Community Working Group Use of Force Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE October 3, 2022

CONTACT: Arewa Karen Winters, (773) 593-3477 Michael Harrington, (773) 971-1215

COMMUNITY REPRESENTATIVES FROM CHICAGO’S USE OF FORCE COMMUNITY WORKING GROUP RELEASE PUBLIC REPORT

Major policy changes result from advocacy by community-driven working group

Chicago – The community members who served on the City of Chicago’s Use of Force Community Working Group today released their first public report, which describes fundamental changes to Chicago Police Department (CPD) Use of Force policies and highlights ongoing deficiencies in need of immediate change.

The Report was written by the 31 community members who served on the Working Group, first convened as a part of the federal civil rights Consent Decree over Chicago Police Department (CPD) in the summer of 2020. It was not authored or approved by the four Working Group members employed by the City of Chicago, CPD, or Illinois Attorney General’s Office. It is the Report of the community members who served on the Working Group.

“The Community Working Group caused the CPD to transform its basic rules about when and how police officers may use force against community members,” said Craig Futterman, University of Chicago law professor and founder and director of the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project of the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic, whose law students participated in Working Group meetings, provided research on best practices, and helped to draft the Report. “These changes have the potential to dramatically reduce CPD violence and make the people of Chicago safer. The policies represent an entirely new approach to policing and the use of force in Chicago.”

Some of the significant changes to CPD policy achieved with the Working Group include:

· Force policies now prioritize the sanctity of all human life. Officers are now required to de-escalate situations to avoid the need for any force and may

only use force if absolutely necessary. If officers must use force, they may only use the least amount necessary under the circumstances.

· Deadly force is now prohibited unless it is necessary to protect life.

· All chokeholds, “carotid artery restraints,” and applications of pressure to a person’s windpipe are prohibited, except as a last resort against an immediate threat to someone’s life.

· CPD officers can now be held accountable if they fail to de-escalate a situation, fail to engage in tactics to avoid the need for force, and when they use force when it is not necessary to do so.

· Officers are required to verbally and physically intervene to stop another officer’s use of excessive force.

Arewa Winters, the Community Chair of the Working Group, said that the Report shows “what can be accomplished when CPD is forced to engage with people impacted by its policies.”

Community members of the Working Group include representatives from the Southside Branch of the NAACP, Community Renewal Society, Black Lives Matter Chicago, the Chicago Council on American-Islamic Relations, and the ACLU of Illinois. It reflects the product of hundreds of hours of unpaid work of Chicagoans devoted to making Chicago a better and safer city.

The Report states that the changes to CPD policy occurred only after CPD had first rejected all but one of the Working Group’s 155 recommendations in October 2020 and found itself at risk of being found guilty of violating the Consent Decree. The Decree requires the Police Department to meaningfully engage the community in revising its use of force policies.

“The CPD had initially used the Working Group process as a sham to create the illusion of community engagement so that CPD could check off boxes on the community engagement requirements of the Consent Decree without having to actually engage the Working Group on its recommendations,” said Winters, who lost her nephew to CPD violence. “The negotiations that ultimately led to meaningful change to CPD policy occurred only after we forced the CPD to engage with us.”

The Report states that as a result of threatened sanctions that could arise from CPD’s violations of the Decree, the CPD engaged in a series of meetings with representatives of the Working Group beginning in late Fall of 2020. These meetings were overseen by the Independent Monitor of the Consent Decree and the Office of the Illinois Attorney General. While the Report describes fierce CPD resistance to change, it also chronicles a process by which members of both the community and CPD “came to listen and learn from the experiences and perspectives of one another.” These meetings, which continued into 2022, led to fundamental changes in CPD policy. Dr. Waltrina Middleton, the Executive Director of the Community Renewal Society and member of the Working Group, reflected that the Working Group process has important lessons for Chicago and elsewhere: “The path to better policies that people in the community will trust and policies that reflect the knowledge and experience of people on the ground—are those in which people who have been most impacted by CPD’s policies have an empowered seat at the table from the beginning to end. A real voice in the process.”

The Report also highlights CPD’s force policies in need of change on issues from police raids on homes and gun pointing to transparency and use of Tasers:

· Gun Pointing and Drawing. The Report criticizes CPD’s practice of raiding family homes in Black and Brown communities. It states that Chicago police officers continue to burst into people’s homes and point their guns and rifles at children and family members. The Report recommends that CPD immediately change its policies to prohibit officers from pointing their firearm at a person unless the person presents an immediate threat of death or serious bodily injury to another person. The Report also reveals that CPD has refused to put in place any policy regarding when it is and is not appropriate for an officer to draw their firearm.

· Use of Force Reporting. The Report criticizes CPD’s Force Reporting policy for failing to require that officers submit written Use of Force Reports when they point their guns at community members. The Report also discloses that CPD policy fails to require officers to write Force Reports when they body slam or use other force against people unless it is in response to physical resistance. The Working Group recommends that CPD must change its policy to require officers to report police force every time an officer points a gun at a person or otherwise threatens or inflicts violence against a community member, regardless of whether the person resists or not.

· Transparency. The Report found that the City of Chicago’s policies on transparency, including video release, are in need of immediate change. The Working Group demands a new policy that requires the City to release video within 48 hours after an officer shoots or kills a person. The Working Group would allow the release to be delayed for up to 14 days, but only when extraordinary circumstances compel such secrecy. Working Group member Aaron Gottlieb, assistant professor at the University of Chicago the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, said, “We had hoped that the City would have learned its lesson about the importance of being honest from all the damage it did by covering up Officer Jason Van Dyke’s murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. But even after all that, top City officials fought to hide the video and cover up the truth about CPD’s horrific raid of Anjanette Young’s home. It’s past time to make truth and transparency guiding principles in Chicago.”

· Tasers and Oleoresin Capsicum (OC) Spray. The Report calls for the prohibition on the use of Tasers against children in schools and the immediate ban of the use of any chemical weapons against people who pose no immediate threat to the safety of others, including banning the use of OC Spray against people confined inside a car who are engaged only in passive resistance. The Report further recommends the prohibition on the use of OC Spray and other chemical weapons whenever they create a significant risk of harm to others. The Report states that “CPD should never spray chemicals into innocent third parties.”

The Report states that Chicago’s newly-constituted Community Commission on Public Safety and Accountability must use its policymaking authority on behalf of the people of Chicago to immediately address the deficiencies in CPD Force policies. Working Group member Michael Harrington of the Network 49 community organization in Rogers Park, said, “People fought for years to create community oversight of the police in Chicago. For everyone’s safety, the Commission needs to use its policymaking power to cure the critical deficiencies in CPD policy described in our Report.”

CPD is currently in the process of implementing and training all of its officers on the policies described in the Report. Community members who served on the Working Group warned that Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown’s decision to remove 46 officers from the already resource-starved Policy and Training Divisions could not have come at a worse time. A’Shonti McKinney, a Working Group member who recently observed CPD’s training first-hand, said, “These policy changes will mean nothing if officers are not properly trained and held to account. I saw veteran officers’ resistance to these changes. They don’t want to be told that they can’t resort to violence as they have in the past. They need to see that there is a new and better way. Removing quality trainers when they’re most needed sends a horrible message from the top. It’s almost like they want this to fail.”

Professor Futterman summarized a central theme of the Report to the Community, “Perhaps the greatest lesson that we learned from this experience is that change is not self-executing. It happens only when the people of Chicago make it happen.”