SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent non-profit newspaper by and for the South Side of Chicago. We provide high-quality, critical arts and public interest coverage, and equip and develop journalists, artists, photographers, and mediamakers of all backgrounds. Volume 8, Issue 13 Editor-in-Chief Jacqueline Serrato Managing Editor Martha Bayne Senior Editors Christian Belanger Christopher Good Rachel Kim Emeline Posner Adam Przybyl Olivia Stovicek Sam Stecklow Politics Editor Jim Daley Education Editors Ashvini Kartik-Narayan Michelle Anderson Contributing Editors Lucia Geng Matt Moore Francisco Ramírez Pinedo Jocelyn Vega Scott Pemberton Staff Writer
Kiran Misra
Director of Fact Checking: Charmaine Runes Fact Checkers: Grace Del Vecchio, Ebony Ellis, Hannah Faris, Kate Gallagher, Savannah Hugueley, Elizabeth Lindberg, Yiwen Lu, Maria Maynez, Olivia Stovicek, Peter Winslow Visuals Editor Haley Tweedell Deputy Visuals Editors Shane Tolentino Mell Montezuma Anna Mason Staff Photographer Davon Clark Staff Illustrators Mell Montezuma, Shane Tolentino Layout Editors Haley Tweedell Davon Clark Tony Zralka Web Editor Social Media Editor Webmaster Managing Director Director of Operations
AV Benford Davon Clark Pat Sier Jason Schumer Brigid Maniates
The Weekly is produced by a mostly all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute each Wednesday in the fall, winter, and spring. Over the summer we publish every other week. Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773) 234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly.com
Cover Illustration by Eva Azenaro Acero
IN CHICAGO Improved rent relief The City announced a third, and possibly final, round of rent relief since the beginning of the pandemic. With $1.9 billion in federal relief expected to be allocated to Chicago, $80 million of those funds will "quadruple" the amount of housing aid available, said Housing Commissioner Marisa Novara, whose department worked with Mayor Lori Lightfoot to hold two rent lotteries in the spring and summer of 2020, which helped about 12,000 households in the City, but left out tens of thousands of applicants in need. This time, tenants or landlords, including immigrants, could qualify for up to fifteen months of rent assistance, twelve of which could be used for rent that is past due, and three of which could go toward future payments, as well as utilities. Renters can fill out an application at chicago.gov/renthelp until June 8 at 11:59 p.m. and will need their landlord’s contact information and their lease or proof of rent. Separately, the Illinois Housing Development Authority is offering grants of up to $25,000. Landlords must fill out the application first at ilrpp.ihda.org, then tenants will be asked to submit their information before June 7. Lightfoot’s weak plan for civilian oversight of the police Mayor Lightfoot unveiled her proposal for civilian oversight of police that, if adopted by the City Council, would create a seven-member commission that could recommend candidates for police superintendent and other positions, review and approve CPD policy changes, and submit budget recommendations. But it would have little real power, and control of the police would remain in the mayor’s office. As a candidate, Lightfoot pledged to implement the Grassroots Association for Police Accountability (GAPA) proposal for civilian oversight of the police, but has broken that promise. A former CPD officer who chairs the City Council’s Public Safety Committee, Ald. Chris Taliaferro (29th Ward), supports Lightfoot’s proposal and said he would hold a vote on it in June. The People’s Ordinance, which has the support of every major caucus in City Council, including the Black Caucus, Latinx Caucus, and Progressive Caucus, would provide more robust and independent community oversight of the police than Lightfoot’s proposal. Monthly checks for families with children The IRS will begin sending advance payments of child tax refunds to eligible working-class families who have filed their taxes this year and meet the income requirements, as outlined in the American Rescue Plan pandemic-related package. From July until December of this year, households with kids will receive direct deposits of $300 a month per child under five years old, and $250 for each child between six and seventeen years old, with a potential extension pending legislation. Heads of household have the ability to opt-out and instead receive the bolstered Child Tax Credit refund in one payment after filing their taxes in 2022.
IN THIS ISSUE public meetings report
A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level. olivia stovicek.................................................4 a midterm conversation with lightfoot
An abolitionist had a one-on-one with the mayor. bella bahhs, the triibe..................................5 ‘objectively
reasonable, necessary, and
proportional’
The use-of-force report in CPD’s killing of Anthony Alvarez claims he used deadly force while fleeing police. They shot him in the back. madison muller...............................................8 in majority deadly foot chases, chicago police shoot people in the back
Thirty-five years of fatal CPD shootings during foot pursuits. alex stein, jilana thomas, and ed vogel...10 op-ed: lightfoot has failed us on an elected school board
Two bills in the General Assembly would mean democracy for Chicago’s public education. naoma nagahawatte.....................................12 private eyes
CPD pays for access to private security cameras. michael murney.............................................13 what’s next for the chicago community bond fund?
The organization’s primary function—bonding people out of jail—will become obsolete. anna attie......................................................14 reclaiming the sacrifice zone
A comic book. written by maria maynez and illustrated by mike centeno, borderless mag...............18
Public Meetings Report
A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level for the May 27 issue. BY OLIVIA STOVICEK
ILLUSTRATION BY HOLLEY APPOLD
May 11 The City Council Committee on Workforce Development met to discuss pandemic-related hiring barriers and review resources for workers and employers during reopening. Restaurant and retail industry representatives highlighted a lack of vaccinated employees and affordable, consistent childcare, noting that childcare centers lost city funding in the 2019 budget and were among the businesses the pandemic most affected. Commissioners approved selling the site of the former Michael Reese Hospital— unused since the City acquired the property in 2009—to developers of the roughly $3.5 billion Bronzeville Lakefront project at the Community Development Commission meeting. The proposed development is expected to cover almost eight million square feet, with the first building to be completed by 2024. The Commission also approved selling city lots in North Lawndale as sites for affordable housing. May 12 Public commenters at the Chicago Park District meeting said Riot Fest in Douglass Park, and private events in other parks, infringe upon residents’ rights to enjoy their local parks. Paid entertainment events, residents complained, destroy the refuges they turn to for sanity, fresh air, grassy areas, exercise, and recreation. Residents lose full use of parks in the short, hot summer and must wait for them to regenerate. With some 600 Chicago parks, those not in neighborhoods should be used instead. Parks Supt. Michael Kelly responded, “I don’t take [these concerns] lightly.” He noted that “the revenue brought in by private music fests helps fund [Park District] programs.” May 13 Back of the Yards residents were introduced to three proposals for INVEST South/ West development at 47th and Ashland during a community presentation by the Chicago Department of Planning and Development. The Back of the Yards Works proposal was from a group with strong neighborhood roots and focused on supporting homegrown entrepreneurship. Ald. Raymond Lopez criticized it for not including a housing component requested by the City. Proposals from New City United Yards and 1515 W. 47th Street LLC both recommended building fifty affordable apartments. New City United Yards proposed more housing designed for families and seniors. May 17 The City Council Committee on Environmental Protection and Energy meeting focused on combating the urban heat island effect, in which limited green space and heat-trapping built environments raise temperatures in cities and negatively impact residents’ health. In Chicago, Black and brown populations are affected disproportionately. Council members discussed mitigation strategies such as bolstering the city’s shrinking tree canopy, encouraging “green roofs,” and investigating the impact of industrial corridors. 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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May 19 INVEST South/West proposals for a vacant lot in North Lawndale discussed at a community presentation by the Chicago Department of Planning and Development ran the gamut, including: a cosmetology school and an African-American hair museum; a performance space and a small grocer; and green terraces with a grocery store and restaurants. Each proposal included at least fifty affordable apartments. Three more proposals were presented the next day. Two combined commercial and co-working spaces with mixed-income housing; the third proposed a 200-room hotel. May 20 A study on the racial wealth gap in Chicago was the focus of the Cook County Commission on Social Innovation meeting. UIC Prof. Amanda Lewis, an expert on race and public policy, noted that about a third of Black families in Chicago have net worths of zero, compared to just fifteen percent of white families. The racial wealth gap is multigenerational and has been increasing nationally, she explained, mostly because of past and present government policies. Reparations, more robust family support policies, and student loan forgiveness could begin to address the problem, she said. The Chicago Plan Commission approved a proposed 120-unit affordable housing development in predominantly Latinx McKinley Park, by a 7 to 4 vote, at its meeting, despite reservations over its proximity to the controversial MAT Asphalt plant. For nearly three years, neighbors have voiced strong concerns about air pollution after the plant’s construction across from a park was approved with little community notice. Voting no, Commission Chair Teresa Córdova called the negative health risks for residents an “environmental racism” concern. The Chicago Police Board reviewed a report on the outcomes of the Chicago Neighborhood Policing Initiative, which was piloted in two police districts since its 2019 launch. Lead researcher Northwestern University Prof. Andrew Papachristos explained in the meeting that the model created “district coordination officers” to foster more relationships with community members, though many residents felt that cops were there when they didn’t need to be, and not there when they wanted them there. Consistent with broader trends in Chicago, the program had no statistically significant impact on community trust in police. Papachristos and CPD Superintendent David Brown supported continuing the program with more resources. This information was collected, in large part, using reporting from City Bureau’s Documenters at documenters.org.
