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.

The police union’s messaging, which has dominated San Antonio’s municipal elections this spring, wasn’t crafted to go after any particular mayoral or city council candidate, but rather to spread fear about Proposition A, a police reform charter amendment that local activists petitioned to get on the May 6 ballot. 

The so-called Justice Charter is broad in scope because it was drafted by a coalition of San Antonio groups representing causes ranging from organized labor to reproductive justice, which wanted to build on reforms local organizers have been pushing for years. It would add a “Justice Policy” to the city charter that calls for ending citations and arrests for low-level marijuana possession, an idea city council members have long paid lip service to but failed to fully implement, as well as decriminalizing abortion, which the council already directed the city’s police to do last August after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision triggered Texas’s criminal abortion ban. 

Prop A also calls for banning police chokeholds and no-knock warrants, both of which the San Antonio Police Department already has internal policies against. It would also direct police to prioritize citations over arrest and jail for people accused of certain low-level crimes, like theft below $750; this would codify and expand a cite-and-release policy that city and county law enforcement began implementing several years ago in the name of criminal justice reform. 

Police union rhetoric has already convinced many people in power in San Antonio to oppose it. The city’s chambers of commerce established their own PAC last month to raise money from business interests to campaign against the ballot measure and amplify the police union’s talking points. Most of the candidates running for city council this year oppose the Justice Charter, and Mayor Ron Nirenberg, who is expected to sail to re-election later this year, urged people to vote no in early April despite having previously voiced support for much of what’s in it.

Their opposition raises major questions about Prop A’s future even if it were to pass, as some local officials also signaled they would not implement whole swaths of the measure. Prop A could also be challenged by Republican officials who dominate state government and love to pick fights in Texas’ more liberal cities, and anti-abortion activists who already sued to try to stop the measure from appearing on the May ballot are likely to keep agitating should it win.

Still, Ananda Tomas, founder and director of ACT 4 SA, the police reform group that led the effort to get the Justice Charter on the ballot, says that the intense opposition from the police union and the backtracking from the mayor highlight why local activists are pushing reforms through citizen-led ballot initiatives in the first place. 

“I think not just here in Texas or San Antonio, but nationally, you’re seeing a lot more ballot initiatives as the people’s way of fighting back,” Tomas said. “When we have city or state leadership or even federal leadership that’s not moving with the people, then we’re going to take matters into our own hands, and that was the exact thinking behind this.”

Tomas’ group was born out of the massive protests and increased activism around police accountability that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020. In 2021, Tomas and Act 4 SA gathered enough signatures to put a different measure on the ballot that sought to repeal police collective bargaining rights in San Antonio, which they had pitched as a means to begin addressing disciplinary procedures baked into the city’s police union contract that long shielded bad cops, sometimes even allowed awful ones back on the street, and yet had remained a third rail in local politics; officers the city’s police chief had tried to fire, but couldn’t, included a cop who berated and hurled racial slurs at a Black man while arresting him, an officer who was drinking on duty when he got into a gunfight and killed his girlfriend’s ex, and another who gave someone living on the street a sandwich with feces in it. 

Proposition B, the 2021 ballot measure, failed by two percentage points. But last year, when the police union negotiated a new contract with the city, it quickly agreed to tweak its arbitration process in order to give the police chief more power over firing decisions—a departure from previous contract talks, when disciplinary rules were essentially off limits and yet still negotiations could drag on in years of acrimony and litigation with city officials. 

“There was this whole narrative shift and power that the city was able to get in the negotiations by saying, ‘Hey, this is how close you guys came to losing your contract because people are so upset with how unaccountable it is,’” Tomas said. She thinks that the close vote over Prop B ratcheted up pressure to change the next contract. 

The history of the San Antonio Police Officers’ Association is a case study in how police unions amass and wield power in local elections. It dove headfirst into local politics in the 1980s when it started publicly endorsing and opposing candidates, created a political action committee to bankroll their supporters, and established a formidable phone banking operation ahead of elections. People running for city council who wouldn’t commit to better pay and equipment for cops were smeared as anti-police and pro-crime, and by 1988 San Antonio police had paved the way for other police unions by negotiating one of the best wage and benefits packages in the nation.

San Antonio’s police union became notorious for its brash approach to local politics. One former San Antonio mayor wrote in a memoir about turning down police union money ahead of an election in the 1990s and receiving a gift basket with a dead rat in return. Politicians started calling the police union president at the time “The 44 Caliber Mouthpiece.” In 2013, after San Antonio’s then-city manager Sheryl Sculley established a task force to study reforming officers’ generous benefits because she thought they were threatening financial disaster for the city, one high-profile business leader on the benefits task force reported being tailed in his car by police officers. Sculley felt so aggrieved after battling the city’s public safety unions that she wound up writing a book chronicling the experience, which she titled “Greedy Bastards.”  

With its fiery campaign against Prop A this year, the police union is again fighting back against what little reform it has been forced to accept in recent years. It has opposed the local cite-and-release program since Bexar County’s reform-minded district attorney spearheaded it after taking office four years ago, and which the Justice Charter aims to strengthen. The DA and his supporters say the program has saved the county $5.6 million in jail booking costs, helped alleviate overcrowding at the dangerous county lockup, and diverted thousands of people with petty, non-violent charges towards services.

