership.

Lightfoot, meanwhile, has struggled to defend herself from a barrage of criticism coming from all sides. Community activists are frustrated over low levels of funding for community-based violence prevention during Lightfoot’s tenure as mayor, all while she’s increased the police budget every year since she took office in 2019. During the candidate forum, Lightfoot touted her administration’s record on violence prevention programs. “When I came into office, we were funding about two million dollars a year,” Lightfoot said. “We’re now spending $58 million a year. The money is flowing to street outreach.” (City records indicate that $52 million was allocated to violence intervention annually.)

Still, violence prevention groups only receive a tiny fraction of the funding that the police department receives. CPD’s budget is nearly $2 billion, and makes up over 65 percent of the city’s total spending on public safety. Chicago currently has more police officers per capita than any other major city except Washington D.C. 

Mayoral candidate Brandon Johnson, favored by left-wing organizations, argues that the safest neighborhoods aren’t the most heavily policed. Instead, he says, those neighborhoods have robust infrastructure, from quality schools to affordable housing and public transportation. “We’re spending $5 million a day policing alone, and that hasn’t solved any of our systemic problems,” Johnson said. Johnson’s public safety plan does not include increasing the police budget or hiring more police officers.

According to a WBEZ and Sun-Times questionnaire, just two candidates—state Rep. Kam Buckner and activist Ja’Mal Green—said they would reallocate resources away from policing and toward the “root causes” of gun violence. 

 Gun violence prevention groups are now in the political spotlight, but at current funding levels, these groups are only reaching a small fraction of people who are at risk of being targeted by shooters. 

“We have to keep scaling this work. We know we’re not at scale,” Arne Duncan, co-founder of Chicago CRED, who also served as CEO of Chicago Public Schools, as well as US Education Secretary, said. “There’s so many men and women and teens we’re not serving yet.” 

Ali, of Chicago CRED, is skeptical of the political rhetoric coming from the candidates. “I don’t know how serious that politicians and policymakers are taking this,” he said. “What has to be said to them? These young people need a chance, an opportunity, to really grow and bring something back to the community. They are not liabilities, they are assets.”

Ali wonders how many more of the city’s young people have to die before Chicago is willing to fully commit to a holistic approach that treats gun violence through a compassionate, public health-focused lens. 

While not often associated with enhancing public safety, the expansion of Medicaid, increased access to mental health care, and a guaranteed basic income have shown to reduce crime. Mayor Lightfoot’s latest budget did not include funding to extend Chicago’s universal basic income program, which cut $500 monthly checks to 5,000 Chicagoans facing economic hardships. 

At the South Shore meeting on gun violence, the organizations presented a vision of safety that includes a role for law enforcement, but also transcends the narrow confines of policing, prosecution, and incarceration.

“This is the moment we need to reject fear,” said Gross. “You’ve already had more policing for the last 30 years. And more incarceration. We have the right to say we don’t want more of that.” 

Gross added, “We need more peacekeepers.” 

The post In Chicago Mayor Race, Policing Dominates Over Violence Prevention Programs appeared first on Bolts.

Many states hold their local elections on odd-numbered years—a schedule that depresses turnout and that some places are fighting to change. That means that, if you’re interested in the shape of your criminal legal system, critical storylines are already taking shape: These local and state offices enjoy the brunt of the discretion to shape incarceration and policing. DAs and sheriffs, in particular, decide which cases to prosecute and with what severity, exercise nearly unfettered control over jail conditions, and choose how they partner with federal immigration enforcement.

There are nearly 500 elections for prosecutors and sheriffs scheduled for 2023, a Bolts analysis finds—and the first filing deadlines are coming up in just weeks. 

These elections are largely concentrated in Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, with just a few sprinkled in Florida, New Jersey, and Washington State. (The full list is available here.)

Other local offices that shape criminal punishment and policing are also on the ballot next year, including three governorships, at least two supreme court justices in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and hundreds of state lawmakers, local judges, and mayors.

Local elections are often very late to take shape, so in most cases the field remains undefined. At this time, the likeliest elections to draw the stark contrasts we have seen in recent cycles—with candidates disagreeing on whether to intentionally aim to reduce incarceration, or what goes into advancing public safety—include prosecutor races in New York City and upstate New York, Pittsburgh and the Philly suburbs, and Northern Virginia, as well as mayoral races in Chicago, Philadelphia, Denver, and across Texas. Sheriff races across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia may draw some scrutiny to immigration and detention conditions.

