Dyer is a road patrol deputy-turned social worker who campaigned on a reform vision that includes trying to steer people away from the justice system rather than draw them into it. Her win in November is a culmination of prior wins by a coalition of reformers in the county that also brought progressives into the prosecutor’s office and courts. 

Dyer has worked with these reformers to lay out plans to reduce unnecessary police encounters and arrests by limiting officers from making stops for certain low-level violations. She has pledged to address the stark racial disparities in traffic enforcement by ending quotas for traffic stops, and says arrests are the wrong tools for dealing with substance abuse and the opioid crisis: Her approach rejects the war on drugs and aims to steer people towards support rather than criminal punishment.

“Looking at the disparities involving drug arrests, there was a general understanding that we don’t want officers wasting their time,” Dyer told Bolts in an interview. “There is a frustration when officers are nickel and diming or getting involved in low-level things, and a frustration with pretext stops in general was resounding countywide.”

Dyer’s platform appealed broadly to voters in the liberal college town of Ann Arbor, as well as the surrounding rural areas where even many voters with more conservative values are fed up with the kind of policing that cycles people through the legal system without addressing their needs. 

But to effectively carry out her plans, Dyer will also need allies in the justice system. She has at least one in Eli Savit, who was just reelected as Washtenaw’s Prosecuting Attorney after running unopposed. Savit first won office in 2020 at the height of the racial justice movement that swept through the country following the police killing of George Floyd. The movement helped give rise to a brand of progressive prosecutors including Savit, who embraced a less punitive approach that broke away from his tough-on-crime predecessor. His office took aim at the issue of racial profiling by announcing he would drop the charges in situations where officers use minor traffic violations as an excuse to search for drugs or other contraband. A slew of other policies offered leniency towards juveniles arrested on minor offenses, and declined charges for consensual sex work and certain low-level drug crimes — but those reforms can only make an impact after an arrest has already been made. 

Now with Dyer as the county’s top cop and Savit as its lead prosecutor, they hope to move these reforms forward by working collaboratively on policies that were previously siloed in different parts of the justice system. 

“What you see in Washtenaw is a lot of different partners in conjunction with the community are largely working towards the same goals and from the same playbook,” Savit said. “It reflects our community values. Ultimately, what people in Washtenaw want is for us to work together to get people on the right track, rather than cycling them through the justice system over and over again in an ineffective fashion.”

In November of 2020, Savit’s win was hailed as a success for the progressive prosecutor movement that for at least a decade has sought to reform local DA offices across the country. His policies gave reformers in Washtenaw an inroad for curbing the harm wrought on by excessive criminal punishment by deflecting some low-level arrests. 

Savit regards his policy on pretextual stops — where minor traffic violations are used as an excuse to search cars for contraband — as a success. His office initially declined several of those cases, Savit told Bolts. But soon, police agencies across the county largely stopped sending those kinds of cases to his office. The approach later gained support in Ann Arbor, the county’s largest city, where the city council unanimously voted last year to limit police from stopping drivers for minor violations like cracked windshields or broken taillights that do not pose any risk to traffic safety. 

Now with Dyer in office as well, organizers hope to stop even more of those arrests from happening in the first place. 

“Our racial disparities in low level traffic stops are through the roof at the sheriff’s office,” Dyer told Bolts. “Regardless if the prosecutor decides to charge a case, the harm is still caused at the forefront. Avoiding those stops when possible, when it’s not a safety-related issue, is really important. There are so many instances where somebody has been pulled over, pulled out their car and searched. The police find nothing. They let them go, but the harm stays with that person.”

Like Dyer, Savit also embraced a legal strategy for addressing drugs that is focused on harm reduction and rehabilitation rather than punishment. His office decriminalized the possession and distribution of controlled medications like methadone and buprenorphine that are used to treat opioid addiction and curb fentanyl use. Like with the traffic stop arrests, very few of those cases now come across Savit’s desk. The remaining arrests for illegal possession of methadone or buprenorphine mostly come from people incarcerated in nearby prisons, and Savit’s office typically drops those cases, he said. Even though prosecutors rarely need to decline charges now, it is critical to have a public policy in place so the fear of criminal penalties will not deter people from accessing life saving medications, he said. 

“Why on earth would we want to be discouraging somebody from using a medicine that we know is an alternative to using a dangerous drug that could kill them? We want less overdose deaths, not more. ” Savit told Bolts.

But a policy of non-enforcement is only effective if the entire criminal legal system is aligned across prosecutors and police, which isn’t the case for most places in the state. As Michigan has scaled up harm reduction initiatives in recent years—funded in part by payouts from pharmaceutical companies acquired through opioid settlements—the enforcement around controlled methadone and buprenorphine has been a patchwork across the state and even within Washtenaw County. 

Dyer’s position—that criminal enforcement and arrests are the wrong way to address addiction issues—is rooted in her background as a social worker and therapist. She has advocated for unarmed community responders and public health outreach workers to deal with opioids, rather than police. And she plans to end internal quotas that encourage officers to make stops, search people for drugs, and cite or arrest them for minor drug violations.

Having a sheriff who’s onboard with harm reduction tactics helps establish a uniform approach to managing the opioid crisis, said Jonathan Laye, program director for Supportive Connections, a social service group aimed at steering people away from the justice system.

“The county is definitely starting to go in the right direction when it comes to prioritizing treatment or engagement rather than locking people up over petty stuff. The question is really getting people in the right places who understand the difference between a symptom and a crime,” Laye said.

Even when police don’t make arrests for drug paraphernalia, those items are sometimes still used by officers as probable cause to justify a search, said Cindy Bodewes, president of the Washtenaw Regional Organizing Coalition, a grassroots group pushing for reforms in the county. She hopes Dyer will bridge the “disconnect between the prosecutor’s strategy and arrest strategy,” Bodewes said.

“That’s why it is so important to have a law enforcement policy in place in order to have harm reduction in a community where they don’t have to be looking over their shoulder, afraid of the police taking action, regardless of whether they can be charged or not,” Dyer said.

Even when prosecutors signal that they will not pursue certain cases, changing the culture and behavior of police departments can be more difficult. Police leaders don’t always know what is happening on the ground, and are sometimes unaware that officers need to be brought up to speed on policy changes, Bodewes said. That is why it is important for grassroots organizations and community members to have a way to “report directly to the sheriff,” she said.

Dyer says her experience as a rank-and-file deputy showed her the extent to which officers are often slow to adapt to new policing strategies, especially when changes are not written into department policy and backed with additional training. 

She is forming community advisory committees on issues like traffic stops, jail visitation and mental health to bolster transparency and accountability by allowing the public to help shape department policy. Savit formed similar committees after first winning office to develop his reforms, which also helped prosecutors develop a restorative justice process that diverts people from criminal punishments. Dyer aims to create another group of diverse community voices to make policy recommendations directly to her office. It’s another step, she says, to ensure that her advisors are not just an echo chamber of police brass: critics will have access to the inner workings of the department.hold their elected officials accountable. 

“Having a community that is educated around what we’re doing, our operations, our policies, can be a really powerful ally to make sure that what I think is happening at the top is what’s actually happening at the bottom,” Dyer said.

Dyer’s and Savits’ victories last month were an exception to what was largely a nationwide turn away from reform politics. 

In Chicago, retiring State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, who championed reforms like the abolition of cash bail statewide and the development of the nation’s first restorative justice community court, will be replaced by tough-on-crime Democrat Eileen O’Neill Burke, who has promised to roll back some of Foxx’s policies. In Los Angeles and Alameda Counties, progressive prosecutors George Gascon and Pamela Price were unseated amid complaints that their lenience was to blame for crime, which has largely declined since the pandemic, and social issues like opioids and homelessness. On the national stage, the Democratic party’s national platform abandoned issues like police violence and mass incarceration that were at the core of past campaigns. 

For many observers, this election signaled a waning in the strength of the criminal justice reform movement that came into full force just four years ago. 

But criminal justice reform has managed to remain on the agenda in Michigan. In October, the state enacted an overhaul of the juvenile justice system to eliminate most of the fines and fees that saddled young people with debt and penalized them for being unable to pay. Widespread dissatisfaction with the juvenile justice system helped stoke an appetite for continued change in Washtenaw, according to some of Dyer’s supporters. She wasn’t the only progressive candidate running for sheriff in Washtenaw. She narrowly won the primary against Derrick Jackson, the current director of community engagement at the sheriff’s office who works closely with grassroots reform groups and has a track record of boosting diversion efforts. In many communities, Dyer’s message resonated more deeply in many Washtenaw communities because her vision for reform was more bold, said Carolyn Madden, co-chair of Friends of Restorative Justice. 

“It was a matter of being a bit more progressive, a bit more out there, a bit more bold. And that is what we need in our criminal justice system right now—some boldness—and Alyshia seems to want to make some real change,” Madden said. 

Madden’s organization has already worked with Savit to help develop his office’s restorative justice process to repair the harm caused by a crime without “heaping on punishment,” Madden said. The program puts charges on hold for 18 months while the perpetrator of a crime works with the victim and community-based mediators to repair the harms they caused and address the underlying issues that led to their actions. Prosecutors drop the case if there are no new violations at the end of the period—though offenses that pose a serious risk to public safety or involve domestic or sexual abuse are not eligible for restorative justice. She hopes Dyer’s expertise in social work will help expand restorative justice practices in Washtenaw and improve opportunities for rehabilitation both in the community and in the jail.

“When police work very closely with the community, they know the people and they can go about addressing issues with different kinds of programs. Even if you’re not going to arrest them, particularly young people, you have to help them. You have to give them other things, especially if it’s a result of young people being confused or impoverished,” Madden said.

The county is already piloting a program to that effect: the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion and Deflection (LEADD) initiative, which was spearheaded in part by Jackson’s community engagement team within the sheriff’s office. Unlike typical diversion programs, where the court drops charges once a person meets certain conditions like completing drug treatment, LEADD allows county officers to connect someone to a case manager to get the support they need in lieu of making an arrest in the first place.

“The goal is to provide an alternative to arrest or citations for individuals who have unmet basic needs that stem from things like mental illness, substance abuse, and severe poverty and homelessness. It can increase the number of people getting the services they need and decrease the number of people in contact with the criminal justice apparatus,” said Hailey Richards, the program coordinator for LEADD.

Many of Dyer’s supporters hope she will continue to build upon the LEADD program, which is currently being tested in Ypsilanti Township, and expand it across the rest of the county. The pre-arrest diversion model “is a less harmful way police can offer someone assistance, and it can really help change people’s lives,” Dyer said. But there remains a need for community-based alternatives for responding to many issues that armed law enforcement officers are not best suited to deal with. Dyer says she also plans to support these by using a portion of the county’s budget dedicated to mental health and public safety initiatives.

“We as a country have dumped everything on law enforcement. But officers are not doctors, are not social workers, they’re not therapists, and we keep expecting them to be. I talk to officers who say they don’t like to go on low-level calls or calls involving mental health when they’re not trained to understand how to handle it,” Dyer said.

 “We have a unique opportunity to really start building safety net responder programs that avoid the legal system.”

The post A Michigan Sheriff and Prosecutor Join Forces to Implement Progressive Policy appeared first on Bolts.

Chicago Police officers have secretly pulled over as many as 20,000 more drivers per month in the past year than they have reported publicly, in violation of a 2003 law requiring them to document every traffic stop, a Bolts and Injustice Watch investigation has found.

The rate of stops conducted off-the-books has increased under Superintendent Larry Snelling, even as he has positioned himself as an agent of reform who is moving the Chicago Police Department away from its longstanding strategy of using traffic stops to find illegal guns and tamp down on crime. In June, Snelling reported traffic stops were down by about 87,000 over the same time last year. But behind that reduction is a pattern of thousands of unreported police encounters, which accounted for one-third of all traffic stops over the first seven months of Snelling’s tenure.

Records obtained by Bolts and Injustice Watch show police department officials know the traffic stop data they report to state regulators are an undercount. Internally, the department tracks stops using police radio data that doesn’t rely on officers filling out the state-mandated forms.

The findings come at a time when the police department’s targeting of Black neighborhoods with thousands of traffic stops has come under increased scrutiny, following the March killing of Dexter Reed, who was shot 13 times by five plainclothes officers just seconds after being pulled over for a seatbelt violation. The officers said Reed fired at them first.

While many police departments across the country have moved away from the use of traffic stops as a crime-fighting strategy, Chicago remains a stark outlier, with more stops per capita than most major cities, according to a recent analysis by the New York Times.

