Civilian oversight plan for Chicago police narrowly advances after heated debate, criticism from FOP president
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Chicago is on the cusp of a new era of civilian police oversight in which citizens would get much more input than they have now, but resulting rules would give a strong mayor lots of power to keep setting Police Department policies and picking who serves as police superintendent.
After two hours of heated debate, the City Council Public Safety Committee on Tuesday evening advanced a compromise ordinance backed by Mayor Lori Lightfoot and grassroots police activists who have spent years in off-and-on negotiations, haggling over the particulars of the police oversight plan. The vote was 12-8.
The full City Council will consider the package Wednesday. It needs a two-thirds majority to pass the 50-member council, because the ordinance sets regular elections for police oversight councils.
South Side Ald. Leslie Hairston, 5th, worked with activists to encode civilian oversight. She said the deal is a chance to change the city’s policing trajectory after decades of police misconduct.
“Here in the city of Chicago, in my two decades of having sat on this council, we have seen, from Jon Burge torture and murders, to Laquan McDonald and Adam Toledo. And we have to know that what we’re doing, and our approach, is not and has not been working,” Hairston said during debate on the plan.
But Chicago Fraternal Order of Police President John Catanzara during public comment at the beginning of the meeting listed six agencies he said already have ample oversight over the Chicago Police Department. Passing the ordinance would mean turning oversight over to “the squeaky wheels who made this city into anarchy last summer.”
“And now, entertaining the idea that you want to give them the ability to dictate police policy going forward is absolutely absurd and dangerous and reckless,” Catanzara said.
Under the ordinance, a citizen panel will have the power to pass a vote of no confidence in the police superintendent, but that move won’t be binding. Activists dropped a push to allow voters to decide whether to create a commission with the power to fire the superintendent, when it failed to gain aldermanic support.
Still, Lightfoot saw aldermen also take a dim view of her own competing oversight proposal that made the citizen board almost entirely advisory.
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So she agreed during negotiations with activists and aldermen in recent days to give the civilian board more authority to set Police Department policy than she would have liked, while retaining the ability for mayors to veto such decisions.
And she agreed to the no-confidence vote against the superintendent, which would be embarrassing for the mayor if it happened, even though she and her successors would be free to largely disregard it.
Passing the package on Wednesday would mean Lightfoot could finally say she delivered something she first promised to accomplish within 100 days of getting elected in 2019.
And grassroots supporters of the deal could point to the fact community involvement in police policymaking will skyrocket as citizens get to push their own ideas and demand answers from Police Department officials. They argue the deal still represents the strongest citizen police oversight package in the U.S.
The process for staffing two tiers of proposed civilian panels created by the ordinance is complicated.
While elections would be held to name members to 22 citywide district councils, those bodies would be largely advisory. A seven-member Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability would have slightly more power, and the mayor would retain a great deal of the authority to decide who gets to serve on that body.
At the outset, Lightfoot would get to select the members of an interim commission from among 14 nominees chosen by the City Council Rules Committee. The president of the commission would be paid $15,000 per year, and the other six members would get $12,000.
In 2023, elections would be held in each of the city’s 22 police districts, to name three-member councils in each district. Those panelists would get $500 per month.
Each district council would name a member to serve on a nominating committee, which would submit the names of nominees to the mayor to fill the seven-member Community Commission.
The mayor would be free to accept the nominees or reject them. The nominating committee would then keep submitting nominees until the mayor accepted enough people to serve on the commission.
So if Lightfoot or any subsequent mayor worried a nominee would operate as too much of a free agent on the commission, she could simply decline to name that person to the panel.
Once in place, the commission would be able to vote to remove the chief administrator of the Civilian Office of Police Accountability that investigates police-involved shootings and reports of wrongdoing. If two-thirds of aldermen agreed, the chief administrator would be removed.
The commission would also be able to vote to remove the police superintendent, but the mayor could accept or reject that recommendation.
The commission could adopt new Police Department policies, but the mayor could veto those rules. A two-thirds vote of the 50-member City Council would be needed to override the mayoral policy veto.
Twitter @_johnbyrne
