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.

Whitmire, a fixture of Democratic politics in Texas and state lawmaker for half a century, has made the story central to his campaign for mayor of Houston this year, weaving it between calls to jail more people, aggressively hire more police, and deploy hundreds of state troopers to patrol the city. “When I watch the crime that’s in Houston, it alarms me,” he said in a recent campaign ad where he talks about the robbery three decades ago. “You know, I was robbed at gunpoint in my garage, and I definitely thought he was going to kill me, my wife and my 9 year old daughter. And it just changes your life forever.”

Whitmire finished on top of a crowded field of 17 other candidates in the Nov. 7 election, winning 42.5 percent of the vote. He now faces a Dec. 9 runoff against Sheila Jackson Lee, the longest serving member of Houston’s congressional delegation and another towering figure in Democratic politics in the state, who came in second last week with 35.6 percent.

The mayor’s race has spotlighted the tough-on-crime politics that still dominate debate around public safety in the nation’s fourth largest city. Police in Houston have a long history of brutality and impunity, while Harris County, where the city is located, was until recently known as the death penalty capital of the world for how many people it has sent away for execution. 

In recent years, local debates and policies around criminal punishment started to shift as Democrats solidified control of the county government and as activists pushed for reforms. Throughout the two terms of Mayor Sylvester Turner, who could not run for reelection this year due to term limits, advocates lobbied him to implement police reforms, with mixed results: Turner updated policies to increase access to officer body camera footage and promised greater police oversight but he also balked at other requests. He resisted demands that the city make its contract negotiations with the Houston police union, which determine many oversight and discipline policies, a public process, as it is in other major Texas cities like San Antonio and Austin.

Heading into the city’s municipal elections this fall, advocates for police reform tried to turn the mayoral race into an opportunity for broader discussion around public safety and changes they want the city’s next mayor to prioritize. Under Houston’s “strong mayor” form of government, the mayor wields enormous power over city policy by appointing each department head, overseeing all administrative work, and setting the city council’s agenda. 

A coalition of community and civil rights groups, which called themselves RISE Houston (or “Reimagining Safety for Everyone in Houston”), developed three demands for candidates: reducing minor traffic stops that disproportionately target Black drivers, ending a controversial multi million dollar police surveillance contract that has proven ineffective, and freezing the city’s police budget. 

But when the coalition tried surveying each candidate on those issues, few responded or took any concrete positions. Neither Whitmire or Jackson Lee, the political juggernauts in the race, even attended a forum on public safety policies that the coalition held in early October—although Jackson Lee, who was in Washington D.C. at the time, spoke to the crowd virtually later in the event. 

RoShawn C. Evans, one of the activists who helped form the coalition, said the local criminal justice reform group that he co-founded in 2015, Pure Justice, had considered making endorsements for the first time this year but eventually decided against it.

“We chose not to because of the narrative around public safety,” Evans told Bolts. “It’s very bothersome that I’m watching all these candidates run to represent the city of Houston and the platform that they’re running on is a platform that is around the narrative of mass incarceration. Every dollar we put into law enforcement, every dollar we put into building a new court or hiring more DAs, it opens the floodgates to mass incarceration even wider than what it already is.” 

Whitmire, who has led in both polling and campaign funding throughout the race, helped set the terms of debate during the race with his promise to be “tough and smart on crime.” Like in cities across the country, violent crime rose in Texas’ largest city during the pandemic and remained a top concern for Houstonians surveyed before this year’s election, even as crime rates have started to fall. 

Whitmire is a rare Democrat with any semblance of power in the GOP-dominated Texas legislature. As chair of the Senate’s criminal justice committee since 1993, a position he has retained since the Republican Party solidified control of the chamber later in the 1990s, he has sat at the center of the state’s policies around criminal punishment for decades. In the 1990s, Whitmire was an architect of policies that scaled up incarceration in Texas, helping pass a legislative package that increased prison time for serious offenses and pumping $1 billion into an unprecedented prison-building boom. Later, in the 2000s, he helped expand diversion programs that reversed the trend and staved off even more prison building. 

In more recent legislative sessions, advocates have criticized Whitmire for being a barrier to change, saying the senate criminal justice committee has become a killing field for reform legislation under his leadership. He has refused to consider reforms the Texas House has passed, such as legislation raising the age of criminal responsibility to 18 (Texas is one of only three states that charges 17 year olds as adults) and efforts to install air conditioning in the state’s dangerously hot prisons. Even reforms he claims to support, like “second chance” legislation to allow reconsideration for people sentenced to life in prison as children, have derailed in the committee on his watch. 

Whitmire, who didn’t respond to questions for this story, has defended his legislative record and insisted reform advocates have unrealistic expectations, telling the Houston Chronicle recently, “I don’t think any criticism has an appreciation for the difficulty in Austin of doing criminal justice reform at any time in the 30 years that I’ve been chair.” 

Civil rights advocates in Houston are particularly worried about one of Whitmire’s core campaign proposals, to bring in more state troopers from the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) to help patrol the city, warning that it will worsen racial disparities in policing in Houston. The actions of the state agency, which is far whiter and less diverse than Houston’s police force, have raised concerns about racial profiling and police brutality when troopers have been deployed to patrol other cities and along the border with Mexico. 

When Austin city leaders tried the approach earlier this year, troopers primarily arrested people of color before officials called off the partnership. When Dallas brought in DPS troopers in 2019, some local leaders criticized the agency for acting like “an occupying force.” Christopher Rivera, an outreach coordinator in Houston for the Texas Civil Rights Project’s criminal injustice program, pointed to a report the group put out earlier this year showing minor traffic enforcement already disproportionately targets Black drivers in Houston. While activists have asked for an ordinance limiting traffic stops and police encounters for non-moving violations, like expired registration, they now worry Whitmire’s proposal for DPS patrols could exacerbate the problem. 

“Probably the most concerning thing that has come up in the race has been the DPS issue,” Rivera told Bolts. “When we bring more police into the city of Houston, they just end up over policing more neighborhoods of color and low income communities.”

Rivera said local activists hope that a change to municipal government that voters adopted last week will open the door to more reform discussions at city hall, regardless of who’s in the mayor’s office. More than 80 percent of voters approved Proposition A, which gives city council members more power to force the council to take up issues even without the mayor’s approval; beginning next year, any three of Houston’s 16 city council members can join together to put items on the council’s agenda.

Progressive advocates in Houston are hopeful that they’ve retained some footholds in municipal government in this fall’s elections. Council Member Tarsha Jackson, who was formerly a top staffer with the Texas Organizing Project (TOP), which has become a driving force in left politics in the state, won reelection last week. Council Member Letitia Plummer, who has advocated for changing how the city spends money on public safety, faces a runoff against challenger Roy Morales.

While Whitmire has the backing of local and state police groups in his run for mayor, Jackson Lee has garnered endorsements by more outwardly progressive organizations and leaders, like TOP and also Lina Hidalgo, Harris County government’s chief executive, who has supported bail reform and pushed back against some of the district attorney’s funding requests. While Jackson Lee has used a different tone from Whitmire when talking about crime, she has done little to carve out a competing vision around public safety and has offered few specific policy priorities on the campaign trail. 

Jackson Lee, who did not respond to questions for this story, expressed some caution about Whitmire’s plan to deploy state troopers during one of the final televised debates in the race last month. 

“I give them credit for their investigative skills, they will be used for that, but not patrolling our neighborhoods where our families are looking to those they know and those who know them,” she said, promising instead to “expand” the presence of local police.

On election night, Jackson Lee thanked her supporters and spoke in broad terms about combating gun violence, increasing mental health services, and “making sure that every corner of this city will be represented at the table of empowerment.” Across town, as he addressed his supporters, Whitmire again returned to his own brush with crime three decades ago. 

“Let anyone who can hear my voice: I don’t apologize for being tough on crime,” he said. “I’ve had to beg for my life and my wife and my nine year old daughter in our garage. That person put a gun in my face and I thought I was finished. I was worried about my daughter and my wife. But God had a plan for me.”

Correction (Nov. 17): An earlier version of this article misstated the result for one of Houston’s council seats; Letitia Plummer and Roy Morales will face off in a runoff.

The post Promises to Scale Up Policing Stir Houston’s Mayoral Race appeared first on Bolts.

But last month, Wu, now mayor, flipped on that key campaign issue and asked the city to increase funding for BRIC. On Oct. 4, the Boston City Council approved Wu’s funding request, electing in a series of 7-5 votes to give the surveillance center an additional $3.4 million in grant funding to hire eight new analysts—four times the amount that Wu voted against two years ago. 

The increase in BRIC funding was approved despite concerns from some city councilors that the center and the Boston Police Department (BPD), which oversees it, had not sufficiently addressed evidence of targeted surveillance, with all five of the council’s members of color voting against the funds. BPD’s gang unit and BRIC’s gang database are currently being investigated for racial bias by the Massachusetts attorney general.

