Lights, camera, action: City Council committee meetings now streaming live

The meeting of the Committee on Public Safety, which might otherwise have had trouble attracting a quorum, dragged on for nearly three hours.

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Chicago City Council, meeting on May 29, 2019.

Chicago City Council committee hearings now are being streamed live. The first to go online was Wednesday’s meeting of the Committee on Public Safety.

Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times

It’s taken years to livestream City Council committee meetings to shine the light on the place where the real legislative work gets done.

On Wednesday, it finally happened with the Committee on Public Safety as the guinea pig. The impact on attendance and performance was dramatic.

The meeting, which might otherwise have had trouble attracting a quorum, dragged on for nearly three hours.

In all, 22 aldermen showed up to confirm three of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Police Board appointees and talk about the latest quarterly report from the Civilian Office of Police Accountability.

“We do have a very short agenda. Only four items,” said Public Safety Committee Chairman Chris Taliaferro (29th).

Famous last words.

Aldermen from across the city took turns in the spotlight by peppering the nominees with questions.

They demanded to know why disciplinary cases against wayward Chicago Police officers still take years to adjudicate even though swift justice is required to restore public trust shattered by the police shooting of Laquan McDonald.

“We had a case we announced last month. A case of child abuse. This happened to a very young child. He ended up testifying at the administrative hearing and he was a grown man. From the time that the complaint had been filed when he was 7, he was then 18 or 19 by the time the case was resolved. And that’s unacceptable,” said Police Board member Paula Wolff, who was re-appointed after taking Lightfoot’s place on the Police Board a year ago.

“It’s really, really, really slow. Part of the community’s concern about the accountability system is that it feels as if things just get dumped into the system, and then they never get anything back and they don’t know what’s going on. ... We’ve now asked that, with every case, we get a chronology. When was the complaint filed? Where are the hold-ups?”

Ald. Ray Lopez (15th), the mayor’s most outspoken City Council critic, accused the Police Board of abdicating its responsibility to recommend changes in police policy.

“That is what the law requires you to do. ... To be there for a year and say that it’s not really your place or the board’s place to actually come up with policy is somewhat insulting given the totality of what the board is supposed to be doing,” Lopez told Wolff.

Wolff countered: “If you read our decisions closely, you’ll see that we have been pointing out places where we think the Police Department can make administrative changes.”

But she also argued that the Police Board is only “one piece of the puzzle.” The inspector general and a federal monitor “see other parts of the puzzle.” The total package is “helping all of us figure out what kinds of policies need to be changed,” she said.

Last month, the Police Board voted to fire four Chicago Police officers accused of covering up for Jason Van Dyke, the officer convicted of shooting Laquan McDonald.

Police Board member John O’Malley Jr., another re-appointee, was asked to justify his lone dissenting vote against the firing of Daphne Sebastian.

“My opinion was her statements did not rise to the level of being dishonest. It was her perception,” O’Malley said.  

“My experience of actually being involved in life and death situations and how fast those appear before you. Your lack of, sometimes visual, audible surroundings, a very rich environment, as we all know in that case. That was my opinion.”

As a new board member, former federal prosecutor Matt Crowl was spared the tough questioning.

He was simply asked about the dramatic decline in homicides during his tenure as deputy chief of staff for public safety under former Mayor Richard M. Daley and what lessons from that decline can be applied to the current fight against violent crime.

Crowl was on Daley’s staff when the mayor’s nephew, Richard J. Vanecko, punched David Koschman on April 25, 2004. Crowl was subsequently identified in special prosecutor Dan Webb’s report as the mayoral aide who, within days, told Daley about Vanecko’s involvement.

“There is a sense more recently among police officers that it’s harder out there for them to do their job. I’m not sure that’s really the case. But that’s the perception. And I think there’s a sense right now in the community that there’s less trust that crime is going to be solved and that the police are working collaboratively with them,” Crowl said.

“Having the kinds of crime numbers across the board — not just with murders — with other cities we’re better than: New York and Los Angeles. Why can’t we have the same kind of numbers that they have? That’s our challenge.”

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