Pulling over drivers for minor traffic infractions like a broken tail light, or turning without a signal has been a central part of Chicago’s policing tactics for nearly a decade. Officers have used targeted enforcement of minor traffic issues in Black and Latinx neighborhoods as a way to find and remove illegal guns from the streets. The goal, former top police officials have said, is to deter drivers from carrying guns and drugs. Critics say the practice is, at best, an ineffective waste of city resources, and, at worst, an illegal violation of people’s rights that puts drivers and officers in harm’s way.

Snelling has pledged to change course, and earlier this year launched a process to bring traffic enforcement under the oversight of the federal consent decree CPD has been under since 2019. Community groups and advocates pushed back on this effort, arguing the slow-moving consent decree process would delay real traffic stop reform. The sweeping set of court-ordered reforms was designed to address patterns of discriminatory misconduct, excessive force, and rights abuses found to be prevalent in the department, but so far the department has fully met just seven percent of its obligations under the decree. 

The significant number of undocumented traffic stops threatens to undermine any reform efforts and obscures the true impact of the police encounters from oversight groups, preventing them from fully understanding which drivers are stopped, and where in the city they are concentrated.

As Snelling moves to bring traffic stops under federal oversight, the lack of transparency also calls into question whether the department will make a good faith effort to curb the problematic police conduct, or if leaders will instead just sweep those patterns out of view from the public.

“It is quite concerning, especially if CPD is intentionally not recording traffic stops so they can claim they’re fixing the problem, when all they’re doing is hiding it behind an absence of data,” said Alexandra Block, director of the Criminal Legal System & Policing Project at the ACLU of Illinois. 

Snelling declined to be interviewed for this report. A spokesperson for Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson declined to comment.

When asked about the unreported stops, the police department’s public relations staff stood by the publicly-reported numbers.

“The Chicago Police Department is committed to implementing substantive and lasting reforms rooted in constitutional policing as we work to build trust in our communities. Superintendent Snelling is committed to ensuring traffic stops are being used effectively,” a Snelling spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement.

200,000 traffic stops missing from reports to state last year

Traffic stops have grown increasingly central to the reform goals of civil rights and police accountability groups in Chicago since the department began to reel in the use of pedestrian stops nearly a decade ago. Police moved away from the controversial tactic known as stop-and-frisk after a wave of scrutiny launched by the police killing of teenager Laquan McDonald in 2014, as well as the botched investigation and coverup by police, prosecutors, and the mayor. The following year, the ACLU of Illinois released a report finding officers regularly targeted Black Chicagoans and violated their Fourth Amendment rights using stop-and-frisk; the city eventually agreed to a legal settlement to begin to reduce the practice.

But as footstops plunged, traffic enforcement in Black neighborhoods soared. Many dubbed this pattern the new stop-and-frisk; police were still initiating millions of encounters with civilians to fish for guns and evidence of other crimes, but by stopping cars rather than pedestrians.

Watchdogs were able to sound the alarm on the massive increase in traffic stops in Black neighborhoods thanks to the Illinois Traffic Stop Study, a 2003 law that requires law enforcement agencies to report the details of every traffic stop to the Illinois Department of Transportation, including a car’s make and model, the driver’s race, and the justification for the stop. With this granular level of data, the state’s racial profiling oversight board is supposed to identify troubling disparities and advise police departments to make changes.

The study has repeatedly shown clear disparities in how often officers pulled over Black drivers. In 2020, Chicago police stopped Black drivers at seven times the rate of white drivers and searched Black drivers or their cars more than three times as often. The ACLU of Illinois sued the city in 2023 on behalf of five drivers who alleged they were racially profiled and had their rights violated in dozens of traffic stops, many of which were not reported.

But the board has never had an accurate picture of the full scope of traffic stops, because the numbers Chicago police reported to the state didn’t match their own internal records.

Our analysis of the radio dispatch data found nearly 200,000 traffic stops last year that were not properly documented or reported to the state.

Traffic stops have, in fact, been falling since early 2023, but not by as much as the state data appears to show. According to the publicly reported data, Chicago police made about 74,000 fewer stops from January through April, a 35 percent drop from the same period last year. But the police dispatch data shows the true reduction in stops was less than 59,000.

“It presents issues for effective oversight and accountability. If you don't know what's happening on the ground, it is hard to make accurate judgments about it. But the data that does exist does paint a pretty clear picture,” said Amy Thompson, an attorney for Impact for Equity who also sits on the state racial profiling oversight board.

She said the board is developing a survey to uncover why some police departments are not in compliance with the law, but it is only an advisory panel that doesn’t have the authority to make sure police are accurately reporting stops.

Data reported to the state in the first half of this year show the gap between stops of Black and white drivers narrowing to three times as many, according to an analysis by WBEZ Chicago.

But with so many stops happening off-the-books, those reports are a misleading portrayal of the purported improvements. Since the radio communications data doesn’t track details like the race of the driver and whether officers did a search, watchdogs groups can’t calculate the extent of the disparities in the off-the-books stops.

"It raises the concern that potentially the stops that are missing are ones where there are harms that are not being surfaced, or where there are particularly egregious incidents that are happening,” Thompson said.

CPD did not answer questions about why there are so many traffic stops logged in the radio system with no paper trail. But two former Chicago Police commanders said in interviews that a small amount of the discrepancy could be due to dispatchers mistakenly logging other kinds of officer activity like a footstop as a traffic stop, or by backlogs of paper traffic stop documents that are delayed from being entered into the record-keeping system or lost altogether.

Jacquez Beasley, one of the drivers suing the city over the traffic stops, suspects his experience of being searched without consent during a traffic stop is far more common for Black drivers than police report to the public.

When he and his brother were pulled over for plate violation in 2021 by a plainclothes officer in an unmarked SUV, the situation quickly spiraled out of control, Beasley said in an interview. After asking Beasley and his brother for identification, the officer called for backup, he said. Within minutes, a large group of undercover cops swarmed the car, ordered them to get out of their car, and detained them.

"The way they flooded the scene, the way they pulled up like that, it escalated so quick. They went from asking my name to putting my brother in cuffs in just minutes,” Beasley said. 

When they asked to search Beasley’s car, he felt he didn’t really have much of a choice. "There was no cause to even search the car. But I knew there wasn't any saying no. I just wanted to get it over with,” he said.

The search turned up nothing, and Beasley was never ticketed for the traffic infraction, he said. The officers still should have made a detailed account of the encounter, under the state law, but there is no record in the traffic stop data that the officers stopped and searched Beasley and his brother, according to the lawsuit. Beasley said he believes officers didn’t bother to report the traffic stop because they didn’t find any drugs or weapons to justify the unnecessary search.

“They didn't find anything. If they found something, they would’ve put the report in. But when they screw up, they want to make themselves look good,” Beasley said.

A previous investigation by Block Club Chicago and Injustice Watch found Chicago Police use traffic stops in Black neighborhoods to target illegal gun possession, though officers had to make over 150 stops for each gun found. And even when officers did make a gun arrest, they often failed to report that the arrest began with a traffic stop.

Missing Chicago police data hinders oversight efforts

In the aftermath of the murder of Laquan McDonald in 2014 and the scathing Department of Justice investigation that followed, a constellation of police oversight agencies were created in Chicago to address the department’s history of unconstitutional and discriminatory policing.

All of those bodies have been stymied by the department’s inconsistent record-keeping and lack of transparency.

The independent monitors assigned to oversee the city’s reform of stop-and-frisk under the settlement with the ACLU of Illinois noted in a series of reports the “unknown quantity” of missing stop-and-frisk documents made it difficult to assess whether officers were complying with the new standards. The monitoring team made recommendations to improve transparency, but unreported stops persisted.

An inquiry last year by Chicago Inspector General Deborah Witzburg into how long it takes for Chicago Police to respond to 911 calls for help was similarly limited by missing data in up to half of all 911 calls. This prevented any analysis of disparities in 911 response times across the city and the factors that contribute to delayed responses, according to the report. 

A separate OIG investigation into use-of-force incidents found Black Chicagoans are far more likely to be stopped, searched, and have an encounter with police escalate into a physical altercation. But the Inspector General’s findings were again limited by unreliable data marked by undocumented encounters.

In the course of investigating patterns in use-of-force incidents, Witzburg’s team examined data on the encounters where such complaints often emerge, including traffic stops. Police provided investigators with data only from traffic stops where officers filled out the required documents—but not those tracked through radio communication records.

"There's a reason that CPD members are required to collect that data on every traffic stop. It is so that oversight entities and the department itself and community stakeholders can get a complete view of the department's traffic stop activity. That only works if they are, in fact, collecting all the data,” Witzburg told Bolts and Injustice Watch.

Although this investigation confirms CPD leadership internally tracks undocumented traffic stops using radio communications data, the Inspector General’s report notes that the police department “was not able to provide OIG with any empirical estimate of rates of unreported or improperly reported stops or uses of force.”

Of the various oversight bodies meant to check CPD’s authority, only the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) can investigate misconduct allegations and punish individual officers. It, too, has dealt with incomplete data in completing its investigations.

The most common complaints the office receives involve claims an officer stopped or searched someone in violation of their rights. During the course of those investigations, the agency regularly disciplines officers for failing to report the stop that resulted in the complaint, COPA Chief Administrator Andrea Kersten said in an interview. In those situations, COPA must use other means, such as GPS and bodycam footage, to gather details about the misconduct incident.

"We're not necessarily limited in our ability to hold officers accountable and find information and evidence about those traffic stops. But we are limited by who complains about them,” Kersten said. “If there is no documentation about these stops, or we don't receive a citizen complaint, then we are not going to have any knowledge that it happened.”

Since 2022, COPA has expanded its capacity to follow patterns across misconduct incidents that point to an underlying issue in police procedures that the agency can advise to fix, Kersten said. The agency's Policy Research and Analysis Division is currently laying the groundwork for a study of the trends around the undocumented stops that COPA's investigators regularly flag, Kersten said. 

"The fatal shooting of Dexter Reed, and the nature of that stop, it shines an unfortunate light on the fact that we as a city need to better understand why this is a police tool that is being used, and what harms it may be causing,” Kersten said. "We are looking at trends across districts. We are looking at trends across different types of officers, to identify if there are unique patterns.”

Community advocates push for new traffic stop policies

Even before the police killing of Dexter Reed, a large coalition of community groups and advocates have called for police to adopt a formal policy to conduct fewer traffic stops. 

In April, Snelling asked U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer, who oversees the federal consent decree, to bring traffic stops under the court’s supervision. 

Many advocates would prefer that traffic stops come under the purview of the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, an oversight body created in 2021 which has the power to set police policy and call for the removal of a superintendent. The commission has asked Pallmeyer to avoid overtaking the community oversight’s role in monitoring traffic stops, since the panel has no authority to set policy on issues under federal supervision.

Advocacy groups have presented the commission with a policy agenda that has three main components: banning officers from using traffic enforcement to fish for unrelated crime, limiting traffic stops for non-safety violations, and restricting officers from asking drivers for consent to search them without suspicion of criminal activity. The commission will have a public hearing on Aug. 27 to gather input on how communities want the commission to intervene, and what a policy would look like. 

A number of U.S. cities have begun to phase out some traffic stops as a primary crime deterrent strategy, saying the risk for racially-biased harm outweighs potential public safety benefits. Philadelphia was the first major city to ban low-level traffic stops as a way to prevent racial profiling in 2021, and since then, a wave of cities including San Francisco, Ann Arbor, and Minneapolis have implemented similar policies.

“A number of cities have policies that refocus police away from making minor stops to prioritize activities that actually affect traffic safety, like dangerous driving,” said Daniella Gilbert, director of the Redefining Public Safety initiative at the Vera Institute of Justice, a national policy group. 

Some jurisdictions that have limited officers from making non-safety traffic stops have been able to focus resources on moving violations and drunk driving, resulting in safer roads and lower racial disparities, studies show.

“There are benefits to road safety itself, in addition to mitigating the erosion of trust and disparate impact that these kinds of stops result in,” Gilbert said. 

Prosecutors in Ramsey County, Minnesota, home to St. Paul, said in 2021 that they would stop charging arrests stemming solely from non-public-safety traffic stops, five years after a police officer in a nearby suburb killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop for a broken taillight. Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx recently said her office would follow suit, but with just a few months left in office, it’s unclear if Foxx’s proposal will be implemented or maintained by her successor.

In the meantime, advocates are continuing to press for a stronger CPD policy to reduce the number of unnecessary stops, but any such efforts will be hampered as long as CPD continues to underreport traffic stops.