“They provided no metrics, no evidence that it makes us safer,” said Councilor Ricardo Arroyo during the meeting. “The fact that they’re currently under investigation for possible civil rights abuses and racial discrimination makes it impossible for me to vote for those grants today.” 

To local organizers, Wu’s 180-degree pivot feels emblematic of a larger reluctance by her administration to enact the policing reforms that she championed during her rise in Boston politics. Wu had called for a 10 percent reduction in the city’s police budget during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. The following year, she campaigned for mayor with bold rhetoric around policing as well as specific policy priorities, from ending police use of tear gas and no-knock warrants to abolishing the surveillance center. Anger over years of police abuses helped sweep her into the mayor’s office with a 28-point margin of victory. 

But since she took office, those promises largely have not materialized, and funding for law enforcement has mostly gone up. During the most recent round of budget negotiations in June, Wu even rejected the council’s attempt to cut $30 million from the police department, and instead passed a final budget with a $9 million increase for police.  

Fatema Ahmad, the executive director of Muslim Justice League, which has led the charge against BRIC funding, said that Wu’s about-face on the surveillance center is part of a broader retreat from the promises that politicians made during the height of the movement for police accountability. “As soon as she was elected, the stances started turning around,” Ahmad told Bolts. “Immediately, we were told that the gang database wasn’t a priority because of other policing issues they were tackling. You know, we saw not only a lack of commitment to decreasing the budget, but now this year an increase in the police budget.”  

Wu has gestured to policing reforms instituted since she voted against the BRIC funding in 2021 to explain her change of heart. In a recent letter to city council members urging them to support the increase in funding, Wu wrote, “Since the June 2021 council vote, several consequential policy and leadership changes have been implemented such that the BRIC and the Boston Police Department operate in a significantly different environment today.” 

In this new environment, Wu explains, the surveillance BRIC conducts—which she calls “public safety intelligence and analysis”—is crucial to achieving larger public safety goals like reducing gun violence. “From reimagining community outreach and coordination of providers, to engaging high-risk individuals with high-quality supports,” Wu wrote, “Our community safety efforts rely on detailed and accurate intelligence to guide all City agencies to close gaps through deploying coordinated resources and services.” Wu did not respond to Bolts’ request for an interview for this story. 

Boston-area activists and other politicians elected in the wake of the 2020 uprising say that little has changed about policing there and argue that Wu’s progressive credentials are now serving to provide cover for what is little more than an attempt to give even more money to a law enforcement agency that operates mostly in the shadows. 

janhavi madabushi, the executive director of the Massachusetts Bail Fund, which pays people’s bond so they can stay in their community pre-trial, told Bolts, “I don’t understand how a progressive mayor can rubber stamp and give basically a blank check to the Boston Police Department.”

The Boston Regional Intelligence Center was established in 2005 as one of a host of intelligence-sharing “fusion centers” established around the U.S. after the events of 9/11. BRIC brings together local law enforcement and first responders from nine communities across the Boston metro area, as well as liaisons from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and even the “private sector,” according to an archived description of the center on BPD’s website.

“The initial justification for the creation of these places was ‘we need local police to be involved in a nationwide fight against terrorism,’” Kade Crockford, the director of the Massachusetts ACLU’s Technology for Liberty Program and a longtime scholar and critic of the BRIC, told Bolts—despite the fact that the intelligence failures that led to 9/11 had nothing to do with local law enforcement. 

“There was almost immediately an identity crisis in these fusion centers, because local police and the democratically elected people that are in charge of the police are in pretty much every city in the country under some degree of pressure politically to deal with regular crime,” Crockford explained. “People are not going to community and neighborhood meetings where they can have coffee with a cop and asking them, ‘What are you doing about al-Qaeda?’” Moreover, actual instances of terrorism on U.S. soil are quite rare; in 2012, a report by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Investigations concluded that fusion centers were ineffective and wasteful of taxpayer dollars. 

So fusion centers shifted course, allocating resources to ordinary street crime while continuing to maintain their image as crucial bulwarks against terrorism. But Crockford argues that BRIC and its brethren have actually been used for two very different purposes: “One, to monitor people’s noncriminal speech and associations that are protected by the First Amendment related to activism and religious expression; and two, to continue criminal intelligence operations primarily directed at Black and Latino young people under the auspices of anti-gang programs.” 

BRIC regularly shared information about Boston public school students with ICE, with life-changing consequences for at least one person: in 2018, a young Salvadoran man was deported after police wrongly labeled him as an MS-13 associate. A 2012 report by the Massachusetts ACLU and state chapter of the National Lawyers Guild  found that the center has a habit of spying on anti-war demonstrators and other activists engaged in constitutionally protected forms of protest. And in late 2017, FOIA requests by the organization revealed that BRIC had used a social media surveillance program called Geofeedia to monitor common Arabic terms like ummah, which translates to “community,” as well as phrases like #blacklivesmatter and #muslimlivesmatter. The program flagged posts that expressed solidarity between Jews and Muslims, tweets from the volunteer group Muslims Against Hunger, and a slew of sophomoric jokes about ISIS. (“My god ISIS needs some decent videographers. Any Emerson students interested? I hear they pay well in promised virgins.”) 

“We’re so used to being surveilled by every type of law enforcement,” said Ahmad of the Muslim Justice League, speaking about Muslim communities in the U.S. “And so when you have something like BRIC locally, it’s just so much harder for the community here to feel like they can talk about their politics especially, or organize in the face of an institution that’s not just flagging them for using just really common Muslim words—but also clearly going after activists.”

Today, BRIC operates a fleet of cameras throughout the Boston metropolitan area—including at least 40 in the northwest suburb of Somerville, which, like all the other cities besides Boston included within its purview, has no direct say over how or where that surveillance technology gets used. Willie Burnley Jr., a city councilor in Somerville, says this presents basic democratic and transparency issues. “Without the consent of the council and an explicit pathway for us to withdraw participation in BRIC, it puts us in a particularly challenging position to adequately protect our constituents from surveillance that may not be in their best interest,” he told Bolts.

Moreover, Burnley says that BRIC’s inter-agency status allows it to effectively override the fact that Somerville, as a smaller, more progressive city than Boston, has different attitudes towards policing and greater checks already in place around the use of surveillance technology. Burnley himself was elected to his at-large city council seat in Somerville in 2021, after helping found the activist group Somerville Defund the Police, which advocated for the reallocation of money away from the Somerville Police Department and towards social services and housing.

Recently, when the department decided it wanted access to a phone hacking program, GRAYKEY, BRIC went ahead and bought it for them. “This extremely well-funded multi-jurisdictional surveillance structure is bypassing our own municipal laws and policies,” Burnley told Bolts. The department still needs to go before the council to be granted official use of the technology, Burnley said, but the center’s actions seemed to bypass some standard checks and balances on police department authority. “We’re not in the police department watching them every day,” he said. “So the fact that they have this technology, we have to essentially take them at their word that they aren’t using it.” 

BRIC has been arguably best known for the controversial gang database it maintains: a list of thousands of Boston-area residents, only about 2 percent of whom are white. As of 2021, 75 percent of names in the database belong to Black people, who make up only 7 percent of the Boston metro population. 

Wu once spoke of abolishing the gang database altogether. But earlier this month, in her letter to city council asking for increased BRIC funding, she praised new guidelines for the database that resulted in the removal of nearly 2,500 names since 2021. 

But to local activists, this purge doesn’t go far enough. They believe that the entire methodology that underpins the database is fundamentally flawed. 

“There’s this myth that they’re using some kind of science for figuring out who is a gang member in this database, but it’s based on this 10-point model,” said Ahmad. “It’s all very behavioral. And that hasn’t changed.” Residents are assigned different numbers of points for various behaviors or associations, including the clothing or tattoos they sport and the people they interact with. The young Salvadoran man who was deported had racked up 21 points, all for instances in which police observed him hanging out with people they had also labeled MS-13 associates or gang members.  

madabushi’s organization posts bond for residents in five counties, including Suffolk, where Boston is located. They said that the people they work with are more likely to be assigned a higher bail, denied bail entirely, or face harsher conditions of release, such as house arrest or GPS monitoring when their name appears in the gang database. “Young people are being surveilled over social media and if there is cash appearing in a young person’s picture, or a certain kind of hat that they are wearing, the BRIC is making assumptions about what that could mean for them being involved in organized crime,” they told Bolts. They have also seen people in this situation receive additional federal charges or have immigration enforcement looped in.

madabushi also noted that from the experience of the community members the bail fund works with, the collateral consequences of inclusion on the gang database don’t necessarily end when someone’s name is removed. “The demand is not to purge names from the database, the demand is to completely shut down the database and shut down the entity that is carrying on this kind of racist surveillance,” they said.

While Wu has pointed to changes in the gang database to justify backtracking on the BRIC grants, she has also gestured to broader police oversight and accountability reforms that have been implemented since 2020. 

