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.

Activists in Austin have advocated for greater civilian oversight in response. A coalition of progressive organizers pushed the city council to amend the city’s contract with the Austin Police Association (APA) in order to reduce barriers to accountability and to create an Office of Police Oversight. But the police union fought back, attempting to leash the newly empowered watchdog by blocking it from conducting independent investigations into complaints of misconduct against officers. 

Their confrontation came to a head this weekend. Activists put an ordinance on the municipal ballot to bolster and codify the powers of civilian oversight in the city. The police union and its supporters retaliated with a petition drive of their own, which deceptively bore the same name as activists’ version, and succeeded in putting a competing ordinance in front of voters to weaken oversight.

Austin voters on Saturday decisively sided with police reformers. A resounding 70 percent approved Proposition A, the measure that would bolster oversight of police. They overwhelmingly rejected Proposition B, the version supported by the police union, which received support from only 20 percent of voters.

Kathy Mitchell, a longtime advocate for police accountability in Austin who helped organize the campaign for Prop A, says the results illustrate strong support in the city for robust civilian oversight of police, and voters’ frustration at police efforts to push back against their organizing of recent years. 

“We have literally tried everything, there was no other way to enforce the stronger standards for oversight other than going to the voters and saying, ‘Okay, you’re going to have to show that this is something you expect,’ Mitchell said. “And now they have.” 

Mitchell says she hopes that Prop A’s strong showing empowers city officials to begin changing police oversight as early as this week, including pushing for independent review of complaints against officers and cases involving police violence. 

The results in Austin were a stark contrast to the overwhelming defeat of a different police reform ballot measure 80 miles south in San Antonio, which also held its municipal elections on Saturday. As Bolts reported last month, San Antonio activists petitioned for a more sweeping ballot measure, also called Proposition A, that sought to decriminalize weed and abortion as well as reduce arrests and jail time for minor charges, but faced inflammatory rhetoric and well-funded opposition from the police union and much of the city’s political establishment. 

Only 28 percent of San Antonio voters supported Prop A on Saturday. The result was a decisive win for the San Antonio Police Officers’ Association, one of the most powerful and combative police unions in the country. “Tonight, the voices of our great city were heard and heard loudly,” Danny Diaz, the union’s president, said during a victory party Saturday night. “We will not become another statistic, we will not tolerate criminal leniency, and we will not allow our city to crumble.” 

Prop A’s organizers issued a statement after the election accusing the police union and its supporters of “spreading fear tactics and lies” in its campaign against the ballot measure. “We still have to do a lot of public education. We’ve been doing it for several years and we’re going to continue,” Ananda Tomas, executive director of the police reform group that led the effort, told reporters Saturday night, according to the San Antonio Current. “We know when we’re at the doors and we break all of these things down, that folks are with us.”

The police union in Austin was no less defiant than San Antonio’s despite its defeat. “The APA simply will not stand by while this city and anti-police activists operate with blatant disregard for state law and the rights and protections afforded to our hardworking men and women,” the Austin Police Association tweeted on Saturday night.

Mitchell says it’s telling that the union is talking about state law and seems to be appealing more to Texas’ Republican leaders at this point than to local voters.

The Austin Police Association is advocating for a bill drafted by Republicans in the legislature that would prohibit civilian oversight of police departments that has already passed the Texas Senate and is now pending in the House. The legislation, which would undermine Austin’s new oversight ordinance by blocking access to police information until the department finishes investigating itself, mirrors measures that Republicans have pushed through elsewhere in the country. 

State-level Republicans have stepped in to protect local police in other ways. Republican governor Greg Abbott has publicly decried the prosecution of Austin police who brutalized protesters, and even appointed one of the officers indicted for assaulting demonstrators in 2020 to a state law enforcement commission. 

“Increasingly, and this has been going on for a while, APA is turning to the GOP to save itself from its own community,” Mitchell said. “They have decided strategically to stop talking to Austin, and that is remarkable, because they are our employees.” 

The post Austin Voters Embrace Civilian Police Oversight in Saturday Election appeared first on Bolts.

Soon after Tyre Nichols’s brutal killing by Memphis police officers in January, the chairman of the city’s civilian review board, James Kirkwood, appealed to the city council to strengthen its oversight of police. “If you slap someone on the wrist for something they’ve done wrong, then covered it up and left it alone, they’re going to do it again,” Kirkwood, a pastor and former police officer, told the council, requesting more money, more staff, and more power to conduct independent investigations. 