A Midterm Conversation with Lightfoot
PHOTO BY ANF CHICAGO FOR THE TRIIBE
Having a mayor who isn’t afraid to have a pro-Black journalist day is nice, but having one who implements pro-Black policies would be better. BY BELLA BAHHS, THE TRIIBE
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t’s May 19, the day before Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot’s midterm anniversary in office, and each one of her press rooms on the fifth floor of City Hall are filled with journalists of color. Two of the mayor’s staffers, Victor Owoeye and Kate Lefurgy, were impressed by my new Brandon Blackwood End Systemic Racism tote. When Lightfoot entered the room, she was impressed by my Air Jordan 1 Retro High OG “Dark Mocha” sneakers. And I couldn’t hide my delight to see her in a well-fitting and cute suit. Lightfoot’s suit choices have been a running joke on Black Twitter, and although I’m a critic of the mayor’s politics, I had to let her know that the suit was giving what it was supposed to give.
Back in 2016, Lightfoot presided over monthly Chicago Police Board hearings that I disrupted as a youth protester demanding that the board hold then-Chicago Police Department (CPD) Officer Dante Servin accountable for the 2012 murder of twenty-two-year-old Rekia Boyd in North Lawndale. I was co-organizing the budding Black youth-led prison abolition movement with the #LetUsBreathe Collective, Black Youth Project 100, Assata’s Daughters and Black Lives Matter Chicago’s Justice for Families working group. I can’t tell y’all how many times I’ve been in the same room with Lightfoot. But, she didn’t seem to remember me—at least, if she did, she didn’t let on. MAY 27, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5
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am a revolutionary. I’m the granddaughter of a Mississippi sharecropper turned West Side queenpin and the daughter of formerly incarcerated parents. My people are still fighting for their lives and freedom inside Illinois and federal prisons and Cook County Jail. My people are organizing to defund police, fighting for no cop academies and police-free schools. My people are still fighting for justice for Boyd, Laquan McDonald, Ronald “Ronnieman” Johnson, Pierre Loury, Adam Toledo and the growing list of Black and brown families who’ve lost loved ones at the hands of Chicago police officers. Borrowing from one Black feminist organizer I admire and respect, Ella Baker, early in the interview I asked Lightfoot: “Who are your people? Who are you accountable to in this world— before and beyond being Chicago’s mayor?” Lightfoot has worked for two anti-Black Chicago mayors—Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel—who Black community leaders have been organizing against for decades. “When I was a kid, and really into my twenties, my mother would always say to me, ‘Don’t forget you’re Ann Lightfoot’s daughter.’ When I was a kid, what I thought that meant was don’t go out there and act a fool and embarrass me,” she said. “But who am I accountable to? I’m accountable to my heritage. I’m accountable to the sacrifice that my parents made to put me in a position that I could succeed beyond their wildest expectations and dreams for themselves. I’m accountable to the people who elected me [and] who wanted to see something different.” I’d hoped our first Black woman mayor would have mentioned the Black and brown Chicagoans who have been subjected to redlining and governmentsanctioned anti-Blackness, and how those issues shaped the lives of many Black people whose families migrated from the South only to discover there was no refuge from racial violence here either. Since the Great Migration, many Black Chicago families have continued to struggle with 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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housing and job discrimination, school segregation, fascist police and more.
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ori Lightfoot doesn’t come from the same world that many Black Chicagoans like me did. She grew up in the small town of Massillon, Ohio, fifty miles south of Cleveland. She was raised in a predominantly white community, attending well-resourced, predominately white schools throughout her life. When she was class president in high school, one of the biggest issues she and her peers faced was bland cafeteria food. In 2019, Lightfoot told WTTW that she felt the most Black during her three years in Hyde Park as a student at the University of Chicago Law School. I’m from out West, and not many Black people I know can relate to that. I wanted to know more about which Black community spaces she frequents on the West and South Sides. “If you follow Black and brown businesses across the city [on social media], what you’re going to see is a trail of where I’ve been,” Lightfoot said, without naming a single Black business on the West Side, and pausing before naming one South Side business. “I make sure that I’m dining in Blackowned restaurants, whether it’s Pearl’s in Bronzeville [or] a nice little ice cream shop that’s opened up nearby. Of course I go to the West Side haunts as well.” I came to the interview wanting to get to the nitty-gritty: On national news outlets, Lightfoot has presented herself as a truly progressive Black queer woman mayor. But I specifically wanted to know more about her understanding of Black liberation movements and the demands within them. When I asked her which Black Chicago liberation struggle resonated most with her, she didn’t mention any of the Black queer-led movements to end criminalization of Black LGBTOIA people and dismantle systems that perpetuate institutional racism and intersectional oppression. Instead, she told me about her brother Brian Lightfoot’s seventeen-year stint in a
federal prison for possession of and intent to distribute crack cocaine. “You mentioned, for example, formerly incarcerated individuals. This is something that’s very personal to me,” Lightfoot said before naming her brother. “I know he came out of that experience traumatized because he didn’t get access to good health care. He didn’t get access to the kind of job training and skills that he needed. And he didn’t get access to a transition plan so that when he came out, he’d actually be able to land on his feet and not recidivate. He didn’t get access to addiction counseling and support that he needed to keep him away from narcotics. So that’s something very near and dear to me.” Lightfoot also spoke about the Black men she represented pro bono as a defense attorney, although she offered nothing about the ones she prosecuted as a federal prosecutor. “As a Black woman, as a woman, as a lawyer who has fought hard for justice for people who have been wrongfully incarcerated, for immigrants and refugees, the struggles that I am most aligned with are those where we see wrong, we don’t take no for an answer and we fight like hell to change things around,” she explained. I asked what she’s doing to help the ever-growing population of Black Chicagoans faced with post-conviction struggles. In a couple of weeks, she said, her administration will make an official announcement about new programs to support returning citizens. For the last six to eight weeks she’s commissioned a working group to create a comprehensive plan of recommendations to holistically address the issues and unique challenges facing people newly released from prison. These challenges have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The working group includes Safer Foundation and Cara Chicago. “Up until recently, when you got out of [the Illinois Department of Corrections], you didn’t even get an ID. If you don’t have an ID, guess what? You can’t rent an apartment. You can’t get utilities. You can’t do anything without having an ID,” Lightfoot said.
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lack low-income neighborhoods on the South and West sides have been hit hard by mass incarceration. The North Lawndale Employment Network estimates that more than seventy percent of all North Lawndale men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five have criminal records. Although the state spends more than $1 billion annually to incarcerate Black and brown Chicagoans, there’s been comparatively very little investment in reentry services. “What I ideally would like to see coming out of IDOC, coming out of Cook County, is a real transition plan,” Lightfoot continued. “We know when inmates are going to be released. Let’s start six months ahead of time, if not sooner, in talking to them about the things that they need to know: how to be connected to services, whether it’s Medicaid, whether it’s food stamps [or] job training.” Revolutionaries, I won’t get my hopes up because I’ve seen first hand the limitations of working groups. Since 2018, I’ve been working with the statewide Women’s Justice Task Force to develop recommendations to decarcerate and reduce harm to women and families entangled in the criminal punishment system. And although many women leaders from across the state— including Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx and Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton—have supported our working groups, Lightfoot has not. Furthermore, Lightfoot’s office led a working group with CPD last fall to develop recommendations to remove police officers from schools, but CPD rejected seventy percent of the group’s recommendations. Because of this, the mayor’s plans for new re-entry programs didn’t seem promising to me. However, I did want to know one thing: if she is so passionate about supporting returning citizens, why do we hear her speak with such haste to reopen criminal courts, which would incarcerate more people? In March, when Fox News asked Lightfoot about the backlog of cases
POLITICS
“Lori Lightfoot doesn’t come from the same world that many Black Chicagoans like me did.”
in the criminal courts, she said, “We’ve arrested literally thousands of people who have been involved in car thefts, carjackings and so forth, but what happens is within 24 or 48 hours, they’re back out on the street and the backlog of criminal cases isn’t moving because Cook County hasn’t figured out that they can actually do criminal trials virtually like Lake County.” Now we all know what Fox News is about. In a 2019 interview with “The Breakfast Club” radio show, former Fox News host Eboni Williams said the network was founded for the sole purpose of “the demonizing of the other.” Lightfoot skillfully panders to different audiences like a true politician. During our interview, she said nothing about arresting carjackers or keeping criminals locked up when discussing this topic. Instead, she offered this: “When people get arrested and they have a charge hanging over their head, and their case isn’t moving, what we’ve seen— and there’s been a number of studies in Cook County about this—[is] people end up pleading guilty because they just wanted to be done,” she told me. “If you’re not guilty of something, under our Constitution you have to have your day in court. And with the criminal courts not being open and cases not moving, people aren’t getting their day in court.”