In both her letter to council and a recent interview with WBUR, the mayor cited the creation of new state and local police oversight bodies—the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission, as well as its local counterpart, Boston’s Office of Police Accountability and Transparency. 

The state commission, established by a 2020 police reform law, is supposed to standardize training, certification and disciplinary standards for police, as well as maintain a public database of police disciplinary records, but its work has been beset by delays and debate over how much information about officers should be posted online. Some worry the commission is essentially toothless since it can’t compel agencies to disclose records or mandate that they remain public. And since it’s only tasked with oversight of sworn law enforcement officers, it’s unclear how the new state police commission could provide more accountability for the many civilian analysts who work at BRIC and feed information to local law enforcement. 

As for Boston’s Office of Police Accountability and Transparency, which was created in January 2021 to review police policy and investigate civilian complaints against officers, it has faced staff turnover and criticism that it has done very little. Of the 107 complaints submitted since its inception, only three were sustained (47 were still pending as of publication, according to the database). Of these, two involved officers posting inappropriate information or comments online—information that is more or less objectively verifiable.

Ahmad with the Muslim Justice League questioned whether the new office would have any impact on BRIC operations. How could people surveilled or targeted by BRIC even know enough about the center’s actions to submit a successful complaint?

To her, recent reforms like the state police commission and Boston’s police accountability office largely seem like window dressing to make a weary public feel better about law enforcement. “These task forces and commissions and, you know, call them whatever name you give them—it doesn’t address the root problems,” she said.

The post Boston Mayor Backtracks on Ending  Controversial Police Surveillance Center appeared first on Bolts.

In 2019, the Dayton City Commission approved an initial $205,000 contract with ShotSpotter, a California-based company, to deploy microphones that listen for gunshots across a three-square-mile area of west Dayton, the heart of the city’s Black community, which has a long history of economic segregation and redlining. When the contract came up for an extension in late 2020, Mateo and other Dayton activists circulated a petition that gathered hundreds of signatures demanding the city drop the technology. But the commission approved the extension, nearly tripling the city’s overall spending on ShotSpotter. 

So Mateo was a little incredulous, if not pleasantly surprised, when the Dayton Police Department (DPD) announced late last year that it would not seek to extend the ShotSpotter contract beyond December 2022, when it was set to run out. While DPD defended the system, saying it had helped locate shooting victims and get illegal guns off the streets, the police statement announcing the end of ShotSpotter in Dayton partly echoed a broader point that activists had long raised—with police admitting it was “challenging” to prove the effectiveness of the technology. 

“It definitely felt like a relief,” says Mateo. “And it definitely felt like our efforts played a role in them making this decision.”

The end of ShotSpotter in Dayton marked a rare victory for activists who have fought against the company’s rapid expansion in Ohio and across the rest of the country in recent years, drawing the attention of groups elsewhere who have been fighting for cities to drop the surveillance technology. Rebranded in April as SoundThinking, the company has rolled out microphones in over 150 cities, feeding sound to proprietary software that the company says identifies gunshots and alerts staffers, who in turn notify local cops. The company, founded in 1996, is now worth around $260 million and has been championed by mayors and police departments across the country, who call it an essential crime-fighting tool and advocate for its lucrative contracts.

SoundThinking claims its system is nearly flawless, but researchers and defense lawyers have challenged its effectiveness as well as the increasing use of the company’s technology as evidence in court. An Associated Press investigation last year found that the company’s microphones can miss gunfire that happens right under them, misclassify fireworks or sounds from cars as gunshots, and that company employees can, and often do, alter evidence gathered by the technology; during a 2016 police shooting trial in Rochester, New York, a ShotSpotter employee admitted to reclassifying sound from a helicopter to a bullet at the request of police. 

The largest peer-reviewed study of the technology, a 2021 examination of ShotSpotter across dozens of large metropolitan counties over several years published in the Journal of Urban Health, found that it didn’t significantly reduce gun deaths or increase public safety. Other outside research has concluded the technology largely results in dead-ends for police, including a 2021 analysis of nearly two years of ShotSpotter data in Chicago by the MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University’s law school, which determined the vast majority of alerts generated by the company’s gunfire-detection system actually turned up no evidence of gunshots or any gun-related crime. 

Last year, the Center sued the City of Chicago seeking to bar the technology’s use in the nation’s third-largest city, filing the lawsuit on behalf of two men falsely accused and jailed in part because of faulty ShotSpotter alerts. 

“Every one of these deployments creates a dangerous, high-intensity situation where police are primed by ShotSpotter to expect to find a person who is armed and has just fired a weapon,” the MacArthur Justice Center researchers wrote in one court brief. “Residents who happen to be in the vicinity of a false alert will be regarded as presumptive threats, likely to be targeted by police for investigatory stops, foot pursuits, or worse. These deployments create an extremely dangerous situation for residents, prompting unnecessary and hostile police encounters, and creating the conditions for abusive police tactics that have plagued Chicago for decades.”

A recent Houston Chronicle investigation of ShotSpotter’s deployment in Houston concluded that it mostly resulted in dead-ends for police there, as well as delaying response times for other calls. Another analysis in Dayton by local radio station WYSO had similar findings, showing that fewer than 2 percent of ShotSpotter-initiated police deployments in the city ended with arrests, with just 5 percent of ShotSpotter calls resulted in police reporting incidents of crime—any crime, not just gun crimes. 

Jacob Wourms, a Dayton resident and researcher with the police reform group Campaign Zero, told Bolts that ShotSpotter ratcheted up potentially dangerous police encounters in a predominantly Black area of the city. He recalled being on a police ride-along in west Dayton last summer when ShotSpotter alerts for gunshots began to ping on the officer’s phone. “We get to the location, and it was two little boys shooting off fireworks with their grandparents,” Wourms said. He was bothered by the seemingly needless encounter between the children, who were Black, and police, since such interactions can be detrimental.

Some Dayton residents living in the area where ShotSpotter microphones were deployed reported being harassed by police who were responding to a report of shots fired and feel the technology fueled racial profiling.

“[T]hey just start harassing him on the porch,” west Dayton resident Graham Moor told WYSO of his brother’s interaction with police in 2021. “I was fortunate enough that they left.”

People living near ShotSpotter sensors might not even know it. The company doesn’t disclose where it places microphones to police or the public, although they can sometimes be easily spotted on street lamps. Morgan Hood, who lives in the area of west Dayton where the sensors were deployed, told Bolts she wasn’t aware of them. Hood also says she hasn’t noticed any difference in the frequency of gunshots she hears in her neighborhood now compared to a year ago, when ShotSpotter’s sensors were active. “I hear gunshots almost nightly,” she said. “It’s probably people shooting up in the air,” she says.

Dayton police didn’t answer detailed questions sent for this story. But a DPD representative told Bolts the department was never aware of the locations of ShotSpotter sensors nor whether they were even removed from Dayton’s streets, saying that removing them is SoundThinking’s responsibility. Sometimes, the company’s sensors have been left in place even after a contract has expired. Wourms suspects they get left behind in the event that a contract is picked back up again in the future.

SoundThinking also didn’t answer questions sent for this story, including whether its sensors remain in west Dayton. “While we cannot comment on contractual matters, we continue to partner with more and more agencies across the country and stand ready to re-engage with the City of Dayton should the city decide to revisit the use of gunshot detection technology to better serve the citizens of Dayton,” the company said in a statement. 

Dayton isn’t the only city that has recently turned away from the company. In November, Atlanta declined to renew its contract with SoundThinking after a six month free trial, while Seattle’s city council chose to exclude funding for the technology in its 2023 budget, despite a push by the city’s mayor to include it. Shares in the company have fallen by nearly half since March.

Even with those setbacks, ShotSpotter surveillance continues to expand in Ohio and across the country. Cincinnati, which adopted it in 2018, recently shelled out millions more to keep it through 2025. Both Cleveland and Columbus expanded the company’s footprint this year. SoundThinking, which has pushed jurisdictions to use federal grant funding to buy its products, claims that six cities deployed its technology in the first three months of the year, resulting in over $8 million worth of new or renewed and expanded contracts.

The company continues to rake in profits even in cities where officials have called for dropping its surveillance technology. While Chicago’s new mayor, Brandon Johnson, vowed to end the city’s contract with SoundThinking during his campaign, he angered many activists last month when his signature appeared on a $10 million payment extending the company’s deal (Johnson’s staff claimed he didn’t know his e-signature was being used for the payment). 

Mateo says activists fighting SoundThinking’s rollout or expansion in Detroit, Chicago and California have contacted him in recent months. “Some people (who want to remove ShotSpotter) in Chicago reached out to me to ask if I could potentially come and talk to their group about the Dayton situation,” he says.

Mateo recalled how he and other Dayton activists had scrambled to mount a unified opposition to the contract the first time it was up for renewal in November 2020, during the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic. After the city set the vote for the contract extension for the day before Thanksgiving, activists quickly gathered around 370 signatures for a petition urging the commission to reject it. But pandemic precautions meant the meeting took place over Zoom, without public comments, with commissioners eventually voting four-to-one to extend the contract.