Instead, what little power the board did have may soon vanish, as the Tennessee legislature draws closer to gutting civilian oversight over police in Memphis and other cities in the state.

Introduced in late January by GOP lawmakers, just weeks after Nichols’s death, Senate Bill 591 and House Bill 764 would dissolve community-led oversight boards in Memphis and Nashville, ending their ongoing investigations by the close of July and precluding the possibility of other cities establishing boards with similar powers. 

“This bill essentially strips away police accountability in our state, at the height of a police killing that was so tragic and brutal,” said Jill Fitcheard, the director of Nashville’s Civilian Oversight Board. “These state legislators want to cut away oversight and police accountability and dwindle it down until it’s nothing.”

The Republican legislature’s latest assault on Memphis and Nashville, the state’s two most populous cities, comes just weeks after its headline-grabbing expulsion of two young Black lawmakers, Memphis’s Justin Pearson and Nashville’s Justin Jones, for leading a gun control protest on the House floor. The state government has engaged in a series of other maneuvers in recent months to interfere with self-governance in Tennessee’s bluer and more diverse cities. 

The new bills would still allow local governments to set up what they call “police advisory review committees,” but local advocates and the Memphis and Nashville boards’ leaders—both former law enforcement officials—denounce these replacements as impotent. They would not be able to conduct independent investigations or take quick action on misconduct, and their members would no longer be appointed by community groups. 

“The new law takes away robust investigative power from the committee and sends it back to internal affairs and the respective local governments,” said Sekou Franklin, a professor of political science at Middle Tennessee State University. “So the police would basically investigate themselves.”

The timing of this legislation stings particularly in Memphis, where advocates had hoped that the national spotlight after Nichols’s killing would spur long-needed changes to the way the city polices and prosecutes its residents, including to the city’s decades-old civilian review process. And it threatens to erase hard-won gains in Nashville, where years of struggle and coalition building led to a successful 2018 voter referendum establishing a board made up primarily of community-nominated members with the ability to issue policy recommendations. 

“This is what the people want,” said Sheila Clemmons Lee, the mother of Jocques Clemmons, whose killing at the hands of a Nashville officer sparked the movement for community oversight there. “If you go back and look, see how many people came out to vote on this, plus the signatures that we had gathered for it—[this new legislation] is just saying that our voices don’t matter.”

In Memphis, renewed attention to police oversight after Tyre Nichols’s murder

Memphis’s Civilian Law Enforcement Review Board (CLERB) has been around since 1994, but it has often been condemned as underfunded and ineffective. In that, it’s hardly an outlier—many civilian review boards across the country, even those with more enumerated powers, struggle to achieve effective oversight of police. Barry Friedman, an attorney and scholar who published a 2022 report on civilian oversight boards, told Bolts in January that most boards are more symbolic than effective. All but six boards lack disciplinary authority. 

In 2020, then-law professor Steve Mulroy wrote an article in Memphis Lawyer urging the mayor to issue an executive order requiring the Memphis Police Department to cooperate with CLERB and ultimately comply with its directives. His recommendations weren’t followed. Two years later, Mulroy was elected district attorney of Shelby County, ousting the incumbent prosecutor on promises of reform, and he now finds himself tasked with dealing with a department whose deep-rooted problems have been exposed to the entire nation. The Department of Justice recently announced a review of Memphis’s policing practices, and they may be considering a comprehensive “pattern and practice” investigation as well.

Mulroy’s office swiftly moved to prosecute the Memphis police officers responsible for Nichols’s death, and he has continued to call for stronger civilian oversight, telling Bolts in February, “we need comprehensive CLERB reform.”

Cardell Orrin, executive director of the Tennessee branch of Stand For Children, has also criticized CLERB for its many shortcomings. He believes many people who file lawsuits against the Memphis police department aren’t even bothering to take their case to CLERB, given its low number of yearly investigations (Memphis looked into just five cases in 2022, to Nashville’s 102.) “Of course, all of that is moot if the state takes away any ability even to have citizen oversight of police departments,” he told Bolts. 

The introduction of the legislation that would abolish existing community review boards had shifted the goalposts: now, instead of pushing for stronger CLERB powers, advocates are left pleading for the preservation of any oversight at all. 

“It’s better to have the structure in place,” Orrin said, noting that CLERB could look very different under a mayor who was more willing to implement policies like the ones Mulroy had proposed. “If you get rid of it you don’t even have the option.” 