Danny Diaz, president of San Antonio Police Officers’ Association, said in an interview with Bolts that cite-and-release policies have fueled an uptick in crime that was reported in San Antonio as well as cities across the country during the pandemic, even in places without such changes. But the city’s longtime police chief, William McManus, who does not support Prop A, has rejected that notion, and the DA’s office reports a recidivism, or re-offense, rate for defendants in the cite-and-release program of 9.6 percent compared 38 percent for people booked into the county jail. 

Diaz insisted that the police union’s terrifying vision of what could happen if Prop A passes is “realistic”—that decriminalizing marijuana and abortion, in addition to codifying and expanding cite-and-release, would really allow dangerous criminals to escape consequences, force business across San Antonio to close, and plunge the city into chaos. But he also struggled when asked for evidence. How, as he argued, would local businesses and the community at large be worse off if more people accused of low-level theft got a citation and summons to appear in court instead of being hauled to jail? “I’ll put it as simply as I can,” Diaz said. “As children, we were all taught not to lie, cheat or steal. This proposition is basically telling people you can steal.”

Diaz, a former SWAT officer, also insisted that decriminalizing marijuana was a slippery slope but again sputtered general talking points about lawlessness when pressed. “If they’re not convicting or going to court or going to jail or giving fines for maijuana, they’re gonna turn around and do the same thing for theft on cite-and-release,” he said. 

The police union’s ads and public statements over Prop A are also divorced from the reality of what’s actually in the ballot measure, claiming for instance that it seeks to decriminalize offenses like graffiti. But a cite-and-release program, which is meant to avoid people’s stay in jail, does not “decriminalize” since people would still be subject to criminal penalties.

Currently, it seems unlikely that any sweeping policy changes would immediately follow passage of the Justice Charter; San Antonio’s city attorney has already claimed that much of what’s in it is unenforceable. But part of what’s motivating the police union’s attacks on Prop A is the concern that a win would put pressure on future city councils to go further.

Diaz said he’s worried about more “activists” making it onto the council in the future and pushing to implement elements of the Justice Charter, especially if they see this year’s vote as a clear referendum by residents. He pointed to two progressive council members, elected in 2021, who voted against the union’s last contract for not going far enough on reforms to police discipline and oversight, and are now supporting the ballot measure. 

The single element of the ballot measure that city officials have said they would implement has also riled the police union. It would create a new position at city hall, a Justice Director, someone without ties to law enforcement appointed by city council to review public safety policy, hold regular stakeholder meetings with communities that are heavily policed or have complaints about officers, and help mediate conflict between police and the public. The police union has, unsurprisingly, ridiculed the idea of appointing someone without policing experience to monitor them. But Prop A supporters have called it their best attempt to bolster independent oversight of the San Antonio Police Department, which is currently paper thin, even compared to dysfunctional oversight bodies in Texas’ other large cities. 

Progressive organizers in other Texas cities have turned to local ballot measures to force reforms that local elected officials are refusing to consider or failing to fully implement. While most of those campaigns centered on marijuana, San Antonio’s is the most expansive and the first attempt by a Texas city to decriminalize abortion since the end of Roe.

But these initiatives are also a kind of end-run around an anemic and poorly organized Texas Democratic Party. One recently-formed statewide group, Ground Game Texas, has thrown itself into helping local organizers, including the coalition of San Antonio activists pushing Prop A, raise enough signatures to put reform measures on their local ballots.

Mike Siegel, who helped start Ground Game after twice running for a central Texas congressional seat on a progressive platform, said that the point of their work isn’t just to mobilize voters and build coalitions across the state, but also to force debates whenever people in power dig in their heels. “We’re starting fights,” Siegel said. “I think that’s the most important thing we’re doing, and I think that really is in some ways the core of Ground Game, kind of a catalyst, an allied group that partners with local organizations that have deep roots in the community.” 

“Now we are head-to-head as a coalition with the anti-abortion lobby and the pro-cop lobby, which are two extremely formidable forces,” Siegel said. 

Lingering questions over implementation, as well as fearmongering and misinformation by the police union, have clouded what’s actually at stake in San Antonio’s upcoming Justice Charter vote. But Yaneth Flores, policy director at the abortion rights group Avow Texas, insists that the threats pregnant people face in light of the state’s total abortion ban underscore the importance of taking a stand at the local level and codifying protections. 

“I think that’s the right path for us, to say that as a city we are not buying into the fascist policies of the state,” Flores said. “I’m not exaggerating when I say that, because we are being robbed of having autonomy to make our own health care decisions.”

In addition to presenting it as a local bulwark against increasingly extreme anti-abortion laws at the state level, Prop A supporters hope that it sparks a deeper debate about what kind of criminal legal system San Antonio voters want. “At the end of the day, a really significant part of this ballot initiative has to do with a fundamental question of whether or not we as a community think that sending people to jail and having them sit there away from their families, away from their job away from their lives, is the best way to solve crime in our communities,” said Alejandra Lopez, president of the San Antonio Alliance, the local teachers union that backs the ballot measure.