Bolts will follow these races throughout the year. Today, I am kicking off our coverage by laying out six big questions that will define the cycle: 

1. Can reform-minded prosecutor candidates hold their ground in Virginia, and make inroads elsewhere?

The last time the counties that are electing their prosecutors in 2023 voted for these same officials, in 2019, the results made for a striking split screen. Virginia saw one of the widest set of wins to date for candidates who campaigned on reducing incarceration. After winning  in a string of populous suburban counties,  they formed a statewide coalition called Virginia Progressive Prosecutors for Justice—at the time an unprecedented step—that advocating for lawmakers to abolish the death penalty and mandatory minimums, among other reforms. But their positions drew heavy heat from the right, including judicial pushback and failed recalls as well as criticism from the left over false promises. 

Now, those first-term incumbents are up for election again. They include Arlington’s Parisa Dehghani-Tafti and Fairfax’s Steve Descano, both in Northern Virginia, who drew attention in 2019 for ousting a pair of incumbents in Democratic primaries, as well as Albemarle’s James Hingeley, Loudoun’s Buta Biberaj, and Prince William’s Amy Ashworth. Several of these incumbents are now facing challengers, intra-party strife, or conservative anger, and the results of the 2023 cycle will determine the political strength of the state’s reform prosecutor coalition  going forward.

In New York and Pennsylvania, though, the 2019 DA elections saw advocates of criminal justice reform largely stagnate due to the sky-high number of uncontested elections and some high-profile losses. 

Pennsylvania’s marquee election in 2023 is likely to be the DA race in Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), where longtime Democratic DA Stephen Zappala is a vocal critic of criminal justice reforms amid significant racial disparities in his office. In 2019, Zappala beat multiple progressive challengers, though progressive organizers have made major progress in Pittsburgh in the intervening years, including winning a ballot measure meant to curtail solitary confinement and electing decarceral judges in 2021. 

Other DA races in Pennsylvania include counties like Cumberland and Lancaster that took a distinctly punitive approach to the opioid crisis, and populous Philly suburbs like Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery. Philadelphia’s reform DA Larry Krasner is not up after cruising to re-election in 2021; he has remained relatively isolated so far among DAs in the state, a far cry from the dynamic in Virginia, and 2023 will be the next test of whether his allies can change that.

In New York, where most prosecutors have been relentlessly critical of a landmark package of pretrial reforms, at least two former presidents of the state’s DA association are up for re-election this year—in Monroe County (Rochester) and Onondaga County (Syracuse). Another DA who has battled against state Democrats’ bail reform, William Grady of Dutchess County (Poughkeepsie), has said he is retiring after 40 years as DA.

Bronx DA Darcel Clark has drawn a reform challenger who says she is running to “end mass incarceration” four years after securing re-election unopposed. Also on the 2023 calendar: Queens, the site of the extraordinarily tight 2019 race that saw Melinda Katz become DA after defeating socialist organizer Tiffany Cabán.

In Mississippi, I have my eyes on the Fifth District, which covers seven counties in the central part of the state: DA Doug Evans drew national opprobrium and condemnation from the U.S. Supreme court for his decadeslong effort to prosecute Curtis Flowers six times for the same crime—a crusade exposed in the podcast “In the Dark.” Even with that exceptional spotlight, Evans ran unopposed in 2019 and remains in office, with little accountability, today. 

2. Will sheriffs and jailers face accountability?

The 2022 midterms showcased once again that, with some exceptions, sheriffs tend to secure re-election even when they link up in far-right networks, signal their eagerness to disrupt the federal government, or prepare to disrupt local elections. Next year will bring a different cast of characters to the forefront. There’s Sheriff Adam Fortney of Snohomish County, Washington, in the Seattle suburbs, who faced a recall effort in 2020 for quickly disregarding statewide COVID rules even while ramping up other arrests.

There’s Sheriff Sid Gautreaux, in East Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s most populous parish, who runs a jail with infamously dangerous conditions. Or there’s Sheriff Mike Chapman in Loudoun County, Virginia, who has drawn scrutiny for accepting campaign donations from private contractors that work with his office, a common practice among jailors. The vast majority of sheriffs in Louisiana and Virginia will be elected in 2023, creating a window for local jails to draw more public attention.

Note that Pennsylvania sheriffs have far more limited powers than elsewhere as they typically do not run local jails, which are managed directly or indirectly by other local offices, many of which are on the ballot in 2023. A string of deaths at the Allegheny County jail, located in Pittsburgh, and complaints that the lockup is violating a voter-approved ban on solitary confinement are now issues set to define the race for the county’s next chief executive.

