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.

Memphis residents who head to the polls next week will face a dizzying ballot for mayor. With Mayor Jim Strickland term limited in this city of 600,000, there are 17 candidates running to replace him in this nonpartisan race—a crush of local businessmen and politicians, including a former reality TV judge, two different life coaches, and a former mayor. Despite the crowded field, Oct. 5 will be the only round of voting: Whoever finishes first becomes the next mayor of Memphis, however small their share of the vote. 

Memphis is by far the most populous city in the nation to elect its mayor this way, in a one-round, first-past-the-post election. There is no primary, no runoff, no ranked-choice voting to cull the herd, encourage consolidation, or help clarify the stakes. All other U.S. cities with at least half a million residents have some such mechanism to ensure that the field narrows, or that the winner gets broader support.

This rare voting procedure was set up when a court eliminated runoffs more than 30 years ago to prevent white residents from coalescing to block Black candidates. But the white share of the population has declined considerably since then, rendering that original purpose more obsolete. Voters in this now majority-Black city tried in recent years to change their election rules and adopt ranked-choice voting, a system that could produce winners with wider appeal. But Tennessee Republicans who run the state government adopted a law in 2022 that banned the use of ranked-choice in the state. 

This has left Memphis with a system that risks diluting voters’ power, making it harder for them to elect leaders who represent the preferences and priorities of a large share of the population. 

“There’s still a whole lot of battle fatigue, angst, frustration, anxiety,” says Reverend Earle Fisher, director of the Black Clergy Collective of Memphis, about voters’ mood. “If there’s one thing I’ve heard a million times over the last few months that I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard it is: ‘There’s too many people in this race.’”

He says the danger to democracy is that public officials are getting elected without a mandate, without “50 percent of the people participating saying, ‘I want this person because I believe this person is gonna do the things that the majority of us want to be done.’”

Whoever wins the mayor’s race in Memphis will have to contend with concerns over public safety and economic disinvestment, a shrinking population, and a GOP-run state government that has increasingly interfered in the decisions made by its cities. The election also comes in the wake of Tyre Nichols’ death and other high-profile police shootings that have rocked the city recently, which puts a spotlight on the next mayor’s relationship with the police department and appointments of a police chief.

But in a field that’s this crowded, and where nearly all mayoral contenders say they share the same broad priorities—reduce crime, promote economic investment, and improve housing—it’s been exceedingly difficult for the conversations to go beyond sound bites or to really air out any policy disagreements between any two candidates. 

“Voters don’t really create their own messages. They choose between the alternatives that are put in front of them,” says Jack Santucci, who studies electoral systems as a political science lecturer at Queens College, CUNY. “Especially in a nonpartisan local election, voters are going to have trouble differentiating among the candidates.”

Local media has made decisions about which of these 17 candidates to invite to debates based on how much money they’ve raised and the available polling. 

By those metrics, the leading candidates include Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner, who is touting support from police unions and his long experience in law enforcement, while also  drawing criticism for the high number of deaths in the local jail he oversees. They also include Paul Young, president of the Downtown Memphis Commission, a newcomer to electoral politics who leads the race in funds raised; state Representative Karen Camper, who voted against the law to ban ranked-choice voting while in the legislature; and Shelby County Commissioner Van Turner, a former Memphis NAACP president whose left-leaning platform has earned him the endorsement of Justin Pearson, a lawmaker representing part of the city who was expelled from the state House (and later reinstated) by Republicans earlier this year over a protest for gun control.

Also running is Willie Herenton, who has made fewer appearances at public events, skipped debates, and raised a lot less money. But as the former mayor from 1992 to 2009, the name recognition he garnered over his five terms makes him a frontrunner: In an August poll conducted by Emerson College, Herenton received 16 percent—enough to put him in the lead. A plurality of respondents, 26 percent, remained undecided. 

Even in smaller debates organized by the media, candidates have had limited time to state their cases and have struggled to distinguish themselves. The dynamic has heightened competition, incentivizing attack ads and even jockeying among the candidates over who has the best Christian faith credentials. 