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aturally, that brought us to Foxx. In her first two years in office, nearly 4,500 fewer felony retail theft charges were filed as a result of her raising the threshold for approving felony charges to $1,000 from $300. And though I wouldn’t go so far as to call Foxx an abolitionist, she has certainly been a leader in bond reforms that have gotten us closer to abolition. In February, Illinois became the first state in the nation to end money bail. I wanted to know how Lightfoot feels about the movement to decarcerate Chicago. “I don’t think Cook County Jail should be a debtors’ prison, and that’s a big part of, I think, things that Kim has talked about,” Lightfoot began. “But I want to also say we can’t forget the
victims. I was just on a Zoom on Saturday with a number of mothers whose children had been killed by gun violence in the city. Their pain was just pouring through the screen. What they feel like is there’s nobody there for them.” While families impacted by gun violence may feel temporary satisfaction when a perpetrator of harm is arrested, tried and convicted, that is not justice. The criminal legal system is not equipped to heal the families of victims of gun violence, who also have very little say in how criminal proceedings are handled. The way Lightfoot equates accountability with carceral punishment is troubling for Black Chicago. Even more troubling is the disparity in what she believes accountability looks like for police officers. Sparked by the murder of George Floyd, Black revolutionaries in Chicago were protesting everyday for months in 2020. I asked Lightfoot what her views are on the proposed George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which aims to eliminate qualified immunity, a policy that helps police officers escape legal liability for civil rights violations. Her response revealed how disconnected she is from Chicago’s Black liberation movement. “If you unarm the city with valid defenses and officers, I think the consequences are going to be monumental. I think the amount of money that we are paying out in settlements and judgements is only going to go up exponentially,” she said. “I think, as an officer, if you believe that you’ve made an honest mistake, and you’re now going to risk your pension, your salary, your house, your future, I don’t know who would take that job.”
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y this point, revolutionaries, I was livid. I wanted to walk out the press room. I couldn’t believe that she was sitting in my face telling me that we should not abolish qualified immunity because it will make policing a less attractive job. But I had an interview to finish. As Black organizers continue to call for police divestment and community investment, I had to ask about Invest
South/West, one of Lightfoot’s signature initiatives to revive some of Chicago’s underserved neighborhoods. Over the past year, Lightfoot said, her administration pushed out $70 million through Invest South/West. “And we got a return on that investment of $300 million in private capital investments,” Lightfoot said. “We’ve been extraordinarily transparent about the work that we’re doing and we’re changing the face of these communities by putting money [in them] and drawing attention to it.” Although the Invest South/West initiative is exciting, it still falls short of the efforts we’ve seen the City put toward more affluent and resourced parts of Chicago. For example, the City is putting $2.4 billion in taxpayer subsidies into two new development projects, Lincoln Yards and The 78, according to WBEZ. Overall, the estimated costs to build Lincoln Yards alone is $6 billion, according to the City’s website. The Invest South/West part of the conversation didn’t last for too long. We were only given fifteen minutes to do the interview, and by this point we had managed to stretch the conversation to thirty minutes—despite her press team rushing us to wrap up. Afterwards, I left City Hall thinking that having a mayor who isn’t afraid to have a pro-Black journalist day is nice, but having one who implements proBlack policies that we could benefit from every day would be better. Today, Black and brown youth organizers are protesting Lightfoot’s midterm anniversary near her home in Logan Square. The Triibe will be there. And anyone interested in joining our tribe in building a revolutionary agenda for Black Chicago 2023 should be there too. ¬ A version of this story was originally published on May 20 on thetriibe.com. Bella BAHHS is a writer for The TRiiBE and raptivist who spits revolutionary commentary on politics and pop culture. This is her first contribution to the Weekly. MAY 27, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7
POLICE
‘Objectively Reasonable, Necessary, and Proportional’
In a use-of-force report, Evan Solano claimed Anthony Alvarez used “deadly force” when Solano shot him in the back. BY MADISON MULLER
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early a month after the Civilian Office of Police Accountability released video and written reports about the fatal shooting of twenty-two-year-old Anthony Alvarez by Chicago Police Officer Evan Solano, omissions and inconsistencies in Solano’s use-of-force report about the incident remain unexplained. In that use-of-force, or Tactical Response Report (TRR), Solano, who shot Alvarez in the back, claimed Alvarez “used force likely to cause death or great bodily harm.” Solano also noted in the TRR that he was injured during the killing, but did not explain how. The TRR is an official record of an involved officer’s version of events, and most importantly, explains why they made a decision to use force, according to Andrew Fan, chief operating officer at the Invisible Institute. Officers are required to fill out a TRR after they have used force against a person, or when a civilian says they’ve been injured by police. Officers are only authorized to use force that is “objectively reasonable, necessary, and proportional” and are required to utilize de-escalation tactics whenever possible. TRRs are firsthand accounts that COPA relies on, along with physical evidence and interviews with officers and witnesses, to determine whether a fatal shooting is justified. In assessing use-of-force incidents, CPD directives state that officers must make “split-second” decisions and therefore their actions must be considered 8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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based on circumstances known at the time, and not “with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.” In 2017, after the police shooting of seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald and subsequent cover-up drew national outrage, the department amended their use-of-force directives updating TRR forms and establishing use of force as a “last resort.” CPD also emphasized that use of force should be limited when a subject is fleeing. At the time, the reforms were hailed by politicians across the city, including Alderman Ariel Reboyras of the 30th Ward, where Alvarez was killed. “The process used to develop this policy is an example of the police department's commitment to reform and building the community trust," Reboyras told ABC7. Jason Van Dyke, the officer who fatally shot McDonald in 2014, was found to have filed a false TRR form, which along with other untrue statements, served to “exaggerate the threat McDonald posed,” according to the Chicago Inspector General’s report. Van Dyke had marked boxes on the TRR indicating that McDonald posed an “imminent threat of battery” and that he used “force likely to cause death or great bodily harm.” Prosecutors alleged that additional TRR forms filed by other responding officers attempted to corroborate this false narrative and justify Van Dyke’s actions. The Office of the Inspector General recommended
disciplinary action against sixteen officers, but CPD only fired four. The three officers accused of lying on police reports to cover up Van Dyke’s actions were acquitted of all charges. A Justice Department report released in the wake of the murder of McDonald found that “the true details of a force encounter were often obscured by a lack of sufficient detail and the use of boilerplate language” in TRRs. This week, the Cook County Medical Examiner’s report confirmed that Solano shot the five-foot-three, 127-pound Alvarez twice; one bullet hit him in the back, and the other in his thigh. In Solano’s TRR, he claims that both he and his partner, Sammy Encarnacion, were facing a threatening assailant and were in “imminent” danger. “CPD directives call for officers to assess the level of resistance that a person is displaying (ranging from not following officer commands to threatening an officer with deadly force) and to respond with an appropriate level of force,” according to the Invisible Institute. The TRR records a subject’s actions and department member’s response from the perspective of the officer, and is then reviewed by supervisors, including the Force Review Unit, and ultimately submitted to COPA for their investigation. Solano’s report alleged he sustained an injury during the encounter with Alvarez. The TRR gives examples of several types of injury, including swelling,
pain, laceration, gunshot wound and others. There is also an option for officers to mark “no injury.” He marked “Other,” meaning that none of the other boxes apply. When officers mark this box, they are supposed to explain the type of injury in the narrative section of the TRR, according to a spokesperson for CPD. The narrative section on Solano’s report was left blank. Under CPD directives, if any section of the TRR is incomplete, review by a supervising officer and investigating supervisor should ensure completion. Supervising Officer Patrick Haran and Investigating Supervisor Cmdr. Ronald Pontecore, Jr. reviewed Solano’s report, according to the documents provided by COPA; still no explanation for Solano’s injury was given. Solano’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for more information about the officer’s injury. Solano also marked a box indicating that Alvarez “used force likely to cause death or great bodily harm.” Force is defined in CPD directives as physical contact and is reported differently than “threat of battery with a weapon,” which Solano also reported. Body-worn camera footage and corresponding third-party surveillance footage, as well as a weapon recovered on the scene, do appear to confirm that Alvarez was in possession of a gun. But Solano reported on his TRR that the weapon was “displayed, not used.” Solano also noted that Alvarez
EVAN SOLANO’S BODY-WORN CAMERA FOOTAGE SHOWS HIS PARTNER SAMMY ENCARNACION MOMENTS AFTER SOLANO SHOT ANTHONY ALVAREZ IN THE BACK. CREDIT: SHANE TOLENTINO
“committed assault or battery against officers performing a police function”; assault can mean there was tangible reason to believe a subject could cause harm and battery refers to physical contact, according to a CPD spokesperson. A request for clarification on which term better describes Alvarez’s actions was denied by Solano’s attorney. Video footage captured by a homesecurity system and Solano’s body camera, and subsequently released by COPA, shows a disturbing scene: Alvarez walking through a gas station, shopping bags in hand, when an unmarked police vehicle approaches him. He drops his bags and runs, with officers on foot and chasing close behind. About two blocks from the gas station, Alvarez turns a corner and crosses a neighbor’s yard, and Solano—who had lost his eyeglasses during the chase— shouts at him to drop his weapon a moment before shooting him in the back. Alvarez appears to be holding a handgun, but in the footage COPA released is never seen pointing his weapon at officers. In Alvarez’s last moments, he asks Solano, “Why are you shooting me?”