As the federal court mulls bringing traffic stops under the consent decree, there’s skepticism among residents and civil rights groups that anything will change soon. They’re disillusioned by Chicago Police’s already extremely low compliance with the consent decree reforms and the department’s track record of misleading oversight agencies to avoid accountability, said C.M.D. Chiimeh, an organizer for Southsiders Organized for Unity and Liberation, at the consent decree hearing.

“It is evident the current approach is ineffective and inefficient. The issues surrounding pretextual traffic stops need to be addressed now. And it has been proven the consent decree is incapable of doing that," Chiimeh said. "Putting this issue in the consent decree … would only continue to perpetuate overpolicing, degrade community trust, perpetuate racial disparities, and squander valuable resources associated with CPD's handling of traffic stops.”

The post Chicago Police Made Nearly 200,000 Secret Traffic Stops Last Year appeared first on Bolts.

“It’s like these little cuts and scrapes that happen over time for Black mothers who have kids on the road who are driving,” Harrison said. “When I knew my youngest son was on the road, I was nervous all the time. I was on edge. When he called me, sometimes it was like my heart would stop.”

Harrison’s resulting policy, the Driving Equality Ordinance, passed handily in 2023 in the small progressive university town that often welcomes reform. The measure prohibits officers from pulling drivers over for small infractions, allowing them to send drivers a ticket in the mail instead. Now, the policy has also set the stage for a larger debate across Washtenaw County, where Ann Arbor sits. There, candidates in the race for county sheriff have echoed local calls to reform traffic stops, but have diverging visions on policy.

Sheriff Jerry Clayton announced in 2022 that he wouldn’t seek reelection after serving four consecutive terms leading law enforcement in Washtenaw. With no Republicans in the race, voters will choose Clayton’s successor in the Democratic primary on Aug. 6. Clayton never formally limited officers from making stops for equipment and registration issues. But he did previously speak out against the use of traffic stops to search drivers and fish for contraband after prosecutors decided in 2021 to stop charging many cases where drivers are arrested during a non-safety-related traffic stop.

Alyshia Dyer, a former deputy sheriff and social worker who is one of the three candidates in the sheriff’s primary, previously advocated for the Ann Arbor restriction on non-safety traffic stops and said she would scale the policy across the entire county if elected. 

One of her competitors, Ken Magee, does not support a restriction on non-safety stops, but has proposed a policy to reduce fines and fees from traffic enforcement. The third candidate, Derrick Jackson, has also included reforming traffic enforcement as an item on his platform, though his proposal for a comprehensive traffic stop study is less sweeping than the others’ plans. 

The traffic stop policy of whomever wins the race will most heavily affect those living not in Ann Arbor, but in surrounding areas like Ypsilanti Township, where the local government relies on sheriff’s officers in lieu of having its own police department. Nearly half of the 27,000 stops by sheriff’s officers in Washtenaw County in 2023 happened in Ypsilanti Township, where Black people make up a higher portion of the population than Ann Arbor and the county at large, data shows. 

“Traffic enforcement can often be a gateway for funneling people into the legal system. And even if you don’t get a ticket, it can cause a lot of trauma for people,” Dyer said. “Blanketing communities by making these low-level stops… I think all it does is criminalize the neighborhood instead of investing in the neighborhood to make it safer.”

Dyer’s approach to reforming traffic stops grew from her decade in the Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Office, where she encountered both pressure from the chain of command to do high volumes of traffic stops, and the negative effects of those stops on communities.

“I saw when I was doing community engagement work that it actually was reducing violence in the communities I was frequenting. But I was frustrated because I wasn’t getting evaluated on that good community engagement work,” Dyer told Bolts. “Instead, it was all about how many traffic stops, how many tickets or arrests you’re making.”  

It is illegal for law enforcement departments in Michigan to require officers to meet quotas for traffic stops, tickets and other activity. But even without a formal quota, higher-ups often evaluate officers’ performance using those metrics and officers are trained to initiate frequent contacts with civilians “to show they are being productive,” Dyer said.

“I really believe when you evaluate officers on punitive metrics like traffic stops, it creates an issue with over policing,” she continued.

In Ann Arbor, these policing practices rarely broke down evenly across racial lines. Around the same time that Harrison put forward the policy to reduce unnecessary encounters between police and civilians, Eastern Michigan University released a study that documented significant racial disparities in traffic stops conducted by the Ann Arbor Police Department. The study found Black drivers were stopped twice as often for equipment violations and searched at five times the rate that would be expected given their portion of the local driving population.

“It’s our goal to provide law enforcement services without bias or favor,” Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor told Bolts. But traffic stops based on equipment violations, where the racial disparity is the widest, generally “do not have any material public safety benefit.”

Harrison’s plan to take low-level violations like tinted windows, burned-out tail lights and loud mufflers off of police officers’ plates was intended to curb racial bias by preventing unnecessary police encounters. It is also meant to allow officers to focus on things that really make a difference when it comes to safety. Harrison based the ordinance on Philadelphia’s Driving Equality Act, enacted in 2022, that made it the first major city to limit officers from making stops for certain minor traffic offenses. 

“I want to free up the police department to go after speeding, running red lights, and those violations that can get someone seriously injured,” Harrison said.

The ordinance passed unanimously through city council with virtually no opposition. To Harrison’s surprise, the local police union did not challenge the reform, even though it limited officers’ authority.

“There is a common understanding that this is something the police should be okay with, in this day and age,” Harrison said. “I feel like we can be leaders, and we can set the example.”

In fact, police leadership announced that officers would stop pulling over drivers for equipment violations even before the ordinance took effect. “There is always a struggle with a change in culture,” said Ann Arbor Chief of Police Andre Anderson about the process of implementing the policy. (Anderson wasn’t police chief when the ordinance first passed, but is now overseeing its rollout.)

Despite some initial hesitation officers have been receptive to making changes that “ensure our actions build trust and don’t damage the relationship with the community,” Anderson told Bolts. 

The Driving Equality Ordinance in Ann Arbor served as a direct policy model for Dyer’s plan to end non-safety traffic stops throughout the county. Dyer’s proposal aims to end the indirect quotas by limiting the authority of sheriff’s deputies to pull drivers over for low-level infractions, including many of the same equipment and registration issues. Such a policy would have an immediate effect on traffic stops in Ypsilanti Township, Superior Township, and rural parts of the county where sheriff’s deputies routinely patrol. Shifting the culture within the department is equally important, Dyer said, and that’s something that must be achieved by restructuring the way officers are evaluated.

Michigan’s rules for funding the legal system also cloud the motive for county officers to do stops, since district courts are funded in part by traffic ticket revenue. The court in Ypsilanti Township has in recent years budgeted for some $625,000 in fees such as traffic tickets to flow through the court, accounting for up to a third of its funding, records show. 

The state’s Trial Court Funding Commission released a report in 2019 that said it was imperative to separate the justice system from penal fees due to risk of excessive police and court enforcement being used to boost municipal revenue. The funding mechanism risked a budget crisis for some courts during the coronavirus pandemic when fewer drivers were on the road and revenue plummeted, Dyer said.

“Local municipalities become reliant on it. What we realized during COVID is that it’s not sustainable,” Dyer said. “We shouldn’t be using deputies to be revenue generators.”

Magee, a former federal agent and one of Dyer’s opponents in the race for sheriff, also insists there should be no conflict of interest or incentive for officers to stop drivers for any reason besides traffic safety. The justice system shouldn’t balance its budget on the backs of working-class drivers, he said. But a blanket policy against stopping drivers over certain equipment and registration violations reaches too far and “flies in the face of traffic safety standards,” Magee told Bolts.

“These are traffic offenses that are geared towards making sure people’s vehicles are roadworthy and safe,” he said, adding that equipment standards prevent danger like carbon monoxide poisoning due to faulty mufflers.

Instead, Magee would reorient the ticketing system toward education rather than a financial penalty. Instead of paying a fine or challenging the ticket in court, Magee’s traffic education model would give drivers a third option: a short online course that addresses the specific traffic violation. Completing the 15- to 30-minute course suspends the ticket, and if the driver keeps a clean record for 18 months, the violation is dismissed without a fee or adding points to the driver’s record.

“Why are we utilizing this as a cash cow for the court systems?” Magee asked. “Traffic enforcement has to be about prevention of harm and educating people. It should not be a punitive process. An educated driver is going to save lives.”

Besides creating a traffic education model to take the money out of the traffic stop equation, Magee says the sheriff’s office must create “checks and balances” to address any biased policing and ensure officers aren’t making traffic stops just to make searches. 

To do this, Magee is proposing the creation of a countywide independent civilian oversight panel to investigate complaints of officer misconduct, review internal investigations and track any patterns that emerge in enforcement activities. Such accountability mechanisms are necessary, Magee says, to make sure existing guardrails like the quota ban are actually followed.

“Leadership has to hold their troops accountable to make sure those trends don’t lean towards racial bias, and leadership has to be held accountable for making sure those policies are adhered to,” Magee said.

Traffic stops are not the only issue that the incoming sheriff will face; at a public forum in May voters also questioned the candidates on how they would manage conditions at the local jail, develop programs for mental illness and substance abuse, and strengthen transparency and community partnership. 

But traffic enforcement is the most common encounter that people have with law enforcement, and in a progressive county where each of the candidates is trying to position themselves as a reformer, the differences between their platforms on this issue could impact how thousands of people experience their county’s policing force. 

Jackson, who is the current Community Engagement Director for the sheriff’s office and has received outgoing Sheriff Clayton’s endorsement in the race, has defended the current sheriff’s approach to reducing traffic stops and insisted that improvements are already in the works. While Jackson, who did not respond to Bolts’ request for an interview, proposed a study to analyze enforcement patterns, he approaches the issue of traffic stops as something to address through management rather than through a new policy. 

On the other hand, Magee and Dyer are more focused on entirely removing incentives for officers to make stops to gain ticket revenue or search for contraband. It’s a fundamental rethinking of the role of sworn officers in traffic enforcement that Anderson, the Ann Arbor police chief, says is happening more broadly. 

“It is something being considered all across the country, that at some point we will evolve in law enforcement where there may be alternative ways to address some of the more minor infractions,” Anderson told Bolts. “It may not be the police. There may be another way to address these concerns.”

The post A Michigan City Ended Low-Level Traffic Stops. Now the County Could Follow. appeared first on Bolts.

It started as a traffic stop for an alleged seatbelt violation. It escalated to a deadly encounter within seconds.

Since the release of body cam footage showing plainclothes police killing Dexter Reed in Chicago, loved ones and activists have demanded to know why the 26-year-old was stopped, and how a simple traffic stop left Reed dead, an officer wounded and cops firing nearly 100 shots in a residential neighborhood.

The traffic stop is part of a pattern that has increasingly targeted Black neighborhoods in recent years and activists say may violate people’s rights. The traffic stops have been called “the new stop-and-frisk.”

And they’ve been particularly aggressive on the city’s West Side, where Reed was stopped and killed. Activists have warned for years that these traffic stops can spark volatile encounters.

In fact, police pull over more Chicagoans in the Harrison (11th) Police District, where Reed was pulled over, than in any other district in the city, according to a Block Club Chicago analysis of police data. The vast majority of those stops don’t lead to tickets. 

One-tenth of all Chicago traffic stops happened in that district—averaging more than 154 stops per day—even though the area accounts for just 3 percent of Chicago’s population, according to a report by Impact for Equity. About 96 percent of people living in the district are Black or Latino, according to the report.  

“The strategy ends up creating a dangerous situation for everyone rather than contributing to any improvement of public safety in Chicago, said Amy Thompson, staff counsel for Impact for Equity. “Pretextual stops are creating danger, not finding danger.”

She thinks that Reed’s arrest illustrates that danger. “Five officers rushed out in plainclothes for a seat belt violation. It clearly was an attempt to fish for crime,” she said.

Chicago’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability, the oversight agency that investigates when officers shoot someone, raised concerns over the reason officers gave for stopping Reed. Investigators are uncertain how officers would have seen Reed wasn’t wearing a seat belt given their positions and the fact Reed’s SUV had tinted windows, chief administrator Andrea Kersten wrote in a letter to Police Supt. Larry Snelling, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. 

Newly released documents show the officers involved in the fatal shootout were being investigated for several other traffic stops that drivers said were unwarranted.

Police Superintendent Larry Snelling, who became Chicago’s top cop last year, has indicated the number of traffic stops is a problem, too. He has reversed course from previous administrations by pledging to reduce traffic stops. He also has committed to routinely training officers to ensure they act based on “reasonable articulable suspicion or probable cause,” he told neighbors at a town hall the day before footage of Reed’s killing was released.

