ORGANIZING
A Step Toward Community Control of the Police
For now, ECPS organizers want to ensure community voices are included in the interim commission that will be formed in January and on slating candidates to run in the district-level elections. BY JACQUELINE SERRATO
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early a decade of grassroots organizing for police accountability in Chicago culminated in a measure that provides residents with two levels of oversight of the Chicago Police Department—on a citywide scale and in each police district. Frank Chapman, a field organizer for the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (CAARPR), attended the first meetings in Englewood in 2012 that called for a fully elected civilian police accountability council. In other words, community control of the police, in the spirit of the Black Panthers. Organizers called that proposal The Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC).The earliest supporters of the movement were families of police torture survivors and the kin of people who had been killed by CPD, namely twentytwo-year-old Rekia Boyd, who was shot by an off-duty cop. Within a few years, the campaign grew from a couple of hundred supporters, to tens of thousands, emboldened by the police murder of Laquan McDonald in 2014 and countless other cases of police brutality that have gone unaccounted for. An ordinance that passed on July 21 was celebrated by roughly one hundred community organizations on the South
and West Sides. However, it was not CPAC. The new ordinance, called the Empowering Communities for Public Safety (ECPS), was a compromise. It was “a unified ordinance,”Chapman told the Weekly, one that combined the CPAC ordinance with another one that a separate but overlapping coalition, the Grassroots Alliance for Police Accountability (GAPA), had been drafting under the same name since 2017. The conversations about policing in Chicago bubbled to the surface the previous year, after the murder of George Floyd that sparked the 2020 uprisings across the country. The work of the coalitions preceded the Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police movements, according to Chapman, though those popular campaigns undoubtedly influenced public opinion about the role of police. Marches and protests last summer were repeatedly attacked and surveilled by police, as demonstrators continued to push for police accountability. “The police have always been in the forefront of repressing our movements,” Chapman said. “And that's why we see having some kind of community control over the police is critical to the defense of our movements.”
In the City Council, the push for civilian oversight came to a head in February, when Lightfoot asked Alderman Chris Taliaferro (29th), chair of the Committee on Public Safety, to stall consideration of the two ordinances presented by CAARPR and GAPA while the mayor drafted her own. The legislative maneuvering only fueled the coalitions’ efforts. In a joint statement in March, organizers said, “After years of working independently, the coalitions joined forces, collaborated with aldermen who have been powerful voices for reform, and delivered an ordinance that integrates the best thinking on police reform in Chicago.” On March 29, a Chicago police officer shot and killed thirteen-year-old Adam Toledo, and on March 31, another Chicago cop shot and killed twentyyear-old Anthony Alvarez as he fled. In a Weekly op-ed on April 29, Chapman and GAPA spokesperson Desmon Yancy wrote, “The ECPS ordinance has broad support within City Council—but it is being blocked by Mayor Lightfoot, who has refused to join forces with our coalition and who has had important Public Safety Committee meetings canceled to stop our work.”
In May, Lightfoot presented her own ordinance, which would have kept most of the control of police in the Mayor’s Office. It failed to pass. As public support of ECPS mounted and compromises were made at the negotiating table, the ordinance gradually gained the support of every caucus in City Council and even Lightfoot’s reluctant support— and ultimately the vote of thirty-six aldermen. “We admit that we made some concessions,” Chapman said of ECPS. “But we also admit that there were a lot of things that we didn’t make concessions of.”
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oth Chapman and Yancy are native South Siders whose respective offices are located on 63rd Street, an area of the city that is overpoliced, with two police stations located on that thoroughfare about two miles from each other. Yancy, who serves as the community organizing director of the Inner City Muslim Network (IMAN) said the mayor’s role in advancing the ECPS ordinance was “small” despite her campaign’s talking points around overhauling the police department.
AUGUST 19, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15