But in the years since, as word got out of the potentially negative consequences of having a private company involved in surveilling communities, a groundswell of opposition rose up. 

“I think [city authorities and law enforcement] knew there would be a lot of public pressure this time around [when the contract renewal conversation emerged last fall]. The community had already shown there was opposition to it and we knew that this time it would make its way to the city commission,” says Mateo. “That was not the case the first time around [in 2019].” 

The DPD statement announcing the end of the ShotSpotter contract also noted a new law that came into effect in June 2022 legalizing the permitless carry of concealed guns as another reason for discontinuing it; the law makes it more difficult for police to confiscate guns. ShotSpotter’s efficacy was also complicated by the fact that Ohio law does not make it illegal for people to discharge many types of firearms on their own property as long as doing so causes no harm or interference to others.

For opponents of police surveillance technology in Dayton, the battle isn’t over. Last July, three months before announcing the end of ShotSpotter in the city, the city commission approved a contract with the new and rapidly growing surveillance company Flock Safety to install more than three dozen cameras to scan license plates across the city.

Mateo also isn’t convinced that the city is done with ShotSpotter or similar such technology. He fears companies may start combining camera, microphone and facial recognition technologies to sell to law enforcement. 

“I don’t think gunshot detection technology is done,” says Mateo. “My concern is that it may come back in a different form, [possibly] as a broader surveillance package.”

The post Why Dayton Quit ShotSpotter, a Surveillance Tool Many Cities Still Embrace appeared first on Bolts.

“We’re here today with the candidate that our movement backs,” he said. That candidate, Helen Gym, sat in the front row wearing a bright red suit. “[T]he reason that we back this candidate is because Helen Gym is someone to not only listen to us, she not only said, ‘Here’s my public safety campaign, what do you think of it?’ But rather said, ‘Hey, I need a public safety campaign, can you help me build it out?’” 

In a crowded field of nine Democratic candidates vying for office ahead of the May 16 primary, Gym is one of five with the fundraising and popular support to be truly viable. The primary is considered a de facto general election in this deeply blue city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by a margin of nearly seven to one. All of the leading candidates are pretty evenly split in recent polls, and unlike in Chicago, there are no runoffs here. So, the next mayor of Philadelphia could win with less than thirty percent of the vote. With just two weeks to go, campaigns are ramped to full speed. 

At the event in March, Gym spoke of violence tearing apart neighborhoods, emphasizing her overall public safety platform centered on investing in communities most affected by violence, bolstering trauma-informed services, and remodeling the police department.

“In the face of unmitigated violence that’s happening to our young people, to Black and brown youth all across the city of Philadelphia, it is our mission to be able to show a new path for how we’re going to save the city,” she said, “and deliver a vision for safety—and investment across Philadelphia—that does not drag the clock back on civil rights.” 

She added: “If it was about funding our police department… we should have the safest city in America.” (The Philadelphia Police Department’s nearly $800 million budget this fiscal year is the largest of any city agency and has grown by $150 million since 2016 when the current mayor took office.)

A Gym administration would be the most powerful seat held by Philadelphia’s burgeoning progressive political machine which has been strengthening since Donald Trump’s presidential victory in 2016. Since then, the left has delivered a number of blows to the typically centrist Democratic establishment in Philadelphia. The election of District Attorney Larry Krasner in 2017—and his reelection four years later—has been the highest-profile victory, but a slew of other leftists have taken office at the neighborhood, city, and state level including the city’s first Working Family Party councilperson, two prominent community organizers elected to the state house, and a number of progressives at the helm of some of the city’s numerous Neighborhood Advisory Committees. 

The next mayor has their work cut out for them. Homicides over the last few years have reached a historic high, schools are closing because of asbestos contamination, people are dying from opioid overdoses at relentless rates, and economic disparity along racial lines is on the rise. At a time when the stakes for voters are so high for public safety, public education, and inequality, the fact that Gym is a viable candidate proves how far the city has come in taking left-wing politics seriously, explained Steph Drain, Philadelphia political director of the labor-aligned Working Families Party, which endorsed Gym. “[Jim] Kenney was considered progressive in 2015,” said Drain, referencing the current mayor. “But we are now recognizing that we are able to have someone who is actually progressive and not just settle for someone who is a moderate.” 

Some local activists have expressed frustration with Philadelphia politicians for their relative inaction, for example not standing up sufficiently in defense of Krasner’s criminal justice reforms when they’ve been assailed by state Republicans and other critics. To get an ally in the mayor’s office, they say, could be a game-changer to transform the city further. “It says that the progressive movement has teeth,” Drain said.

Gym was first elected to city council in 2015, becoming the first Asian American woman to sit on council after ascending over the past two decades through Philadelphia politics, from public school teacher, to activist, to elected representative. She was reelected in 2019 with a dramatic lead over other at-large council members, winning more votes than any other candidate for city council since the 1980s. She ran as an activist councilmember and ferocious defender of social justice causes, especially inequities in the public education system. She kept this profile up as a councilmember—one time going so far as being arrested at the state Senate with other activists demanding better funding for Philadelphia schools. During her tenure, she spearheaded a number of successful initiatives such as improving monitoring of lead in public schools and installing hydration stations, establishing ‘fair workweek’ regulations, and ending contracts with troubled juvenile detention providers where staff abuse ran rampant.

Critics accuse her of grandstanding, focusing on headlines more than policy. “You can’t go to get something passed in the Senate,” said another mayoral candidate, Cherelle Parker, in a recent forum. “[I]f you’re going to roll around on the floor, use a bullhorn, shout at the senators, and tell them they’re morally bankrupt.”

But Pennsylvania State Senator Nikil Saval, who cut his teeth as a labor organizer and endorses Gym, rejects the notion that politicians need to leave their activist hat at the door in order to legislate effectively. “People who come out of social movements as organizers have a mode of coalition building and communicating among people who may not otherwise see eye to eye,” he said. He demonstrated this concept by passing a $125 million home repair program during his freshman term in a Republican majority legislature, with allies from across the aisle. 

Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016, delivering him to the White House. In Philadelphia, this moment galvanized grassroots organizations, many who supported Bernie Sanders during the primary of that election cycle, to come together and work in concert. In fact, former Sanders staffers and canvassers founded the leftist political group Reclaim Philadelphia, which has propelled several members to office, including Saval. 

“After the 2016 election, we saw the birth of Reclaim, the expansion of the [Democratic Socialists of America], empowerment of the [Working Family Party], these organizations with largely socialist ideals,” said Drain. “The momentum from Bernie Sanders delegates and voters transferred over to these political institutions. We’ve gained power.” 

Since then, community organizers have worked in tandem to support candidates who care about issues like environmental and racial justice. In 2017, over 30 of these groups formed the Coalition for a Just DA and hit the ground knocking on doors to usher Larry Krasner into office. The groups represented a wide array of communities most affected by the carceral system: LGBTQ people, sex workers, immigrant families, formerly incarcerated individuals, and victims of violent crime. That coalition has since disbanded, but a number of the original organizations are backing Gym. 

Holbrook said that the decision to back Gym was an easy one, based on history. “The relationship that she’s built with the left goes back years—to the years she was an activist in the community.” 

If she wins, Gym could govern alongside a veritable progressive flank in city council. Because so many current city council members left office to run for mayor, a wave of freshmen councilmembers will be ushered in next term. Five of the seven at-large seats up for election are open without incumbents; the race to fill them has drawn a large and diverse pool of candidates—with a distinct camp running as progressives, potentially upending the ideological balance in Philadelphia city government.

The only other mayoral candidate seen as liberal is former City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart, who has roots as a Wall Street banker. Without a track record on city council, it’s hard to know how Rhynhart would govern, but during her tenure as comptroller, she did take on the establishment by conducting ruthless audits of agencies such as the Philadelphia Police Department. Her office’s report revealed deficient systems of accountability, inefficiencies in operations, and made her an enemy of the Fraternal Order of Police local chapter. However, on the campaign trail, she has positioned herself more as a technocrat, deft at navigating bureaucracy, friendly to business, and more aligned with the local political establishment. She boasts endorsements such as three former mayors, including Michael Nutter, who aggressively advanced stop-and-frisk during his tenure—and continues to support the tactic—and is a vocal critic of Krasner for being “anti-police.” 

Rhynhart also supported a controversial new curfew banning unchaperoned teens from a downtown mall after 2 p.m., which opponents see as a return to draconian policing of youth. Gym, who opposes the curfew, said so at a recent candidate forum. “We cannot criminalize young people.” 

As of April 28, the Democratic party itself has not endorsed any candidate. “The Democratic establishment here is in this fractured state,” Drain said. “But the progressives have figured it out from the beginning, moving in lockstep while the establishment is devouring itself.”

