Lightfoot warns of backlash if Rahm stalls civilian oversight
Mayor Rahm Emanuel will face a furious political backlash if he refuses to empower a civilian oversight board to fire the police superintendent and establish police policy or attempts to stall a City Council vote until after the 2019 mayoral election, Police Board President Lori Lightfoot warned Tuesday.
Sounding more and more like a mayoral challenger, Lightfoot embraced the sweeping proposal drafted by the Grassroots Alliance for Police Accountability ( GAPA) and warned Emanuel to get on board a “ship that is sailing.”
“The mayor endorsed this process two years ago. . . . Any effort to stall it and not let it see the light of day, not engage in the City Council process . . . will bemet with extreme, extreme hostility. And it will be taken out on them in February of 2019,” Lightfoot said.
Fraternal Order of Police President Kevin Graham was equally outspoken in opposition to civilian oversight, underscoring the political box Emanuel is in.
Graham said “policing is becoming almost impossible in Chicago” because of layers of oversight that already exist by the FBI, the Illinois State Police, the state’s attorney’s office, a Civilian Office of Police Accountability that has officers “under virtual siege” and an “exceedingly biased media.”
“The democracy this group supposedly demands already exists. The mayor is elected. So is the City Council. Complaints about the police and new policies emerge from and are endorsed by this institution,” Graham wrote in an emailed statement.
Graham said failure to “convince these elected officials and the general public that the police are villains . . . is not a green light to override the city’s elected officials to push their own measures. That’s not democracy. It’s chaos mislabeled as reform.”
Emanuel has already signaled a goslow approach by arguing that the civilian oversight he promised two years ago but failed to deliver must be “complementary — not contradictory” to the city’s “public safety goals.”
Chicago Police Supt. Eddie Johnson has argued that civilians “don’t have the professional acumen to develop strategy” for the Police Department.
Lightfoot co- chaired the Mayor’s Task Force on Police Accountability that forced the mayor to abolish the Independent Police Review Authority and recommended the civilian oversight board.
At a City Hall news conference Tuesday called to make the case for the sweeping ordinance, Lightfoot said she expected opposition from the FOP. But she urged the mayor, aldermen and police officers to remain “open to discussion and debate.”
The plan outlined for aldermen this week during closed- door briefings calls for the seven- member commission to be chosen by elected representatives from the 22 police districts.
The commission would be empowered to choose the Police Board and the head of the Civilian Office of Police Accountability ( COPA) that replaced IPRA and conduct annual reviews of the superintendent, the COPA chief and the Police Board president.
All three could be fired for cause. It would take a twothirds vote of the City Council to reverse a firing of the police superintendent ordered by the civilian commission.
Only six aldermen joined co- sponsors Roderick Sawyer ( 6th) and Harry Osterman ( 48th) at Tuesday’s news conference: Ricardo Munoz ( 22nd); Chris Taliaferro ( 29th); Scott Waguespack ( 32nd); Deb Mell ( 33rd); James Cappleman ( 46th) and Ameya Pawar ( 47th).
That’s a clear indication that supporters face an uphill battle.