Lopez said that part of the reason she has been personally working to pass the Justice Charter is because, as a teacher, she’s seen first hand how a criminal charge for pot or a stupid mistake like graffiti can derail a young person’s life and disrupt their family. She added that she’s disturbed by the inflammatory, streets-on-fire message by opponents. “The lies that are coming out of the opposition on this, we should all be troubled,” Lopez said. “We should be troubled deeply to our core about those tactics.”

The post Police Union Spreads Fear Over San Antonio Ballot Measure Decriminalizing Weed and Abortion 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 Riders Scandal rattled the city of Oakland in 2001, leading to a historic prosecution, a massive civil-rights lawsuit, and decades of federal oversight. As investigative reporters Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham detail in The Riders Come out at Night, their exhaustive new history of the Oakland Police Department, the fate of the men on trial essentially hinged on a central question: were these officers bad apples, or were their actions evidence of a far deeper rot?

The Alameda County DA’s prosecution strategy relied on painting the “Riders,” as the gang came to be known, as rogue cops within an otherwise functional system. It’s not hard to imagine why the DA might be invested in excising the Riders from the rest of the OPD. I noticed the same dynamic during the trial of Derek Chauvin: other cops testified over and over that his actions were against procedure. By proving the aberrance of the few, the state can demonstrate guilt—and preserve the good name of the many.

Meanwhile, in arguing that the Riders’ actions were within procedure, the defense advanced a far more damning indictment of the OPD, inadvertently making an argument more common among abolitionist critics of American policing. The Riders’ lawyer, Winston and BondGraham write, called the Oakland police chief to the stand, then used his testimony to “show the jury a picture of a city where cops had been told to be aggressive, put their hands on suspects, hit the corners, and attack the drug trade head-on. Their actions, no matter how egregious, were all in the name of public safety and hitting the mayor’s magic 20 percent crime drop.” The Riders, in other words, “weren’t rogue cops; they were following orders.” The fact that the case would end in two separate mistrials, with one officer ultimately acquitted, suggests that the bad apple theory failed to sufficiently compel jurors. And though Winston and BondGraham argue repeatedly that the Riders were far from rogue cops, the real question they’re interested in exploring is slightly different.

What are the preconditions that allow a group like the Riders to flourish, the journalists ask, and what can be done to preclude those conditions? Or, in plainer language: why are police the way they are—and is it possible for them to change?

Winston and BondGraham answer the first half of this question clearly, devoting a considerable amount of Riders to the OPD’s 19^th-century origins as a violent and graft-prone institution that exploited and suppressed minority groups. 

“During the first century of the department’s existence, custom and practice condoned the quick use of the nightstick and revolver to control restive populations: labor unions, the Chinese, and white ethnic immigrants who upset the city’s image of itself as a pious, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon settlement,” they write. Dozens of Oakland police officers were members of the KKK; at one point, Winston and BondGraham refer to the Klan as night riders, wording that draws a direct line between the Riders and these grim forebears, especially given the supposed origin of the nickname (a Black man who’d been stopped for a traffic violation allegedly thanked the officer for being respectful, and added, “This isn’t at all what it’s like at night. At night, the Riders come out.”)

When African Americans started arriving in Oakland during the Great Migration, the combative, us-vs.-them mentality the OPD had cultivated against immigrants and radicals was neatly transposed onto this new population, with a heaping dose of anti-Black racial hatred thrown in to boot. In 1950, during one of the city’s first panels on police brutality, a local civil rights attorney testified that “the Negro citizens of Oakland live in daily and nightly terror of the Oakland Police Department.” The chief of police, meanwhile, dismissed this criticism as a Communist plot. 

Whether police can change, though, is a trickier question—and a divisive one, especially on the left. The reporters lean into this tension. To say that reform is impossible, they argue, discredits the painstaking work of activists, lawyers, journalists, and ordinary people to expose the department’s abuses and bring it to heel. For evidence of this truth, look no further than Riders itself, which would not have been possible without both authors’ years of dedicated reporting on the OPD, statewide legislative reforms that required law enforcement to turn over more internal records, and the hard work of an attorney who sued on behalf of the two journalists, forcing OPD to comply with these new laws. To contend that nothing can be done would be to imply that there is no reason to fight.

But there are limits, and Winston and BondGraham, who spent years covering the OPD as local investigative journalists, explore them in excruciating detail. Take the Riders whistleblower Keith Batt, a rookie whose testimony allowed the case to go to trial and was key in establishing the federal consent decree that’s covered the department since. On its face, the story pits the Riders’ “bad cops” against Batt, a “good cop” who did the right thing under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. But without negating anyone’s agency or moral culpability, Winston and BondGraham show how it’s ultimately less about the individual will of the officers than what the system they work within condones—and encourages. The department rewards and promotes aggressive, confrontation-prone cops, and constrains ethical ones: taking them off assignments, making their work lives hell, and often driving them to quit. Two Black officers who are presented as critics of the OPD’s practices eventually leave; one ends up writing a sociology dissertation about the force’s endemic racism. 