“It’s a walk in the wrong direction,” Kirkwood, who spent three decades in the Memphis Police Department before his retirement in 2017, told Bolts of the legislation. If only CLERB were adequately staffed, funded, and empowered to investigate and recommend changes to the department’s practices, “we could really do a whole lot,” he said. “I think our city deserves that.” 

“You give a lot of authority to these men and women when you put this badge on,” Kirkwood reflected. “And they can take freedom, they can take life, they can take peace from individuals. They can cause a lot of harm with the authority that you’ve given them—and that authority needs to always be in a place where it can be checked. Not just by police but also by the citizens.” 

In Nashville, a hard-won civilian oversight board under threat

Before Nashville’s civilian oversight board was established, all complaints about police conduct were routed through the Nashville police department’s Office of Professional Accountability, akin to an Internal Affairs department. Clemmons Lee told Bolts that hundreds of allegations of misconduct and brutality went unaddressed every year, with the office ruling against the vast majority of complainants. “All of these incidents was just scooted to the side,” she said. “You know, it is what it is. It’s just the police. No, it’s not. These are lives we’re talking about.”

In 2017, the death of Clemmons Lee’s son Jocques at the hands of a white police officer renewed long-standing calls for civilian oversight in Nashville. “It was a very brutal fight,” recalled Franklin, who was closely involved. “Our city council didn’t want it…two mayors opposed it. We had to build coalitions with veterans groups, immigrant groups, human rights groups, Jewish groups, Muslim groups.”

As the resulting group, Community Oversight Now, organized, the fatal shooting of another black man—Daniel Hambrick—by another white officer further galvanized the effort. “We knocked on doors, we held town halls and meetings trying to educate people about the Community Oversight Board,” Clemmons Lee told Bolts. “And the people listened.” After a successful petition drive, a measure to establish a civilian oversight board was put on the ballot, and on November 6, 2018, it passed with 59 percent of the vote. 

The result: a robust board with 11 members, seven of whom must be nominated by community organizations or grassroots petitions—one of the most important components of effective civilian oversight boards, according to a 2016 paper by Udi Ofer, who then led the ACLU of New Jersey. The COB also enjoys a number of other qualities that Ofer highlights as critical to the success of such boards, including independent investigatory powers, and the ability to conduct audits and make policy recommendations, many of which the police department has accepted. 

The board lacks some important powers, such as the ability to discipline officers, and it still has its work cut out for it. “Even with all of that taking place we’ve had a slew of police shootings and killings in Nashville, but the COB has probably prevented more police violence,” said Franklin. “A lot of that could be undone.” 

“Once this oversight board is eliminated and [if] there’s no legal action—It will probably take decades to do something significant around police reform in the city of Nashville,” he added.

The Tennessee legislature continues to target its major cities

Nashville’s board has been under threat since before it was established. The city’s police union first took issue with the number of signatures on the petition, then sued to overturn the 2018 referendum’s results, in a case that they appealed all the way to the Tennessee Supreme Court. They lost each time.

“We faced so many different hurdles,” Franklin said. “And then—the one avenue that they have access to that we don’t have is state lawmakers.” 

In 2019, the Tennessee legislature took up the fight, removing subpoena powers from the board. (Now, only the city council can compel witnesses to testify on behalf of the boards). In 2021, it required board members to complete a police academy course or risk losing their voting power. Pretty much since its inception, Fitcheard said, Nashville’s board has been “plagued with this cloud of legislation takeover.”

The new bills’ sponsors, Republican Representative Elaine Davis and Republican Senator Mark Pody, neither of whom represent either Memphis or Nashville, have said they want to standardize oversight procedures across the state. But Pody has also said that police feel like they are “under a microscope” under the current system. And both Pody and another supporter have made vague claims about oversight board members abusing their power but have not provided specifics. In a recent senate committee hearing, Senator Richard Briggs, a Republican from Knoxville, alleged that Tennessee Bureau of Investigations (TBI) Director David Rausch had told him that board members were interfering with crime scenes and that the bill would allow the TBI to “gather all the evidence without it being interfered with or contaminated by these outside boards.” 

“It startled me,” Fitcheard told Bolts, to hear these allegations repeated by multiple sources given that no one had ever contacted her about them. “It was just fabricated, it’s not true.” Her lawyer reached out to Rausch asking for specifics, but received no response. 