The video does not show any physical contact between the police and Alvarez until after he is shot. As Alvarez lay bleeding on a neighbor’s walkway, Solano attempts to handcuff him before being stopped by his partner, who says they must first render medical aid. Later, Solano tells Encarnacion that his eyeglasses fell off “in the alley,” indicating he lost them before he shot Alvarez. Steven Fine, one of the attorneys representing the Alvarez family, said that the officer’s body-camera video speaks for itself. Alvarez does not make any aggressive actions or movements and never turns back towards Solano during the pursuit, he said. “When Anthony asks, ‘Why are you shooting me?’ and the officer responds ‘because you had a gun,’ that statement is inconsistent with a reasonable officer being concerned for their safety,” Fine said. “The TRR is completely selfserving.” ¬
“When Anthony asks, ‘Why are you shooting me?’ and the officer responds ‘Because you had a gun.’ That statement is inconsistent with a reasonable officer being concerned for their safety.”
Madison Muller is a graduate student of social justice journalism at Northwestern University. She last reported on media descriptions of children killed by CPD. MAY 27, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9
POLICE
In Many Deadly Foot Chases, Chicago Police Shoot People in the Back CPD killed seventy-one people in foot pursuits in Chicago since 1985; in more than half, they shot the person in the back. BY ALEX STEIN, JILANA THOMAS, AND ED VOGEL
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n March 31, Chicago police officer Evan Solano shot and killed twenty-two-year-old Anthony Alvarez in the back during a foot chase. Alvarez was the third person killed by a CPD officer in as many weeks, including thirteen-year-old Adam Toledo, who was also killed after police chased him. Despite repeated attempts to reform the practice, CPD officers continue to kill people who run away, often shooting them in the back with no consequence. In the wake of the killings, Mayor Lori Lightfoot called for a review and changes to the Chicago Police Department’s foot pursuit policy. The administration has apparently been considering such reforms at least since last summer. Emails reviewed by the Weekly that were published online by Lucy Parsons Labs as part of the Jones Day hack show the mayor's office and CPD have been discussing foot pursuits since at least July 2020. Over the last four decades, multiple policy changes have failed to halt an unbroken pattern of CPD officers killing people during pursuits. Since 1985, CPD officers have killed no fewer than seventy-one people while or immediately after chasing them. In 1985, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Tennessee v. Garner that it was unconstitutional to shoot a fleeing 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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person who poses no immediate threat. The decision changed the longstanding practice that allowed police to kill people solely to prevent them from escaping the suspected commission of certain felonies. Since Garner, CPD has repeatedly adjusted its policies related to the use of deadly force. The policy in place when Solano killed Alvarez, revised as recently as December 2020, stated that CPD officers “will not use deadly force… on a fleeing person unless the person poses an imminent threat,” meaning that the person is “immediately likely to cause death or great bodily harm to [the cop] or others unless action is taken.” Neither constitutional law nor CPD policies, however, are designed to prevent police from extrajudicially executing people. The only legal remedy for a person whose constitutional rights have been violated is a lawsuit for damages. As Lightfoot’s staff privately acknowledged last year, the City has spent over $500 million in the last decade on lawsuits stemming from police misconduct. Similarly, a violation of a CPD policy— which is an internal directive, not a law— often results in little to no consequence to the officer. Although none of the policy changes the Weekly reviewed have been explicitly designed to stop police from killing people as they ran away, we sought to determine whether the department
did stop or reduce such behavior after Tennessee v. Garner. By searching newspaper articles on newspapers.com and other digital outlets, we found thirtyone instances between 1985 and 2010 of Chicago cops killing people while they ran or shortly after a chase ended. The Fatal Encounters database, which tracks people killed during interactions with police nationwide, lists forty more that occurred between 2011 and 2020. These seventy-one instances are not exhaustive; it is possible that some such killings went unreported or that we did not find the news articles written about them in our research. We were able to identify the race of the person killed by police in fortyone cases. Thirty-six of those people, or eighty-eight percent, were Black. One was a white person. Cops most frequently killed people in chases in Auburn Gresham and Englewood, killing six people in each of those neighborhoods. In forty-one cases, we found information about where on their body the person was shot; more than three quarters of these people were shot in the back or in the back of the head. In nine cases, the cops claimed that the person they killed fired a gun at them. In thirty-seven cases, the cops claimed that the person pointed a gun at them, but didn’t fire. Of those forty-six people alleged to have pointed or shot a
gun at police, the majority were shot in the back. In fourteen cases, the police killed a person simply because they possessed a gun—a justification specifically rendered illegal by numerous courts, including the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Weinmann v. McClone in 2015. Of those fourteen instances, we could only confirm one case where a person was not shot in the back. In nearly half of cases, witnesses disputed police narratives of the shooting, and in no fewer than thirty cases the person’s family filed a lawsuit. Those lawsuits resulted in at least $28 million in payments, at least ten of which were over $1 million. Some lawsuits are still pending in court. There are at least forty-five police officers involved in these seventy-one shootings who are still on the force today. In more than eighty percent of the cases we reviewed, nobody had been injured at all until the police became involved. According to previous analyses the Weekly has done, that is typical in police-involved killings. The notion that police often make situations more dangerous and violent is one central to the message of Damon Williams, a movement-builder and organizer with the Let Us Breathe Collective and #DefundCPD.