For every Batt, there are dozens of officers depicted in this book who look the other way, and face few consequences for it. The whistleblower ultimately served just 17 days in the OPD. He was harassed relentlessly, essentially forced to resign, and found himself threatened by other cops when they crossed paths afterward—even as one of the Riders successfully sued the city for wrongful termination, walking away with $1.5 million in damages. Someone illegally pulled Batt’s DMV records, accessing his home address and other personal information. And with the scariest of the Riders remaining a fugitive from justice today, Batt is probably still looking over his shoulder more than two decades later.

Riders begins with the book’s eponymous scandal, then zooms out to capture the historical and political context that led up to it, the fight to prosecute the officers at its center, and two prominent local civil rights lawyers’ simultaneous efforts to hold the department accountable. The result: a federal consent decree—a court-enforced reform agreement—from which the department has still not emerged, two decades later.

Winston and BondGraham make the stakes clear. The consent decree is the external accountability tool for reforming American police departments, and Oakland has been under one longer than anyone—even LA, where the Rampart scandal, which came on the heels of the Rodney King beating, occasioned one in 2000. “More has been done to try to reform the Oakland Police Department than any other police force in the United States,” they write.

From the beginning, though, the authors sow doubt as to whether the OPD will ever be able to fully comply with the terms of the decree, a comprehensive settlement agreement that required the OPD to overhaul its training and internal investigations, implement an ‘early warning system’ to root out problem officers, and make sure all officers were supervised in an attempt to avoid the lack of oversight that led to the Riders’ abuses. 

Many in the department are openly hostile toward its imposition. (“You’ve got to stop using that word reform,” a captain nicknamed ‘Maniac’ tells one of the external monitors, suggesting that his men will bristle at even the mention of change.) There is a culture of silence and internal loyalty around officer misconduct that extends even to the most egregious cases. To call OPD’s Internal Affairs team merely feckless feels charitable; the division often gives the impression of actively stonewalling investigations. Punishments, when they are occasionally meted out, are downgraded, and then downgraded again; it’s not uncommon for officers to resign rather than accept their slap on the wrist. The department’s union, the Oakland Police Officers Association, is willing to spend whatever it takes to defend its men, which often results in cops who brutalize and kill civilians getting their jobs back through arbitration.

And Winston and BondGraham also show how opportunities for change have been thwarted by historical vicissitudes: the war on drugs; state and municipal budget crises; the subprime mortgage crisis, which disproportionately targeted Black and Latinx homeowners; the leadership of politicians like Jerry Brown, whose lefty-radio vibes quickly morphed into law-and-order rhetoric in order to win his mayoral race in the late ‘90s. The book doubles as a rich political history of Oakland, the birthplace of the Black Panthers and a city that has been repeatedly devastated by austerity and racist policies. 

“So long as Oakland and the rest of America is riven by extreme racial and class inequalities and the power of the federal government is not brought to repair the economies of destitute cities and rural areas, and deal with the intergenerational trauma that leads to despair and hopelessness,” they write, “then it’s very likely the police will continue serving more or less the same function they have for well over a half century: containing and repressing the symptoms of broader social problems through violence.”

The second half of the book explores OPD’s glacial progress post-consent decree, which is continually marred by the revelation of scandal after scandal. At one point, Winston and BondGraham describe this advancement as “two steps forward, and one step back.” Often, reading Riders, it felt more like the other way around.

There’s a moment around 2014 where things are starting to look up: For the first time in decades, the OPD had a chief interested in reform and willing to stand up to the police association. The department was finally making good progress on its settlement agreement tasks. “In just a year, the Oakland PD went from utter failure to a national leader in policing reforms,” the journalists write.

Reading this feels sort of like watching the beginning of a horror movie: you suspect that something awful is coming, even as the characters remain unaware. And the next scandal to be revealed is one of the most stomach-churning in the book: the Celeste Guap case. Guap was the pseudonym of a young woman named Jasmine Abuslin who was groomed, abused, and pimped out, both before and after her 18^th birthday, by multiple OPD officers as well as cops from a laundry list of other departments in the region.  

Cases like Abuslin’s stand out for their shock value. The abuse was discovered when a cop who groomed and statutorily raped the girl shot himself in the head and left a damning suicide note. That decision unleashed a chain of events that eventually lead investigators to realize that the cop had most likely killed his wife several years earlier, staged it as a suicide, and had the whole thing covered up by the department. This was after Abuslin revealed the abuse directly to an OPD sergeant, who responded to her by writing “tell me you were an adult.” The internal investigation went nowhere. 

But the individual instances of cruelty, incompetence, misconduct, and malfeasance detailed in Riders can start to blur together. In a way this is the point. The book does center the Riders scandal, but it doesn’t argue for its exceptionalism; those officers’ wrongdoing is presented alongside many, many more examples big and small, lurid and mundane.

