While nearly 60 people spoke at a public meeting on civilian oversight of the Chicago Police Department, none of them came out in favor of the reform proposals pitched by the head of the City Council’s public safety committee who’s been hosting a series of meetings on police reform.
But the CPAC plan has been repeatedly written off by city officials. Reboyras, a staunch ally of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, has said giving elected civilians the power to hire and fire the police superintendent is “out of the question.” But the proposal has received renewed attention in light of GAPA’s ordinance—introduced in March by Sixth Ward alderman Roderick Sawyer and 48th Ward alderman Harry Osterman—and Reboyras’s response to it.
“These hearings have been set up very wrong, to pit CPAC and GAPA against each other,” said Tonii Magitt, an organizer with Good Kids Mad City who supports the GAPA proposal. “We’re trying to work collectively to build policy that’s not discriminatory towards black and brown communities.”
“In the last six years there have been about 17,000 people who have been shot in the city—less than 1 percent of those are officer-involved shootings,” said Kevin Graham, the president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge Seven, the union representing rank-and-file cops. “One of the things that I would like to see done is more openness so that you understand how investigations work, because obviously there are people who don’t think that things are fair. These ordinances are not going to do that.”
After the meeting, asked by the Reader whether he felt swayed in any particular direction by all that he’d heard, Reboyras said he had, but that he wasn’t ready to discuss it in further detail. “I’m not tied to any of the four ordinances, including the ones that I submitted,” he said. “It’s just a matter of choice and see what works the best, and we’re gonna work on that.”
Frank Chapman, of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, also said his group is open to coordinating with GAPA, but not at the expense of the fundamental principal of its proposal: to wrest control of the police department from the mayor.