The West Philadelphia church gathering is emblematic of that cohesion. Last month Gym announced her public safety platform flanked by Holbrook and a number of other activists. “This conversation about public safety is one that is about investing in communities and actually stopping cycles of violence,” she said.

Public safety is the banner issue of Philadelphia’s campaign for mayor. According to a recent poll by the market-research firm SRSS and The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, nearly 90 percent of Philadelphians believe crime should be a top priority for the city’s mayor. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Philadelphia has seen a devastating uptick of gun violence. Last year, the city recorded 516 homicides, a slight decrease from the year before but still surpassing the previous record of 500 set in 1990. Nearly nine out of ten murders between 2020 and 2022 were committed by firearm. The violence was heavily concentrated in communities of color, which have historically been under-resourced. 

The mayor will decide who leads the Philadelphia Police Department, propose the size of that department’s budget, as well as how funds are allocated to anti-violence programs.

The plan Gym has laid out prioritizes crime prevention with ambitious measures such as universal access to mental health treatment in neighborhoods most affected by gun violence, guaranteeing job placement assistance to young people in those neighborhoods, and ensuring that recreation centers are open nights and weekends—a plan she brought up directly in contrast to the new mall curfew for unchaperoned teens. She proposed deploying mobile mental health crisis units, staffed with social workers rather than police, 24/7. The plan focuses on the root causes of violence, namely poverty and trauma, rather than a carceral response. 

Gym’s public safety plan doesn’t increase the number of police officers in the department, but reorganizes how they are deployed. She endorses a community policing model that increases the number of cops on the street in high-crime neighborhoods; her case is that it would allow officers to form relationships with community members to improve relations. But critics of this approach say it could simply lead to more arrests and harassment in already over-policed sections of the city. When it’s been deployed in other cities, community policing has been criticized for still ostracizing Black and Latinx youth, even as police prioritize the concerns of other older residents in the same neighborhoods. 

“There’s always tension when we start talking about more policing in these already over-policed neighborhoods,” said Holbrook, who is also executive director of the Abolitionist Law Center. “As a movement, we are going to continue to navigate them.”

Gym’s critics in the mayoral race say that the cash-strapped city cannot fund her plans for public safety or other areas. Parker called Gym’s education plan “imaginary,” and said, “What taxes will you raise? What services will you cut?”

In response, Gym’s campaign says that her plans will not be funded by extra dollars off the average Philadelphian’s back, but primarily by leveraging state and federal funding that is available, for example, expanding job training programs that already rely on federal funds, and utilizing resources such as Medicaid to give low-income citizens access to mental health care.

“Other candidates in the race have promised to cut taxes across the board while also promising things like year-round schooling, neighborhood infrastructure improvements, hundreds more police officers, and expanded workforce development with minimal details on what that would look like—notably, these candidates rarely get asked how they would fund or implement such programs,” a spokesperson with Gym’s campaign wrote in a statement to Bolts. “While Helen’s vision for investing in people and neighborhoods and prioritizing residents in neighborhoods hardest hit by gun violence is a departure from the status quo, she is by no means the only candidate proposing new or different city services.” 

Gym has said that she would create a new commission to conduct a “comprehensive review” of existing tax policy, with an eye for instituting some reforms. And if necessary, reallocating city funds away from other areas to improve the services that Gym prioritizes is also on the table. “If the only way we can find money to clean a vacant lot in Nicetown is by spending less on center city or Rittenhouse square, Helen is prepared to do that,” the spokesperson wrote. 

Some other candidates’ messaging around public safety calls back to the “tough on crime” heavy-handed policing common in US cities throughout the 1990s—part of a national trend in political rhetoric that some have identified as a backlash against the historic uprisings against police brutality in 2020. “In some of these debates these candidates have sounded, if not centrist, and then somewhat more conservative than what you’d expect from a bunch of Democrats running in a big city,” Patrick Christmas, chief policy officer of the good governance group the Committee of Seventy told Bolts.

Parker has proposed hiring 300 new police officers, also with an emphasis on increased community policing. Three of the five leading contenders are open to some form of stop-and-frisk—which a judge found to be used in racist and unconstitutional ways here in 2011. The Philadelphia Police Department is still under court monitoring for its use of pedestrian searches.

“Under a Parker administration, every legal tool available, every constitutional tool available to our Police Department will be employed to ensure that we end this sense of lawlessness,” Parker told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “And I’m no flip-flopper about it.”

Allan Domb, a real estate magnate and current at-large city councilmember, wants to triple the department’s recruitment budget and vows to thwart what he sees as a “culture of lawlessness” in the city.

Messages centered around police reform, often boiled to the phrase, “defund the police” have become a toxic concept in this election cycle. Gym, even as she tries to ward off accusations from the right that her proposed reforms would make the city less safe, has bowed to some of their pressure. “I am not coming in to dismantle departments that I myself run,” she told Al DÍA. But her supporters on the left have made it clear that, should she win, they will work to make sure she ushers in transformational changes on policing and justice.

Drain is drawing inspiration from the left’s victory in Chicago’s mayoral election in April. “I think that we saw that with Brandon Johnson, we have these education activists who are running these elections in cities that are dominated by the establishment,” they said. “It shows that Philly organizers are making it happen and it could happen in these large cities that haven’t seen change historically.”

The post Philadelphia’s Progressive Movement Aims for the Mayor’s Office 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.

Last summer, a billboard with an unexpected image graced the intersection of Olympic and Crenshaw boulevards in Los Angeles. Near advertisements for personal injury lawyers and recently released television shows hung a bar chart illustrating how the city spends the public’s money. A green rectangle representing police spending under the mayor’s proposed 2021-2022 budget dwarfed the numbers for housing and homelessness, stretching all the way to the right-most side of the frame to represent over $3 billion. The caption asked simply: Is Mayor Garcetti’s Budget Good For You?

The billboard was put up by Kenneth Mejia, the frontrunner in the race for Los Angeles city controller. Mejia has taken a creative and unconventional approach to campaigning for a position that is habitually misunderstood and hardly ever considered exciting. In running for the elected office responsible for audits, financial reporting, and the city’s payroll, he has used public records requests to glean data on everything from LAPD traffic stops to the residence of every LA city employee, presenting the information in easy-to-use online platforms, plastering it on billboards like the one at Olympic and Crenshaw, and promoting it relentlessly on social media. 

Thus far, these efforts have paid off: Mejia won the endorsement of the L.A. Times editorial board, which commended him for using his campaign “to demonstrate the kind of transparency-and-data-driven controller he would be.” In June, in a crowded, seven-person nonpartisan primary, the 31-year-old candidate finished first with 43 percent of the vote, more than 100,000 votes ahead of longtime city council member Paul Koretz. Mejia and Koretz are now set to face off in a November runoff. 

Mejia’s campaign strategy builds on the efforts of groups like the People’s Budget LA, a coalition of organizations led by Black Lives Matter LA that argue that the city’s spending priorities should look very different. His approach—to visualize and publicize the chasm between the city’s current budget and demands for reform coming from the community— follows the logic behind campaigns like the People’s Budget Report, released during the George Floyd uprisings in mid-2020, which polled thousands of residents and juxtaposed their budgetary priorities with Mayor Garcetti’s “Justice Budget” proposal. 

This sort of campaign has deep roots in Los Angeles: In 2003, the nascent Youth Justice Coalition, which is now a member of People’s Budget LA, mounted a “dollar for dollar” campaign with the goal of massively expanding funding for youth centers, intervention workers, and jobs. “That was essentially a youth-led campaign to urge city officials to invest the same amount of dollars they do into law enforcement and criminalization spending into youth development,” said the group’s media coordinator, Emilio Zapién. 

Meijia shares the fundamental goal of these campaigns: to engage voters in the city’s budgetary process, reframing something commonly viewed as abstract and opaque as a willful process of resource allocation—one that affects everything from what neighborhood you can afford to live in to where in the city you’re most likely to get arrested. 

“I’m hoping that we can have a more transparent LA, especially with funding, and that’s what I want to bring as city controller,” Mejia told Bolts. “Like, nothing’s hidden, you can’t hide it. You’re going to show it and you’re going to explain why you did it.”

To those who would dismiss him as just an activist, Mejia has a quick rejoinder: he’s also a certified public accountant, a qualification that few city controllers possess. “In the past, the controller position has been used as a placeholder position for career politicians who just need a job,” Mejia told Bolts. “That’s why a lot of people don’t know where their money’s being spent or if it’s being used effectively or efficiently.”

Francine McKenna, a lecturer in financial accounting at Wharton who also maintains a newsletter about auditing and accounting issues, says it’s much more common for city controller candidates to be politicians looking for a stepping stone than actual financial professionals. “I can’t remember anybody ever running a campaign saying, ‘I’m actually an accountant with a CPA and I know how to do this stuff,’” McKenna told Bolts.