One in particular struck me. It could have happened in any police department in the country. It’s the case of Spencer Lucas, a young Black man who was stopped by OPD officers while driving to a friend’s house in 2005. Lucas was just 30 days away from completing a three-year parole term when he was pulled over. He was essentially homeless, but otherwise doing well. The cops seemed to want to mess with him. When they found out he was on parole, they got their chance. They strip-searched him in broad daylight, finding nothing. Even after calling his parole officer and finding out he’d been complying with all his terms, they forced him all over the city in handcuffs, trying to find something that would constitute a violation of his parole. After hours of this, they showed up at the home of his estranged wife, searched it, and found a BB gun.

In this brief anecdote, we see this institution, even under federal decree to do better, return to familiar habits: doing nothing to keep people safe, but instead intruding greedily into their private lives, searching for ways to snatch them back within its clutches, and fostering only rage and humiliation and despair in those it targets. As a result of that encounter, Lucas ended up going back to prison for almost a year.

The post Oakland’s “Riders” Scandal and the Fraught Road to Police Reform 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.

Oklahoma City police are regularly in the spotlight over police shootings, having shot at least 20 people in the last two years, killing at least 41 people since 2015. But these shootings rarely yield accountability, and very few police officers have faced criminal charges. 

Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater broke that pattern in 2021 when he charged five officers with first-degree manslaughter for killing 15-year-old Stavian Rodriguez outside a convenience store. Rodriguez had allegedly tried to rob the store before police intervened and surrounded the building. When Rodriguez exited, he raised his hands in the air, then dropped his handgun. He then reached for his back pocket, which held a cell phone. He was shot more than a dozen times by five officers and died at a local hospital later that night.

But Prater’s impending retirement, which will bring a new top prosecutor to the state’s largest county for the first time since 2007, is set to reshuffle both the DA’s office and its relationship with local law enforcement in this county of nearly 800,000. 

Republican nominee Kevin Calvey, in announcing his run for DA last year, said he would “support the police, not persecute them,” and vowed that same day to drop the charges Prater had filed over Rodriguez’s death against the Oklahoma City officers. He told The Frontier and Bolts he had not looked at the case beyond seeing news reports that the Oklahoma City Police Department investigated the shooting and found it was justified.

“I would have shot him myself,” he said during a primary forum last year. 

During another debate this month, Democratic nominee Vicki Behenna accused Calvey of pandering to law enforcement when he vowed to drop the manslaughter charges against the five officers. Calvey responded by accusing Behenna of pandering “to those anti-police people.”

The candidates

Kevin Calvey is no stranger to controversy. Known as one of the most conservative lawmakers in the state House during his twelve years as a lawmaker, he threatened to set himself on fire in 2015 over a bill that proposed a pay raise to state Supreme Court justices. Calvey said the court wasn’t doing enough to prevent women in Oklahoma from receiving an abortion.

“If I weren’t a Christian and didn’t have a prohibition against suicide, I’d walk across the street and douse myself in gasoline and set myself on fire,” he said, pumping his fist angrily during a debate on the House floor.

After joining the Oklahoma County commision, Calvey voted in 2020 in favor of sending more than $30 million in federal coronavirus relief funds to the county jail instead of spending it on local relief funds, a vote that sparked anger as it was rushed before a commissioner who opposed the measure could even sit down. 

Earlier this year, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation announced it was investigating some of Calvey’s campaign expenditures. Prater told News9 that employees from the State Auditor’s Office alleged that Calvey had misused public money in his campaign. Calvey denied the allegation in a press conference he staged directly outside Prater’s office, and at a debate earlier this month proclaimed he had been cleared. The OSBI later said the investigation is ongoing.

This history aside, Calvey has numbers in his favor. Oklahoma County is the state’s most purple metro area, and increasingly competitive—it voted for Donald Trump by one percentage point in the 2020 presidential race—but it still leans Republican. And in a state where every county has sided with the GOP’s presidential candidate on election day since 2004, and the state Legislature is heavily Republican, having an R next to your name goes a long way.

But Prater himself is a Democrat, and Behenna is intent on testing her party’s local strength.

Sitting in an office overlooking Oklahoma City from the 30th floor of her downtown office building, she looks and sounds like a focused, experienced attorney.

Behenna is a former a federal prosecutor, who served on the team that prosecuted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. She has also worked as a criminal defense attorney; she says she worked with the Innocence Project after she noticed “mistakes we made on the DA side at times.”

It’s that experience, she says, that makes her the perfect candidate to succeed David Prater as Oklahoma County’s DA. And she told The Frontier and Bolts that she entered the race in part because of the contrast with her opponent.

“When I saw (Calvey) was running, I was concerned,” she said. “It’s just not a job for a career politician or a lobbyist, it’s a job for someone with experience, who understands how the system works. I’ve been in this my whole career, I know what it’s about and what the DA does.”

Calvey rejects that this is the right lens to judge a DA. 

“Experience is important, but let’s look at the right kind of experience,” Calvey told The Frontier and Bolts. “What does this job entail? How many cases is the district attorney himself or herself actually prosecuting? In an urban DA office, it’s virtually none.”

Calvey compared the role to “an administrative position” and said his role as county commissioner provided him with the experience he needs to manage the DA’s office.

“What the DA does in a large urban office is work with stakeholders, law enforcement and lawmakers,” he said. “And I know all of them.”