“People have been sounding the alarm that the massive escalation in traffic stops would lead to more violent interactions because of the way this strategy is being conducted. These stops have become so routine and they are so ineffective that we knew we would have some tragedy like this occur as a result,” said Ed Yohnka, spokesperson of the Illinois ACLU. “The stops take place in this fashion where guns are drawn and there’s an immediate escalation of things.”

How stops surged after Chicago funneled more cops to traffic stops

Traffic stops in Black neighborhoods surged after a 2015 ACLU report found stop-and-frisk encounters were frequently baseless, targeted Black and Latino Chicagoans and routinely violated people’s rights. After the city agreed to reform the practice, Chicago police turned to traffic stops, Yohnka said.

The number of traffic stops Chicago Police reported to state watchdogs surged from under 100,000 in 2015 to nearly 600,000 in 2019, according to the Illinois Traffic and Pedestrian Stop Study. Documented stops dipped during the first years of the pandemic, but in 2023, Chicago police logged its second-highest number of stops in two decades, according to the Impact for Equity report. Black drivers are stopped up to seven times more often than white drivers, the state report showed. There are few traffic stops in districts where many police officers live while cops disproportionately stop drivers in Black neighborhoods.

But the study vastly underestimates Chicago police traffic stops. A Block Club investigation found hundreds of thousands of traffic stops annually that the department did not report to the state, in violation of a transparency law meant to address patterns of racial bias in police encounters.

Chicago police rely heavily on these encounters to search for contraband like illegal guns and drugs, stopping and arresting thousands more Black drivers than they report to oversight agencies, a Block Club investigation found. Officers make millions of stops but find guns in fewer than one of every 150 stops, Block Club and Injustice Watch found.  

“It is clear that this kind of stop has nothing to do with traffic safety. It is all about trying to search for guns and drugs,” Yohnka said. “If your expectation is to try to find a weapon, you look at that situation much differently than someone who rolled through a stop sign.”

Chicago police have funneled resources and manpower supposedly earmarked for other public safety strategies to make more traffic stops and scale up gun arrests, Bolts and Block Club have found.

The signature project of David Brown, Snelling’s predecessor, was a community policing unit purportedly launched to build trust between South and West Side residents and police, solve local problems and tackle crime at its root. By 2021, it was the largest unit in the department with over 800 officers.

But an analysis of dispatch records by Bolts showed those officers rarely did those positive community engagement activities. Instead, they were deployed primarily on the South and West sides as a roving strike team and the central enforcer of the growing traffic stop program. The community policing team stopped and searched more drivers than any other police unit, amounting to nearly one-third of the mountain of traffic stops in 2021, data shows.

The community team was dismantled amid outcry from watchdogs and legal turmoil from drivers and officers who complained of an illegal quota system that discriminated against Black Chicagoans. 

An ongoing class action lawsuit filed by Black and Latino drivers and the ACLU alleges the traffic stop strategy—and Brown’s community team in particular—flooded Black neighborhoods with traffic stops as a pretext to search drivers without their consent. The complaint references emails sent by then-Deputy Superintendent Ernest Cato III that ordered commanders to “utilize traffic stops to address violence.”

A former lieutenant on the community team sued the city in 2021, claiming leadership retaliated against him for refusing to  require officers under his command to conduct at least 10 stops daily. Though the community team was disbanded, Snelling reinstated it under a new name.

“Every officer in those units is not one that’s in the community, talking to neighbors and trying to find solutions,” Yohnka said. “Our clients described traffic stops where officers approach the car with their hand on their gun. People are being singled out and targeted for their race. It points out the danger of these stops, the inefficiency of the stops and the tragedy of the situation.”

Officers who are supposed to respond to 911 calls have also been steered toward traffic stops, a Block Club investigation found.

Hundreds of officers each day are assigned to rapid response duty, answering top-priority 911 calls and reducing long wait times that have become a pressing concern for many communities, according to police directives. It is supposed to allow beat officers to stay on their local patrols and build community relationships rather than respond to emergency calls.

But dispatch data shows rapid response officers rarely handle 911 calls. Instead, the majority of those officers are dedicated to traffic stops, the data shows.

“That’s a lot of manpower,” community organizer Arewa Winters said. “While we have all these issues going on everywhere, and you’re pulling people over with no good outcomes. Is that a practical use of manpower? Could you be somewhere else doing something else?”

A promise to reduce traffic stops: ‘We have to unlearn old things’ 

Snelling, the city’s first superintendent chosen under a new community oversight commission, has broken from past leadership by promising to address the harms caused by the mass use of traffic stops. 

Former Supt. Brown denied the existence of racially discriminatory stops and quotas and rejected evidence that stops were used to fish for gun possession cases.

At an April community hearing, Snelling acknowledged how traffic stops are part of the department’s strategy for dealing with guns, touting the department has scaled back on traffic stops while still increasing gun arrests. Snelling plans to continue to reduce traffic stops by training officers on different tactics, he said.

“We have to train the officers out of that and bring them into something new,” Snelling said. “In order to get them to learn new things, we have to have them unlearn the old things.”

Snelling said Chicago police have conducted 46,000 fewer stops in 2024 compared to the first quarter of last year. Police spokesperson Thomas Ahern declined to share a source for how the department tracked that reduction in stops, saying the statistic came from “computer data.”

To address the long-term issues with traffic stops, Snelling committed to bringing traffic stops under the supervision of the federal consent decree so the reductions “will be long lasting after I am gone,” he said.

But many are skeptical and urge the superintendent to take more immediate action. Only 6 percent of the requirements from the consent decree have been met in the five years since it took effect, according to a recent report.

“Whether or not Snelling views traffic stops differently, in order for community to have clarity on what their interactions with law enforcement will be, and even so police has clarity on what they can and cannot do, there needs to be a formal policy on these pretextual stops,” said Thompson of Impact for Equity.

When the goal is to investigate unrelated crime, officers are motivated to escalate a traffic stop to search for contraband, not deescalate the situation, Winters said. The tactic widely used in Black neighborhoods thrusts hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans each day into a high-risk situation that could turn lethal at any moment.

Investigators concluded Reed shot at officers first. But the focus on who fired first distracts from the bigger picture, Winters said: Neither the officers nor Reed were in a potentially deadly situation until police pulled Reed over. 

“The conversation needs to begin with what the police started with and how they approached that young man.”

It is reminiscent of when officers killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop near Minneapolis in 2016, Winters said. Officers used a broken taillight as a pretext to stop Castile and investigate him for an unrelated armed robbery nearby, an investigation showed. Within a minute of the encounter, officers fired at Castile while his girlfriend and her 4-year-old child were in the car.

That same year, Winters’ nephew Pierre Loury was killed after officers pulled over a car he was in to investigate a shooting earlier that day. After the 16-year-old tried to run away, an officer shot Loury after the teen climbed a fence.

“I know so many other families who have lost loved ones to police. We’re retraumatized, we’re frustrated, we’re angry, we’re hurt,” Winters said. “It’s truly overwhelming. But at the same time, we have to fight. We have to push back on the narratives that they try to spin.”

The post Behind Dexter Reed’s Police Killing, a Surge in Traffic Stops on Chicago’s West Side appeared first on Bolts.

The Florida legislature approved a bill this month that would further limit local civilian police oversight boards by barring them from investigating allegations of police misconduct. Police unions support the bill as a measure to protect the rights of officers, though critics say it represents yet another blow to police accountability efforts already shackled by existing state laws giving cops extraordinary legal protections.

Some of these civilian oversight agencies have been around for decades. The Civilian Investigative Panel in Miami, for instance, was created in 2002 amid concerns about police conduct in a number of high-profile shootings, as well as in the aftermath of the Elián González standoff when the city’s Cuban American community decried police treatment of protesters in the wake of the crisis. Miami’s panel was formed to investigate police misconduct incidents alongside the local police agency’s internal affairs departments. 

But many of the 21 agencies across the state that would be affected by the ban emerged in cities like Pensacola and Key West following the 2020 George Floyd protests amid widespread calls for additional police accountability. After the national uprisings, many local Florida governments threw their cities a bone in the form of hamstrung civilian oversight panels that could review cases but had practically no legal authority.

Critics say this current bill would undermine what were already baby-steps toward greater police accountability and walk back cities’ efforts to improve public trust in law enforcement.

“They’re making it seem un-American to question policing, which should be a huge red flag to everybody,” said Taylor Biro, a former member of Tallahassee’s police oversight board. “It is another way of showing how far to the right Florida wants to be seen. It’s a lot of political theater, and there’s not a lot of thought behind what the community review boards’ goals are.”

The bill forbids civilian panels from investigating complaints and misconduct cases involving specific officers, a key starting point for oversight agencies to uncover underlying policing issues. It would only let these boards review and advise on broad department policies and problems that emerge as patterns in police activity. 

It is now headed for the desk of Governor Ron DeSantis, who has yet to say whether he will sign it into law but has repeatedly positioned himself as a close ally to law enforcement groups. It aims to showcase Florida as “the most law enforcement-friendly state,” said state Representative Wyman Duggan, a Republican sponsor, at a January committee hearing. However opponents say it is part of a larger backlash against criminal justice reforms, which has become a cornerstone of the governor’s policies. DeSantis has been a leading voice rallying against reforms nationwide, pushing for harsher punishments for drug crimes, a lower threshold for death penalty sentences, and recruitment programs to draw out-of-state officers to Florida.

The bill’s Republican sponsors and police union supporters did not respond to requests for comment from Bolts. But in legislative hearings, proponents said the ban is not intended to eliminate civilian oversight boards entirely or stop them from reviewing department-wide policies such as use-of-force procedures.

“Those discussions about chokeholds, about knees on necks—that’s the stuff that could be valuable with a civilian review board, those discussions about policies and procedures,” said state Senator Blaise Ingoglia, the bill’s sponsor in the upper chamber, during a January committee meeting. “But stay away from the actual specific incidents that happen with the law enforcement officer.”

Oversight boards can still improve transparency and strengthen internal processes through these broader reviews of police department policies, says Ursula Price, executive director of Miami-Dade County’s 13-member Independent Civilian Panel. Her agency has made several recommendations to law enforcement in Miami-Dade County that have been adopted, including for more training in de-escalation, and a review of department processes for receiving and investigating complaints.

But even without explicitly banning oversight on department-wide policies, the new bill would still obstruct the panels from digging into misconduct incidents to get to the internal practice at the root of the problem, Price said. “We use individual complaints as data. It’s information to help us understand the system,” she said. “We cannot analyze that system or understand it without looking at some of the details in the accountability process.”

For Miami-Dade County’s Independent Civilian Panel, it was essential to look into specific complaints to determine whether the investigation process managed by the police’s internal affairs office was sufficient. By looking into individual cases, the panel uncovered that the investigation wasn’t always rigorous enough to match the gravity of the complaint, Price added.

“There were some anecdotal instances where complaints were getting shuffled off without anybody looking at it. We wanted to make sure that was the exception, not the rule. Luckily, the police department was open to making those changes,” Price said.

This review of the police department’s complaint process was only possible because of a civilian investigation into an incident where an officer was accused of making an illegal search, Price said. That investigation led the Independent Civilian Panel to review a large sample of complaint reports to get to the bottom of how the police department was managing similar accusations. 

The city of Miami has its own local oversight agency, the Civilian Investigative Panel, which has also historically reviewed both individual complaints and broader department procedures. Rodney Jacobs, the panel’s executive director, says many of their recommendations for strengthening internal policy have stemmed from misconduct investigations that bring light to the underlying policing practices that allow for misconduct to occur.

“In the course of an investigation, you often find systemic issues,” Jacobs said. “By doing it from an investigative lens, it raises red flags to have a proactive approach. By having active investigations, it allows you to stop misconduct before it becomes a metastasized issue.”

The city’s panel reviews up to 400 complaints each year, and many of these complaints result in policy changes within the Miami Police Department: Jacobs said the panel’s investigations have prompted the police department to revise its strip search policy, develop mediation programs between law enforcement and local communities, and clarify body cam procedures to improve transparency. By accepting these recommendations, Jacobs said local police have increased public trust by giving communities recourse for addressing individual cases as well as the underlying patterns of police conduct.

“The best way to build trust is having a great sense of transparency,” Jacobs said. “It helps bolster police work because police need the community to do their work effectively, especially when it comes to solving cases.”

