Here’s what you should know before voting for Chicago’s Police District Councils.

Community Resources, Criminal Justice , ,

During the upcoming February 28 municipal elections, Chicagoans will have a chance to directly elect civilian leaders to the newly created Police District Councils (PDCs).

The councils, like the citywide Community Commission on Public Safety and Accountability (CCPSA), are the product of the Empowering Communities for Public Safety (ECPS) ordinance, passed by the city in 2021. Both the PDCs and the CCPSA play similar and distinct roles in Chicago’s police accountability apparatus and represent the city’s most democratic attempt to monitor and regulate the Chicago Police Department’s (CPD) policies and behavior. 

Here’s the background* we think you should know before you vote.

* At the bottom of this page, we’ve included a few resources that can help you research your PDC candidates.

Police District Councils

There are 22 police districts in Chicago that cross ward boundaries–sometimes up to nine times. On February 28, 2023, Chicagoans will be asked to vote for candidates to take 66 council seats spread across the 22 police districts. Each PDC will consist of three elected members, including a chairperson, a community engagement coordinator, and a member of the citywide committee responsible for nominating members to the CCPSA. To be eligible for candidacy, individuals must live in the police district and cannot have been a member of the Chicago Police Department, Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA), Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA), or the Police Board for at least three years before they take office. The newly created councils have several responsibilities, some of which include developing and expanding restorative justice programs, soliciting input from community members about police department practices, and gathering input from community members to pass along to Commission members.

The district councils responsibilities are expanded upon in greater detail here. 

Community Commission on Public Safety and Accountability

One of the key responsibilities of the district councils is to nominate members to the CCPSA, casually referred to as the Commission. The Commission is empowered to exert more pointed influence over policing in Chicago. Following the upcoming municipal election, our 22 new district councils will nominate 14 candidates to the CCPSA, seven of whom will be selected by the Mayor to sit on the commission. Once confirmed, the CCPSA has various responsibilities to carry out, some of which include drafting police department policies (open to feedback from the public), identifying candidates to fill vacancies in several key public safety administration positions, and hiring or removing the COPA Chief Administrator.

The full range of the Commission’s responsibilities are available to read in greater detail here.

The PDC and CCPSA system represents Chicago’s latest attempt to enact police reform. However, we see a few key limitations of the system that raise concerns about how effective it will be at addressing the urgent problems of police violence and the lack of police accountability in our city.

History of Reform

Then and Now: What Have We Learned from Chicago’s Past Attempts at Police Reform?

For decades, Chicago has been rocked by ongoing and systemic failures in policing. Through multiple mayoral administrations, the city has made various attempts to construct agencies tasked with investigating incidents of police misconduct and otherwise overseeing the activity of one of the nation’s largest police forces. More often than not, however, the offices created to provide oversight to the Chicago Police Department have served as little more than symbolic responses to public outcries over CPD’s rampant abuse and over surveillance of Black and Latine communities. 

The new two-tiered system can trace its evolution back to Chicago’s previous bureaucratic inventions designed to, in some way, address consistent problems within CPD. Since the 1960s, grassroots coalitions led by Black and Latine groups and sparked by actions from the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party, have been mobilizing communities around the issue of police accountability in Chicago. Much of their work to establish civilian control of CPD was brutally thwarted by former mayoral administrations, police violence, and anti-black FBI surveillance. In the years following the assassination of Black revolutionaries, like Fred Hampton, and ongoing Chicago Police violence, elected officials made several pandering attempts to establish oversight of the police. 

In 1972, a congressional convening led by then U.S. Representative Ralph Metcalf led to the creation of the Office of Professional Standards (OPS). Composed of civilian members of CPD, the office was infamous for stifling misconduct investigations or outright neglecting to investigate numerous complaints. In 2007, Chicago City Council voted to replace OPS with the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) after decades of failed investigations and wildly apparent conflicts of interest. But moving oversight out of the department’s control did little to improve accountability, and IPRA was the source of public outrage for years, as its investigations routinely sided with law enforcement—even finding numerous CPD shootings to be justified. It wasn’t until 2016, following CPD’s murder of Laquan McDonald, that the City Council replaced IPRA with COPA, which investigates misconduct and makes recommendations to the Police Board. 

COPA functions independently of CPD and has concluded a number of investigations with recommendations for disciplinary actions against specific officers, but its influence amounts essentially to guidance. On top of that its investigation into misconduct is limited to use of force and specific civil rights violations. Anything that falls outside of COPA’s relatively narrow jurisdiction is taken on by the Bureau of Internal Affairs (BIA). Given that the BIA is housed within CPD, it similarly lacks true independence or concrete measures of accountability. 

While our city’s new Commission is equipped to do more than merely investigate matters of misconduct, the procedural restrictions placed on its predecessors demonstrate how effective they can be in preventing significant changes in policing from taking place.

