roderick sawyer

“They have decided that these teams most in need of monitoring are the very units they are exempting and ensuring that no video evidence of these encounters will ever exist. It has to be an intentional decision.”

“CPD officers are not assigned and or required to wear body cameras, it’s ridiculous,” he said.

Futterman said while CPD isn’t breaking the law by not providing officers on the Community Safety Team with body cameras, they are “violating the spirit of the consent decree,” which is designed to ensure that officers who engage with the public the most are held accountable, through the use of body cameras and other tactics.

He said the issue is widespread within the department. Special units such as the Community Safety Team, SWAT, narcotics units, gang units, and units regularly conducting dangerous raids are often not assigned body cameras.

Futterman believes CPD is avoiding transparency and accountability. “The units that have been the most abusive and are engaging in these encounters everyday are ironically the very units that CPD refuses to issue body cameras,” he said.

Futterman has been critical of mistaken CPD raids where officers were found to not have their body cameras turned on.

“This is a matter of CPD policy,” he said. “They have decided that these teams most in need of monitoring are the very units they are exempting and ensuring that no video evidence of these encounters will ever exist. It has to be an intentional decision.”

Furthermore, officers who do have body cameras are often not turning them on—as required by CPD policy—and they are not held accountable when they do not, he said.

Alderman Matt Martin (47th) has been very hands on when it comes to enforcing the consent decree and enforcing its directives. On Tuesday’s meeting of the Committee on Public Safety, Martin asked why officers responding on Sunday did not have body cameras.

Martin told the Weekly that CPD’s response that they were actively working to equip officers with body cameras was “not an acceptable answer.”

“When you respond to calls for service, you should have a body camera that you can activate if you end up interacting with a member of the public,” he said.

Martin said he can appreciate the difficult position Superintendent Brown is in, inheriting a department that still has a long way to go for true reform. “There are a lot of moving parts,” he said.

Martin said the city missed a major opportunity to prove the city and its police department are making strides in implementing the consent decree. “It was a mistake not to have [body cameras] in this situation,” he said. “I hope we make body cameras available to all officers as quickly as possible.”

The footage reviewed by COPA from the POD camera on the corner of 57th & Racine does show the individual who, according to CPD, “matched the description of the person sought to be in possession of a firearm,” but the camera did not capture any evidence beyond that, said a COPA spokesperson.

On Tuesday, Judge Susana Ortiz gave Allen a $1 million bail. The bond proffer confirms that the officers responding did not have body cameras and that their squad car was not equipped with dashboard cameras because the “Community Policing Unit is a newly formed Unit.”

Ballistics and DNA evidence are still with the Illinois State Police and has not yet been processed.

Ultimately, the case against Allen is likely to hinge on the sworn testimony of the same officers who shot him. Without body camera, dashboard camera, or POD camera evidence, Chicago may never know what truly happened that Sunday in Englewood. ¬

Jonathan Ballew is a Chicago-based freelancer who lives in Uptown. His work has appeared in Block Club Chicago, Chicago Magazine, The Chicago Reporter, and the Sun-Times, among others. He last wrote for the Weekly about the proposed Tiger Woods golf course in South Shore.

Line Language

Sage Smith discusses the therapeutic process of linework, motionwork, and pattern-making in her art

BY RODERICK SAWYER

Amid a pandemic and civil uprisings, many artists are trying to figure out how to make social and personal impacts through their work. For Sage Smith, her work both speaks to the importance of her identity and transcends the idea of being mono-cultural. She grew up on the South Side and is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Arts Education and Bachelor’s in Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She just completed her first solo show, The Barriers That Create Us, at Connect Gallery (1520 E. Harper Ct.) in Hyde Park, which ran from August 2 to August 9 and featured an in-person, socially distanced artist talk at its opening. Smith sat down with South Side Weekly to talk about her therapeutic relationship with patterns, line work, and motion, and how she strives to create work outside of what society believes Black creatives should be making. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How do you mentally set up your environment to create?

It’s definitely different working at home after having gone to Baltimore, [where] I have a studio space. All of our dorms have giant studios that you can go work in, and not having access to that I started working in just the corner of my house, but I know that personally what I need is a level of comfort. It was really about finding that space here because I had already established that in Baltimore, sort of like purchasing a bean bag chair so that I could sit and focus on making a pattern for hours. It just has to be extremely peaceful; I don’t really like a lot of music, I’ll usually listen to a book. It’s not high energy, it’s very meditative.

How do you start your creative process?

Usually, I start off with a line drawing—I don’t really plan too much or sketch things out a whole lot. I’ll section off the piece and then I build up a color language from that, and then from that, I’ll build up a pattern language. They all usually start out with a line drawing of sorts that gets layered upon.

What has your first solo show at Connect Gallery meant to you, especially now?

I sort of developed an aversion to making political work in college. I think that even more so during this time there was that expectation, and I saw this tweet that said “Artists during this time, just create.” And it didn’t say anything about what we should be creating about, it just said create, and I think I really took that to heart as validation that I don’t have to create work about the time, and it’s still work about the time.

I had done group shows before, but this is the first time that I could really say anything [about my work]. It was very important for me to talk about something that I felt was very important to me, which was this environment, this space, that’s really what the show became about, but it was so many different ideas bouncing around in the show which made it amazing. It was the first time I had ever gotten to say anything that I wanted, I compare it to like, your first creative writing assignment where you just write anything. It doesn’t have to be a story, it doesn’t have to be a poem, write anything. So that’s kind of how I felt.

“It didn’t say anything about what we should be creating about, it just said create, and I think I really took that to heart as validation that I don’t have to create work about the time, and it’s still work about the time.”

Is this something that you felt like you haven’t been able to do, or is it just a different method of doing it than your work has been able to do?

Yes, I just felt unfiltered, unedited, unapologetic. It was just raw, it’s what I felt like creating without having to justify it or tweak it into someone else’s idea or make it for a homework assignment for school. It felt like, wow, I just made these [paintings] just to make them and this a story that I was talking about, and it all kind of came together.

How do you think language works within the motion, line, and pattern work that you do?

The way I use the word “language” is usually to convey stylistic choice, like I’m using this language of style to communicate this from one line to an extremely flat piece that sort of conveys depth but was not made with one line. I think a lot of what I’m talking about when I was using the word “language” was using the same sort of letter but just in a different word. My pattern work and my avatar character, who I drew since high school, helped me to convey these emotions of existence in different spaces throughout this show. I’m not sure what I wanted people to get from it. I got a lot of different responses on race, on homosexuality, on a lot of these things, which I didn’t necessarily intend because I think that’s of course part of my prerogative, you know, not necessarily making outright comments on those.

As an artist, putting work out there in a very direct way can be limiting. Art can be about complexity, it can tell the intended story but then it can tell so many different other stories as well.

Yeah, I’m not one for imposing my meaning on others. I really enjoy listening and learning what different lenses and different perspectives and different people take from different pieces. That was probably the best part of the entire show.

Has that worked well with the group shows, or is there another way that you show your work that allows you to get that feedback or interaction?

I think that’s why I dive so heavily into abstraction. I don’t use a lot of symbolism in my work. … You take what you want from it. I don’t necessarily enjoy having to explain it. I know it’s weird because I’m doing an interview [laughs] but it’s very hard for me because I told you where I’m at, where I’m creating is just a peaceful, cozy moment and it’s really hard to let other people into that moment because it just seems so private. Then once you put the

work out there it’s for everyone else. I’m still coming to terms with that aspect.