This week, the City Council’s Public Safety Committee advanced Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s nominations for three open seats on the Chicago Police Board.
The mandate to fill vacancies on the city’s most powerful police accountability panel presented the mayor with a prime opportunity to consummate one of her core campaign promises to communities long besieged by abusive law enforcement practices.
As a candidate, Lightfoot vowed to dismantle Chicago’s pernicious system of racialized police brutality. So it came as a stunning disappointment to local reform advocates when the mayor failed to endorse a single candidate who would offer a measure of independence or community perspective to the Chicago Police Board.
Lightfoot opted instead for the retention of two of former Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s police board nominees and the appointment of a high-ranking operative in the administration of former Mayor Richard M. Daley.
As an appointed body, the Chicago Police Board has historically lacked the independence and grassroots representation required to eradicate corruption, violence and impunity within the Chicago Police Department.
Through the nomination process, the mayor and City Council implicitly bestow their staunch political loyalty to city law enforcement upon board members.
As a result, the oversight commission has served as an obstruction rather than an instrument of progressive reform.
The Chicago Police Board consistently abstains from exercising its authority to issue policy recommendations to the police department, and in reviewing incidents of officer wrongdoing, seldom pursues justice.
In 2018, the Chicago Police Board upheld the superintendent’s recommendation for disciplinary termination, in only 38% of the cases it considered.
Lightfoot’s insider nominations explicitly endorse the police board status quo and confirm a long held assertion among local reform activists: In order to advance safety, equity and justice for all Chicago neighborhoods, residents must assert direct community control over the police.
To this end, the Workers Center for Racial Justice is mobilizing voters to place a binding referendum on the 2020 ballot that would make the Chicago Police Board a directly elected representative body.
We urgently call upon Chicagoans to turn out in 2020 to vote in favor of this critical measure and demand that the mayor and City Council respect the principles of direct democracy and resist the political impulse to block this measure from the ballot.
DeAngelo Bester, South Side
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‘No generation always fails, not even baby boomers’
Hopefully some Chicago teachers will make Neil Steinberg’s Sept. 3 Sun-Times column required, or at least highly recommended, reading.
Not long ago someone noticed that there were now children who never knew a world without MTV. Or, remember that girl who was surprised when her mom told her that Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?
Steinberg writes that by early 2025, many students won’t remember a time when Donald Trump wasn’t president.
Unsettling.
Most students today probably don’t remember when many of today’s societal ills weren’t attributed to baby boomers. All I can say as a boomer is, no excuses here.
But, if those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, please consider pre-2016 history before judging us by our current president. We’ve always elected flawed presidents, including baby boomers.
President Bill Clinton’s googled name will display Monica Lewinsky; President Barack Obama’s will recall his Syrian “red line in the sand”; before them President Lyndon Johnson will be inseparable from Vietnam.
Further study shows that Clinton also balanced the budget, Obama helped veterans with a $78 billion tuition assistance GI bill and Johnson gave us the Great Society programs.
No generation always fails, not even baby boomers. I suspect, perhaps naively, that there is more hatefulness than actual hate among those who disagree.
Thanks to medical advancements and a generational affinity for exercise, we boomers, for better or worse, may be around a long time.
We all might as well get along.
James H. Newton, Itasca