Limitations: Vague Mandates and Diluted Power

Although the PDCs and the CCPSA represent Chicago’s most comprehensive approach toward democratizing decision-making meant to shape police practice and policy, the new entities face important limitations. While the new councils do provide residents with a chance to produce an elected body responsible for nominating members to the city-wide commission, the councils themselves largely take-up an advisory role; some of their roles are restricted to vaguely described tasks with uncertain outcomes. Take for instance, the requirement as characterized on the City of Chicago’s website that councils facilitate collaboration between police and residents, “to work on local initiatives rooted in community concerns and priorities.” Or, for example, their responsibility to, “collaborate in the development and implementation of community policing initiatives.” Neither task speaks with any clarity about how they are intended to lower police abuse and misconduct, or improve the community’s ability to exercise control over police action.

Without a clear mandate and goals, PDCs and the CCPSA will likely be left to spend their initial time determining their exact job description – precious time that could be spent addressing the myriad issues these groups were created to tackle. 

Much of the power of the Police District Councils and the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability is filtered through the Mayor and City Hall. When filling vacancies for positions, including Police Superintendent, the Police Board and its president, and COPA Chief Administrator, the Commission is able to exercise discretion in its choice of candidates. But the ordinance requires the Mayor to provide ultimate approval, which allows the Mayor to reject any and all of its nominated candidates, thereby sending the Commission back to the drawing board. This process dilutes the CCPSA’s authority to independently shape the make-up of our public safety administration. Similarly, while the CCPSA is authorized to draft and vote on police policies open to public comment, the Mayor can veto policies agreed upon by the Commission, which requires a two-thirds majority vote in City Council to override. 

The Commission does maintain the authority to dismiss the COPA Chief Administrator for cause (with approval from the City Council). It is worth noting, though, that COPA itself maintains little influence over CPD policies and practices. And what of the Commission’s involvement in the city’s police budget planning process? Under the new ordinance, the CCPSA is empowered to review CPD’s budget and make recommendations for proposed changes, but that is where their budgetary influence ends. The dilution of independent decision-making power or direct influence over CPD is a consistent theme in the ordinance, evident in the organization of both newly created entities and in certain procedural hurdles. 

The district councils play an important role in the construction of the more influential CCPSA, but again, they represent the city’s reluctance to allow residents the opportunity to directly exert influence over policing in Chicago. 

With PDCs’ power to nominate Commission members, organizers must not only continue working to shift the ideological composition of City Hall and the Mayor’s office, but now must also work to control the political leanings of these new district councils. Unsuccessfully controlling their ideological make-up may lead to the creation of a Commission rife with individuals less willing to challenge and scrutinize police policy and practice. Even if we are to assume that organizers are successful in mobilizing voter support for PDCs that are progressive in their approach to police reform and accountability, the new ordinance’s requirement that the Mayor decide which 7 of the 14 nominees sits on the Commission further strips power away from voters and their elected representatives. This would allow a mayor uninterested in meaningful police reform to simply pick the nominees that are least likely to make meaningful change. 

Who Polices the Police? Support for the Community’s Proposal for Oversight of the Chicago Police Department

This problem is compounded by the fact that PDCs, which play a key role in nominating members to the CCPSA, are organized by police district. Our police districts are large and encompass multiple wards and community areas. This presents a problem, given the extreme racial and economic segregation of Chicago’s neighborhoods. Although a given district may comprise predominantly Black or Latine community areas where residents have long standing desires to minimize police activity, they sometimes share their police districts with enclaves home to current and former members of law enforcement. For example, the 8th district is one of the largest by area in the city, and contains both heavily policed areas like Roseland, which has a population that is over 95% Black, as well as the mostly White (81%) enclave of Mount Greenwood, which is home to many people in law enforcement. 

While the CCPSA and PDCs may represent Chicago’s most significant step toward enhancing police accountability and shifting problematic policies, their formation is littered with evidence of the city government’s attempts to restrain their authority. These obvious restrictions on the public’s ability to control CPD aren’t mere happenstance. They are the political product of a city council and mayoral office that have time and again responded to police injustices with the creation of bureaucratic agencies often armed with superficial reformative powers.

What’s Next?

As shown previously, the fight to accomplish transformative police reform spans multiple generations. By tracing the evolution of Chicago’s police accountability mechanisms one thing seems abundantly clear: Without independent and direct civilian control over CPD’s policies and operation, any effort to influence police so as to save lives and significantly curb unnecessary contact with law enforcement is (at least to an extent) paying lip service to injustice. Primarily Black and Latine organizers have fought across multiple eras to help dismantle the harms of policing. Without their effort, it is highly likely that our discourse on policing would still be entirely limited to conversations about “bad apples”; because of their efforts, the discourse about policing now recognizes the systemic failings of our police force. 

Voting for our soon-to-be-formed PDCs may be an important step toward enhancing police oversight.

But when making those decisions, we cannot lose sight of how pervasive the culture of policing is within our city government, nor can we forget how determined certain elected leaders may be to placate residents while neglecting to meaningfully hold our police force accountable. 

Resources

Before voting for your three Police District Council members on February 28, check out the following resources to learn about your candidates:

Kareem Butler (he/him) is a Pretrial Justice Fellow with Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts, where his work primarily focuses on the statewide implementation of the Pretrial Fairness Act, passed in 2021, with the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice (INPJ).