“As long as police exist, they are going to kill Black people. So, in a world where we want this to not happen, we need to not have policing as we know it exists.” ILLUSTRATION BY GABY FEBLAND
“Policing is inherently violent, policing is violence. It is rooted in torture and slavery and perpetuates murder,” Williams said. “As long as police exist, they are going to kill Black people. So, in a world where we want this to not happen, we need to not have policing as we know it exists.” Williams says that when he sees police, “I see one hundred other jobs smashed into one thing with a gun. We believe we need to transition away from policing and prisons under the framework of abolition...through a divest/invest strategy, where we take the resources we invest in police and invest those into life-affirming institutions that actually promote health and wellness.” The families of those killed by police are often systematically overlooked by law enforcement and the media, and are left with few answers about what happened to their loved one and fewer promises of any positive response from the city. Arewa Karen Winters’ sixteen-yearold nephew Pierre Loury was running
away from CPD officer Sean Hitz in 2016 when Hitz shot and killed him. Winters is now the co-chair of a use of force working group that is trying to help the City and CPD change their policies. She also helps support other families of people killed by police through Black Lives Matter Chicago’s Justice For Families group. Regarding Lightfoot, Winters said, “the only reason I voted for her was because she said she wanted police reform. And I feel so very deceived because she has not shown that at all.” Winters, who doesn’t identify as a police abolitionist, works with a broad coalition of groups that has proposed numerous changes to improve CPD policies and procedures, many of which have been mandated by the federal consent decree the City entered in January 2019. “We keep telling [the city and CPD], we’re coming in and trying to help y’all,” she said. “We are just getting a lot of resistance.” Winters feels compelled to stand up for Loury and other loved ones killed
by the police, because few other people will. “The first thing that happens 99.9 percent of the time is the media begins to immediately villainize whomever is killed by police,” she said. And even now, in a burgeoning movement to defund the police and create new systems to keep people safe, Winters sees that “there are so many names [of people the police have killed], they cannot lift up every single name.” Williams is one of the people working to uplift those names. Some of the basic demands that Williams is advocating for go beyond any possible remedy in a civil rights lawsuit. “It could be firing officers, or removing them from the area where they’ve committed harm. But at a deeper level, I think it is to invest in the healing and the sustainability of the families and communities impacted.” The primary response to an unjustified police killing is to file a civil rights lawsuit. Winters, like Williams, doesn’t see attorneys or lawsuits as the primary tools of change in the face of a
system that resists reform at every step. “There are small things happening in the end that can only be attributed to the people,” she says. “It’s not because of attorneys, it’s not because of any of those things. It’s because of the activists and the organizers and the family members that have been getting involved in this work that even these minor, miniscule changes are happening.” The police killing of Anthony Alvarez underscores the failure of prior reforms to stop police from shooting people in the back as they run away. “The word justice means ‘to make right,’ and there is no making that right,” Williams said. “I think the closest we can get to that is it not happening again.” ¬ Alex Stein is a lawyer and researcher who lives in Chicago. Jilana Thomas has lived in Chicago for sixteen years and studies the impacts of harm. This is her first story for the Weekly. Ed Vogel lives in Back of the Yards. Stein and Vogel last wrote about media descriptions of children killed by police. MAY 27, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11
OPINION
Op-Ed: Lightfoot Has Failed Us on an Elected School Board
ILLUSTRATION BY MELL MONTEZUMA
Two bills in the General Assembly would mean democracy for Chicago’s public education. BY NAOMA NAGAHAWATTE
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tanding with hundreds of other Chicagoans outside of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s home on May 20, her two-year anniversary as mayor, it occurred to me that we shouldn't have had to be there. Lightfoot told us she would do right by thousands of disenfranchised people whose needs have been disregarded by this City. She told us she would lift all of Chicago to rise together. But that hasn’t happened. As a mother and CPS parent, I’ve watched our mayor continue to put her interests over the needs of our children in a global pandemic. Frankly, this is not okay. A case in point is Chicago’s current unelected, undemocratic, mayorcontrolled school board. Existing gaps in education funding, school staffing, and student social-emotional support have been magnified by COVID-19. While the children of our city are in real crisis, CPS is barely meeting their needs. The kids who need the most are getting the least while Lightfoot awards COVID relief funding to police and businesses. Yet all isn’t lost. Of 892 Illinois school boards, only Chicago’s is appointed. We 12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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have $1.8 billion of federal relief coming to our City—and the only way to ensure enough goes to our kids is to end mayoral control of Chicago’s school board now. Currently, the school board can raise property taxes with no accountability to voters; one of two recently resigned school CEOs went to prison; and overall, the unelected board has been a disaster for the mostly Black and Latinx students CPS serves. For more than two decades, Chicago has seen a hundred school closings while dozens of turnarounds and consolidations have disrupted education for tens of thousands of low-income students. This has contributed to a purge of over 50,000 Black students since the year 2000, while inequity between Black, Latinx, and white students has increased. We can better address this—and so much more—with a democratically elected school board. Right now, there are three elected school board bills in the Illinois Senate. Two of these bills are complementary and would mean democracy for Chicago’s public education, while one would mean more of the same. Bill SB2497 would establish a
twenty-one-member elected school board starting in 2022. Voters would elect one representative from each of twenty districts and an at-large member as chair to four-year terms. HB2908, which passed the House and is currently in the Senate, would divide Chicago into twenty electoral districts starting in 2022. The twenty-first seat would be a citywide election for the board’s president. Both of these bills would ensure a wide swath of candidates from across the city, which is crucial in creating a school board that better represents all CPS families. The third bill, SB827, is a naked attempt by the mayor to maintain control of the school board. Lightfoot’s “hybrid” plan offers two elected seats and five appointed seats in 2026, which would later increase to three elected seats and eight appointed seats. The mayor would name the board president and vice president, draw district maps, and the bill would sunset in 2030. This undemocratic bill serves no one and its passage would guarantee widening inequality for Chicago public school families. It’s important to note that the bills for a fully elected board do not directly
address the ability of undocumented Chicagoans to vote in school board elections. However, the issue is being addressed legislatively through SB1565, which would allow people who are not citizens to vote in school board elections via affidavit. The sponsors of SB2497/HB2908 support extending enfranchisement to undocumented Chicagoans in school board elections; the companion bills are compatible with noncitizen school board voting legislation if that legislation were to pass. In past referendums, ninety percent of Chicago voters asked for the right to have a say in choosing a representative school board. Governor Pritzker supports it and state legislators have approved an elected school board three times. Chicago parents deserve to sit on a school board that governs policies and makes decisions that will shape their children’s futures. The time for a fully elected school board is now. ¬ Naoma Nagahawatte is a CPS mom and advocacy director of the non-profit Raise Your Hand Illinois.
Private Eyes BY MICHAEL MURNEY
ILLUSTRATION BY EVA AZENARO ACERO
CPD expands its wide-ranging surveillance network by paying businesses and homeowners for access to private security cameras.
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n a 2019 speech to the City Club, then-Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson credited enhancements to CPD’s surveillance network for reducing crime in Englewood. Johnson boasted police were solving crimes faster and collecting stronger evidence by pulling “surveillance video from more than 40,000 cameras that are placed through the city.” The transcript of Johnson’s speech—which the Weekly found among the thousands of emails released by DDoSecrets in April—shows Johnson bragged that in one investigation detectives were able to “pull footage from private security cameras too.” Those cameras are part of a network the City has quietly expanded since at least 2009 by subsidizing security cameras for renters, homeowners, and businesses who connect them to the department’s surveillance centers. An analysis by the Weekly found that
at least fourteen different organizations, from Wicker Park and Andersonville to Back of the Yards and Englewoo,d, receive funding through City contracts to promote and manage camera rebates to residents and businesses. Through the Special Service Area (SSA) program and the Private Sector Camera Initiative (PSCI), the city distributes millions annually to local nonprofits. The Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council offers rebates for two fully subsidized cameras per storefront, citing a 2017 partnership with CPD. In Rogers Park, owners and tenants of street-level commercial properties can apply to the Rogers Park Business Alliance for up to one hundred percent funding for camera purchase and installation. West Town tenants and building owners can apply to the West Town Chicago Chamber of Commerce for up to seventy-five percent of cameras’ purchase and installation price. In West Lawn
POLICE and Englewood, the Greater Southwest Development Corporation distributes grants as large as $1,500 for qualifying businesses to purchase cameras. Mayoral appointees oversee each nonprofit’s program execution, and recommend budgetary allocations for their nonprofits to the City. The Office of Emergency Management and Communications (OEMC) conducts an on-site inspection to confirm cameras meet the City’s specifications, then connects them to one of the largest and most powerful integrated video surveillance networks in the world. In May, OEMC announced a feature that helps residents partner with police. Through SMART911.com, residents can volunteer to share their home surveillance camera footage any time CPD contacts them. The portion of the network’s growth accounted for by private cameras is currently unclear; no public data accounts for how many are linked to the network. Freddy Martinez, executive director of the Chicago-based transparency and digital rights group Lucy Parsons Labs, said the Labs’ numerous requests for PSCI data have all been rejected. “You never know which one of these cameras is connected in a bank or in a school,” said Martinez, “so that’s why we’re trying to figure out how many there are, and their locations. But we never get any answers.” Chicago’s surveillance network has ballooned from around 11,000 cameras in 2011 to at least 35,000 today. Ed Yohnka, director of communications and policy at the ACLU of Illinois, said despite persistent admonitions from the ACLU, the City Council has never held a public hearing addressing the camera network, let alone proposed any ordinances regulating it. “There is literally no public disclosure of who can make the decision to start tracking, and what the guidelines are for that tracking,” he said. “In other places, where these systems are in place, or as they’ve been built out, you have this debate as to what the privacy policies should be, and those debates take place in public.” “Everybody recognizes that the
system here is the largest and most pervasive in the country,” said Yohnka, “and yet we’re the least transparent.”
