Sheriff’s office faces 4% budget cut in proposal
The day after her husband’s death on Easter Sunday, Cassandra Greer-Lee got up from her couch and rummaged for a piece of cardboard, she said. With a black Sharpie, she wrote, “#Justice for Nick” and headed to Cook County Jail, where her husband Nickolas Lee had been locked up before he died ofCOVID-19.
Greer-Lee said she had never protested before and didn’t knowwhat slogans to chant. As she planted her feet under the shadow of the barbed fences, she came to realize the writing on her sign was too small for passing drivers to read, she said.
“Everyone talked about how Chicago is so big. I never realized howempty it was until I openedmy front door and walked out with that sign because the unknown is scary,” Greer-Lee said. “But I just knew my heart was gone. My heart was broken. I lost my best friend. I was numb. So I took that sign. I stood in front of the Cook County Jail.”
Greer-Lee, fueled by what she saidwas the belief that jail officials did not act swiftly enough to curb the coronavirus during the early days of the pandemic, kept protesting outside the facility this summer to call for defunding the jail. (Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart and a medical paper have said Cook County Jail successfully stamped out an initial outbreak.) An influx of other activists soon joined her, she said, after the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd in May, which sparked a nationwide movement that led thousands to march in Chicago for causes such as reallocating law enforcement funds.
In July, Cook County commissioners overwhelmingly passed a reso
lution that said the county should “redirect funds from policing and incarceration to public services.”
Several months later, as commissioners get set to vote in the comingweekson Cook County’s proposed budget for the next fiscal
year, Greer-Lee and other activists said they feel the county is making strides toward reallocating funding fromthe sheriff’s office. But they also said Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle’s proposed $25.9 million cut in the sheriff’s budget, which is about a 4.2% decrease and includes the elimination of about 300 vacant positions, is a disappointment after they clamored for much greater divestment.
A coalition of advocacy groups such as The People’s Lobby, Southsiders Organized for Unity and Liberation, Shriver Center on PovertyLawand ChicagoCommunity Bond Fund joined with Greer-Lee and the union National Nurses United in September outside of Stroger Hospital to roll out their own budget plan, dubbed the “Budget for Black Lives.” Their blueprint, among other things, called for cutting funding to the sheriff’s office by $157 million, and followed the County Board’s nonbinding “Justice for Black Lives” resolution.
“Twenty-five million is not a number that we want to see,” TanyaWatkins, executive director of SOUL, said. “Twenty-five million is not enough. One hundred and fifty-seven million is not enough. But we are moving in the right direction.”
The “defund the police” movement, which calls for shifting law enforcement dollars into other social services and, for some, abolishing police entirely, became a rallying cry for protesters nationwide in the wake of Floyd’s death. In Chicago, Watkins said, activists have targeted the Chicago police and Cook County Jail budget for years as high-profile abuses such as the murder of Laquan McDonald have convinced them that other entities can best keep their communities safe.
In an October speech, Preckwinkle said her budget proposal included a historic level of cash for “equity- focused investments.” Her plan includes $20 million more toward the Justice Advisory Council for street outreach, restorative justice and reentry services for formerly incarcerated people over the next two years. Another extra $20 million would go toward economic development and housing assistance.
But when it comes to reallocating law enforcement funding, Preckwinkle has said the reduction in her proposed 2021 budget is a response to massive budget woes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to a question on the radio show Connected to Chicago about how much her budget plan would move money from law enforcement to equity programs, she said, “We’re not.” She elaborated to reporters that each officewas askedto reduce budgets in light of a $409 million coronavirusdriven shortfall for 2021.
After the July meeting in which commissioners passed the “Justice for Black Lives” resolution, Preckwinkle reiterated her support for reducing law enforcement funds — a break fromher political rivalMayor Lori Lightfoot, who has said the “defund” cause is a “hashtag.”
At the city level, Lightfoot is facing her own pressure from aldermen and activists who want to see her make more Police Department cuts as she tries to get the City Council to pass a budget that plugs a $1.2 billion 2021 shortfall.
Lightfoot plans to cut the Police Department budget by about 3.4% next year by eliminating more than 600 vacant positions. But critics want her to go further to lower the department’s share of total city spending as the mayor prepares to lay off hundreds of workers in other city agencies and proposes a series of tax increases, including a $94 million property tax hike.
Lightfoot has repeatedly said meaningfully reducing the Police Department budget would require firing police. Most Chicagoans don’t want that, according to the mayor, who has said cutting the most recently hired officers as required under the city’s contract with the Fraternal Order of Police would hurt the department’s diversity by getting rid of many young Black and Latino members of the department.
For Dart, Preckwinkle’s current plan represents “a little of both” diverting resources from the sheriff’s office and a reflection of financial strain from the pandemic, his spokesman Matt Walberg wrote in a statement.
“Sheriff Dart has long said that there is a critical need to increase the kinds of programs and services — both within the community and in the sheriff’s office — to prevent or break the cycles of violence, poverty, mental health, and substance abuse disorders,” Walbergwrote.
Dart has dismissed the call to defund police departments as a “sound bite,” saying he believes his office provides the very social services that protesters want.
“The defund folks, they’re misplaced because I always said, OK well then what’s your solution, what are you going to do once you defund the police?” Dart said during a City Club of Chicago speech in July. “There needs to be changes, absolutely needs to be changes, but the defunding part of it does not make sense as far as it doesn’t begin to address any of these issues at all.”
During a November budget hearing, Dart stressed to commissioners that the concessions he agreed to in the 2021 budget plan are “workable” for only that year, predicting that afterward he might need to recoup some of the eliminated vacant positions.
Out of the 4.2% proposed cut to the sheriff’s office, divisions overseeing incarceration would not see a substantial drop. The Department of Corrections would see a net increase of $5.4 million from last year, despite about $3.1 million less in non-personnel funds because of a decrease in the jail population. In community corrections, which oversees electronic monitoring, there would be a $29,000 net increase that accounts for eliminated vacant positions but a jump in operations and maintenance expenses because of the rise in the electronicmonitoring population.
The sheriff ’s office’s court services division, which provides security at courthouses and executes court orders, would see one of the deepest cuts at nearly $23 million after getting rid of a net 264 vacant positions. The police department of more than 500 officers would get about $1.5 million more, mostly due to increased benefits costs.
April Friendly, an organizer with The People’s Lobby, said the overall proposal was “a very small step.”
“The money we saw coming out of the sheriff’s departmentwere dollars for vacant positions essentially, so the actual reduction from the sheriff’s budget I would say is not in line with how do we reduce this footprint of harm into our communities,” Friendly said.
On the county side, efforts to reallocate funding from policing and incarceration likely aren’t going away. LanettaHaynesTurner, Preckwinkle’s chief of staff, said during a budget hearing in November that while law enforcement is necessary, some of their functions can be served by other entities.
“One of the first areas that we’re going to address is the re-imagination of public safety in alignment with the Justice for Black Lives and the moment,” Haynes Turner said. “Where are there opportunities to realign or shift or reallocate resources from the separately elected offices and back to communities?”
Greer-Lee, the protester whose husband died at the jail, said she will be closely following the matter. Still staking out Cook County Jail with her signs on Sundays, she said she doesn’t consider herself an activist but simply a “hurt widow.”
“Reality has set in that I will never talk to my husband again,” Greer-Lee said. “I’m never tired, but some days the devastation of grief overtakesme.”