Every possible advantage counts: The next mayor is likely to win with less than 30 percent of the vote, if not less, hardly a mandate from voters to carry out a particular policy vision.

“What we’re facing right now, with so many candidates in the way, is that we could possibly have the next mayor of Memphis elected by 20,000 or fewer votes,” Martavius Jones, chair of the city council, told Bolts.

Tennessee’s other largest city just held its own mayoral race this summer under different rules: Nashville holds runoffs for its local elections, giving the race a much different shape.

There were 12 candidates for mayor during Nashville’s first round of voting on Aug. 3, and the top two vote-getters, Freddie O’Connell and Alice Rolli, received 27 and 20 percent of the vote, respectively. In Memphis, this would have been the end of the road, but in Nashville it paved the way for a 6-week runoff campaign. O’Connell touted his progressive bona fides while Rolli ran with conservative support, a contrast that gave voters a clear choice. During the runoff, O’Connell rallied support from progressive advocacy groups, labor unions, as well as several of the candidates he beat in the first round, and on Sept. 14, won the mayorship with a decisive 64 percent of the vote. 

Republicans in the legislature floated a bill earlier this year to ban runoffs in municipal elections throughout the state. Democrats denounced it as an attempted power-grab in the run-up to Nashville’s election, warning that it would allow a single Republican to beat out a crowd of Democrats in the decidedly blue city. Had the bill passed, the summer’s result would not have changed since O’Connell won both rounds. Still, Rolli, the sole Republican among the major candidates, would have been 7 percentage points from victory rather than the 28 percentage points by which she lost the runoff.

Memphis too used to have runoff elections for its mayoral and city council contest, a system it adopted in the mid 1960s. Because of the city’s racial makeup at the time—63 percent white and 37 percent Black—runoffs worked to preserve white political power and ensured that Black candidates almost never took office. Runoffs were used not only to consolidate votes around just a couple of candidates, but also to shore up racial voting blocs. 

“Blacks could not hope to win citywide races given the traditional level of white polarization and bloc voting,” explains Marcus Pohlmann in his book Racial Politics At a Crossroads, a history of Memphis electoral politics. “Without a runoff, Blacks could have run single candidates in races in which there were several white candidates, and, by giving a candidate a plurality of the vote, have some reasonable possibility of winning.”

Elections continued on this way until in 1991, when a federal judge struck down the runoffs rule, saying that it violated the Voting Rights Act. U.S. District Judge Jerome Turner said the city had to adopt a new plan to “eradicate the minority vote dilution.” 

Mere months later, Herenton was elected as the city’s first Black mayor—by a hair, with only 142 more votes than his opponent, white incumbent Richard Hackett. The contest was decided in one round, and a runoff very well could have reversed the results, Pohlmann writes.

The racial makeup of Memphis has changed considerably since then; the U.S. census’ 2022 estimates show that 63 percent of the city’s population is Black and 24 percent is white. This has largely eliminated the concern of “minority vote dilution” that the 1991 ruling was intended to address. Still, the no-runoffs rule has remained. 

Memphians have devised other informal ways of consolidating the field in intervening years, including holding an unofficial mock election called the Memphis People’s Convention, also known as the People’s Primary. The event was originally put on ahead of the historic 1991 race, and had the effect of galvanizing Black voters around Herenton. 

After a long hiatus, the event was brought back in 2019 by the Black Clergy Collective of Memphis as a way to engage and inform voters, give candidates an opportunity to make their case, and signal who the leading candidates might be. 

“It’s been important for us not to concentrate on individuals or politicians as much as we concentrate on issues and policies that the majority of the people want to see enacted,” says Fisher of theBlack Clergy Collective.

This year, only six candidates registered for the event, which took place in August, and only two candidates—Young, the president of the downtown commission, and Turner, the former Memphis NAACP president—showed up in person. Young won the mock election, though Fisher stresses that many Memphians remain undecided. 