Police unions and their allies in the statehouse say the new ban on civilian investigations is at its core an issue of protecting the due process rights of officers. Duggan, the bill’s sponsor, argued at a committee hearing that the oversight panels are a risk to officers since they don’t have uniform qualifications for the members overseeing investigations and lack due process standards for how they conduct their investigations.

The exposure to scrutiny from civilian panels can “hinder recruitment and retention of officers in jurisdictions that have these entities in place,” Duggan said.

But opponents of the bill say a ban on investigations wouldn’t give officers any additional protection because these oversight boards pose no risk to an officer’s due process rights in the first place; the state’s Law Enforcement Officer Bill of Rights already forbids them from having any authority to take disciplinary action following a misconduct investigation.

“They’re unable to conduct hearings or report their findings and recommendations publicly,” said NR Hines, a policy strategist for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. “Even if they did report findings, they are recommendations that are not binding in any way and have no force over the officers that are mentioned.” 

Florida’s officers bill of rights, a law guaranteeing officers under investigation a list of special protections, was first passed in 1974 and has been expanded over time. The law allows officers accused of misconduct to select at least one member of the internal panel charged with investigating their case. Interrogations of police are also highly regulated, and officers are allowed to review all evidence and testimony against them before being interviewed by fellow police or prosecutors.

Accountability advocates worry those protections give officers advantages that prevent an impartial investigation. They say these built-in advantages underscore why independent reviews of police misconduct cases are essential for improving public trust, given the skepticism toward internal affairs investigations led in part by colleagues hand-picked by the aggrieved officer. 

“The processes that currently exist don’t always achieve accountability,” Hines said. “The intention is to be an unbiased board that can represent all residents and review police activity.” 

Even before this year’s legislation undermining local oversight panels, Florida’s supreme court ruled in 2017 that the protections granted to officers are so expansive that they prevent external agencies like oversight panels from having subpoena power to compel officers to appear at hearings or answer questions related to misconduct investigations.

Local rules in some cities place further restrictions on citizen panels. In Tallahassee, the oversight board cannot begin reviewing a misconduct case until it is already closed by law enforcement’s internal affairs office.

“When I was on the board, we didn’t know the officers’ names,” Biro, the former Tallahassee board member, said. “We would determine what policies a situation touched, and make recommendations on how to shift those policies, never touching those officers.”

Tallahassee’s city commissioners removed Biro from the oversight panel in 2022 after police unions complained about a sticker on Biro’s coffee mug that was critical of police. Two other members resigned after Biro’s removal to protest that the panel was hampered from taking real action to heighten police accountability. For most of 2023, the board was unable to meet due to lacking enough members for a quorum. 

“It was really eye-opening,” Biro said. “The grassroots folks who pushed for a board to happen got a very watered-down version of what a lot of communities imagined would be helpful. Now we see that watered-down version being taken away.”

Florida is the latest of several states to preemptively weaken civilian police oversight. Utah previously stripped police oversight groups from having the authority to revise department policy in 2019. New Jersey’s supreme court ruled in 2020 that existing state law limited oversight boards from investigating misconduct cases until police completed their own process, though a bill introduced this year would give civilian panels such authority as well as subpoena power.

More recently, Tennessee passed legislation in 2023 to eliminate community-led oversight panels and prevent advisory groups from investigating police misconduct cases.

In Florida, this push for a ban on outside misconduct investigations underscores how limited civilian oversight panels already are in their capacity to reach their goals of transparency and accountability. Further weakening civilian oversight serves more as a political posture rather than a policy that would truly address issues facing local law enforcement, Hines said.

‘It’s really based on a perception that accountability for law enforcement is ‘woke,’” Hines said. “It seems like they’re trying to find a problem where there isn’t one. Civilian review boards pose no threat to law-abiding officers.”

Jacobs, from the oversight panel for the city of Miami, worries that attacks on the already-limited powers of oversight agencies in the state signal a larger aversion to police accountability. “If police unions are able to sway elected officials, we may see attacks on internal affairs divisions,” Jacobs said. “This is probably just the first bite of the apple of police accountability.”

The post Police Oversight in Florida Is Already Weak. The State Is About to Gut It Further. appeared first on Bolts.

It had been a year since a federal judge ordered the city of Chicago to overhaul its police department. The requirement was to address discriminatory policing and misconduct that had decimated public faith in law enforcement, and progress was slow. But in summer 2020, the recently appointed Superintendent David Brown announced a new direction in public safety that promised to strengthen the bond between police and the communities they serve.

At the core of this community-centric policing strategy was a newly minted unit, the Community Safety Team. Brown said their mission would be getting to know neighbors, partnering with local churches, block clubs and businesses, and empowering residents to guide law enforcement’s crime priorities and solutions to neighborhood safety issues.

“The only way to create safer communities is one neighborhood at a time,” Brown said at the July 2020 announcement of the new team. 

But rather than police encounters aimed at building community trust, data show the Community Safety Team, which quickly grew to over 800 officers in less than a year, focused instead on interactions known to harm community relations: hundreds of thousands of traffic stops. 

The Community Safety Team was responsible for nearly a third of all traffic stops citywide by 2021, more than any other police team. Community Safety officers overwhelmingly stopped drivers in Black neighborhoods on the South and West Sides, contributing to massive racial disparities in traffic enforcement, data show.

Police accountability watchdogs say the Community Safety Team’s conduct reveals a pattern of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) hiding aggressive tactics beneath a veneer of community policing. In the past, CPD’s most aggressive units made heavy use of stop-and-frisk encounters to search people for drugs and weapons. But since a 2015 lawsuit led to major reforms of the practice, CPD replaced stop-and-frisk with stopping exponentially more motorists.

Now, despite a new progressive mayor’s outspoken stances against such notoriously harmful policing practices, and a newly confirmed police superintendent signaling a decisive shift in public safety strategy, many doubt whether the department can course-correct to an earnest community policing model. 

“The city has a horrific history of these roving, violent citywide teams…that racially profile people and terrorize and physically brutalize people,” said Alexandra Block, Director of Criminal Legal Systems and Policing Project for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. “The Community Safety Team is just an outcrop of that pattern.”

When drivers believe they are stopped and searched by police without reason, the feeling of harassment only deepens the divide between police and the communities they patrol, said Joseph Williams, member of the Englewood Police District Council, one of the civilian oversight bodies recently created to enhance community partnership and accountability. 

“There’s no way you can do community policing while you’re doing all those stops,” Williams said. “You make them feel like less than a human being. They leave feeling worthless, like they’ve been targeted. I know what I felt like when I went through that.”

When Williams, 34, was pulled over most recently in July, the stop was relatively uneventful, and officers let him go without a search. But each of the countless traffic stops he endured still reminds him of a traumatic incident when he and a group of friends were pulled over as teens.

As the officers searched the group without their consent looking for illegal guns, they violated and humiliated the teenagers, Williams said.

“I’ll never forget them pulling me and my friends right out of the car and searching us,” Williams said. “They reached down into my private parts, went into our boxers, and they didn’t find anything. …We were young and glad we were let go, but ultimately that was a traumatic experience.”

The Community Safety Team

As the department poured resources into the Community Safety Team, Brown pledged their work would be driven by long-term relationships with residents, businesses, religious organizations and neighborhood groups.

By the end of 2020, the Community Safety Teams logged over 200 of those community interactions, according to a Bolts analysis of data from the Office of Emergency Management and Communications’ dispatch system, which generates a unique record each time officers radio headquarters to document civilian interactions or routine activities. Those community interactions included food drives, youth sports events and community input meetings, according to a Chicago police spokesperson. 

But those interactions were dwarfed by the 48,000 traffic stops the team conducted in 2020—nearly all of that unit’s documented activity that year. In 2021, when the Community Safety Team was at its largest, its officers logged over 150,000 traffic stops—more than twice the number of community engagement activities, the data show.

Although the Community Safety Team was called a “first-of-its-kind approach designed for officers to get to know the people and places within each of the unique neighborhoods," Brown’s promises were reminiscent of a different community policing initiative launched in the 1990s, the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy, or CAPS.

The CAPS approach was a hyper-local, bottom-up strategy that hinged on residents working with officers to identify both the issues in the community as well as potential solutions. The strategy worked to increase trust in police because the same officers had a consistent beat in a particular geographic area where residents could get to know them personally and officers could get familiar with the safety challenges in a small area, proponents said. 

In the Englewood neighborhood on the city’s south side, CAPS officers have helped by listening to people’s priorities and focusing on problem-solving rather than numbers, Williams said. For instance, when a group of abandoned cars on a city-owned vacant lot became a magnet for drug dealing and other crime, Williams told the local CAPS team that it was a serious problem for neighbors. Officers then quickly dealt with the issue, he said.

"They ticketed those cars and got them towed. The community's been trying to get that done for a year almost," Williams said. "Our CAPS department is phenomenal."

But the Community Safety Team turned out to be a somewhat opposite approach: rather than officers building relationships in consistent beats, it was a roving citywide unit with no direct ties to specific neighborhoods. And they employed the same tactics as the notorious strike forces and saturation teams— squads of officers used to flood areas with police activity.

The legal backlash

After Chicago police shifted away from widespread use of stop-and-frisk tactics in 2015 following an ACLU Illinois lawsuit over the practice, the number of traffic stops conducted across the entire department soared. Between 2015 and 2023, officers made over 4.5 million traffic stops, mostly in Black and Latinx neighborhoods, CPD data show. Nearly 900,000 of these stops were made in 2019 alone, and by then the Illinois chapter of the ACLU had again raised the alarm that the stops may be violating drivers’ civil rights. 

This work culminated in a class action lawsuit filed in June 2023 against the city on behalf of Chicagoans claiming the traffic stop strategy routinely violated the rights of Black and Latinx drivers. It singled out the Community Safety Team for the tremendous volume of traffic stops it conducted, amounting to what the suit called Chicago Police's "mass traffic stop program."

The lawsuit claims this program relies on illegal quotas, and flooding Black and Latinx neighborhoods with police encounters to deter unrelated crime, using the pretext of traffic enforcement to search drivers for contraband—often without their consent. This racial profiling of drivers of color resulted in police "harassing hundreds of thousands of Black Chicagoans" annually, Block said. 

Twenty-five-year-old West Side resident Mahari Bell joined the lawsuit after being stopped over 10 times in the past eight years. While some of the stops seemed harmless, others left him fearing for his life, Bell said.

"A lot of us are just tired. People don't want to be harassed by Chicago police," Bell said. "I was profiled, harassed, my rights are violated consistently. Nobody wants to live like that, especially in the city that they're from."

While driving for UberEats in May 2022, Bell was pulled over downtown when officers accused him of cutting off another driver—a claim he contests. Just moments into the encounter, officers put Bell in handcuffs without any explanation. When they asked to search his car, Bell felt like he had no choice but to agree.

"It all happened so quick. There wasn't any need for a search or for handcuffs. The officer, he was very accusatory, so it was clear that it wasn't about traffic," Bell said. "I feel like if I would have said no, the stop could have been completely different. I could've spent the night in a holding cell."

But even when police encounters don’t escalate, being constantly pulled over makes Bell feel "belittled, degraded and ultimately disrespected," he said.

"It made me realize, I think a lot of officers in Chicago just don't care to be a part of the community. They don't care to offer their public service," Bell said. "Despite my intentions, despite who I am, I'm still just a statistic to CPD. Just another traffic stop that has to be done for their numbers."

The lawsuit is still in early stages, but its goal is to end citywide units dedicated to traffic stops so Chicago Police can reel in the harm to community trust inflicted by the Community Safety Team and affiliated units, Block said.

"We are hoping CPD will rethink its reliance on the mass traffic stops strategy as its go-to supposed crime fighting technique, because it just doesn't work," Block said.

The ACLU's class action lawsuit builds upon an existing complaint about the Community Safety Team that came from within the unit itself. In 2021, Franklin Paz, a former lieutenant on the Community Safety Team sued the city over illegal traffic stop quotas. Paz, who was also a 20-year department veteran, claims he was demoted and punished for resisting the quotas. 

Police sergeants on the Community Safety Team testified that when they were assigned to the unit, leadership told them their primary mission was to stop masses of drivers and proactively initiate police encounters, court records show. Officers were required to meet stop quotas unrelated to crime levels or traffic safety, according to Paz, who was instructed to demand that each officer in his platoon conduct at least 10 traffic stops daily, the complaint shows.

The ACLU lawsuit references emails where CPD’s then second-in-command, Deputy Superintendent Ernest Cato, urges commanders to raise traffic enforcement numbers and "utilize traffic stops to address violence."

