Lightfoot says civilian police oversight plan coming ‘soon’
Chicago aldermen said Friday that community groups were nearing agreement on two separate, longdebated policing oversight proposals and would have had an ordinance ready for a City Council vote by next week if Mayor Lori Lightfoot had not asked for a delay.
The aldermen, who are working with two community coalitions to find compromise, said 11 sticking points had been narrowed to fewer than four in advance of a planned Friday committee vote on an ordinance, which was delayed after Lightfoot asked for time to craft her own plan.
“We have been meeting around the clock behind closed doors …. to pass and to bring forward a strong version of civilian oversight,” Ald. Carlos RamirezRosa, 35th, said at a Friday morning news conference. “We’ve been coming closer and closer and closer … to really working out our differences. … We would have gotten there. I am just so disappointed. … We want our mayor to be supportive of these efforts, not to be someone who is hampering our progress.”
Lightfoot’s hand-picked Public Safety Committee chairman on Thursday postponed a scheduled vote on the two ordinance proposals, referred to as CPAC and GAPA, after the mayor told him she wants to bring forward her own ordinance next month.
The mayor, speaking at a separate event Friday, pointed to her long track record on this issue, saying hers isn’t an eleventh-hour move to derail the other ordinances.
“In 2016, I led the Police Accountability Task Force. In that report was a recommendation regarding civilian oversight,” Lightfoot said, referring to the group she chaired for Mayor Rahm Emanuel in the aftermath of the Laquan McDonald police shooting. “There’s nothing last-minute about my involvement in this work.”
“We will put together a proposal. We’ve been doing a lot of listening from all sides, including the GAPA folks, including others who have come to the table about civilian oversight. But civilian oversight is something that I started the conversation in this city about almost five years ago,” the mayor said at a news conference after receiving her second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Lightfoot refused to discuss specifics of her plan, saying only that it will be out soon and that the public will need to “wait and see.”
For sure, the creation of a community oversight board that would have strong input and control over the Chicago Police Department is high stakes for the mayor. For some four years the community groups have debated critical issues such as control of policy and the ability to fire a superintendent. This week they reached agreement on policy.
Community oversight of policing is now considered essential for policing reform, especially in a city such as Chicago, with its decades of documented abuses against citizens in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. The Police Department is currently undergoing court-ordered reform, in fact, to correct these widespread problems.
Lightfoot on Friday said she’s confident she will have the City Council votes to overcome a coalition of aldermen who might come together to back a compromise ordinance agreed to by supporters of the GAPA and CPAC plans. The Public Safety Committee, which will consider the plans, tilts
heavily toward aldermen who are mayoral allies.
“I do a lot of talking to aldermen,” she said. “I feel very confident about where those proposals lie. I have a pretty good sense of what’s going to happen there. So we’ll see. We’re going to put out our proposal, which borrows from, I think, the best that we’ve seen here and across the country, and it’ll be what it’s going to be.”
At the news conference, however, speakers on behalf of the GAPA said conversations with the mayor had ended, saying it was her decision to “leave the table.”
“What did we do? The only thing we know how to
do — fight,” said organizer Carlil Pittman, a co-founder of GoodKids MadCity and an organizer at Southwest Organizing Project. “We worked harder and made our ordinance stronger.”
The two community coalitions had been in meetings up until this week ironing out differences on key areas. This came after years of each group organizing and pushing individual plans at hearings and in neighborhoods.
At the news conference, speakers from both groups also repeatedly stressed the successful effort at compromise.
Ald. Roderick Sawyer,
6th, said he was disappointed in the mayor’s decision but remained confident she wants to see police reform, and said he hoped she’d be willing to meet with the groups on making it happen.
“We have gone a long way in working collaboratively toward making an ordinance that the city of Chicago can be proud of,” said Sawyer, a co-sponsor of the GAPA proposal. “The real effort is (for her) to come with us and discuss it with us.”
The founder of the Lake County chapter of Black Lives Matter has been charged in Wisconsin with a felony count of attempted battery dating to Aug. 24, when protests rocked Kenosha following the police shooting of Jacob Blake.
An arrest warrant was issued Friday in Kenosha County for Clyde J. McLemore, 62, of Zion, on charges of aggravated battery or threats to a judge, prosecutor or law enforcement officer, as well as a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct, according to Kenosha County Circuit Court records. Kenosha officials could not be reached for comment Saturday.
According to a criminal complaint, the incident occurred about 2:20 p.m.
Aug. 24 when Mayor John Antaramian held a news conference at the Public Safety Building, 1000 55th St.
An “unruly crowd” formed and tried to force its way into the building, so officers from the Civil Disturbance Response Team were called to disperse the crowd.
Someone told a detective that McLemore posted images of himself on Facebook that showed him kicking the front door of the Public Safety Building and bragging that he was trying to break the fingers of an officer who was pulling the door shut, the complaint said. A detective found the images on McLemore’s Facebook page that were posted on Aug. 25.
McLemore wrote in the post that the officer whose fingers he was trying to break was a Kenosha police lieutenant who he said grabbed a Black girl, used her as a shield, and went inside and grabbed the door to close it, the complaint said. McLemore “attempted to intentionally threaten to cause bodily harm” to an officer, according to the complaint.
In a public Facebook post, McLemore wrote: “instead of filing criminal charges against the officer that attempted to murder Jacob Blake instead Kenosha County Government District Attorney Michael Graveley chose to go after me for kicking a door.”
“It’s sad to see in America that a Door is more important than the life of a Black man or woman,” McLemore said in the post.
McLemore wrote to a Tribune reporter in a Facebook message that he will not be doing an interview until he surrenders.
Blake was shot seven times on Aug. 23 by Officer Rusten Sheskey, who was not charged in the shooting. Graveley said he would not be able to disprove Sheskey’s self-defense claims.
A video of the shooting sparked both peaceful protests and violent demonstrations over several days that left two people dead. Kyle Rittenhouse, 18, is free on $2 million bond after being charged with murder in those shootings. Rittenhouse, 18, of Antioch, was allegedly in town to protect businesses amid the protests.
Blake, 29, is now paralyzed from the waist down and lives in chronic pain as a result of the shooting.