Lexi Carter, chair of the Shelby County Democratic Party, agrees that the People’s Convention this year is less of a political bellwether compared to the first convention in 1991. 

“That was effective then, but I think as the years passed the dynamics changed,” Carter told Bolts. She says that people engaged in 1991 “because it was the first time a Black mayor was ever going to be elected. Whereas now, there are African Americans that fill most of the elected positions [in city government.]” The leading candidates in the race this year are all Black and have some attachment to the Democratic party.

The Shelby Democratic Party has largely stayed out of this race, as they have a policy of not endorsing candidates in non-partisan races such as this one, where most candidates are registered Democrats or have Democratic affiliations. “It’s really a very close race and difficult to predict,” says Carter.

As an alternative to the current system, Memphis has tried to adopt ranked choice voting. This voting method, in which voters rank all candidates in order of preference instead of choosing just one, helps ensure that whoever wins has at least some level of support from most voters. 

Memphis residents first approved ranked choice with 71 percent of the vote in a 2008 referendum. The city didn’t move to implement it until 2017, though, when Shelby County Elections Administrator Linda Philips announced plans to use it in the 2019 elections. But members of the city council raised concerns about whether voting equipment could handle the change, and Tennessee’s election director Mark Goins halted Philips’ plan, issuing an opinion saying that ranked-choice voting violated state law. The Memphis city council put another referendum on the ballot for 2018, this time asking voters whether they wanted to repeal ranked-choice voting, but that referendum failed when 54 percent of voters rejected repeal. 

In 2022, the legislature stepped in to ban ranked-choice voting throughout Tennessee with a law sponsored by Republican state Senator Brian Kelsey, who represents parts of Shelby County. Many Democratic lawmakers who represent portions of Memphis voted against the ban, including Camper, the state Representative who is now running for mayor.

“I voted against the bill because the people of my community were for ranked choice voting. We chose it for ourselves,” Camper told Bolts in an email. 

“The legislature likes to lean on and meddle in the affairs of Memphis and Nashville,” she added. “I believe that this is one more way to override the will of Memphis and Shelby County.”

Fisher, who has supported the adoption of ranked-choice voting in Memphis, says he was disappointed to see the option removed. 

“I wanna do whatever we can do to ensure that whoever is elected to office, the probability of them representing the will of the majority of the citizens is high and not low,” he told Bolts.

With the path to ranked-choice voting now blocked, one prominent local Democrat is proposing another path to reform: introducing partisan primaries. Jones, the city council president, recently introduced an ordinance that, if passed, would put a popular referendum on the ballot in 2024 to set up a system that would have parties nominating candidates before they face a general election. Mayoral elections in Memphis are currently nonpartisan.

Jones says his ordinance is motivated by the size of the mayoral race, though in a city that is as staunchly blue as Memphis, a one-round Democratic primary could still reproduce some of the current system’s crowding issues. Jones says a partisan primary setting would still help condense the field and encourage candidates to adhere to party values.

He also says it’s less complicated and uncertain than petitioning a court to allow them to bring back runoffs. “Some of the feedback that I’ve received from people has been that there are just way too many people in the race,” said Jones. “So just by doing a partisan basis for selecting the mayor, we avoid having to go to court.”

The Shelby County Democratic Party has endorsed the measure. “We would much prefer to have the opportunity to choose our candidate,” Carter told Bolts. “When we have a nominee in advance, we can really get behind one individual and put all of our resources there, instead of dividing our resources between 16 or 17 people.”

Jones’ proposal has not yet been brought up for discussion by the full city council. It’s not likely to come up until after this election is over. 

“It’s a beautiful thing that we have the freedom that anybody who meets the qualifications can get in the race,” said Jones. “I don’t have a problem with that. But when it comes down to making that mayoral decision, let’s make it simple.”

The post With 17 Candidates and Unusual Voting Rules, Memphis Mayoral Race Gets Jumbled appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“People know that our shower list fills up quickly,” Beddis said. She says the drop in center is one of only two places unhoused people in Kensington can consistently take a shower. Visitors can also pick up safer use supplies like drug testing strips, get clean clothes and snacks, or simply hang out—lounging and chatting under the center’s neon purple lights and framed posters of the Philadelphia Eagles. 

