(The Gate/Sonya Eldridge)
Activists and faith leaders gathered outside the mayor’s office Monday, April 6 to reaffirm their commitment to police accountability reform and an end to police brutality across the city.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel met with about a dozen activists this past Saturday, just two weeks after activists staged a die-in outside his office, following months of calls and emails requesting a meeting, Community Renewal Society member Rev. Eddie Knox Jr. said.
Knox said the meeting was granted only after a delegation of clergy continued to pressure the mayor’s staff to schedule one.
“If black and brown lives mattered to this mayor, it shouldn’t take months of actions, thousands of phone calls, multiple protests and even civil disobedience to get him to respond to reasonable requests,” Knox said.
Organizers said they went into the meeting hopeful that the mayor would be ready to take action, but felt disrespected when he would not commit to any of the recommendations listed in the group’s proposal, which includes the creation of a civilian oversight council for the Chicago Police Department. According to organizers, the mayor agreed to continue conversations with the group, but that was the extent of his commitments.
“Practically the first words out of his mouth was that he was not going to commit to taking action on any of these issues presented,” Dee Van Pelt of the Jane Addams Senior Caucus said. “We tried over and over to ask him to make real commitments to action. But the mayor was not going to commit to anything other than ongoing meetings and more talk,” she added. “We appreciate his commitment, and expect him to honor it, but we can’t continue just talking.”
Adam Collins, spokesperson for the Mayor’s office called the conversation “positive and productive.”
“Mayor Emanuel and Superintendent McCarthy put community policing and community relationships built on mutual trust and respect at the heart of the city’s public safety strategy, which is why they have worked to engage clergy and community leaders in an important dialogue on public safety issues. On Saturday morning, Mayor Emanuel and several senior staff members had a positive and productive conversation with representatives of the Community Renewal Society. While the Mayor has already begun implementing a number of the group’s policy proposals over the past four years, he agreed to a number of their other recommendations during the nearly one-hour meeting on Saturday. The meeting ended with a mutual agreement that building trust between police and residents is essential to achieving our shared public safety goals, and a commitment from the Mayor’s Office to meet with the group again by early May.”
Sara Jones from Urban Village Church and member of the Community Renewal Society (CRS) police brutality issue team said the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) has failed to protect Chicagoans from police misconduct. She said IPRA must be reformed to restore trust between police and community residents.
“We have been asking the mayor and the police superintendent for four months to completely overhaul IPRA or to create a new independent civilian oversight council that will focus on protecting the public, creating transparency, and oversight, and public accountability,” she said.
Jones said the current process for filing complaints of police misconduct does not “protect the interests of citizens” and fails to “adequately investigate and prevent police abuse.” She added that few allegations of police misconduct are sustained, reports are not made publicly available and that IPRA does not actually have the authority to enforce police discipline.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” Congressman Danny Davis said in the press conference, quoting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Congressman Davis mentioned the recent American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) study that showed the Chicago Police Department stops and frisks more people than New York City. According to an ACLU analysis of 2014 data, African Americans make up approximately 72 percent of all the stops in Chicago, even though they only comprise about 32 percent of the city’s population.
“For too long, individuals in low-income African-American and Latino communities have been oppressed by the very people that they expected to serve and protect them,” Davis said after noting that he personally has been stopped and frisked at least 20 times in his life.