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s industry left in the 1970s and 80s and unemployment skyrocketed on the South Side, CPD accelerated surveillance, deploying geographic information systems and expanding databases that mobilized an army of beat cops to police Black communities. By 2000, CPD had entrenched disproportionate representation of Black and brown people in crime databases— legitimizing their hyper-surveillance and policing. After 9/11, the Bush administration fueled rapid proliferation of novel surveillance technologies and policing methods in cities across the U.S. The influx of federal funds earmarked for digitized surveillance and policing empowered CPD to continue weaponizing racially overdetermined crime databases with unprecedented sophistication. In Chicago, officials beta-tested these technologies in Black and Latinx communities before expanding their reach across the city. The CPD first linked its command center to a Department of Homeland Security-funded “fusion center” in Springfield in 2003. The center integrated numerous state and federal criminal databases, allowing law enforcement to cross-reference mugshots, video footage, biometric data, and location information. By 2005, CPD was using this model, planting its first data centers in predominantly Black, South Side neighborhoods. That year, OEMC drew from funds from federal counterterrorism initiatives to launch Operation Virtual Shield (OVS). Starting on the South Side, agency officials cast a net of more than 2,500 cameras with movementtracking capacities across Chicago, and connected them to a single network accessible from OEMC headquarters. Operators could suddenly track people’s movements from camera to camera with previously unmatched seamlessness and precision. DHS counterterrorism grants funded the proliferation of police data centers across the South and West Sides MAY 27, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13
POLICE throughout the mid- and late-2000’s. As federally funded data centers and surveillance networks proliferated during the final years of the Bush administration, however, public backlash prompted DHS to shift its surveillance expansion strategy. During President Obama’s administration, DHS began giving counterterrorism grants to nonprofits, who passed those funds to subcontractors, or used them for mentorship programs and other initiatives purportedly aimed at preventing “radicalization” of youth in primarily Muslim communities. “The Department of Homeland Security initially tried to give the money directly to communities. Then they realized this was controversial,” said Nicole Nguyen, professor of Education Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago specializing in surveillance and policing. President Obama formalized this strategy with the launch of the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program in 2011. CVE promised a preventative approach to counterterrorism through partnerships with local organizations to create mentorship programs, education initiatives, and other community-based interventions to steer at-risk populations away from violent extremism. This model, Nguyen said, allowed DHS to build federal surveillance power by deputizing local nonprofits and social services groups. “It’s using a front organization that provides legitimacy to what would be seen as an illegitimate policing initiative,” she explains. Internal documents detailing CVE operations obtained by the Brennan Center for Justice show that DHS sought to recruit members of primarily Muslim communities and leaders of partner organizations to act as informants, and distributed hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars annually to fund expansion of local law enforcement’s surveillance apparatuses. Under President Trump, CVE programming explicitly targeted other non-Muslim communities as well. The Brennan Center found that during Trump’s presidency, eightyfive percent of CVE grants distributed to Chicago and eighteen other cities participating in the program specifically 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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targeted Black, immigrant, Muslim, or LGBTQ communities. Chicago began receiving CVE funding in 2016, and the OEMC told Chicago’s inspector general it started adding cameras in 2012.
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n audit commissioned by the City shows some organizations were receiving funding for camera rebates as early as 2009. Chicago has since received hundreds of millions of CVE dollars annually to build out its surveillance apparatus. This year, the Biden administration granted the City $68 million in Urban Area Security Initiative grants, on top of the $14.5 million it granted the state of Illinois. The portion of these funds earmarked for camera rebates is not accounted for in the City’s annual budget, nor in DHS’s CVE reports. As federal and local officials continue to pour funds into surveilling Black and Latinx neighborhoods during the pandemic, their residents are again facing tandem housing and unemployment crises. Officials “call it public safety, but they don’t consider public safety things like access to education and clean drinking water,” Martinez said. “Cameras are not going to solve a history of redlining in Chicago, or correct this disinvestment.” Meanwhile, Chicago continues grappling with the police killing of thirteen-year-old Adam Toledo—who was shot by cops responding to an alert from another unregulated surveillance program called ShotSpotter. “The problem with these programs is they’re pitched as an alternative to law enforcement, but it’s about intensifying police power,” Nguyen said. “We want to solve more crimes with more cameras on the street, but who is being policed then? Who is actually being surveilled?” ¬ Michael Murney reports on housing, policing, immigration, and beyond; he is currently pursuing his M.S. in Journalism at Northwestern University. He last covered the people organizing for a community benefits agreement for the Obama Center.
What’s Next for the Chicago Community Bond Fund?
On the heels of the summer uprisings, the campaign to end money bond was propelled towards victory.
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BY ANNA ATTIE
n 2023, less than ten years after the Chicago Community Bond Fund (CCBF) was founded, its primary function—bonding people out of jail— will become obsolete. That is the year that the Pretrial Fairness Act (PFA) will go into full effect, making Illinois the first state to fully abolish cash bail. Signed by Governor J.B. Pritzker on February 22, the PFA will also limit eligibility for pretrial incarceration, reduce penalties for violations such as missed court dates, and require judges to reconsider electronic monitoring of each individual every sixty days, among other policy changes. The CCBF began as an ad hoc collective with the short-term goal to get DeSean Pittman’s family and loved ones out of jail. In late August 2014, just two weeks after the murder of Michael Brown sparked an uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, Chicago police shot and killed seventeen-year-old Pittman in Chatham. When Pittman’s friends and family held a vigil in his memory, the police disrupted the gathering and arrested eight people. While some were released
without charges, five of them were charged with mob action and incarcerated in Cook County Jail. Collectively, their bonds totaled $30,000. When members of the National Lawyers Guild read about the arrests, they reached out to Pittman’s family on Facebook and offered to help them fundraise. The first person they bonded out was his mother, who otherwise would have missed her own son’s funeral. For months to come, NLG and the family organized raffles, hosted house parties and fish fries, and created online crowdfunding pages. In December 2014, they finally raised enough money to free the last person, DeSean’s cousin, Derrick Wince. It was Derrick’s mother, Jeanette Wince, who suggested that the group create a permanent bond fund. “The question came up: what are we going to do once we get everyone out?” she said. “And we all looked at each other and said, let’s keep going. Because there are so many people who need us.” “We were all very happy to get everyone out. But that was four months that her son had been caged,” said
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jobs, housing, and even children by the time CCBF got them out. “It became extremely clear to us quite early on that this was a hamster wheel,” Grace said, “and that we could stay on this hamster wheel for a long time … Just bailing people out was not enough, alone, for us to end money bond.”
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PHOTO COURTESY OF THE COALITION TO END MONEY BOND
Sharlyn Grace, a co-founder and former executive director of CCBF. “He had lost his job, and he had been separated from his loved ones, and was traumatized from being in jail.” At first, the intention was for CCBF to remain an all-volunteer community project. “No one expected to form a nonprofit that years later would have millions of dollars in resources and multiple staff positions,” said Grace. “I think the people coming together to form [CCBF] by and large had critiques of the non-profit industrial complex and weren’t necessarily looking to build an institution.” In 2015, however, CCBF decided that in order to facilitate fundraising, it needed to apply for 501(c)3 status. “The primary activity of a bail fund is raising money,” Grace explained. “And that’s easier done when those donations are tax exempt.” The bond fund remained all-volunteer until 2017, when it hired its first staff person to sustain a rapidlygrowing organization that was becoming difficult to manage on a volunteer basis.