“It really is a community,” Beddis said. “If somebody spills their coffee, we have our regulars that will jump up and be like, ‘Just give me the mop. I’ll take care of it,’ you know what I mean?”

Kensington and the people who live, work, and use drugs in this small neighborhood on the city’s northeast side have drawn scrutiny in the run up to Philadelphia’s May 16 Democratic primary, which will likely decide the city’s next mayor.

In a tightly-run race animated by issues of crime and public safety, debates on substance use have honed in on Kensington’s opioid crisis and significant unhoused population. All five of the leading candidates say the city needs to end what’s widely described as an “open-air drug market” and increase policing in the neighborhood. At least two of these candidates also propose raising the police budget. 

But local critics of a law enforcement-first approach to substance use worry that it may elevate overdose risks and perpetuate harm against people who use drugs, especially in Black and Latinx communities that already experience more policing. Instead, they hope the city’s next mayor will embrace harm reduction—a set of public health and social justice strategies aimed at protecting the dignity, autonomy, and rights of people who use drugs.

The city government’s response to substance use and the overdose crisis has thus far involved a complex patchwork of departments including police, public health, behavioral health, and homelessness services, and dozens of others, with guidance from the mayor’s office. Meanwhile, grassroots organizers in the city are locked in a years-long battle with state and federal officials to create a space for safer drug consumption. The proposal, championed by a nonprofit called Safehouse, has enjoyed some support from city officials since 2018 but has been delayed by lawsuits and now state legislation, even as similar sites have appeared in New York City. 

The next mayor will oversee the city’s response to the ongoing overdose crisis and shape its policies, wielding powers like its budget proposals, executive orders, or appointing the police commissioner. The mayor’s position on an overdose prevention site may also make or break the proposal in light of some state politicians’ ongoing efforts to preempt the sites. 

“The next mayor must take research about the effectiveness of harm reduction techniques seriously,” said Shoshana Aronowitz, an assistant professor at Penn Nursing who studies racial equity in substance use treatment and works with several harm reduction organizations across the city. 

A skyrocketing overdose crisis

Over 1,200 Philadelphians died of accidental overdoses in 2021—the highest number ever recorded. The potent opioid fentanyl has found its way into stimulants such as methamphetamine and cocaine, and an increasingly unpredictable drug supply, plus a lack of adequate prevention resources are driving up overdose rates citywide, especially in its Black and Latinx communities. A 2021 city report recommended using the phrase “overdose crisis” rather than “opioid crisis” to more adequately capture this impact. 

Much of Philadelphia’s current response infrastructure dates to 2017, when Mayor Jim Kenney convened a task force to determine how to “combat the opioid epidemic in Philadelphia.” The task force’s final report called for easier access to medication assisted treatment, in which doctors prescribe drugs called methadone and buprenorphine to relieve withdrawal symptoms and reduce the risk of overdose. It also advocated increasing access to naloxone, which can help reverse overdoses, expanding drug treatment court, and providing additional resources for housing and jobs training. 

As fatal overdose rates continued to increase, however, Kenney declared an “opioid emergency” in Kensington and directed law enforcement to reduce “open-air drug use and sales.” Since then, the police have increased foot patrols in the neighborhood, seizing cash and drugs and making over 2,500 arrests in 2022 alone.

Since 2020, a harm reduction program within the city’s department of public health has been distributing naloxone and fentanyl test strips through street-based outreach and training Philadelphians on how to spot and reverse overdoses. The city also funds some of the work of a Kensington-based harm reduction nonprofit offering syringe exchanges. And the department of health has committed to reducing overdoses that involve stimulants 20 percent by the end of 2023, according to its strategic plan. 

All five leading mayoral candidates have expressed some vision of treatment for people who use drugs, but Rebecca Rhynhart and Helen Gym’s proposals most resemble this existing plan. Both have expressed support for medication assisted treatment. 