3. Will immigrants’ rights advocates continue to curtail local collaboration with ICE?

When Donald Trump was president, voters in Democratic-leaning counties ousted public officials who cooperated with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But ICE forged new relationships with Southern jails to make up for it, and sheriffs rushed to profit off renting vacant jail space for ICE to detain migrants and asylum-seekers. In 2023, nearly all sheriffs will be on the ballot in Louisiana and Mississippi, states that  proved to be difficult terrain for critics of those ICE arrangements four years ago.

Still, immigrants’ rights advocates have opportunities in some blue-leaning areas to build on their 2022 successes and elect new officials who oppose collaborating with ICE.

Just four counties with 2023 sheriff races participate in ICE’s 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement to act like federal immigration agents in jails. Three of them voted for Joe Biden over Trump: Duval County (Jacksonville), Florida; East Baton Rouge Parish (Baton Rouge), Louisiana; and Rensselaer County (Troy), New York. (The fourth, which voted for Trump, is Culpeper County, Virginia.)

Still, recent history suggests that efforts to curtail cooperation with ICE will be tricky in all three blue-leaning counties. Republicans defended the sheriff’s office in Duval in a special election just last month. In East Baton Rouge, the GOP sheriff easily prevailed in 2019 with endorsements from prominent Democratic officials. And in Rensselaer, the only county in all of New York State that’s part of the 287(g) program, the Republican incumbent ran entirely unopposed four years ago.

4. Will there be more interest in city halls to reform policing?

Since the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the most ambitious electoral platforms for changing or reducing policing have emerged at the municipal level—but so has the most stringent backlash. In the absence of federal elections, 2023 may be the year those dynamics again take front stage with many of the nation’s biggest cities set to hold mayoral races, including five cities of more than one million: Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Philadelphia, and San Antonio. Many others will vote for their city councils.

These elections will feature incumbents who have tended to clash with protesters, such as Chicago’s incumbent mayor Lori Lightfoot; Democrats with a tough-on-crime reputation, such as John Whitmire, a Texas state senator running for Houston mayor; and candidates who have championed shifting resources from policing to other social services, such as Leslie Herod, who is running for mayor in Denver, or Cabán and other left-leaning council members who are up for re-election in New York. Watch out for whatever contrasts emerge around police budgets and ordinances that criminalize homelessness.

5. Will reform initiatives survive state elections in the South? 

In 2023, the elections that may change who runs state governments will largely be concentrated in the South, and the GOP has room to extend their power in what’s already their strongest region. 

In Virginia, the GOP governor and attorney general’s tough-on-crime posturing have run into the Democratic-run state Senate, which has rejected the former’s appointments to the parole board and killed the latter’s proposal to crack down against the state’s reform prosecutors. Should they flip the Senate in 2023, the GOP would gain full control of the state government and could press forward on those matters. 

In Kentucky, Democratic Governor Andy Beshear will seek a second term in difficult conditions given the state’s conservative bent. On his third day in office, he issued an executive order enabling hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians with felony convictions to vote; his re-election bid may decide the fate of his initiative since the GOP has reversed a similar one in the past.

The GOP also hopes to gain full control of Louisiana’s government; Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards cannot run for a third term, in a state where a short-lived bipartisan agreement to lower incarceration shattered within years of him signing a landmark reform package in 2017. 

6. How will judicial elections shape criminal punishment in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin?

In 2021, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia progressives made the unusual choice of organizing around local judicial races, and it paid off with a wave of wins by candidates who ran on curtailing bail and reducing incarceration. Next year, there will be more elections for the local bench in both places. 

Also in 2023, all Pennsylvanians will get to vote in a supreme court election to replace Max Baer, a Democratic justice who died this fall. The court, which is sure to retain a Democratic majority, has vacillated on criminal justice matters. One of Baer’s final opinions came in a September ruling that brought relief to defendants with mental illness, though the court has also disappointed reformers by rejecting cases challenging the death penalty or felony murder statutes. 

While Pennsylvania’s election won’t be resolved until November, one of the year’s most important races looms in April: A state supreme court seat on the ballot in Wisconsin may hand the majority to the liberal wing. Such a flip would affect criminal justice cases that have long divided Wisconsin justices, but the fate of the state’s 1849 abortion ban also looms large. Wisconsin’s staunchly GOP legislature is locked into place by aggressive gerrymanders; unlike neighboring Michigan, there is no mechanism for citizens to put a popular initiative on the ballot. That leaves state litigation, and April’s judicial election, as a rare path for Wisconsinites to curtail the policing of reproductive rights. 

The post What Off Year? Hundreds of Local Elections Will Define Criminal Justice Policy in 2023 appeared first on Bolts.

As results rolled in, though, there was little suspense. The four lawmakers targeted by the FOP, Senators Robert Martwick and Omar Aquino and Representatives Sonya Harper and Lindsey LaPointe, all easily defeated their FOP-endorsed challengers. They received between 66 and 75 percent of the vote in their respective primaries.