Calvey already convinced Republican primary voters of this argument. In the August primary, he defeated Gayland Geiger, a 22-year veteran of the DA’s office who worked under Prater, by more than 20 percentage points.

Relationship with law enforcement

Calvey has centered his campaign on criticizing Prater’s record. He described the current office’s relationship with law enforcement, particularly the Oklahoma City Police Department, as “poisonous.” He told The Frontier and Bolts that he believed the “No. 1 problem” between the DA’s office and police is the “wrongful prosecution of police officers.”

“So that needs to be repaired,” he said. “The reality is the current DA does not work well with others. There’s a definite need for change and reform there.” 

Denouncing the prosecutions over Rodriguez’s shooting have been a campaign refrain for Calvey. He referred to encounters between police and civilians as “combat situations,” implying that Prater does not understand the hardship police officers face.

But Calvey points to another case that he believes exemplifies Prater’s “bullying nature”, and this is a very different case where the DA leaned into “law and order” politics. 

Julius Jones, a prisoner on death row, became a national cause celebre in 2020 as he maintained his innocence and neared his execution date. Celebrities and professional athletes were rallying to his cause, asking Governor Kevin Stitt to release him from prison.

Jones appeared before the Pardon and Parole Board twice to ask for leniency. During that process, Prater empaneled a grand jury to investigate some Pardon and Parole Board members, raising alarms among his critics that he was inappropriately pressuring the board to deny Jones clemency. He also sued the Pardon and Parole Board, accusing the members of bias and self-dealing and sought to keep two members from hearing the Jones case. The grand jury did not indict any of the board members, though both board members who were most often targeted by prosecutors have since resigned. 

The parole board ended up recommending that Jones’ sentence be lessened, and Stitt ultimately commuted Jones’s death sentence last year to life without the possibility of parole just hours before he was set to be executed.

“(Prater’s actions) seemed like something you’d see in a banana republic,” Calvey told The Frontier and Bolts. “To pull a stunt like that at that time seemed very politically motivated. I think had the pardon and parole board not recommended clemency for Jones, what Prater did would have tainted the death penalty process.”

Behenna said that she agrees with Calvey that the DA office under Prater has a strained relationship with other agencies, including the police. 

“What I hear from most stakeholders is that there’s a breakdown in communication with the DA’s office,” she told The Frontier and Bolts. “On the surface, that’s where I have to start. I’m hearing from chiefs of police, telling me they haven’t heard from the DA’s office in years. If they can’t chat with an ADA or understand what an ADA needs done, it’s going to be hard to prosecute that case.”

But Behenna rejects Calvey’s promise to drop criminal charges against the police officers who killed Rodriguez.

She said she spoke with Oklahoma City’s Fraternal Order of Police and was asked if she, too, would commit to dropping those charges.

“I told them I can not promise you that, I just can’t,” she said. “I told them … if they stay within their training and meet force with appropriate force, they are fine. But it is completely inappropriate to prejudge facts of a case just because of a person’s occupation.” 

Rodriguez’s mother, Cameo Holland, has sued the City of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma City Police Chief Wade Gourley, and five police officers over her son’s killing. The lawsuit, which asks for more than $75,000 in damages, is ongoing.

Alternative courts

Looming over the race are the dismal conditions in the Oklahoma County Jail, which has been well above its intended capacity throughout Prater’s tenure as DA. At least 14 people have died this year, and dozens more over the past decade. 

The DA’s office does not run the jail, but prosecutors play a major role in its size based on what they charge and what bail they recommend. 

Calvey does not intend to push for a major reduction in the jail population, something that has already happened to a degree thanks to voter-led criminal justice reforms that reclassified some felony and misdemeanor crimes. “Most of the people who are in jail probably do belong there, even the people being held pre-trial,” he said. “But still, putting some people in jail for basically being too poor to pay fines and fees is a problem.”

Calvey said he would seek to “do something” about people being held in beleaguered jail for not paying fines and fees. For some people, he said, the jail has become a debtor’s prison.

“That is neither fiscally conservative or humane or christian,” he said. “We’re only collecting about 30 percent of those fees under the current system.”

He said using tax intercepts to collect those fees, which are used in part to help fund the DA’s office, might be one potential fix.

Calvey and Behenna both told The Frontier and Bolts they want to expand the use of alternative courts. In Oklahoma County, there are a number of alternative courts that seek to avoid incarceration through treatment, including courts specifically for drug or DUI charges, and courts aimed at finding assistance for military veterans and residents with mental health issues. There are also a number of diversion courts available in the county.

The county’s alternative court program says it has graduated more than 900 people since 2016.

Behenna explained she wants to “speed up” the process of placing defendants into the appropriate place.

“I think it takes far too long to get approvals for people to go to drug court, or veteran’s court,” she said. “I think with the legislative commitment that’s gone on the last few years with these programs and the funding of these programs, it’s important to refocus your ADAs’ views of theses issues, and for them to understand that a determination needs to be made earlier in the process about whether someone is a good fit for one of these courts or not.”

Behenna told The Frontier and Bolts she believes the county jail is “inhumane” and said “there’s no question it’s a disaster.” She said her role as DA would not specifically be to lessen the jail’s population, but noted she believed an increased focus on alternative courts would lessen the burden on the jail by being “smart on crime.”