McKenna first found out about Mejia’s campaign on Twitter. In an interview, she praised the candidate’s online engagement and use of public records to inform residents about the city’s payroll, affordable housing, LAPD arrest and homelessness criminalization zones, and more. “He’s using the skills and the background that he brings as a CPA, as someone who’s worked in public accounting and consulting,” she said. “He’s bringing those to the table and saying, here are all the ways that we think citizens should have greater transparency in terms of where the need is—and how that compares with where money is spent.” 

Mejia possesses a somewhat unique background, having worked both as an auditor for the massive accounting firm Ernst & Young and as a tenants rights and housing activist. At 31, he has already run for national office twice, on the Green Party ticket, before deciding to re-register as a Democrat and focus on local electoral politics. “Everything that I cared about—homelessness, housing, policing, the environment, transportation—it was like, ‘oh, this is all on the local level,’” he recalled.

If Mejia’s third bid for office proves successful, he will occupy a strange place in Los Angeles politics. “At its core, the controller has an immense responsibility that’s probably second only to the mayor and the city attorney—but at the same time, it has extremely limited power.” said Rob Quan, an organizer with Unrig LA, which works against the influence of money in politics locally. The controller cannot investigate other elected officials. The office also can’t set its own budget, and can’t in any way compel the rest of the city government to accept its recommendations. The roughly 130-person department is chronically underfunded. According to Jeremy Oberstein, the former chief of staff to current controller Ron Galperin, much of its auditing resources are taken up performing mandatory, time-consuming reports on the Department of Water and Power and the city’s airports and sea port. 

Quan predicted that it might be difficult for Mejia to completely square his big-picture activist mindset with some of the realities of the position. “I think it’s pretty safe to say there’ll be that tension there,” he said. 

But despite these limits, the city controller does have one key arrow in their quiver, Oberstein said: the discretion to perform an audit “at any point.” The vast, sprawling city budget—nearly $12 billion for the upcoming fiscal year—is theirs to examine, sift through, and hold up to the light. And while city controllers don’t have the ability to enact policy, their reports can still influence public discourse and potentially translate into change. 

Ultimately, the job is quasi-journalistic in both its emphasis on investigation and communication, as well as its indirect ability to influence outcomes, McKenna says. “You have to find a way to communicate sometimes difficult information or information that seems technical or seems kind of narrowly focused. You have to find a way to say: this is important.”  

Quan agreed that the credibility and persuasiveness of a city controller’s reports have everything to do with the level of influence the position can wield. “Your audits can just be headlines, or they can translate into real policy change,” he said.

Mejia acknowledges the limitations of the office but says he hopes to use his audits to motivate constituents to speak up for political transformation. “We don’t have any policy-making power—we can’t change anything, pass rent control, we can’t stop evictions,” Mejia said. “Our power as controller is we provide data and the facts and the numbers for people to use. And then they are the ones who push the policymakers to make systemic change.”

One critical element of the job is the ability to reach people where they’re at. Oberstein stressed that Mejia is not the first to creatively visualize data—Galperin’s office has won awards for its work on data transparency. From the perspective of Youth Justice Coalition’s Zapién, however, Mejia has done a better job getting it into the hands of a wide array of people.

“My role as media coordinator is to be able to collect information that is going to be accessible to our folks, and share with them in a way that feels accessible and not intimidating or overwhelming or confusing—because these systems are designed to be complex and confusing, so that our people don’t feel like they have access,” Zapién told Bolts. “Are you sharing things in a way that it’s accessible to the people doing the work on the ground, regardless of whether we agree with you fully politically or not?”

Zapién noted that he often screenshots Mejia’s resources and sends them to colleagues. They’ve proved useful tools for illuminating the budgeting decisions behind young people’s daily experiences: why LAPD harasses them on the way to and from school, or why they only have only one youth center. “When we actually look at the numbers,” he said, there’s a powerful connection between how the city chooses to spend its money and the outcomes for its residents: “Of course, what do we expect to happen when we’re spending all this money on law enforcement and lockups and not in youth development?”

Mejia’s campaign is working on creating more campaign resources to add to those he’s already released. Next up is a database on the most expensive lawsuits the city has paid out, a map of park inequity across LA, and a big report on the LAPD—“so that people can have a one-stop shop on understanding, like, where the hell’s my $3.2 billion going?” the candidate told Bolts.

“At the end of the day, the controller is—by charter—a job that is open to redefinition,” Oberstein said. “The goal of the job, in my mind at least, should be to drive lasting change. And you do that by creating relationships and speaking truth to power.”

On that matter, the two runoff candidates take opposite approaches. Koretz, Mejia’s opponent in November, has campaigned as an insider, touting his close relationships at City Hall. Mejia flips that logic on its head. “As an outsider and a CPA, I can hold people accountable,” he told Bolts. “We don’t owe the establishment anything because we’re not part of it to begin with.”

In recent weeks, the two candidates’ diametrically opposed relationships to the status quo have boiled over into open conflict. Mejia is a sharp critic of the city’s approach to homelessness, which is characterized by widespread criminalization. Koretz, meanwhile, has been an architect and staunch defender of that approach. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Mejia’s website recently posted a map and analysis of the city’s anti-camping policy, 41.18, showing that unhoused people would be banned from sitting, sleeping and storing belongings in about 20 percent of the city under an expanded version of the law. This statistic has pushed  public debate on the issue, quickly becoming a talking point repeated by activists and local media alike. At a city council meeting on Aug. 9 to vote on the matter, members of the Services not Sweeps Coalition, which has a good deal of overlap with People’s Budget LA, disrupted the event, testifying vociferously to the law’s inhumanity. “I just want help,” one unhoused woman sobbed. 

Mejia was there alongside them. “We’re here at City Hall today to support our unhoused neighbors,” he tweeted. (The candidate has downplayed his involvement with the People’s Budget LA, telling Bolts, “our campaign’s relationship is just providing financial information about the city.”) After protestors were forced out of the chamber by police, Koretz blamed his opponent, saying: “Just because Kenneth Mejia and his band of anarchists tried to break up two different meetings, we’re not going to stand for it. We’re going to take the action that we need to take.” The city council ultimately voted 11-3 to go ahead with the expansion.

One of Mejia’s central goals is to audit the city’s sweeps of encampments and other ways officials have criminalized people who sleep on the street. “I think what you’ll find is tens of millions of dollars being spent on these sweeps—and you’ll notice that the performance metrics of getting people housed from the sweeps are terrible,” he told Bolts. “I’m hoping that we can show just how much the city has failed on tackling homelessness.”

The post Auditing the Status Quo in Los Angeles appeared first on Bolts.

At just 32, Eunisses Hernandez already has a long record of organizing wins steeped in abolition. She has worked to remove drug enhancements from the state’s penal code, close a notorious Los Angeles jail and halt the construction of others, and champion a historic Los Angeles County ballot measure reallocating hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to community programs and incarceration alternatives. So it may come as a surprise to learn that for a long time, Hernandez wanted to become a cop.

Growing up in the predominantly Latinx neighborhood Highland Park, Hernandez saw that her family and friends’ relationship to police was mostly fearful and antagonistic. People in distress didn’t call 911 because they dreaded immigration enforcement more than the immediate threat. Police profiled her cousin so often that when he was eventually arrested, prosecutors accused him of being in a gang. Hernandez’s adolescence coincided with the Great Recession, and her family did anything they could to stay afloat and hold onto their home. They rented out rooms in their house, and one day, there was a fight between the couple that lived there. Hernandez felt helpless. She called 911, but when the police came, they only talked to her through the window of their squad car before speeding off, saying they had more important things to attend to. Maybe, she thought, she could do a better job than the cops who profiled her cousin, or the ones who didn’t even get out of their car when she called for their help.

For Hernandez, becoming an abolitionist was a long journey: one shaped by the complex experiences of her childhood and college years, and a policy and organizing career that moved her steadily towards prioritizing local action. Now, she is looking to bring this perspective into public office with a run for the Los Angeles City Council, where she hopes  to represent a district that includes Highland Park, Chinatown, and the heavily Central American neighborhood of Westlake. 

The area has recently seen the displacement of longtime residents, skyrocketing rent and housing prices, and the criminalization that has both accelerated those changes and followed in their wake. Hernandez accuses Los Angeles officials, including the councilmember she is challenging, Gil Cedillo, of failing to defend a community that has been targeted for gentrification. 

“I know this is very personal for her to be running in this district,” said Lex Steppling, the national director of campaign and organizing at Dignity and Power Now (DPN), a Los Angeles-based organization that organizes for the rights of incarcerated people. (Steppling supports Hernandez’s candidacy in his personal capacity.) “I’ve never seen a neighborhood flip that fast. And Eunisses has managed to stay there.”

Her bid to transform the priorities of local government comes in a decisive election year for Los Angeles, whose city government could go in any number of directions depending on the outcome of races like this one. Mayor Eric Garcetti’s likely departure as Ambassador to India has left a wide open election for City Hall, and the race to succeed him has already become a referendum on homelessness policy in Los Angeles. The city controller and the city attorney’s positions are both open as well. And there are eight seats up for grabs on the 15-member city council.  

