The Spin: Divided Democrats to pick state party chair tonight | Lightfoot proposes new police search warrant policy | White Indiana city councilman says Dave Chappelle skit inspired him to wear blackface on Halloween
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At about 6 p.m. Illinois Democratic leaders will gather virtually to pick a new state chair, a post held by Michael Madigan for 23 years until his resignation last month. Watch it here.
An intraparty squabble has developed among leaders who don’t have a vote in the matter. Gov. J.B. Pritzker and U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth have publicly endorsed Chicago Ald. Michelle Harris, while U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin has endorsed U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly of south suburban Matteson.
Harris has been leading Kelly among the 36 Democratic State Central Committee members who each have a weighted vote on the chairmanship. Duties of the chair include bringing in donations and doling them out to candidates while looking to build the next generation of leaders.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot today proposed stricter police policies on search warrants as she continues to deal with the fallout from the raid on the home Anjanette Young, a social worker who was handcuffed naked by officers after they wrongly raided her residence, my Tribune colleagues report.
“The measure doesn’t go as far as a plan proposed by aldermen last month with Young’s support,” the Tribune’s Gregory Pratt, Jeremy Gorner and John Byrne write. “That ordinance would prohibit officers from pointing guns at kids or handcuffing them, or doing so to relatives while kids are present.”
And after old photos of Jeffrey Minchuk, a white Merillville, Indiana, city councilman who doubles as a detective in the local sheriff’s office, dressed in blackface surfaced online, he said he drew his inspiration from Black comedian Dave Chappelle and a skit from his eponymous show, the Post-Tribune’s Alexandra Kukulka reports.
Clerk-Treasurer Kelly White Gibson, the first Black woman to be elected to the office in the northwest Indiana town, isn’t laughing — and neither is the person who called her to complain about the costume.
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Heading into tonight’s meeting, here’s the vote breakdown: Harris, a 15-year member of the City Council and Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s new floor leader, had just over 44% of the weighted vote of committee members expressing a preference while Kelly, in her eighth year in Congress, had just over 31%, the Tribune’s Rick Pearson reports in his most recent piece on the contest. Harris has the support of 15 members of the Democratic committee while Kelly had 11, he notes in his breakdown.
The 10 undecided members of the 36-person committee will decide the winner: Read more here.
The case for Kelly: “Durbin and others who backed Kelly point to the urban-suburban-rural makeup of the 2nd Congressional District she represents as an example of how Democrats need to reach out to the rural areas where support for Republicans is growing in Illinois,” Pearson wrote in his piece today. In addition to Durbin, U.S. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, of Chicago, who is a member of the committee, is among the high-profile Democrats backing Kelly.
The case for Harris: Pritzker, a multibillionaire heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune, has been making calls on behalf of the South Side alderman. The governor has called Harris a “listener and leader” who knows how to build a strong ground operation and bring in votes. Though he isn’t a member of the Democratic State Central Committee and doesn’t have a vote on the chairmanship, Pritzker holds considerable sway over the party’s future with an ability to self-fund his campaign and assist others, Pearson wrote today.
In addition to Pritzker and Duckworth, Harris also is also backed by Cook County Clerk Karen Yarbrough, who became interim party chairman after Madigan’s resignation last month.
Madigan has a vote too. He was deposed as House speaker in January, resigned from his longtime House seat on Feb. 18 and stepped down as Democratic chairman a few days later. But he remains a member of the state central committee from the Southwest Side and suburban 3rd Congressional District and runs the 13th Ward Democratic organization, Pearson reminds in his piece. And he is backing Harris.
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The Tribune’s Pratt, Gorner and Byrne write: “Mayor Lori Lightfoot unveiled a series of proposed changes to the city’s search warrant policies on Wednesday, amid ongoing pressure from City Council members to implement police reforms in the wake of the wrongful raid on Anjanette Young’s home.”
Highlights:
Under Lightfoot’s proposed new policies, police search warrants need to be approved by a deputy chief or higher. The current standard calls for a lieutenant’s approval.
All “no-knock” warrants will be banned from use except when there’s a safety threat, which the Police Department previously said already was its practice. These warrants will need to be approved by a bureau chief or higher and executed by SWAT, officials said.
Cops also will be required to perform a planning session before serving a search warrant, and an independent investigation of the raid will be conducted to make sure the information used to obtain the warrant was accurate. More details here.
Chicago police Superintendent David Brown said, too, that no matter what, anyone inside a building that is subject to a search warrant should be treated with respect.
“If Ms. Young was the biggest drug kingpin, we still should have treated her with dignity and respect,” said Brown, who was not Chicago’s top cop during the February 2019 raid at her home. “That should be clear to everyone that her dignity and respect had nothing to do with whether or not she was actually the focus of this or this was a mistake and it was the wrong house, she still deserves a measure of respect.”
Lightfoot wasn’t the mayor when the 2019 raid happened, but found herself in a public relations nightmare after her Law Department worked to keep video of the raid under wraps before WBBM-Ch. 2 published the video last year.