“It’s not just being tough on crime, it’s being smart on crime,” she told The Frontier and Bolts. “I believe in separating dangerous people from the community, but also in helping people who need help, like a veteran who has returned and faces mental health trauma.”

Calvey told The Frontier and Bolts he doesn’t mind having a “tough on crime” reputation, but that a “different method” of getting a person to the point of not being a threat to the public “would be better.”

“If the person is a psycho, then let’s put them in prison, they’re unlikely to get better,” he said. “But while this other person has a raging untreated alcohol or drug problem, but they’re otherwise not a threat, then let’s put them in a treatment program. If it works, then that would be a much better solution to the public as well as that individual less cost to the system.”

Whoever wins in November will take over one of the most important roles in the Oklahoma criminal justice ecosystem, Oklahoma County Public Defender Bob Ravitz told The Frontier and Bolts. 

The election is a county election, but the reality is decisions made by prosecutors in large metro areas can impact the entire state, he said. 

“I said this years ago at a Governor’s task force meeting, I said if you get the wrong DA in Oklahoma or Tulsa County, you can add 2,000 beds to the state’s prison population without flinching,” Ravitz said. “By the same token, get the right DA and you can reduce prison space or at the very least keep it steady.”

The post Oklahoma DA Candidate Runs on Dropping Charges Against Officers Who Killed 15-Year-Old appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Chicago Police Union Fails to Oust the Lawmakers It Targeted appeared first on Bolts.

Their Prosecutors Alliance emerged as an alternative voice to the California District Attorneys’ Association (CDAA), the organization that lobbies on behalf of nearly all California prosecutors and typically champions more punitive legislation. Efforts to strengthen accountability for police and prosecutors are a flash point of disagreement. The CDAA has fought bills to curtail racial discrimination by prosecutors in jury selection and to make it easier to prosecute police for misconduct. The Prosecutors Alliance, meanwhile, has called for a ban on law enforcement contributions to DAs, citing the undue influence such donations can portend, and supported legislative efforts for increased data transparency amongst DA offices.

These fault lines are now bleeding into Tuesday’s local elections. During their time leading the Contra Costa and San Joaquin DA offices, Becton and Verber Salazar have prosecuted law enforcement officers for violent or abusive behavior toward civilians, earning their unions’ opposition. Now, both face challenges from opponents who are backed by law enforcement.

Becton faces Mary Knox, a prosecutor in her office. Verber Salazar’s opponent Ron Freitas is a former San Joaquin prosecutor who sat on the CDAA’s board until recently. and who faces a jury discrimination scandal of his own. The Stockton NAACP recently unearthed a case from 2009 where a federal judge ruled that Freitas had illegally struck a Black juror from a case involving two Black defendants. “If Ron Freitas is elected it will cast a shadow over every prosecution involving a person of color,” the NAACP wrote in a press release.

Knox and Freitas are highly critical of the incumbents’ attempts to change prosecutorial practices within their county, alleging that these reforms have eroded public safety. The elections also involve plenty of personal animus: Knox and Freitas sued Becton and Verber Salazar, respectively, after being demoted while serving as high-ranking officials in their offices.

The only other DAs on the Prosecutors Alliance’s advisory committee, San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin and Los Angeles’s George Gascón, have attracted far more national attention. And they have drawn similar animosity from local law enforcement, including from the ranks of their own offices. This has helped fuel a broader backlash from centrist and conservative forces, which are capitalizing on perceptions that the DAs’ policies have contributed to rising crime, though crime has also hiked in California counties governed by tough-on-crime DAs. Boudin is set to face voters as well next week in a recall election that is heavily funded by real estate and venture capital money.  

But Becton and Salazar’s re-election bids are equally symptomatic of the ongoing tussle over DAs who break with the tough-on-crime status quo. Cristine Soto DeBerry, the executive director of the Prosecutors Alliance, believes these challenges are part of a broader effort to roll back criminal justice reforms. “That has been consistent in this state as we’ve passed statewide ballot measures, as candidates have been elected—police unions and conservatives have been looking for ways to unwind those reforms,” she told Bolts. 

Neither Freitas nor Knox responded to requests for comment from Bolts.

In 2018, Becton, a former judge, became the first Black person and first woman to serve as DA in Contra Costa, a largely suburban commuter zone for the Bay Area that includes poor cities like Richmond as well as more affluent areas like Walnut Creek. In 2021, she filed charges against Deputy Andrew Hall for the fatal shooting of an unarmed Filipino man named Laudemer Arboleda. Hall was ultimately found guilty and sentenced to six years in prison—making him the first law enforcement officer to be convicted of a felony for an on-duty shooting in Contra Costa history.

Hall’s killing of Arboleda occurred in 2018, the year Becton took office. Three years later, the same deputy shot and killed another person: an unhoused man with schizophrenia named Tyrell Wilson. John Burris, a prominent civil rights attorney who represented Arboleda’s mother, has criticized the DA office’s delay in charging Hall, saying, “Wilson could be alive if Hall were prosecuted earlier.” In an interview, Becton defended her timeline, saying she had to completely overhaul the DA office’s mechanism for investigating officer uses of force. “These decisions were always made in a back room somewhere,” she said. “No reports, officers were cleared, nobody could tell you exactly how or why.” The DA’s office now has a protocol that every local law enforcement agency in the county has signed on to requiring the office to independently investigate every instance where an officer shoots someone. 