In recent years, abolitionist organizers have achieved a series of previously unthinkable victories across Los Angeles County. Amidst this power vacuum at City Hall, the next test will be whether they can elect one of their own. 

Hernandez says her first real shift in political consciousness came during college, when she studied criminal justice at California State University, Long Beach. Most of the professors were former law enforcement officers, and the major felt like a crash course in the day-to-day of policing. But one instructor, Dina Perrone, taught classes on criminology and the War on Drugs, which Hernandez experienced as a revelation. She finally had a set of tools to interpret the experiences of her youth: the friends arrested for smoking weed, the mental health crises treated as crimes. And in learning about how other countries deal with issues of addiction and incarceration, Hernandez realized that another way was possible. 

After college, Hernandez worked at the Drug Policy Alliance for four years, helping pass Senate Bill 180, which ended drug enhancements that added up to 12 years to people’s sentences for past convictions, and implement Proposition 64, which legalized marijuana in California. There, she felt frustrated by “carve-outs”—policy concessions that exclude certain groups in order to get a law passed. “From what I’ve seen in policy development, we don’t go back for people we’ve left behind,” she told Bolts. 

In 2018, wanting to organize on a more local level, Hernandez moved to JustLeadershipUSA, where she became the Los Angeles campaign coordinator for JusticeLA, a large coalition of racial justice and civil rights organizations. Since its inception in 2017, Justice LA has chipped away at the infrastructure of mass incarceration in Los Angeles County. In February 2019, the coalition successfully pushed to cancel plans for a new women’s jail. That August, it also helped sink plans for a new mental health-focused jail, advocating instead for community-based, non-custodial treatment centers. “We won shit they said we couldn’t win,” said Steppling (DPN is a member of the coalition’s executive committee). “A lot of people point to [the coalition’s victories] as an example of what organizing is capable of,” he said, and Hernandez “played a really central role.” 

Though Justice LA comprises reformist organizations as well, the coalition is guided by abolitionist principles. Hernandez told Bolts: “Some basic questions that we ask ourselves in doing this work: will this policy decision leave anybody behind? Will this policy decision build something we’ll have to destroy in the future? Will this policy decision give more money and more power to the systems that are harming us? If it’s yes to any of those questions, then we have to go back to the drawing board.”

In early 2019, Justice LA successfully petitioned the Board of Supervisors to establish an Alternatives to Incarceration working group, which Hernandez was appointed to as a community stakeholder. The ATI working group would go on to produce a report, “Care First, Jails Last,” that laid out a roadmap for overhauling the county’s existing system of policing and punishment. Working from the findings of that report, the coalition fought for a ballot measure to redirect 10 percent of LA County’s general funds to incarceration alternatives like community programs, which passed in November 2020 with 57 percent of the vote. 

Implementation has been bogged down by bureaucratic delays, though the measure remains one of the most politically significant and financially impactful criminal justice reforms to emerge from the 2020 uprising. Jody Armour, a law professor at USC who supported Measure J, says the ballot measure centered on abolitionist themes rather than shying away from them. “#DefundThePolice part of Measure J was plainly communicated and ‘resonated powerfully’ with many voters,” Armour wrote on Twitter.

Along with Ivette Alé, a fellow Justice LA organizer, Hernandez also co-founded LA Defensa, a  women- and femme-led group that focuses on the judiciary as an understudied lever for carceral power (one early project was a website allowing residents to weigh in on their experiences with Los Angeles County judges). Hernandez still works at LA Defensa, but told Bolts she’ll step away soon to focus more fully on campaigning, calling the race a continuation of her community organizing. “We’re trying to take this—the wins, the experiences, the coalition—to City Hall, because right now, they’re not coming through for the people,” she said. 

Cedillo, Hernandez’s opponent and the incumbent District 1 councilmember, was a vocal supporter of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential run and received Sanders’s endorsement in February 2021, more than a year before the primary or Hernandez’s entrance into the race. The early endorsement angered many left organizers in Los Angeles, who have criticized Cedillo for voting to criminalize homeless encampments, ordering homeless sweeps in Westlake’s MacArthur Park, and failing to use his position as chair of the council’s housing committee to forestall gentrification and displacement in his district. Hernandez saw an opportunity. “That motivated other people to step up,” she told Bolts. 

Cedillo’s office did not respond to Bolts’s questions about his record and platform.

Hernandez says she wants to prioritize alternative crisis responses, such as sending trained mental health workers to some 911 calls instead of police. She supports the People’s Budget LA coalition, which has demanded a vast reallocation of funds from the LAPD to community care programs. “My goal is to build our work locally,” she said. “I want to be part of the budget committee.” 

She also wants to fight criminalization of homelessness. Hernandez told Bolts that she rejects Cedillo’s support for encampment sweeps and that she opposes a recent municipal ordinance Cedillo backed, 41.18, which restricts where unhoused people can sit, sleep, and store belongings. She also hopes to implement a Universal Just Cause ordinance to strengthen eviction protections for tenants and ensure access to counsel during the eviction process. 

If elected, Hernandez would join a city council that has long been unfriendly to progressive priorities. A small, two-person progressive coalition has emerged in the last two years, resulting in a number of 13-2 votes—notably on 41.18. But the bloc may soon vanish. First-term councilmember Nithya Raman saw her district distorted by the 2021 rezoning process, in what some believed was a ploy to reduce progressive voter power, and Mike Bonin, who has long been the council’s staunchest left voice, recently announced his retirement for mental health reasons, after a campaign targeting his work on homelessness came very close to triggering a rare recall vote. 

Still, Dahlia Ferlito of White People 4 Black Lives, a Justice LA coalition member, said they thought it was important for people with Hernandez’s convictions and movement background to seek office: “If it didn’t matter, then our opposition wouldn’t be doing everything humanly possible to ensure that we do not have a voice in the electoral sphere.” Besides Hernandez, there are a number of other left-wing candidates running for council this election season.

Hernandez will have the discretion to do more within her district, where council members have long enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy. Right now, homelessness policy in Los Angeles is especially balkanized: laws are passed by the full council, but each member can interpret them somewhat differently in their own district. 

In one council meeting in January, Cedillo successfully got 28 locations in his district designated as enforcement zones under the homeless criminalization ordinance 41.18. Hernandez told Bolts she would decline to propose 41.18 locations in her district. (This is what Bonin, the progressive councilmember, has done in his district.) 

On one particular issue, she may get a chance to finish what she started with Justice LA. In 2019, the Board of Supervisors vowed to close Men’s Central Jail, an infamous and decrepit Los Angeles County penitentiary that Hernandez described as a “dungeon.” It’s a long road to closure, and then there’s the question of what comes after. “Men’s Central Jail now sits in my district,” she told Bolts. “I’m going to be a part of the plan to shut it down—and the community engagement that happens to inform what gets built on that land.”

The post Abolitionist Organizer Wants to Fill Los Angeles Power Vacuum appeared first on Bolts.

Today, BPD is more politically weakened than ever in recent memory. Civil rights activists in Boston call the current moment a golden opportunity to fundamentally reimagine public safety. 

“Crime is down, arrests are down in Boston,” ACLU of Massachusetts executive director Carol Rose said. “This is the opportunity to take some of the reforms that have started and to really build them into the system.”

Boston has long been controlled by a white power structure that’s resistant to change, but the 2020 uprising following George Floyd’s murder increased public pressure to change policing in the city. In November, Michelle Wu, Boston’s new progressive mayor, took office in a landslide win after promising to make deep and systemic police reforms. 

Wu’s arrival in power in Boston is a new opportunity for the left to showcase the credibility of its policies in confronting police violence, though it also risks underscoring the limitations of municipal leadership and the entrenchment of police power, even when weakened. It was only recently that Bill de Blasio became mayor in New York on similar hopes that he would boldly reform the police after a hard-hitting campaign, only to largely surrender to police opposition. And in many other cities, municipal leaders vocally supported the 2020 protestors without putting their demands into policy. 

Thwarted by a mix of antagonism from police unions or by their own indifference, progressive officials have largely failed to chart a new path of municipal leadership on policing. In that context, Wu’s victory in Boston and promises for police reform beg the question: After decades of inaction from outwardly progressive leaders, what will it take to meaningfully change policing at the local level?

Wu is part of a new, diverse coalition demanding change in Boston. Her signs were ubiquitous in Boston’s Black and brown neighborhoods, which bear the brunt of aggressive policing in the city. In 2019, 70% of people stopped under BPD’s “Field Interrogation and Observation” program, similar to the infamous stop-and-frisk program by New York police, were Black, despite Black people comprising just a quarter of the city’s population. While the total number of stops went down in 2020, the racial disparity continued, with around 62% of those stopped being Black.

The recent shift in politics around policing in Boston reflects a more diverse and engaged electorate, said Toiell Washington, co-founder of the racial justice group Black Boston. City council has started to look more like the people they represent, rather than the old order. “They’re not these random politicians that nobody in the community knows, nobody knows what their plans are,” Washington told me. “They’re people who were actually doing things in the community before.”

