Don't Hold Your Breath! The Mayor’s Chokehold on GAPA
It has been a year since Lori Lightfoot took office and she has yet to fulfill a critical promise to communities of color to establish a civilian oversight board over the Chicago Police Department. As a candidate for Mayor, Lightfoot fully supported civilian oversight of the Chicago Police Department and stated that Grassroots Alliance for Police Accountability was the best solution to provide that oversight. We counted on her to stand by her promise to pass GAPA within her first 100 days. Yet here we are, almost a year later, and GAPA still has not passed.
GAPA, a collaborative of community organizations encompassing 30 different wards, came together in the summer of 2016, in direct response to the Police Accountability Task Force’s recommendation to develop a Community Safety Oversight Board, allowing the community to have a powerful platform and role in the police oversight system. The GAPA collaborative has held countless planning meetings and a multitude of community hearings to help draft the ordinance originally supported by the Mayor.
The Ordinance was geared up for passage this past February, had been through the necessary hearings from the City Council’s Public Safety Committee with a strong endorsement for passage. Suddenly, the following day, the Mayor had a problem with certain language that allowed the Citizen Commission established under the ordinance to draft language for changes in police policy, wanting to leave that to the lawyers at CPD. She wanted to take out a provision allowing the GAPA Commission to cast a vote of no confidence in a Police Superintendent that would then prompt a City Council hearing. She suddenly did not like the required composition of the 7- person Commission, recommended by local Councils to be made up of lawyers, a community organizer, and community reps, including two youth who had been directly affected by police abuse… some concern that 3 community residents was too many. What was the problem? Life experience not good enough credentials for her? Or maybe it wouldn’t pass the litmus test for the white people in power who support her?
The bottom line is that the Mayor, suddenly having to give some power back to the communities that elected her, began to backtrack, now to the point that the GAPA ordinance, in its current form and even if passed, would not allow the necessary time for local Council candidates to get signatures to be on the ballot for November.
What hasn’t changed is the continued action of some police officers in harassing people of color and the officers who are doing their jobs, but still part of a dysfunctional system where they cast a blind eye to the abuses of their fellow officers. The horrific killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the recent racist killing of jogger Ahmaud Arbery, and the recent election of an FOP President with a litany of citizen complaints against him, have again raised the fear level in the male members of our community and in those who care about them.
The Mayor has said publicly several times that there are two epidemics affecting our communities of color – COVID-19 and Gun Violence. Like Mayor Emanuel before her, she says the right things, but the proof is in substantive action, fulfilling her promise to the black and Latinx communities.
Meanwhile, the thousands of Chicago residents who counted on an Ordinance that would establish substantive citizen oversight of the Chicago Police Department, still mired in dysfunction, racism, sexism, nepotism and rogue cops will have to wait. A broken promise to a broken community. Who will be the next Laquan McDonald, the next George Floyd? At this point, the citizens will have no voice in preventing it. Thanks a lot, Mayor!
Fr. Larry Dowling, Pastor, St. Agatha Catholic Church, North Lawndale
St. Agatha is a member church of Community Renewal Society, a GAPA partner