The lawsuits share common claims that the Community Safety Team was simply a rebrand and reshuffling of CPD's infamously aggressive saturation teams.

Though Brown promised at the launch of the Community Safety Team that "this is not a roving strike force like what CPD had in the past," officers testified that unit was staffed with personnel from tactical teams, gun teams, saturation teams, and other groups trained to aggressively stop residents, often while patrolling in plainclothes and in unmarked cars. 

Bolts’ analysis of CPD attendance and assignment data supports this, showing that at least 45 of the sergeants leading the Community Safety Team in its first year were assigned to the community policing initiative immediately after leaving tactical teams.

A new administration, a new era for policing?

Amid the legal backlash, CPD quietly sunsetted the Community Safety Team by reassigning officers to other units en masse by the start of 2023, leaving fewer than a hundred officers on the team. After becoming police superintendent in September, Larry Snelling said during a police budget hearing that he has since “broken that team down” and reassigned the officers back to local districts. 

But even as the Community Safety Team waned, the unit’s aggressive traffic stop tactics continued to be enforced by other officers, including those assigned to neighborhood districts where Snelling emphasized he would focus police resources, data show. The most recent dispatch data show the units stopping the largest numbers of drivers are now those assigned to local districts, including beat officers, tactical teams, and rapid response officers.

Snelling is one of the first major appointees of Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former teacher and union organizer who ran and won on a historically progressive platform, and has promised to chart a new course for public safety centered on community investment, not solely law enforcement power. Since taking office, Johnson has had to balance expectations from the progressives who put him in power with those of the police union which has been antagonistic from the start. One of Johnson’s first acts as mayor established an Office of Community Safety, charged with “dual responsibilities of leading a full force of government, rapid response to safety issues and developing community-driven strategies for addressing the root causes of harm,” a spokesperson for the mayor told Bolts. 

With a progressive mayor at the helm, mounting pressure from newly created civilian oversight councils, and the weight of the consent decree bearing down, the pressure is also on Snelling to set policing policy that can move the dial on community safety without sacrificing public trust in law enforcement.

Historically, incoming CPD leadership inevitably launches a signature crimefighting initiative, like Brown’s Community Safety Team or former Superintendent Garry McCarthy’s use of the CompStat strategy that resembled broken-windows policing. And Snelling will likely follow the example of his predecessors with a signature community policing initiative, said CPD expert Wes Skogan, professor emeritus of political science at Northwestern University.

"My guess is Larry Snelling will invent a new acronym with a promise of a reinvigorated community policing program," Skogan said. 

But like the exchange of officers between tactical teams and the Community Safety Team, a new name doesn’t guarantee any fundamental change in how residents are impacted by the policing tactics. 

Unless new leadership focuses on safety "outcomes" like crime reduction rather than "inputs" like traffic stop numbers, the aggressive policing tactics will likely continue, said former interim Superintendent Charlie Beck, who in 2020 dramatically restructured the department by shifting officers out of citywide units and into neighborhood police districts. 

"You get what you ask for. If you emphasize traffic stops as what you want, then you'll get them. Unfortunately, if you cast too wide a net when you do that, you can make people feel like they're under siege,” Beck said.

There is also broader skepticism over whether Johnson’s administration can effectively steer the department away from the domineering policing tactics that have landed the city in hot water time and again. Johnson has faced continued pressure over his increase of the police budget, his administration’s contract agreement with the Fraternal Order of Police that doubles annual pay raises and may weaken accountability processes for disciplinary cases, and his continued funding of the ShotSpotter gunshot detection technology despite prior vows to drop the controversial surveillance system. 

But Johnson’s budget does offer a preview into the community investments aimed at tackling the root causes of crime, with $209 million going towards efforts like anti-violence programming, restorative justice, re-entry programs and gender-based violence prevention and intervention, a spokesman for the mayor said. The plan vastly expands staffing for public mental health clinics and mobile crisis response teams, which include social workers and addiction specialists who would respond to 911 calls in lieu of police during mental health emergencies. Johnson’s budget would also expand the city’s youth job programs, and includes investments to address the housing and homelessness crisis brought to the forefront by the influx of asylum seekers. 

Johnson and Snelling have both touted plans to replace up to 400 officer roles with civilian positions, such as domestic violence advocates and workers assigned to the officer training academy. 

“Having those civilian employees amongst us, it creates a better environment for the officers,” Snelling said. “It’s officers working with civilians, so we have a better understanding of the community and the community has a better understanding of us. It shows we can work in partnership with people who are not sworn members.”

Community policing

In spite of the Community Safety Team, some prior community policing efforts have forged strong connections between residents and officers, leaving some hopeful for the future. Snelling’s earlier efforts at building connections with Englewood residents made Williams optimistic about future community policing efforts, he said. 

"He brought his tactical officers out—the ones who do a lot of the crazy stuff sometimes—he brought them out so they could get to know the community in a different way,” Williams said. “He's coming in, he's walking those streets, trying to build the relationships.”

A 2019 community policing project, the Chicago Neighborhood Policing Initiative (NPI), emulates CAPS by dedicating a group of officers in each district to build long-term relationships with residents and neighborhood groups and coordinate city resources to solve problems in the area. Unlike the Community Safety Team, these officers don’t do the typical emergency responses, traffic stops, and patrols. 

The program has "reimagined what police officers can do," said Deondre' Rutues, a council member for the 15th Police District in Austin, as well as the Community Engagement Specialist for the Chicago Neighborhood Policing Initiative.

"We're supposed to lead the charge and tell them what we need from them," Rutues said. "It isn't a process where police just come and lock somebody up. The officers follow the lead of the community to determine what to do."

Changing police leadership, staffing shortages and the interruption of the coronavirus pandemic halted the NPI from being fully implemented, a Northwestern report found. But the success of the NPI shows that one arm of the city's agenda may be dedicated to an earnest attempt at community policing. 

But as long as the other arm is focused on mass traffic stops conducted by roving strike teams, Chicago's community policing agenda will be at odds with itself, says Rutues.

"You created the Community Safety Team to enhance relationship building...But it continues to undo everything that is supposed to be contained in the Consent Decree, and also the work people on the ground are trying to do." 

The post “I’m Just Another Traffic Stop” appeared first on Bolts.

Whitmire, a fixture of Democratic politics in Texas and state lawmaker for half a century, has made the story central to his campaign for mayor of Houston this year, weaving it between calls to jail more people, aggressively hire more police, and deploy hundreds of state troopers to patrol the city. “When I watch the crime that’s in Houston, it alarms me,” he said in a recent campaign ad where he talks about the robbery three decades ago. “You know, I was robbed at gunpoint in my garage, and I definitely thought he was going to kill me, my wife and my 9 year old daughter. And it just changes your life forever.”

Whitmire finished on top of a crowded field of 17 other candidates in the Nov. 7 election, winning 42.5 percent of the vote. He now faces a Dec. 9 runoff against Sheila Jackson Lee, the longest serving member of Houston’s congressional delegation and another towering figure in Democratic politics in the state, who came in second last week with 35.6 percent.

The mayor’s race has spotlighted the tough-on-crime politics that still dominate debate around public safety in the nation’s fourth largest city. Police in Houston have a long history of brutality and impunity, while Harris County, where the city is located, was until recently known as the death penalty capital of the world for how many people it has sent away for execution. 

In recent years, local debates and policies around criminal punishment started to shift as Democrats solidified control of the county government and as activists pushed for reforms. Throughout the two terms of Mayor Sylvester Turner, who could not run for reelection this year due to term limits, advocates lobbied him to implement police reforms, with mixed results: Turner updated policies to increase access to officer body camera footage and promised greater police oversight but he also balked at other requests. He resisted demands that the city make its contract negotiations with the Houston police union, which determine many oversight and discipline policies, a public process, as it is in other major Texas cities like San Antonio and Austin.

Heading into the city’s municipal elections this fall, advocates for police reform tried to turn the mayoral race into an opportunity for broader discussion around public safety and changes they want the city’s next mayor to prioritize. Under Houston’s “strong mayor” form of government, the mayor wields enormous power over city policy by appointing each department head, overseeing all administrative work, and setting the city council’s agenda. 

A coalition of community and civil rights groups, which called themselves RISE Houston (or “Reimagining Safety for Everyone in Houston”), developed three demands for candidates: reducing minor traffic stops that disproportionately target Black drivers, ending a controversial multi million dollar police surveillance contract that has proven ineffective, and freezing the city’s police budget. 

But when the coalition tried surveying each candidate on those issues, few responded or took any concrete positions. Neither Whitmire or Jackson Lee, the political juggernauts in the race, even attended a forum on public safety policies that the coalition held in early October—although Jackson Lee, who was in Washington D.C. at the time, spoke to the crowd virtually later in the event. 

RoShawn C. Evans, one of the activists who helped form the coalition, said the local criminal justice reform group that he co-founded in 2015, Pure Justice, had considered making endorsements for the first time this year but eventually decided against it.

“We chose not to because of the narrative around public safety,” Evans told Bolts. “It’s very bothersome that I’m watching all these candidates run to represent the city of Houston and the platform that they’re running on is a platform that is around the narrative of mass incarceration. Every dollar we put into law enforcement, every dollar we put into building a new court or hiring more DAs, it opens the floodgates to mass incarceration even wider than what it already is.” 

Whitmire, who has led in both polling and campaign funding throughout the race, helped set the terms of debate during the race with his promise to be “tough and smart on crime.” Like in cities across the country, violent crime rose in Texas’ largest city during the pandemic and remained a top concern for Houstonians surveyed before this year’s election, even as crime rates have started to fall. 

Whitmire is a rare Democrat with any semblance of power in the GOP-dominated Texas legislature. As chair of the Senate’s criminal justice committee since 1993, a position he has retained since the Republican Party solidified control of the chamber later in the 1990s, he has sat at the center of the state’s policies around criminal punishment for decades. In the 1990s, Whitmire was an architect of policies that scaled up incarceration in Texas, helping pass a legislative package that increased prison time for serious offenses and pumping $1 billion into an unprecedented prison-building boom. Later, in the 2000s, he helped expand diversion programs that reversed the trend and staved off even more prison building. 

In more recent legislative sessions, advocates have criticized Whitmire for being a barrier to change, saying the senate criminal justice committee has become a killing field for reform legislation under his leadership. He has refused to consider reforms the Texas House has passed, such as legislation raising the age of criminal responsibility to 18 (Texas is one of only three states that charges 17 year olds as adults) and efforts to install air conditioning in the state’s dangerously hot prisons. Even reforms he claims to support, like “second chance” legislation to allow reconsideration for people sentenced to life in prison as children, have derailed in the committee on his watch. 

Whitmire, who didn’t respond to questions for this story, has defended his legislative record and insisted reform advocates have unrealistic expectations, telling the Houston Chronicle recently, “I don’t think any criticism has an appreciation for the difficulty in Austin of doing criminal justice reform at any time in the 30 years that I’ve been chair.” 

Civil rights advocates in Houston are particularly worried about one of Whitmire’s core campaign proposals, to bring in more state troopers from the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) to help patrol the city, warning that it will worsen racial disparities in policing in Houston. The actions of the state agency, which is far whiter and less diverse than Houston’s police force, have raised concerns about racial profiling and police brutality when troopers have been deployed to patrol other cities and along the border with Mexico. 

When Austin city leaders tried the approach earlier this year, troopers primarily arrested people of color before officials called off the partnership. When Dallas brought in DPS troopers in 2019, some local leaders criticized the agency for acting like “an occupying force.” Christopher Rivera, an outreach coordinator in Houston for the Texas Civil Rights Project’s criminal injustice program, pointed to a report the group put out earlier this year showing minor traffic enforcement already disproportionately targets Black drivers in Houston. While activists have asked for an ordinance limiting traffic stops and police encounters for non-moving violations, like expired registration, they now worry Whitmire’s proposal for DPS patrols could exacerbate the problem. 

“Probably the most concerning thing that has come up in the race has been the DPS issue,” Rivera told Bolts. “When we bring more police into the city of Houston, they just end up over policing more neighborhoods of color and low income communities.”

Rivera said local activists hope that a change to municipal government that voters adopted last week will open the door to more reform discussions at city hall, regardless of who’s in the mayor’s office. More than 80 percent of voters approved Proposition A, which gives city council members more power to force the council to take up issues even without the mayor’s approval; beginning next year, any three of Houston’s 16 city council members can join together to put items on the council’s agenda.