Backlash to police abuses from the city’s grassroots organizers has been building for years, and Wu harnessed that energy during her rise in Boston politics. Previously, as a member of Boston City Council, Wu called for a 10 percent reduction in BPD’s budget. While running for mayor, Wu also called for banning police use of tear gas, rubber bullets and no-knock warrants. “It is all too clear that our city’s public safety structures have not kept all of us safe,” Wu’s campaign website stated. “We must take concrete steps to dismantle racism in law enforcement by demilitarizing the police.” 

Some activists in the city, like Muslim Justice League (MJL) Executive Director Fatema Ahmad, are skeptical of Wu’s committment to major change. Ahmad criticized Wu and other city leaders for failing to cut police spending after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. When Wu ran for mayor last year, she answered a MJL questionnaire asserting she was in favor of reallocating police spending, but entered zero for the actual amount she’d cut from the police department. When the group asked her to clarify, especially given her previous support for cutting 10 percent of the budget, Wu still wouldn’t commit to a specific amount, insisting cuts would have to be negotiated through collective bargaining with the city’s police union. “No candidate can honestly commit to reinvesting a specific dollar amount from the BPD budget into community services, because true reform necessarily runs through the police union contract,” Wu wrote at the time.

“There’s a disconnect between the language that she uses versus the details of what she’s actually going to do,” Ahmad said. Wu’s office didn’t make the mayor available for comment.

Despite those critiques, Ahmad remains hopeful that Wu can deliver on police reforms based on some of her early moves in power. Ahmad pointed to Wu’s support for dismantling the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, one of 80 multi-agency “fusion centers” that sprouted across the country during the ‘war on terror’ and whose surveillance operations continue to raise concerns about government waste and violations of civil liberties. 

“Mayor Wu has actually taken a stance that she supports abolishing the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, which would be huge,” Ahmad said. “That would be the first fusion center in the country to be abolished.”

The need for new leadership seems to have complicated—and slowed down—the pace of police reform in Boston. Dennis White, who replaced outgoing police commissioner William Gross last January, was suspended within 48 hours of taking office over a domestic violence allegation and fired in June. Wu has since launched a national search for the city’s new top cop.

Local civil rights attorney and activist Carl Williams said that whoever Wu picks should be an outsider; traditionally, Boston’s police leadership has come from within the ranks. 

“Boston is an old guard, old city—you look at all the chiefs and commissioners, these are people who started as patrol officers, they’ve never worked anywhere else,” Williams said.

City Councilor Andrea Campbell, a lifelong Bostonian who also ran against Wu for mayor, said the clock is ticking for police reform in Boston. After over a year of scandal and without clear leadership, she said Boston’s police are suffering from a loss of credibility in the communities they patrol. “If you have this lack of trust, lack of transparency, and most importantly, accountability, it erodes trust within the community and it makes it difficult for officers as well as residents, both players, to do their jobs effectively and to have true community policing,” she said. 

Black Boston’s Washington said she wants to see concrete proposals from the mayor and other city politicians to make departmental change a reality. 

“I want actionable items,” Washington told me. “I don’t want to just hear ‘our hope is, defund the police by this much.’ What are the steps, when is this going to happen?… I want to hear that.”

The post A New Mayor Makes Boston the Latest Test Case on Confronting Police Violence appeared first on Bolts.

Amid the national reckoning over police budgets, opposition is building in Fort Worth, Texas, against a sales tax that has funded law enforcement programs for more than two decades. Voters will decide on Tuesday whether to renew it, and the Black Lives Matter movement’s concerns about policing are front and center in the campaign.   

The tax, which is called the Crime Control and Prevention District (CCPD), raised nearly $80 million in 2019 and funds police equipment, salaries, and various initiatives. If renewal fails, it would significantly reduce the resources of the Fort Worth police.

Voters have renewed the CCPD four times since it was established in 1995; it received 85 percent of the vote in the most recent referendum, in 2014. But this year’s election (Proposition A) is playing out in a different context marked by more visible activist calls to shrink the presence of the police department.

“Policing is necessary when people’s needs are not met,” Jen Sarduy, an organizer with Fort Worth Futures, an advocacy group formed this year that is urging voters to reject the tax, told the Appeal: Political Report. 

The group has in recent weeks released graphics on social media about the sort of public services that the city should boost to “reimagine public safety,” including public housing investments, programs for the city’s elderly  residents, and expanded public transit access, as local transportation advocates are demanding. 

Strengthening these services instead of funding police, these advocates argue, would improve safety outcomes. “When our money is so tied up in crime reaction and control, we are not addressing the root causes of violence or investing in building safer communities,” Sarduy and Lizzie Maldonado, another local activist, wrote in a commentary piece this week. 

Fort Worth’s referendum is just one of the electoral tests for this perspective in Texas next week. On the same day, Austin is voting for its next district attorney, and one candidate is running by making a case for strengthening systems other than criminal justice. “Public safety is a good job, it is access to healthcare, it is a good school to send your children,” the candidate, José Garza, told the Political Report last week. 

Austin’s City Council already approved a measure last month to transfer some police funds to social services as part of a broader public safety package. Because of pressure from the Black Lives Matter protests, city leaders around the country are envisioning similar moves as they rethink the roles usually assigned to police.

Fort Worth is more conservative than Austin and many of those municipalities. It is a rare big city with a strong GOP presence—the mayor, Betsy Price, is a Republican who supports the tax. But that has led to a  set of unlikely bedfellows in the push against the CCPD: progressives seeking police reform and conservatives intent on reducing taxation.

The Texans for Freedom PAC, a group that campaigns against bond packages and tax ratification elections, has jumped into the Fort Worth debate. “No more police tax,” says a website it created for the CCPD campaign. A representative for the PAC did not answer a request for comment. As opposed to progressive advocates seeking to spend the tax elsewhere, the conservative group wants this revenue source eliminated altogether. 

Still, some residents motivated by anti-tax politics are connecting this issue to the protests against police brutality.

“As a Libertarian, I’ll always vote against taxes, but there’s a lot of great reasons to vote against this particular tax,” said John Spivey, former chairperson of the Tarrant County Libertarian Party.  “Much of the $80 million in CCPD funds have been used to militarize our police which in turn is used to terrorize people of color. … Instead of militarizing the police, I’d rather seek ways to end feeding the always hungry prison industrial complex with a steady stream of people of color.”

Proponents of the CCPD, which include Price, Police Chief Ed Kraus, and the Fort Worth Police Officers Association, a police union, point to a substantial decline in crime since the district’s creation to  say the tax helps fund crime prevention programs that are essential to public safety. Crime plunged nationwide over that same period.

Protests against police practices have been simmering in Fort Worth long before the latest wave. In 2016, Jacqueline Craig, a Black mother of two, called the police to report a crime. Instead, a white officer aggressively handled and arrested her, resulting in an uproar. Three years later, a white officer killed Atatiana Jefferson, a Black woman, in her home, occasioning further protests. 

In response to Craig’s arrest, in 2017 the city formed a task force to study racial inequity and bias in housing, transportation, workforce development, criminal justice and other areas, and released recommendations in 2018. The only three criminal justice reforms included were civilian oversight of the police, more people of color in the ranks, and a Police Cadet program recruiting high school students.

Pamela Young, an organizer for United Fort Worth, a group that pushes for policing changes and is now calling for a vote against the CCPD, says these recommendations left gaping holes such as effective community oversight, and that grassroots groups should have been more involved.

United Fort Worth released recommendations of its own. “We wanted to get what we were asking for, not a top-down approach,” Young said. “Problems arise when the city refuses to take the advice we are giving.”

Young views the CCPD in a similar way. “The underlying issue is there is no community involvement,” she said, noting that City Council members who run it take donations from the police union, which can influence how the revenue raised through the tax district is spent. 

Jason Adams, a graduate student at the University of North Texas studying public administration, agrees that those donations are evidence that “we cannot trust that the council will place any substantive value on community input in the allocation of CCPD funds.”  Last month, he helped delay a public meeting regarding the police union’s  agreement with the city to allow for more public input.

Even some beneficiaries of the funds allocated through the CCPD are now opposing the tax. 

LaTasha Jackson-McDougle, the founder of Cheryl’s Voice, a group that educates children and families about domestic violence and that receives grants from the CCPD, came out on Facebook against renewing the tax.

“We as citizens need to vote NO on prop A and have a citizen meeting with adjustment of allocation of funds,” Jackson-McDougle wrote.

Sarduy, of Fort Worth Futures, also assails the city for allocating revenue without community input, but stresses that local advocates are now “keeping track” of the budget and eager to transform the city. 

“We want a different definition of public safety,” Sarduy said. “This is where we’re starting.”

The post A Texas Referendum Provides an Early Window Into Battles Over Police Budgets appeared first on Bolts.