Livingston suggested Becton’s prosecution had been politically motivated, saying, “I also urge her to take down the posts on her reelection campaign social media where she touts this prosecution.” Livingston is also running for re-election on Tuesday, against a challenger who has criticized his handling of the issue.

The Contra Costa sheriff’s deputy union alone has heavily contributed to Knox’s campaign to oust Becton. Knox has also criticized her boss’s handling of the case against Hall, suggesting that the timing of the filing was political. But she has given contradictory answers about how she would have dealt with the case herself, including telling the Mercury News editorial board that she would not have prosecuted the deputy.

A similar dynamic is playing out in San Joaquin, which lies further east in the Central Valley. In 2021, Verber Salazar convened grand juries to investigate two cases of San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office jail guards accused of sexually assaulting incarcerated women; both guards were indicted. 

Verber Salazar, who did not respond to requests for an interview for this piece, has had an unconventional career: she touted her law enforcement donations when first seeking office in 2014, but has since spurned police money. She was the first DA in California to exit the CDAA in 2020, regretting the association’s opposition to the state’s landmark criminal justice reforms throughout the 2010s.

“The community can come together and reach out to our current DA,” Toni McNeil, an ordained elder and lead community organizer with the interfaith social justice group Faith in the Valley, told Bolts when asked about her group’s relationship with Verber Salazar. “Clergy can call that DA together in a meeting and say, Hey, we’re concerned that law enforcement beat Devin Carter, and we demand that these officers be held accountable for violating AB392, excessive use of force. And she shows up. She responds.” 

In the case of Carter, a Black seventeen-year-old who was brutally beaten by four Stockton police officers, Verber Salazar chose to empanel another grand jury, which ultimately charged two of the officers with felony assault. Though the Stockton police department fired the two officers who were ultimately charged, the local police union criticized the grand jury’s decision to indict.

Now, the San Joaquin County Deputy Sheriffs Association and Correctional Officers Association, and the Stockton Police Officers Association, which represented the three law enforcement officials that Verber Salazar has prosecuted for charges of beating or sexually assaulting civilians, are all supporting Freitas. The candidate has received campaign contributions from all three PACs, as well as other law enforcement associations around the state like Peace Officers Research Association of California (PORAC).

Both challengers have criticized the incumbents they’re hoping to unseat for being insufficiently tough on crime. And both say that even lower-level offenses need more stringent responses. 

Knox, for instance, criticizes Becton’s decision to forego prosecuting low-level misdemeanors in favor of diversion or other services, which the DA says she has enacted to try to stop people from “cycling through our system.” Knox also makes the case for confronting substance use with criminal punishment, indicating that she would reverse Becton’s policy of not charging people for possession of small amounts of controlled substances. “The most successful drug treatment comes when there are consequences…those consequences come from being on felony probation,” she said on a recent podcast. 

Freitas has similarly criticized Verber Salazar’s efforts to change prosecutorial practices in San Joaquin, telling a local paper that, if he is elected, he would “get out of the way of the assistant DAs and let them do what they were trained to do.” Freitas supports the repeal of Proposition 47, a 2014 initiative that reclassified some felonies as misdemeanors in an effort to reduce the prison population. Californians decisively re-affirmed Prop 47 in 2020 (the rollback effort lost overwhelmingly in San Joaquin County as well), but in the wake of highly publicized retail thefts, law enforcement and business interests have doubled down on repealing it this year. Legislative proposals to do so have not moved forward.  

“It is the old failed policies of the past that have not kept our communities safe, have led us to the highest rates of incarceration and very high rates of racial disparities in our system, versus continuing the path that we’re on,” Becton told Bolts. 

Similar debates are playing out through a reverse dynamic in many California counties, where outsiders running on decarceration and criminal justice reform are either challenging more conservative sitting DAs or running to succeed outgoing ones including in Alameda, Orange, Santa Clara, and Sacramento. The CDAA’s president, Yolo County DA Jeff Reisig, faces a challenge of his own from former public defender Cynthia Rodriguez.

The state’s elections on Tuesday could shake the established order of so-called progressive prosecutors in California, and there are a huge range of possible outcomes. If Boudin, Becton, and Salazar prevail, and progressive challengers win around the state, the alliance’s ranks could double. But when the dust settles, Gascón, the only DA who is not up for reelection next week, might also find himself in an alliance of one.

The backlash is real, Becton acknowledged. But she recalled how few progressive prosecutors there had been when she first became DA in 2017. “When you look around the country, we’re now about 20 percent of the elected prosecutors in the country [who] are standing on principles of reform and equity in the criminal justice system,” she told Bolts. “I still think that at the end of the day, the movement—and that’s really what it is—is continuing to grow.”

The post Meet the Other Two Northern California DAs Facing Law Enforcement Blowback appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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