From the beginning, CCBF saw themselves not as a charity, but as a tool for organizing. The founders of CCBF initially considered limiting the fund to political arrests, such as those that occured at protests. Ultimately, they decided to expand their criteria, but to still prioritize freeing people who were arrested at protests. “Because of our theory of change, our commitment to movement work, and our belief that grassroots organizing is what achieves social change, there was an agreement early on to have an expansive role, but also to prioritize those sorts of political arrests, to prioritize support for grassroots social movement,” said Grace. She described the “magnifying effect” of “provid[ing] a resource that lessens the state’s power to repress social movements.” CCBF uses eleven factors to determine whose bonds to pay, including a person’s ability to pay bond, access to existing support systems, medical needs, immigration status, and more. Input in the decision comes not from CCBF staff,
but from a rotating Review Committee, which currently includes abolitionist movement leaders such as Mariame Kaba and James Kilgore. CCBF posted bond for forty-five people who were in jail or on electronic home monitoring in its first year of operation, fifty-nine people in its second, and sixty-eight people in its third. In its fourth year, that number jumped to 108. These bonds were paid through use of a revolving fund, meaning that because courts return bonds once a case is closed, CCBF could keep using returned bond money. But with around 6,000 people incarcerated in Cook County Jail at any given time, and over ninety percent of them incarcerated pre-trial, CCBF was still only making a small dent in the number of people who were locked up because they could not afford to buy their freedom. And while paying someone’s bond could be life-changing and life-saving, doing so couldn’t reverse the fact that many people had already lost their
n 2016, the Chicago Community Bond Fund joined the Coalition to End Money Bond, a collective of over a dozen Chicago-based organizations working together to abolish the bail system. The coalition includes research and advocacy groups, legal nonprofits, faith-based organizations, and grassroots community organizing collectives. “I’ve been in coalitions where all of the organizations are very similar, with the same theories of change,” said Will Tanzman, executive director of The People’s Lobby, a community organizing group that belongs to the Coalition. “But what made this coalition successful was that it was so eclectic.” The Coalition and its various members hosted direct actions, lobby days, teach-ins, and days of prayer to gather support for ending money bond. They also met with legislators, engaged in litigation, and turned out their members to courtwatch. Through their close experiences working against the money bond system, CCBF brought an expertise that guided the coalition. “We are the only organization [in the coalition] that is focused on money bond and pretrial incarceration,” said Keisa Reynolds, the transitional executive director of CCBF. “And we are also an abolitionist organization, which I think brings a really important perspective to the Coalition.” In 2016, CCBF referred two plaintiffs for a class action lawsuit which alleged that pretrial incarceration based solely on an individual’s inability to pay bond was unconstitutional. The lawsuit was dismissed, but it led to a new order issued by Chief Judge Timothy Evans of the Circuit Court of Cook County in September 2017, which required that judges only set bonds in amounts that
MAY 27, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15
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people could pay. Within months, the Cook County Jail population fell from 7,500 people to 6,000. CCBF policy analyst Briana Payton said that, because of General Order 18.8.A, advocates were able to “point to Cook County as a case study that shows that when you reduce reliance on money bond, when you let people free while they’re awaiting trial, you don’t have these horrible outcomes that people always want to threaten, like that no one is going to go to court and that crime is going to go up. Those things didn’t happen.” As the order was in the process of being implemented, more than seventy volunteers from the Coalition observed bond court to compile data on whether judges were complying with the order. They found that although the use of money bond had dropped significantly, some judges were still setting unreasonably high bonds, which were disproportionately impacting Black and Latinx people. In February 2017, the Coalition worked to introduce the Equal Justice for All Act to Springfield. The Act was a precursor to the PFA, and would have eliminated money bond and reduced pretrial incarceration. In July 2019, the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice launched, bringing organizations from across the state to fight for the abolition of money bond. The Pretrial Fairness Act was then written by members of the Coalition, including former CCBF executive director Sharlyn Grace. It was introduced to the State Senate in November 2020 by Senator Robert Peters, formerly the political director of The People’s Lobby and an organizer with the CEMB.
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n January 2020, Governor Pritzker announced his support for ending money bond. In February, the CEMB and the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice bused 250 people to Springfield to lobby legislators and host a rally in support of the bill. Less than a month later, the COVID-19 pandemic struck. The legislature shut down, halting the progress of the PFA. CCBF, along with 16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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the Coalition as a whole, shifted their focus to advocating for decarceration in the wake of the pandemic, citing COVID-19 outbreaks in prisons and jails as a death sentence for incarcerated people. In the summer of 2020, George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police, and the ensuing uprisings created a seismic shift in dominant narratives around policing and incarceration. The protests brought with them a slew of arrests, with 240 people arrested in Chicago on May 31 alone. CCBF set to work paying their bonds. “I don’t think anyone believes that the Pretrial Fairness Act would have passed as quickly or in as complete a form without the uprisings last summer really creating a need for elected officials to respond to the demands of the movement,” Grace said. Meanwhile, they were taking in a windfall of donations, despite not actively fundraising for the revolving fund. According to Reynolds, the bond fund received over $5 million from individual donors, with additional donations from foundations. As a result, by the end of 2020 they were able to pay over $2.5 million dollars to free 310 people who were arrested on protest-related charges. CCBF started paying about as many bonds per week as they had previously been paying per year. On social media, the group encouraged people to look beyond bail funds as the primary recipient of their donations, asking them to contribute instead to Blackled, grassroots collectives like Assata’s Daughters, GoodKids MadCity, and SOUL. “Bail funds are not going to end white supremacy or abolish the police alone,” Grace said. “We need longterm grassroots organizing that builds community power for change. And a bail fund is almost like an immediate gratification donation… But the work of organizing for abolition is not immediate at all. It’s long term; it’s often invisible.” On the heels of the summer uprisings, the campaign to end money bond was propelled towards victory. In September, the Coalition and the Illinois
“CCBF uses eleven factors to determine whose bonds to pay, including a person’s ability to pay bond, access to existing support systems, medical needs, immigration status, and more.”
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE COALITION TO END MONEY BOND
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Network for Pretrial Justice hosted a statewide day of action in support of the bill. In November, they brought over 300 people to a virtual lobby day. While the legislature hadn’t met since the spring, the coalition found out that there would be a lame duck session in January. After the summer uprisings, Springfield’s Black Caucus had been moved to pass a racial justice package, and the coalition pushed for the PFA to be included. On January 13, 2021, the PFA passed as part of a larger criminal justice omnibus bill. The People’s Lobby’s Will Tanzman said that a lesson from this win is that “big changes are possible when you have the intersection of movement moments and longer-term organizing.” “This didn’t just get passed in the midnight hour in January,” said Briana Payton. “It was years of organizing. It was years of lobbying.”
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he Chicago Community Bond Fund has done what many abolitionist collectives seek to do: it has played a role in making itself obsolete. In the process, CCBF served as a model for bail funds across the country, only two of which had been established
by the time CCBF was founded. Pilar Weiss, the director of the National Bail Fund Network, said CCBF was a “northstar example” for bail funds around the country because “they were started out of movement organizing and then were the anchor for a coalition.” While a lot of bail funds faced pressure from their boards to prioritize maximizing the volume of people they could bail out, CCBF demonstrated that “you could bail out hundreds of people, and then if you didn’t actually abolish the system, they would just arrest hundreds more people. There was never going to be enough money,” Weiss said. “Chicago used the bail fund as a tool, an organizing tool, always.” Though CCBF’s main function may now be obsolete, the bond fund is here to stay for at least the next few years. Until 2023, when the PFA goes into effect, there will be many more bonds to pay. And in the meantime, CCBF’s advocacy team is expanding with the intention of protecting the bill. Payton said that CCBF and supporters of the PFA need to remain vigilant to ensure that the win is not reversed or watered down. “Laws get changed all the time,” she said. “We need
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE COALITION TO END MONEY BOND
to watch out for people who oppose this bill, who may want to get legislation passed to either completely repeal this bill or to change it so much so that it does not have the decarceral impact that we want it to have.” In 2019, for instance, New York passed bail reforms which prohibited the use of cash bail for the majority of offenses, and which should have kept ninety percent of people who were arrested from being incarcerated pretrial. But law enforcement and politicians used fear-mongering tactics to convince the public that the reforms were causing a rise in crime, and the media followed suit. A year later, the state rolled back some of the reforms, adding more offenses to the list of bail-eligible crimes. Payton warned that in Chicago, opponents of the bill might also find work-arounds that create false alternatives to incarceration. She referenced the growing use of electronic monitoring, which uses often unreliable technology to track a person’s location before their trial. For example, although last year the Cook County Sheriff ’s budget was cut by $25 million after advocacy from CCBF and the Budget for Black Lives campaign, Tom Dart later acquired an additional $13 million to fund an expansion of his electronic monitoring program. “People think that if people are not going to jail they should be on electronic monitoring because that’s how we will know we’re safe,” Payton explained. “But electronic monitoring is literally out here ruining people’s lives. It does the same thing to people that happens when they are incarcerated. It causes them to not be able to work, to not be able to contribute to their household, to not be able to take care of their kids. It exacerbates mental health issues. It exacerbates addiction. It exacerbates everything because of the way it restricts people’s freedom.” Part of protecting the PFA means using popular education to combat these false narratives about public safety, preempting the fear-mongering tactics that opponents of the law may use to try to overturn it. Payton expressed a need to get people on the “same page” that “ incarceration
makes people less safe… if we can just make people understand that pretrial freedom is a public safety strategy, and pre-trial incarceration is not an effective public safety strategy, that’s a large part of the work that needs to be done.” In addition to influencing dominant narratives about the law, Tanzman also emphasized the importance of electoral organizing to keep the elected officials who supported the bill in office.