Bolts reached out to Pody, Briggs, and TBI Director Rausch to inquire about these allegations and request any available evidence that the events described took place. Pody and Briggs’ offices did not respond. Rausch’s office confirmed that a conversation between Briggs and Rausch took place, but would neither confirm the content of the conversation nor offer a response to any of Bolts’ other questions. 

This legislation is progressing through a legislature that has been especially zealous in intervening in the local governance of its major cities, actions that one Nashville lawmaker called an “attack on democracy” in an interview with Bolts last month. This move comes on top of a recently-passed bill cutting the size of Nashville’s metro council by half, and a tabled bill that would have ended runoffs in local elections, which could have hampered Democratic candidates in the majority-liberal Nashville and Memphis. 

“How far can a state body go before it clearly starts to infringe upon the rights of the citizenry in localities?” Orrin asked. “And, you know, that’s a question at some point for the courts to decide.” (Nashville is currently suing over the attempt to halve its council). 

This state-level preemption of local governments isn’t unique to Tennessee. The Local Solutions Support Center, a national organization that aims to strengthen local democracy, has tallied over 600 preemptive bills across all 50 states that it deems “abusive”—instances of states using their power to overrule local governments and shut down legislation around such issues as abortion, housing, voting rights, and now, police oversight. LSSC attributes much of this push to the American Legislative Exchange Council, the right-wing group of lobbyists and legislators known for replicating identical legislation in states across the country. (ALEC, for instance, is behind many of the country’s critical infrastructure laws, which Bolts reported on earlier this month.) 

The Tennessee legislature’s actions also appear to be largely retaliatory. The expulsion of Pearson and Jones, the lawmaker duo dubbed “The Justins,” came after the two young lawmakers led a gun control protest in the wake of a mass shooting in Nashville. Nashville politicians have complained that the bill targeting the council is a response to local lawmakers’ refusal to host the 2024 Republican convention. To Orrin, the timing of the civilian oversight legislation, introduced so soon after Tyre Nichols’s death, felt like a deliberate attempt to shut down the police accountability that Memphis residents were demanding. “Clearly it was because of the questions that were raised,” he said. 

The bill that would abolish civilian oversight of police is now on the verge of becoming law. It has already passed the Senate 26-5 and is currently moving through House committees. If the bill passes the House, where Republicans enjoy a large majority, it would head to the desk of Tennessee’s governor, Republican Bill Lee, who has signed the bills weakening the state’s oversight boards in past sessions.

“They’ll continue to get away with murder”

Activists don’t have to look far for evidence of what may soon change with the bill’s passage. The legislation would authorize cities to retain some police committees—whether they choose to convert their existing stronger boards within 90 days to fit the bill’s far weaker requirements, or create a new body later on. And its sponsors say that they are modeling these new bodies off of Knoxville’s existing police review committee.

Kirkwood and Fitcheard both said that Knoxville’s model, which was established in 1998, is outdated and insufficient to the task. “Policing has changed greatly since then,” said Fitcheard. Moreover, she said, “They haven’t been funded well.” She added, “Up until the last few years, it just had one person reviewing complaints. So how effective is that?” (Nashville’s board receives over $2 million annually and has several full-time staff). 

According to the bill’s most recent version, the new boards would need to have members who are appointed by the mayor rather than community residents. They would not be allowed to investigate any incidents that occurred before Jan. 1, 2023, meaning that some currently open cases would never receive any conclusion or closure. And even for incidents after that date, obstacles to accountability would accumulate. 

The committees would be prohibited from taking up cases before all other avenues—Internal Affairs investigations, civil suits, and criminal cases—were completed. Given the yearslong delay this would entail, Kirkwood told Bolts, “a complainant probably would walk away.”

And when a committee does complete an investigation, it would boomerang back to the local police department’s Internal Affairs. In Nashville, the office is run by a woman who, in her previous job as an assistant DA in Nashville, failed to disclose potentially exculpatory evidence in a murder case against a teenager—in this case, that a central witness for the prosecution was arrested with the murder weapon in his possession. 

Clemmons Lee contemplated a future Nashville without its civilian oversight board. “It’s gonna get worse,” she said. “They’ll continue to get away with murder after murder after murder after murder.”

The post “Our Voices Don’t Matter”: Tennessee Moves to Gut Police Oversight 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.