Progressive advocates in Houston are hopeful that they’ve retained some footholds in municipal government in this fall’s elections. Council Member Tarsha Jackson, who was formerly a top staffer with the Texas Organizing Project (TOP), which has become a driving force in left politics in the state, won reelection last week. Council Member Letitia Plummer, who has advocated for changing how the city spends money on public safety, faces a runoff against challenger Roy Morales.

While Whitmire has the backing of local and state police groups in his run for mayor, Jackson Lee has garnered endorsements by more outwardly progressive organizations and leaders, like TOP and also Lina Hidalgo, Harris County government’s chief executive, who has supported bail reform and pushed back against some of the district attorney’s funding requests. While Jackson Lee has used a different tone from Whitmire when talking about crime, she has done little to carve out a competing vision around public safety and has offered few specific policy priorities on the campaign trail. 

Jackson Lee, who did not respond to questions for this story, expressed some caution about Whitmire’s plan to deploy state troopers during one of the final televised debates in the race last month. 

“I give them credit for their investigative skills, they will be used for that, but not patrolling our neighborhoods where our families are looking to those they know and those who know them,” she said, promising instead to “expand” the presence of local police.

On election night, Jackson Lee thanked her supporters and spoke in broad terms about combating gun violence, increasing mental health services, and “making sure that every corner of this city will be represented at the table of empowerment.” Across town, as he addressed his supporters, Whitmire again returned to his own brush with crime three decades ago. 

“Let anyone who can hear my voice: I don’t apologize for being tough on crime,” he said. “I’ve had to beg for my life and my wife and my nine year old daughter in our garage. That person put a gun in my face and I thought I was finished. I was worried about my daughter and my wife. But God had a plan for me.”

Correction (Nov. 17): An earlier version of this article misstated the result for one of Houston’s council seats; Letitia Plummer and Roy Morales will face off in a runoff.

The post Promises to Scale Up Policing Stir Houston’s Mayoral Race appeared first on Bolts.

But last month, Wu, now mayor, flipped on that key campaign issue and asked the city to increase funding for BRIC. On Oct. 4, the Boston City Council approved Wu’s funding request, electing in a series of 7-5 votes to give the surveillance center an additional $3.4 million in grant funding to hire eight new analysts—four times the amount that Wu voted against two years ago. 

The increase in BRIC funding was approved despite concerns from some city councilors that the center and the Boston Police Department (BPD), which oversees it, had not sufficiently addressed evidence of targeted surveillance, with all five of the council’s members of color voting against the funds. BPD’s gang unit and BRIC’s gang database are currently being investigated for racial bias by the Massachusetts attorney general.

“They provided no metrics, no evidence that it makes us safer,” said Councilor Ricardo Arroyo during the meeting. “The fact that they’re currently under investigation for possible civil rights abuses and racial discrimination makes it impossible for me to vote for those grants today.” 

To local organizers, Wu’s 180-degree pivot feels emblematic of a larger reluctance by her administration to enact the policing reforms that she championed during her rise in Boston politics. Wu had called for a 10 percent reduction in the city’s police budget during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. The following year, she campaigned for mayor with bold rhetoric around policing as well as specific policy priorities, from ending police use of tear gas and no-knock warrants to abolishing the surveillance center. Anger over years of police abuses helped sweep her into the mayor’s office with a 28-point margin of victory. 

But since she took office, those promises largely have not materialized, and funding for law enforcement has mostly gone up. During the most recent round of budget negotiations in June, Wu even rejected the council’s attempt to cut $30 million from the police department, and instead passed a final budget with a $9 million increase for police.  

Fatema Ahmad, the executive director of Muslim Justice League, which has led the charge against BRIC funding, said that Wu’s about-face on the surveillance center is part of a broader retreat from the promises that politicians made during the height of the movement for police accountability. “As soon as she was elected, the stances started turning around,” Ahmad told Bolts. “Immediately, we were told that the gang database wasn’t a priority because of other policing issues they were tackling. You know, we saw not only a lack of commitment to decreasing the budget, but now this year an increase in the police budget.”  

Wu has gestured to policing reforms instituted since she voted against the BRIC funding in 2021 to explain her change of heart. In a recent letter to city council members urging them to support the increase in funding, Wu wrote, “Since the June 2021 council vote, several consequential policy and leadership changes have been implemented such that the BRIC and the Boston Police Department operate in a significantly different environment today.” 

In this new environment, Wu explains, the surveillance BRIC conducts—which she calls “public safety intelligence and analysis”—is crucial to achieving larger public safety goals like reducing gun violence. “From reimagining community outreach and coordination of providers, to engaging high-risk individuals with high-quality supports,” Wu wrote, “Our community safety efforts rely on detailed and accurate intelligence to guide all City agencies to close gaps through deploying coordinated resources and services.” Wu did not respond to Bolts’ request for an interview for this story. 

Boston-area activists and other politicians elected in the wake of the 2020 uprising say that little has changed about policing there and argue that Wu’s progressive credentials are now serving to provide cover for what is little more than an attempt to give even more money to a law enforcement agency that operates mostly in the shadows. 

janhavi madabushi, the executive director of the Massachusetts Bail Fund, which pays people’s bond so they can stay in their community pre-trial, told Bolts, “I don’t understand how a progressive mayor can rubber stamp and give basically a blank check to the Boston Police Department.”

The Boston Regional Intelligence Center was established in 2005 as one of a host of intelligence-sharing “fusion centers” established around the U.S. after the events of 9/11. BRIC brings together local law enforcement and first responders from nine communities across the Boston metro area, as well as liaisons from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and even the “private sector,” according to an archived description of the center on BPD’s website.

“The initial justification for the creation of these places was ‘we need local police to be involved in a nationwide fight against terrorism,’” Kade Crockford, the director of the Massachusetts ACLU’s Technology for Liberty Program and a longtime scholar and critic of the BRIC, told Bolts—despite the fact that the intelligence failures that led to 9/11 had nothing to do with local law enforcement. 

“There was almost immediately an identity crisis in these fusion centers, because local police and the democratically elected people that are in charge of the police are in pretty much every city in the country under some degree of pressure politically to deal with regular crime,” Crockford explained. “People are not going to community and neighborhood meetings where they can have coffee with a cop and asking them, ‘What are you doing about al-Qaeda?’” Moreover, actual instances of terrorism on U.S. soil are quite rare; in 2012, a report by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Investigations concluded that fusion centers were ineffective and wasteful of taxpayer dollars. 

So fusion centers shifted course, allocating resources to ordinary street crime while continuing to maintain their image as crucial bulwarks against terrorism. But Crockford argues that BRIC and its brethren have actually been used for two very different purposes: “One, to monitor people’s noncriminal speech and associations that are protected by the First Amendment related to activism and religious expression; and two, to continue criminal intelligence operations primarily directed at Black and Latino young people under the auspices of anti-gang programs.” 

BRIC regularly shared information about Boston public school students with ICE, with life-changing consequences for at least one person: in 2018, a young Salvadoran man was deported after police wrongly labeled him as an MS-13 associate. A 2012 report by the Massachusetts ACLU and state chapter of the National Lawyers Guild  found that the center has a habit of spying on anti-war demonstrators and other activists engaged in constitutionally protected forms of protest. And in late 2017, FOIA requests by the organization revealed that BRIC had used a social media surveillance program called Geofeedia to monitor common Arabic terms like ummah, which translates to “community,” as well as phrases like #blacklivesmatter and #muslimlivesmatter. The program flagged posts that expressed solidarity between Jews and Muslims, tweets from the volunteer group Muslims Against Hunger, and a slew of sophomoric jokes about ISIS. (“My god ISIS needs some decent videographers. Any Emerson students interested? I hear they pay well in promised virgins.”) 

“We’re so used to being surveilled by every type of law enforcement,” said Ahmad of the Muslim Justice League, speaking about Muslim communities in the U.S. “And so when you have something like BRIC locally, it’s just so much harder for the community here to feel like they can talk about their politics especially, or organize in the face of an institution that’s not just flagging them for using just really common Muslim words—but also clearly going after activists.”

Today, BRIC operates a fleet of cameras throughout the Boston metropolitan area—including at least 40 in the northwest suburb of Somerville, which, like all the other cities besides Boston included within its purview, has no direct say over how or where that surveillance technology gets used. Willie Burnley Jr., a city councilor in Somerville, says this presents basic democratic and transparency issues. “Without the consent of the council and an explicit pathway for us to withdraw participation in BRIC, it puts us in a particularly challenging position to adequately protect our constituents from surveillance that may not be in their best interest,” he told Bolts.

Moreover, Burnley says that BRIC’s inter-agency status allows it to effectively override the fact that Somerville, as a smaller, more progressive city than Boston, has different attitudes towards policing and greater checks already in place around the use of surveillance technology. Burnley himself was elected to his at-large city council seat in Somerville in 2021, after helping found the activist group Somerville Defund the Police, which advocated for the reallocation of money away from the Somerville Police Department and towards social services and housing.

Recently, when the department decided it wanted access to a phone hacking program, GRAYKEY, BRIC went ahead and bought it for them. “This extremely well-funded multi-jurisdictional surveillance structure is bypassing our own municipal laws and policies,” Burnley told Bolts. The department still needs to go before the council to be granted official use of the technology, Burnley said, but the center’s actions seemed to bypass some standard checks and balances on police department authority. “We’re not in the police department watching them every day,” he said. “So the fact that they have this technology, we have to essentially take them at their word that they aren’t using it.” 

BRIC has been arguably best known for the controversial gang database it maintains: a list of thousands of Boston-area residents, only about 2 percent of whom are white. As of 2021, 75 percent of names in the database belong to Black people, who make up only 7 percent of the Boston metro population. 

Wu once spoke of abolishing the gang database altogether. But earlier this month, in her letter to city council asking for increased BRIC funding, she praised new guidelines for the database that resulted in the removal of nearly 2,500 names since 2021. 

But to local activists, this purge doesn’t go far enough. They believe that the entire methodology that underpins the database is fundamentally flawed. 

“There’s this myth that they’re using some kind of science for figuring out who is a gang member in this database, but it’s based on this 10-point model,” said Ahmad. “It’s all very behavioral. And that hasn’t changed.” Residents are assigned different numbers of points for various behaviors or associations, including the clothing or tattoos they sport and the people they interact with. The young Salvadoran man who was deported had racked up 21 points, all for instances in which police observed him hanging out with people they had also labeled MS-13 associates or gang members.  

madabushi’s organization posts bond for residents in five counties, including Suffolk, where Boston is located. They said that the people they work with are more likely to be assigned a higher bail, denied bail entirely, or face harsher conditions of release, such as house arrest or GPS monitoring when their name appears in the gang database. “Young people are being surveilled over social media and if there is cash appearing in a young person’s picture, or a certain kind of hat that they are wearing, the BRIC is making assumptions about what that could mean for them being involved in organized crime,” they told Bolts. They have also seen people in this situation receive additional federal charges or have immigration enforcement looped in.

madabushi also noted that from the experience of the community members the bail fund works with, the collateral consequences of inclusion on the gang database don’t necessarily end when someone’s name is removed. “The demand is not to purge names from the database, the demand is to completely shut down the database and shut down the entity that is carrying on this kind of racist surveillance,” they said.

While Wu has pointed to changes in the gang database to justify backtracking on the BRIC grants, she has also gestured to broader police oversight and accountability reforms that have been implemented since 2020. 

In both her letter to council and a recent interview with WBUR, the mayor cited the creation of new state and local police oversight bodies—the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission, as well as its local counterpart, Boston’s Office of Police Accountability and Transparency. 

The state commission, established by a 2020 police reform law, is supposed to standardize training, certification and disciplinary standards for police, as well as maintain a public database of police disciplinary records, but its work has been beset by delays and debate over how much information about officers should be posted online. Some worry the commission is essentially toothless since it can’t compel agencies to disclose records or mandate that they remain public. And since it’s only tasked with oversight of sworn law enforcement officers, it’s unclear how the new state police commission could provide more accountability for the many civilian analysts who work at BRIC and feed information to local law enforcement. 

As for Boston’s Office of Police Accountability and Transparency, which was created in January 2021 to review police policy and investigate civilian complaints against officers, it has faced staff turnover and criticism that it has done very little. Of the 107 complaints submitted since its inception, only three were sustained (47 were still pending as of publication, according to the database). Of these, two involved officers posting inappropriate information or comments online—information that is more or less objectively verifiable.