A spokesperson for Gym’s campaign told Bolts the candidate would “improve prevention, [drug] testing, and treatment outreach,” especially in “underserved Black communities in North, Southwest, and West Philadelphia, where overdose rates are rising.”

Candidate Jeff Brown has advocated for drug treatment through the criminal legal system. 

“Drug court [is] a very effective way to have a good outcome, because you monitor their substance use. If they fall off the wagon, they have a choice. Do you want to go to jail for your crimes, or do you want to go back to treatment?” he said at a recent candidate forum about public health.

But Aronowitz warns that not all treatment options are created equal. “We know what doesn’t work,” Aronowitz said, “And that is expecting people to just quit cold turkey and be fine, because we know that that’s associated with extreme overdose risk.” 

“When a politician says we need more access to treatment, that’s not enough,”she continued. “We need to know if they’re going to fund the things that work and defund the things that not only don’t work but are potentially harmful.” 

The battle over Safehouse

Advocates doing harm reduction work in Philadelphia are pushing the city government to expand its focus on keeping people alive, beyond offering treatment, and they have fought to establish an overdose prevention site in Philadelphia, an effort the city government nominally supports. Such sites, also known as safe drug consumption sites, are places people can use pre-obtained drugs more safely, in the presence of staff trained to spot and reverse overdoses. 

As of July 2022, more than 120 overdose prevention sites existed in ten countries across the world, and no fatal overdoses had ever taken place in one. But they remain controversial in the United States. So far, only two such sites exist in the country, both in New York City, where staff have reversed more than 700 overdoses in the less than two years since they were created. Rhode Island legalized the creation of a pilot site in summer 2021 and is set to open one in early 2024. California governor Gavin Newsom last year killed legislation that would have allowed San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles to establish their own sites. 

In Philadelphia, efforts to open such a site have been caught for years in a protracted battle pitting harm reduction advocates and some city officials like DA Larry Krasner against the U.S. Justice Department, some state politicians, and opponents in law enforcement, business, and residential communities across the city. 

The struggle dates to a recommendation from Mayor Kenney’s 2017 opioid crisis task force to explore creating a space for safe consumption. In 2018, a nonprofit called Safehouse launched with the aim of opening a site in the city. But soon after, a U.S. Attorney appointed by President Donald Trump sued Safehouse invoking a federal law which prohibits “maintaining drug-involved premises” where criminalized drugs are manufactured, distributed, or used. 

In February 2020, the federal judge’s ruling in Safehouse’s favor led the group’s leaders to announce the site’s imminent opening in South Philadelphia. But after vehement opposition from neighbors, the plans folded in just two days. In 2021, a federal appeals court reversed the ruling that had cleared the way for Safehouse to open, relaunching the legal battle.

The plan remains uncertain at this time. Settlement talks between Safehouse and the U.S. Justice Department have been ongoing for over a year. Local opposition exploded last month, when a group including the police union and business associations filed a petition to step in as party plaintiffs in the lawsuit, fearing that the Biden Administration would reverse its position. 

Opponents to the site scored a decisive win earlier this month when Pennsylvania’s state Senate voted to ban overdose prevention sites anywhere in the state on a bipartisan 41-9 vote.

The bill was sponsored by Democratic Senator Christine Tartaglione, whose district includes parts of Kensington. She told The Philadelphia Inquirer that she opposes “prolonging and allowing a system of state-sponsored addiction in Pennsylvania.” 

The bill now sits in the state House’s Judiciary Committee. If it passed the chamber, it would move on to Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat who has indicated he opposes safe consumption sites.

Meanwhile, five Philadelphia city council members introduced a local bill on May 11 that would prevent an overdose prevention site from being created anywhere in their districts, an area amounting to about half the city. Councilmember Quetcy Lozada, whose district includes Kensington, led the effort, saying that such a site would only worsen the neighborhood’s struggles with drug consumption. 