Jean’s killing cast a harsh national spotlight on the long legacy of violence by Dallas cops and bolstered demands for police reform in the city. Local activists urged officials to revamp Dallas’ toothless, decades-old system of police oversight: a citizen review board with members appointed by city council and tasked with hearing citizen complaints about police. That board was created in the 1980s, when Dallas was home to the highest number of police killings per capita among large cities, and it never issued any recommendations to improve policing. It also never had a budget for investigations. 

While the police union fought changes in the wake of Jean’s murder, activists and members of the review board asked the city to create an independent investigative arm with the budget and staff needed to seriously review citizen complaints and publicize findings and policy recommendations—a model employed by Austin since 2001. In April 2019, seven months after Jean’s murder, the Dallas city council voted for a version of those changes. 

The newly revamped board has been a source of contention practically ever since. Its powers to press for accountability remain weak, and board members have been dogged by accusations that they aren’t doing enough to be the watchdog activists fought for. 

Officially titled the Community Police Oversight Board, the new body is part of the city’s Office of Community Police Oversight, which is itself staffed by a “monitor” who collects citizen complaints and reviews completed police internal investigations into complaints or critical cases, like police shootings. This person then reports any findings to the oversight board. The board is comprised of 15 council-appointed volunteers whose day jobs include everything from law to real estate; they have a budget and the ability to recommend investigations, two key departures from its previous iteration. 

But at a heated, four-hour meeting in mid-November, activists pointed to the case of Michelle Spencer as a recent example of the board failing to do its job. Spencer was injured in a 2021 arrest she says cost her two jobs and a pile of medical bills. Although she was ultimately cleared of wrongdoing, Dallas police took no action on her complaint after an internal affairs investigation, and the board voted against an independent investigation. 

“This office was supposed to be a solution” and a “source of checks and balances,” noted local activist Dominique Alexander. Instead, Alexander said, the oversight body sides too often with a police department they are tasked with keeping in check.  

Even members of the revamped police oversight board seem frustrated by the limitations of the reforms that Dallas passed nearly four years ago. Under the ordinance that created the police monitor and oversight office, the board can only initiate an investigation after a civilian files a complaint, receives an official response from the police department, and then appeals that response to the advisory board—which critics argue makes the board too reliant on whatever information or cooperation police provide. 

Further, even when the board gets an appeal and launches an investigation, they have no subpoena power over city employees or officers, and thus can’t make police cooperate; the board has conducted 18 investigations since their inception, but officers haven’t agreed to be interviewed for any of them. During the November meeting, member Jose Rivas said the board had been “stonewalled,” “marginalized” and “put in a corner” by an uncooperative police department. 

In an interview with Bolts, Jesuorobo Enobakhare Jr., the board’s chair, pointed to a use-of-force review that the board asked the police monitor to conduct two and a half years ago, but that still hasn’t happened, into officers who fired tear gas and pepper balls into a nonviolent crowd of protesters in the summer of 2020. 

“If there aren’t enough staff to get things done, that needs to be put at the feet of the city council,” Enobakhare said. “Government is complicated, and a lot of times it’s complicated for no reason.” 

He added, “It’s almost as if some of these things created at the federal, state or local level are supposed to be exercises in futility.”

Some activists who fought for the revamped oversight board have pledged to protest its meetings until Enobakhare resigns, according to the Dallas Morning News, criticizing him for meeting alone with Dallas police Chief Eddie García, which they say undermines the oversight office. García told the paper that oversight board members need to do more to gain officers’ trust and called Enobakhare an “outstanding advocate.” 

Enobakhare defended his board’s work and said members have managed to influence police policy despite serious limitations. He pointed to a new policy directing officers to take people to a hospital instead of lockup if they suspect a mental health condition, which he says was a result of the board asking police to revise the way they treat people exhibiting symptoms of a psychotic episode.

Police oversight boards are often focal points for policy change after tragedies and scandals involving police violence, particularly after a police reform task force set up by Barack Obama’s administration recommended them as a best practice for building trust between communities and police. There are more than 200 such boards across the country, according to the National Association of Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement. Still, those boards are often volunteers who hold little to no official power over investigating police actions.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, community police oversight boards rarely play any meaningful check on police power and often resemble little more than a thin gesture by police agencies to work with the public without really working with the public, according to Barry Friedman, an attorney and scholar who published a national study on such boards last year. 

“To be blunt, we didn’t find many successful boards, because they were hamstrung,” Friedman told Bolts. “Very often they’re created because the community is angry, so it’s ‘Let’s give them something.’”