I
f the Prerial Fairness Act is successfully implemented, Reynolds says, CCBF will consider sunsetting. “We’ve always been pretty transparent with funders and with staff as people are hired that CCBF would want to sunset once we achieved our mission,” they said. “And that was something we decided because we don’t want to exist for the sake of existing, just sort of replicating the non-profit industrial complex.” Though there haven’t been formal conversations about it yet, CCBF is planning to do a series of retreats to decide what their future will hold. Input in this process would come from staff and stakeholders such as members of the coalition, people that have been bonded out, and the board. Reynolds said it will likely be at least four years before CCBF decides to disband. Before sunsetting, CCBF would want to ensure that the PFA is being implemented properly, and they plan to remain vigilant in protecting the law. “If we were to sunset, we would do so very strategically, looking at where whatever resources we still have can be redistributed,” they said. “It would be amazing to redistribute resources to organizations that are meeting the needs of different communities, particularly grassroots organizations… I would really want to uplift abolitionists and mutual aid work that is happening across the city.” ¬
Anna Attie is a contributor to the Weekly. She last wrote about Metropolitan Water Reclamation District candidates’ plans to address urban flooding.
MAY 27, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17
In partnership with the Southeast Youth Alliance 18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
¬ MAY 27, 2021
The Southeast Side can be easy to miss as you speed across the Chicago Skyway on the way from downtown Chicago to Indiana. But look closely and you’ll see the mix of church towers and smokestacks next to the highway that mark the predominantly Latinx community. This last year has been a hard one for residents of the East Side neighborhood in particular. The COVID-19 pandemic has meant deaths of loved ones and the closing of businesses. Many people here did not have the luxury of working at home during the pandemic lockdowns. Over half of East Side residents work in essential businesses or operations, putting themselves at risk of the disease or death to feed their families. The pandemic has also exacerbated existing challenges of racism, poverty and pollution in the East Side. In a largely working class neighborhood, the factories and heavy industries of the Southeast Side provided residents jobs that many Chicagoans don’t want to do. But the toxic byproducts of heavy industries have meant residents here suffer increased risk of lung cancer and asthma. Longtime organizer Peggy Salazar calls the area the city’s “sacrifice zone,” a place where people’s health has been sacrificed for the benefit of other richer -- and whiter -- parts of the city. In this moment of darkness, a group of young Latinx organizers have come together with a message of hope. With their first meeting in 2018, the Southeast Youth Alliance knew they wanted to amplify opportunities and make resources available for young people in the area. To many SYA members, the proposed move of recycler General Iron from a largely white North Side neighborhood to one where 70 percent of residents speak Spanish at home feels like yet another example of how their city has failed them. “Reclaiming the Sacrifice Zone” follows the work of SYA organizers at this critical moment on the East Side. Illustrated by local Venezuelan artist Mike Centeno and reported by local journalist and SYA member Maria Maynez with support from Borderless Magazine’s staff, the comic tells the true story of how young Latinx people in Chicago have built power among some of those most marginalized in our city. “We want local youth to know if you don’t like something, you have the power to change it,” says SYA member and co-founder Sara Galván Orozco. We hope that after reading this comic, you too see this power in yourself.
MAY 27, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19
Hidden between bridges and state lines, huddled underneath the Skyway, the Southeast Side is easy to miss. For Oscar Sánchez, it has been home since 1997.
Born and raised in the area, he can remember the days he would spend playing at the local parks and beaches with his family. But the days outside were often darkened by the local factories and steel mills, which have occupied the Southeast Side for decades. Me and my brother would play a game, and we would count how many diesel trucks would pass by. That,s how bad it was, it was normalized. Sánchez’s younger brother suffered from asthma and other breathing issues to the point that he had to use a breathing mask connected to a machine at night. Francisco would ask their parents why he had to be that way.
why can,t i just be normal?
The Southeast Side has some of the worst air pollution in the city. Asthma rates here are over double the city’s average. Lung cancer rates in the area are also above the city’s average. 20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
¬ MAY 27, 2021
Industry had provided a stable livelihood for many on the Southeast Side. Among those families who counted on the steel and petcoke industries was Peggy Salazar,s. Most of the people who worked in the steel mills were immigrants, or they were people who didn,t go on to college.
You did what you had to to earn a ,decent living.,
But it came at a cost. Seeing the environmental and health costs to her community, Salazar became an environmental organizer. She rallied and led tours to bring attention to what she calls "the sacrifice zone" — whole swaths of the Southeast Side that the city has decided can be burdened with pollution.
We saw the pattern of the gentrification and revitalization going on on the North Side. And I quickly became aware that we were going to be accommodating of all that beautiful revitalization while our community continued to go through degradation.
When U.S. Steel closed its mills in 1992 and petcoke producers were required to cover the dangerous black dust from their operations in 2014, Salazar celebrated the victories. She and others hoped for development, for something better to come and provide clean, safe jobs. But the land scarred by industrial waste sat empty for years.
MAY 27, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21
That pattern could not be clearer when, in 2018, the longtime metal scrapper General Iron* announced its plans to move from a wealthy North Side neighborhood to the Southeast Side. During its six decades in Lincoln Park, the recycling facility had major fires and explosions, and it received citations for excessive air emissions.
General Iron’s new location in the East Side neighborhood would be run by Reserve Management Group and cost $80 million to build and operate. The company calls itself “a recycler, not a polluter.” It recycles over 740,000 tons of metal products a year and “employs approximately 130 people, mostly minorities,” according to the company’s website.
Southeast Side activists quickly realized that this would be a new kind of fight without the support of “big greens.” They would be on their own.
The proposed General Iron location is half a mile from the local elementary and high schools. For young people on the Southeast Side like Sánchez and Luis Cabrales, that was unacceptable.
Regardless of what they promise, I don,t care. We don,t want history repeating itself. People join the fight against General Iron because as a community we,re healing, we,re moving on. We want better jobs, not jobs that continue to contribute to this contamination. *Reserve Management Group, General Iron’s parent company, denied Borderless Magazine’s request for an interview. 22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
¬ MAY 27, 2021
Sánchez and Cabrales joined other members of the Southeast Youth Alliance and local high school students to speak out about the proposed recycling facility. To them, it was no longer just about keeping General Iron out of the East Side. It was also about being seen as a community deserving of a better way of life.
As the General Iron move gained traction, community members and activists turned to Chicago,s political leaders for help. Protesters met with 10th Ward Ald. Susan Sadlowski Garza and gathered outside Mayor Lori Lightfoot,s house in 2020.
Under pressure, Garza asked the state to stop its review of General Iron,s permit during the coronavirus pandemic to allow for greater community input. But like generations of environmental organizers before them, Southeast Side residents felt largely abandoned by their government. Tired of relying on elected officials, younger activists began to organize as they led the fight against General Iron.
The first rally hosted by youth activists was on the steps of George Washington High School, located right across the street from the new location for General Iron. In just two short months, the anger of a few organizers had turned into a movement. APRIL 29, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 23
Time seemed to speed up for East Side Residents as the day when General Iron would finally make its big move neared. The organizers realized that they would need to act fast if they were going to convince the City of Chicago to deny General Iron,s request to move to the East Side. In January 2021, Sánchez joined Chuck Stark, a teacher at George Washington High School, and Breanna Bertacchi, a member of the United Neighbors of the 10th Ward, in a hunger strike against General Iron.
"We do this because we care not only about our ancestors who were exploited, but about our future generations.” Said Sánchez. “The hunger strike is a culmination of both reflecting on our demonstration and seeing what is the next escalation that we can do to get the mayor,s attention and the Chicago Department of Public Health,s attention."
Every time another industry comes down here, it’s another nail in our coffin.
A week later, the city announced that it was delaying General Iron,s permit in order to assess the impact of air pollution in the area.
During their month-long hunger strike, more than 100 people participated in a one-day hunger strike to show solidarity both in Chicago and nationwide. More than 70 health care and social justice organizations and 500 individuals signed a letter to Mayor Lightfoot supporting the hunger strikers and demanding that the mayor deny the recycler,s permit.
This fight has been going on for years in the city. We don,t want these polluters here destroying our home. They are putting our health on the line. 24 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
¬ MAY 27, 2021
On Earth Day, organizers gathered to plant trees across the street from the proposed General Iron site. They still did not know whether the city would approve General Iron’s permit. But whatever the city’s decision, the discussion about the health of the Southeast Side was just beginning. The Southeast Youth Alliance members are dreaming of a future that is not bound by the chains of environmental racism and corruption. "I,d love to see a center that is dedicated to sports and academics; teaching the youth discipline on and off the field. Perhaps a center with basketball courts and classrooms within the facility." -ROGER RODRÍGUEZ
"I would love to see a sustainable farm with free food for any community member. Or maybe a rec center with a nice basketball court and track." -LINA AVALOS
“Local businesses, especially down Ewing, you know, local shops, coffeehouses, and maybe a little thrift store. That would be cute.” - MARITZA DARLING-RAMOS
"This is a fight for resources. It,s a fight for survival, and we do it with love." -OSCAR Sánchez MAY 27, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 25
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