“Lightfoot initially said she only learned about the video when CBS aired police body camera footage that showed Young repeatedly telling officers who barged into her home that they had the wrong place. But the mayor later acknowledged she had received a November 2019 email about the ‘pretty bad wrongful raid’ that was explicit about the details,” Pratt, Gorner and Byrne remind in their piece.
Meanwhile, Lightfoot criticized what she said is the slow pace of investigations into the wrongful raid by Chicago Inspector General Joseph Ferguson and the Civilian Office of Police Accountability. Both have had investigations going since 2019.
“We haven’t heard a peep from the inspector general on this issue. Where’s he been?”
Law and order - Sons of former state Rep. Eddie Acevedo plead not guilty to tax charge stemming from ComEd probe: “The arraignments for Alex and Michael Acevedo were held a week after they and their father were charged in separate indictments with filing false tax returns in connection with the family’s lobbying firm,” the Tribune’s Jason Meisner writes.
“Alex Acevedo, 35, who made a failed bid for alderman two years ago, was charged with two counts alleging he understated his gross income for 2017 and 2018. Each count carries a maximum of 3 years in prison,” Meisner notes. Read more here.
Tank Noodle restaurant in Uptown to pay nearly $700K in back wages to 60 employees after federal probe: The U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division found that the eatery owed some workers more than $10,000 each in back wages and identified violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act’s minimum wage and overtime requirements, the Tribune’s Kim Quillen reports.
Monumental secret? BGA reports committee examining city’s public statues and markers
Mayor Lightfoot veered from a question today about a Better Government Association report detailing how her administration’s Monuments Project Advisory Committee, created after protests over Christopher Columbus statues lead City Hall to remove them, has operated in secret.
As the BGA’s David Jackson reports, a news release from the mayor’s office promised the committee would be part of “an inclusive and democratic public dialogue” about the future of Chicago’s public art collection. Locally and nationally, public art celebrating Columbus, Confederate leaders and other historical figures, has been part of a larger discussion — and the subject of protests — about white supremacy and justice that was reignited with the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd.
Last month, the committee flagged 41 public statues and other commemorative markers on display throughout that city that may be considered troublesome, which the Tribune’s Gregory Pratt and others wrote about. Read Pratt’s story here.
But City Hall isn’t saying much about how the committee arrived at that decision. And, Jackson reports, there’s been little opportunity for the public to observe or participate in the meetings.
He goes on to write: “ ‘What’s said here, stays here,’ is a message city officials delivered to the committee members at their Oct. 14 meeting, according to a slim, 24-page packet of committee agendas and minutes records City Hall released recently to the Better Government Association.” Read the BGA story here.
When asked about the BGA report at an unrelated news conference today, Lightfoot said: “I know that that’s what the BGA is reporting. I have no confirmation whatsoever (if that’s what) was said.
“And I think what we should focus on is what the committee is doing, which is to raise an important discussion and focus on public comment … around monuments, memorials, and other historic markers across our city that have raised concern.”
More Chicago news: City may be getting another mass vaccination site. The Chicago Cubs and Advocate Aurora Health said on Tuesday they are partnering on a plan to provide COVID-19 vaccinations at Wrigley Field.
Daniel Biss, a former state lawmaker, won Evanston’s mayoral race last month with 73% of the vote and takes office May 10. The city is “dealing with an ongoing pandemic and the toll it has taken on Evanston’s economy. The city also is facing issues of affordable housing and a local push to fight against climate change, among other challenges,” Genevieve Bookwalter writes for the Evanston Review.
But at the top of his list, Biss said, is the city’s fragmentation as residents remain isolated due to the pandemic and increasingly rely on their limited social media connections for information, as opposed to seeing each other in person at meetings and events and hearing what different people think.
“The social recovery (of the pandemic) gets overlooked sometimes,” Biss said. “Rebuild the community bonds that have been strained by the fact that people haven’t been with each other in person for almost a year now.”
Embattled Homewood village employee quits after hot mic comments about opponents of Calumet Country Club development, the Daily Southtown’s Mike Nolan reports.
After word got out that he had years ago dressed in blackface for Halloween, Merillville, Indiana, Councilman Jeff Minchuk took to Facebook to post an explanation for what was, he wrote, a “poor” choice when he was in his 20s or 30s.
Minchuk, 47, said the costume was inspired by a 2003 skit on the former “Chapelle’s Show” which parodied a Black man as a white supremacist. Minchuk stated that there was “no ill intent whatsoever with this idea or any harm meant” in his use of blackface and said “it was purely meant as humor,” the Post-Tribune’s Alex Kukulka writes. Read the full story, here.
Clerk-Treasurer Kelly White Gibson, the first Black woman to be elected to the office in town and considers Minchuk and his family friends, called the councilman’s statement a “non-apology” that offered excuses and “added insult to injury,” Kukulka reports.
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