“Something is created out of hope and promise,” he added, “but people end up being disappointed.”

Friedman’s research, which was published by the Policing Project at New York University’s law school, emphasizes the importance of boards being well-resourced and staffed. Friedman points to the board in Oakland, California as a well-resourced body, while San Francisco has both a police commission and a network of 10 advisory boards: one for each police station. 

Yet adequate staffing and budget matter little if a community oversight body isn’t heard or empowered to influence police policy. In Austin, where activists have fought for years to expand the scope of the city’s police oversight office, police have pushed back to try and limit the office’s ability to proactively and aggressively investigate citizen complaints. 

As a result, local activists last year gathered enough signatures to put the Austin Police Oversight Act on the ballot for the city’s May elections. The act would remove the oversight office from the purview of the city’s labor contract with its police union, giving it access to more police records and allowing the city’s police oversight commission to recommend discipline in cases of police misconduct. Activists pushing for the measure claim a group of opponents has been posing as them to sow confusion about the May ballot measure and circulate another petition for a plan with less oversight.

Police critics of oversight bodies often insist that people from outside law enforcement appointed to oversight boards know little about policing and shouldn’t be tasked with judging the actions of officers. As a result, according to Friedman’s study, police often send board members to a citizen police academy for ‘shoot-no shoot’ drills on a simulator. 

Complaints that police oversight boards are too close to police and offer little more than the window dressing of accountability are not unique to Texas. Buffalo, New York, a city fraught with tension between the community and a troubled police department, offers another example of an ongoing tug-of-war between activists and the board they fought for. The Buffalo city council last year dissolved the board it created after a series of resignations from board members fed-up with red tape and in-fighting. A month later, local activists announced plans to form a dueling board whose members would be elected by the community and not local government.

In Dallas, the same activists who helped push for the creation of the city’s police oversight board have chafed at its members for being too cozy with police since its very first meeting in October 2019, where the police chief was invited to address the public. They also took issue with one city council member appointing someone who had previously called for the very board to be disbanded. Police eventually broke up the crowd of activists who had gathered and demanded to speak at that first community oversight board meeting, an altercation serious enough for officers to file a use-of-force report over the incident. 

Activists are still pushing for more oversight for the city’s cops, which oversight board members admit they can’t really provide without more power. Changa Higgins, a local activist and former city council candidate who pushed for the revamped oversight body, is asking city officials to expand its powers, including the ability to initiate investigations without waiting for a formal complaint to make its way through the police department’s internal affairs process. Activists are also asking for more police cooperation with the board, including access to police data; the department still makes the oversight office submit open records requests when seeking information, according to Higgins.  

Higgins called the police oversight body a “work in progress” that will still take both more time and pressure from the community to really create the watchdog activists want over the police department. He also said some of the language in the ordinance empowering the current oversight board was left intentionally vague or weak to overcome police union opposition and secure enough votes for its passage. 

“We wanted to get a vote quickly, and we thought if we were too granular with the policies, that it would cause too many problems with the council and we would’ve missed their voting window,” Higgins told Bolts. As a result, the ordinance “leaves some room for interpretation by the PD and the city manager and sometimes the board, and those gray areas were never resolved.”

“It takes institutions in this city and boards like this a long time to be fully formalized,” Higgins said.  “We need people to tap in and hold folks accountable.”

Just a half-hour drive away, in the neighboring city of Fort Worth, attempts to even start a police oversight board have sputtered. While a city task force on race relations recommended creating a board years ago to give communities of color an official forum to air grievances about policing, the 2019 police killing of Atatiana Jefferson inside her own home fueled more demands for one. Even with the potential board’s powers whittled down during months of negotiations, Fort Worth’s city council still shot the idea down in a 5-4 vote in early November. The vote came just before the long-delayed trial of Aaron Dean, the officer who shot Jefferson and was convicted of manslaughter last month and sentenced to more than 11 years in prison.  

“This is the most watered-down police board in America, because we tried to come to some type of consensus, to some type of compromise,” said Chris Nettles, a council member who pushed for the board, after the final vote rejecting it. “And even with a board, a snaggletooth board with no teeth . . . you still cannot support it?”

Correction 1/12/23: Enobakhare says the board is waiting on the police monitor, not police department, for a use-of-force review from 2020.

The post “Exercises in Futility”: Dallas Police Oversight Board Mired in Frustration and Inaction  appeared first on Bolts.