Martwick, Aquino, and LaPointe represent Chicago’s Northwest Side, home to a diverse mix of immigrants and working and middle-class residents—and a heavier than average share of residents who are police officers. Harper’s district extends into the city’s Southwest Side.

Also on Chicago’s Northwest Side, Anthony Quezada, a democratic socialist who has worked on enhancing police accountability, defeated Luis Arroyo Jr., an incumbent on the powerful board of Cook County, the county that contains Chicago. The FOP-backed candidate in that race came in third. All FOP-endorsed candidates for county board, sheriff, and assessor also lost; the only FOP-endorsed legislative candidate who won is Michael Kelly, an incumbent member of the state House. 

The FOP’s effort to defeat lawmakers in Illinois was fueled by the union’s anger over the SAFE-T Act, which Illinois adopted in 2021. The law, which was championed by the Black Caucus, limits pretrial detention to people accused of specific felonies and it will end the money bail system by 2023. The law also contained provisions meant to enhance police accountability, including easing anonymous complaints and the decertification process, and requiring officers to intervene if their counterparts are using unauthorized or excessive force.

“You literally just handed the keys to the criminals,” John Cataranza, the president of the FOP, said at the time. Cataranza has been a staunch opponent of the Black Lives Matter movement since taking the FOP’s leadership position in May 2020.

But the provisions dealing with policing in the SAFE-T Act were weakened during the legislative process, in part during negotiations with law enforcement groups. A measure that would have curtailed qualified immunity, the doctrine that largely shields police officers from civil liability over misconduct and that Cataranza strongly supports, was cast aside. 

Martwick, the senator who was the FOP’s chief target last week, supported these compromises with the police, including keeping protections for police officers like qualified immunity. He also supported a separate piece of legislation to boost pensions for firefighters and to help police recruit and retain officers. 

These positions earned him some support from law enforcement. But Cataranza and the FOP 7 maintained a hard line against him. Police unions nationwide have been among the strongest foes of any criminal justice or policing reform, including fighting measures that enjoy wide support like civilian oversight boards. 

The Chicago police union recruited Erin Jones, an 18-year veteran of the Chicago police department, to challenge Martwick, sparking a staunchly negative campaign. It went so far as trying to strongarm three members of Chicago’s city council into opposing Martwick, lest they face retribution in their own races.

“Our members want Martwick’s head on a platter,” Cataranza said in a meeting, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. “He has to go. And you either are for our member or you are for Bob Martwick, who helped champion that bill. There is no middle ground.”

The local FOP did not respond to a requet for comment about its involvement in these primaries.

A PAC funded by the FOP sent out flyers that attacked the union’s targets and called the legislation they supported “the most radical anti-victim, Pro-criminal, and anti-police legislation in the nation.” The union also tied them to Kim Foxx, the reform-minded Cook County prosecutor who secured a second term in 2020 despite facing heavy attacks of her own. 

Given Chicago’s heavily-Democratic electorate, these candidates are favored to win their general elections in November. 

These primary results in Chicago came just three weeks after candidates critical of the status-quo on policing had a good election night in Los Angeles. Eunisses Hernandez, an abolitionist organizer, ousted an incumbent city council memberor, while other progressive council candidates are heading into November runoffs in the lead. In the Los Angeles controller election, Kenneth Mejia came in first and will face a runoff after running on criticizing the size of the city’s police budget. The Los Angeles police union spent heavily in many of these races.

Allie Lichterman is an advocate with People’s Lobby, a Chicago-based organization that supports progressive policies and candidates, and she has spent years working on Chicago’s Northwest Side. She said the People’s Lobby sprang into action to support candidates who were being targeted for their support of the Pretrial Fairness Act.

“[Our members] really threw down to make sure that they did not lose because they took their vote,” she told Bolts.

The organization endorsed Marwick, LaPointe and Harper. It also backed other candidates targeted by the FOP including state Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Chicago), a progressive who won a heated congressional primary for  Illinois’s Third District. 

Along with the endorsements, members of People’s Lobby knocked on over 8,000 doors on the Northwest Side within three months, making the case that the 2021 reforms were positive for safety. 

“We brought the Pre-Trial Fairness Act at every door, and people really understood … that locking people up and throwing away the key and taking away that presumption of innocence doesn’t actually make us more safe, and certainly destabilizes communities,” said Lichterman.  

“We’d have conversations that started about public safety…people care about education and speed bumps, and healthcare and all sorts of other things that they know go into making their communities thrive. And we were really able to move people using that,  and the FOP narrative just totally felt flat.”

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