“We cannot continue to allow them to find ways where they can continue to remain in the same cycle,” she told Inquirer. The bill would still need to get a committee hearing and be voted on by the entire city council—a process that may not happen before the council’s summer recess beginning in July—before going to the mayor to be signed. 

In public statements and court filings, Kenney’s administration has supported efforts to open an overdose prevention site, and remains supportive even in light of the new city and statewide bills. Whether the next mayor supports Safehouse would likely be critical to its chances given that the proposal is assailed from many quarters.

Among mayoral candidates, Helen Gym, a former teacher and city council member embraced by activists on the left, is the only one to have directly stated support for an overdose prevention site, though she did so before the protracted legal battle over Safehouse. 

“[Safe injection sites] are among the most promising new approaches to come forward while we work to end the opioid crisis. I support establishing one in Philadelphia,” Gym said in 2017. Her statement at the time added momentum for the proposal by giving it a prominent supporter on the city council. Gym has recently offered more circumspect answers in public comments, and did not respond to Bolts’ question about whether she currently supports opening a site in the city.

Another leading candidate, former city controller Rebecca Rhynhart, expressed measured support for the proposal. “I won’t take a tool that experts say saves lives off the table,” she told Bolts. “But I would not put a safe injection site in any neighborhood that does not want one.”

“I think that the debate over safe injection sites in Philadelphia has clouded the bigger issue which is what is the comprehensive plan for dealing with the opioid crisis in our city,” she added. 

Three other major contenders—real estate mogul and former councilor Allan Domb, grocery store magnate Jeff Brown, and former councilor Cherelle Parker—all oppose the sites. Parker has been a strident opponent since Safehouse’s efforts to open a site in early 2020, when she participated in the city council’s mobilization against the opening. 

“We should not be participating in a ‘I know what’s best for you’ decision making where we use safe injection sites as solutions,” Parker said in a debate on April 18.

Policing a public health crisis

The role of policing has proved broadly divisive in the mayoral primary, and yet the five leading candidates support increasing police presence on the ground in Kensington, distancing themselves from advocates who worry it would exacerbate criminalization. 

Gym and Rhynhart each said they would do so by reallocating existing police funds to prioritize Kensington, while increasing the police budget overall is a central component of both Domb and Parker’s platforms.

A spokesperson for Gym’s campaign told Bolts the candidate will take a “public health and resident-focused, community-led response,” mentioning a focus on neighborhood improvements, trauma support, and mobile crisis units, but did not detail how increased policing will fit in. 

Rhynhart’s campaign website states that she will attempt to disrupt public drug use by focusing on dealers, with a mix of warnings for “non-violent dealers” and arrests for “those committing violent acts.”

Sheila Vakharia, who helps lead research at the Drug Policy Alliance, warns that the line between people using drugs and people selling drugs is much more fluid. 

“There’s this idea that there is this big bad demon-ish seller and this poor victim user and oftentimes the seller is racialized. The victim is also racialized, but differently,” Vakharia said. “And oftentimes all of this can create heroes and villains.”

To both Aronowitz and Beddis of Savage Sisters, ending the overdose crisis requires a solution beyond what has been proposed by any candidate in the Philadelphia mayor’s race: addressing the toxicity of the criminalized drug market. They argue instead for access to a safe supply of criminalized drugs in a way that clinical and community-led programs have modeled across Europe and Canada, but which has not been piloted in the U.S.

“The way we regulate alcohol is safe supply,” Aronowitz said. “We make sure it’s not poison, and that when you take a drink, you can reliably know how much alcohol is in it.” 

But even if those goals are still far off, at the very least, they say, the city government should meet communities impacted by the overdose crisis with resources and care—not criminalization.

“Our friends have necrotic limbs. Can’t access treatment. Can’t access housing. Can’t access compassionate pain management. Can’t even get a shower,” Savage Sisters’ founder and executive director Sarah Laurel wrote on LinkedIn last month.

“It’s time we respond to this public health crisis accordingly.”

The post How Will Philadelphia’s Next Mayor Tackle the Overdose Crisis? 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gross added, “We need more peacekeepers.” 

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