Ahmad with the Muslim Justice League questioned whether the new office would have any impact on BRIC operations. How could people surveilled or targeted by BRIC even know enough about the center’s actions to submit a successful complaint?

To her, recent reforms like the state police commission and Boston’s police accountability office largely seem like window dressing to make a weary public feel better about law enforcement. “These task forces and commissions and, you know, call them whatever name you give them—it doesn’t address the root problems,” she said.

The post Boston Mayor Backtracks on Ending  Controversial Police Surveillance Center appeared first on Bolts.

Jeff Landry faces 15 opponents in Louisiana’s gubernatorial race this fall, but at times, it seems like the Republican attorney general is really running against the state’s Democratic, majority-Black major cities. 

In his announcement video, the candidate blasted Louisiana’s “incompetent mayors and woke District Attorneys” for what he sees as their role in allowing crime to proliferate. He doubled down in a series of campaign videos that called out the DAs of Caddo, East Baton Rouge, and Orleans for the three parishes’ crime rates, highlighting images of the two Black prosecutors but omitting any footage of East Baton Rouge DA Hillar Moore, who is white. “When DAs fail to prosecute—when judges fail to act – when police are handcuffed instead of the criminals—enough is enough,” he announces. 

In 2022, he assisted a Republican lawmaker in unveiling a bill, House Bill 321, that would have made public the criminal records of young people between ages 13 and 18 who are accused of a violent crime—but only in Caddo, East Baton Rouge, and Orleans, all parishes with some of the highest concentrations of Black residents in the state. Landry made news appearances advocating for the bill and spoke at the press conference announcing it, later using portions of his speech for campaign ads attacking those three parishes’ DAs. 

Bruce Reilly, a formerly incarcerated criminal justice reform advocate who testified against the bill at the Capitol, sat behind Landry as he spoke in favor of HB321. “If you think this is a good thing, why wouldn’t you do it in your own town?” he wondered.

It’s not uncommon for Republican candidates to blame Democrats for crime rates in the cities they control as a way of establishing conservative bona fides. But Landry’s campaign rhetoric isn’t just bluster. During his seven-plus years as attorney general, he has used the power of his office in standard, unorthodox, and at times highly controversial ways to single out New Orleans and the state’s other big cities. 

Landry’s actions have ranged from creating a short-lived anti-crime task force that made arrests in New Orleans without clear jurisdiction to to spearheading punitive legislation that only applied to Louisiana’s three major cities. He also tried to strike down a federal consent decree ensuring a majority-Black state supreme court district in Orleans Parish. And he even recently tried to withhold flood protection funds after city officials suggested they wouldn’t prioritize enforcing abortion crimes. 

Landry, whose campaign did not respond to interview requests from Bolts, will face off against his actual opponents in the primary on Oct. 14. If no one candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two, regardless of party, will compete in a runoff on Nov. 18. The incumbent, Democrat John Bel Edwards, cannot seek re-election due to term limits, and Landry has so far been the front-runner in public polling. 

A win by Landry would return unified control of Louisiana’s government to the GOP. But it would also elevate and empower a man who has tirelessly sought to undermine the political power of the state’s major cities and shield law enforcement from local and federal reform efforts.

“The place is being run like a third world-country,” the attorney general said of New Orleans during an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show last October. “Why doesn’t the state just take it over?” Carlson asks. “It’s a great question,” Landry responded. “In Louisiana, we have one of the most powerful executive departments in the country. The governor is extremely powerful. He has the ability to bend that city to his will, and he [Edwards] just doesn’t.”

“But we will.”

After an early stint as both a police officer and sheriff’s deputy, followed by law school, Landry was elected to Congress in 2010 as part of the ascendant Tea Party, the proto-MAGA movement that crusaded against taxation and federal government overreach. During his lone term representing Louisiana at the national level, Landry posed with a chainsaw in his office, meant to symbolize his willingness to make sawdust of the national budget. His time in Congress would be short lived—ironically, his congressional seat was eliminated during redistricting after New Orleanians left the city in droves in the wake of Hurricane Katrina—but he brought the chainsaw approach to his new role as attorney general, especially when it came to opposing Obama-era federal policy and executive orders.

Since he took office in January 2016, Landry has waged a rhetorical war on crime in New Orleans filled with racist dog whistles implying that the majority-Black city is lawless and out of control. “He definitely appeals to race,” said Bruce Reilly, the Deputy Director of Voice of The Experienced (VOTE), a group of formerly incarcerated Louisianans and their allies that advocates for criminal legal reform. “You pile on the Black mayor, the Black DA, the Black sheriff, right—it’s known as a Black city.” 

“I think it’s obvious,” Caddo Parish DA James Stewart, who is Black, said in an interview about the campaign videos in which he and New Orleans DA Jason Williams are depicted but their white counterpart in East Baton Rouge is not. 

Landry’s belief that New Orleans and other major cities are being poorly run is inextricably tied to his desire to police them more heavily and without restraint. In Landry’s interview with Carlson last October, he made it clear what he believes to be the solution to New Orleans’s woes. “That’s the way you start to take back control of these cities: by instituting state and local control—in law enforcement,” the attorney general said. He has also argued that New Orleans police should be allowed to use stop-and-frisk practices, which a decade-old consent decree, which grants federal oversight of the city’s police department in order to institute reforms, prohibits. 

“I think he genuinely is completely unwilling to entertain the idea that there are solutions to crises that we have in our state that are not driven by criminalization,” Mercedes Montagnes, a local civil rights lawyer, said of Landry. 

In July 2016, citing rising crime rates in the Big Easy, Landry created a Violent Crimes Task Force consisting of five state agents from the Louisiana State Police Bureau of Investigation who would patrol and make arrests within New Orleans city limits. His announcement was met with statements of support from some local officials, but within months, the New Orleans chief of police had signaled to Landry that his office had no authority to engage in law enforcement in the city, and a spokesman chided Landry for using the department, and the city itself, as a “prop in political agendas.” 

Landry ultimately disbanded his task force amidst criticism from local officials and a federal judge, who said she believed that Landry lacked the authority to direct agents to make arrests in New Orleans and stressed the importance of police operating only where they have the authority to do so in order to ensure that arrests were valid. Its actual impact was far thinner than the controversy it fomented: In nearly a year of operations, the task force had made only 16 documented arrests, leading to at least one case where a public defender argued the arrest was illegal (it was upheld).

Landry has also heaped scorn on the consent decree governing the New Orleans Police Department, consistently implying that it is a misuse of federal authority (he recently called it a “pernicious threat to federalism”) and said that it “handcuffs cops instead of criminals,” a pet phrase of his. 

The decree, which Landry also likes to refer to as an example of what he calls “hug a thug” policies popular with Democrats, was put into place in 2013 after a U.S.Department of Justice investigation—itself sparked by an incident just six days after Hurricane Katrina in which a group of New Orleans police officers in street clothes toting AK-47s shot at a Black family and their friend as they were walking to the grocery store. Two of them were killed, including a 17-year-old; four others were severely wounded, including one woman whose arm later had to be amputated. The department then tried to cover up the shooting. Federal investigators found “patterns of misconduct that violate the Constitution and federal law,” which they stressed went far beyond the incident itself. 

The subtext to Landry’s crusade is not merely opposition to federal power or a desire to assert state-wide control—it’s a distaste for any checks on police power. In 2017, he penned an editorial heralding the news that the end of the consent decree was near (it wasn’t). “As expected when police priorities are subject to the approval of activist judges and Washington lawyers, the community suffers and criminals benefit,” the AG wrote.

In recent years, Landry’s campaign against the consent decree has aligned with the efforts of New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, otherwise a frequent sparring partner of Landry’s, to put an end to the decree. (Still, as of April, more than half of the city council opposed the mayor’s stance as of April and said the consent decree should stay.)

But Montagnes, the civil rights lawyer, stressed that Landry’s actions were more about politics than his assessment of how far the New Orleans police department has progressed since the implementation of the consent decree. “[Jeff Landry] is not talking to people in New Orleans,” Montagnes said. “He’s not holding community meetings. This is just based on his unilateral position that we should not trust the federal government, and we should get them out of our business.”

Landry has used his office to retaliate against city leaders who disagree with him on abortion criminalization and immigration enforcement, at times withholding key funding and jeopardizing important city functions with his political gamesmanship. 

In 2016, after New Orleans police adopted a policy preventing officers from inquiring about people’s immigration status, Landry helped craft a bill that would prevent so-called sanctuary cities from accessing state bond money for construction projects. The bill would have also granted him, as attorney general, sole authority to define what a “sanctuary city” actually was—under his definition, New Orleans was the only municipality that qualified. 

Some lawmakers worried that the bill would give Landry too much power, and could place the city in conflict with its own consent decree. New Orleans, meanwhile, maintained that its police force’s anti-discrimination policies, including its best practices around immigration status, came at the behest of the federal government itself. Versions of the bill died in 2016, 2017 and 2023. 

In late 2022, Landry used his position on the Louisiana State Bond Commission to try and hold up $39 million dollars in flood prevention funding for New Orleans after the city council passed a non-binding resolution related to Louisiana’s harsh new abortion law, which lacks rape or incest exceptions. The city resolution requested that police and prosecutors make investigation and enforcement of the law “the lowest priority.” 

Landry responded by urging the commission to “use the tools at our disposal to bring them to heel.” Initially, his fellow commissioners seemed to agree, voting twice to stop the funding from moving forward. But their support crumbled, culminating in a tense, at times openly hostile meeting in September in which the board ultimately voted to approve the funding. “To use this commission as a political maneuver is not our position—shouldn’t be our position, I feel,” said Lieutenant Governor Billy Nungesser, claiming he hadn’t realized how the representative he had sent to previous meetings had voted.

“We’re talking about someone whose job it is to sit on the bond commission withholding vital infrastructure funds to punish any democratically elected local government,” said Monika Gerhart, an energy consultant and the former director of intergovernmental relations for the city of New Orleans. Gerhart is currently consulting on policy for Shawn Wilson, one of Landry’s chief opponents.

Gerhart believes that Landry’s ultimate goal wasn’t even to punish New Orleans, but rather to force his fellow commissioners, several of whom were also considering a run for governor, to vote to signal their anti-abortion bona fides, inevitably angering a large municipality whose residents would soon go to the polls to choose whether to elect them as governor. He has since announced that he will not run, but at the time, Nungesser was considered Landry’s most viable Republican opponent in the gubernatorial race; another commissioner, State Treasurer John Schroeder, is a more centrist Republican whom Gerhart believes will likely seek to court New Orleans Voters, especially if the race were to come down to a run-off between him and Landry.

“It was a completely manufactured crisis,” she added. “I think it’s a really dangerous way to prioritize politics over governance.” 

Landry is, of course, running to be governor of the entire state. But Reilly believes Landry sees it as more advantageous to scapegoat New Orleans in order to rally his base than he does to seek out its residents’ votes. In Louisiana, he said, “you can win an election on all rural votes. You can win an election on all white votes.” 

And so far, those are the very voters Landry seems to be courting with his campaign. He aligned himself with Trump early on and received his endorsement, and he has woven his critiques of New Orleans into a larger “tough on crime” platform. His main Democratic opponent, Wilson, meanwhile, is charting a moderate approach, emphasizing his statewide leadership experience and credentials; his slogan is “We need leaders who will build bridges, not burn them.” 

If Landry wins control of Louisiana’s executive branch, he would have the power to staff many of Louisiana’s more than 500 boards and commissions, including a number with direct power over the state’s criminal legal system, such as the Committee on Parole, the State Police Commission, the Police Officer Standards and Training (POST) council, and the Louisiana Sentencing Commission. Landry would also have ultimate say over the state’s budget;. the office’s line-item-veto power means that Landry would have the ability to, with the stroke of a pen, edit the state’s budget in order to divert resources away from New Orleans and other cities when they adopt policies he doesn’t like. 

Critics of Laundry’s who spoke to Bolts fear he would go even further in inserting the state into New Orleans politics on issues like crime, homelessness, and social and cultural issues—much like Governor Ron DeSantis has done in Florida. 

“There’s this incredibly complicated relationship between the remainder of our state and New Orleans,” said Montagnes. New Orleans is the center of business and tourism in Louisiana, she said, “but I think it becomes a bogeyman on cultural, social issues, and I think that Jeff Landry is really particularly interested in dividing people of Louisiana based along those issues. And so we’d be an easy target.” 

The post Jeff Landry’s Bid for Louisiana Governor Has Been a Crusade Against Its Cities appeared first on Bolts.

On April 4, Chicago progressives cheered when Brandon Johnson won the mayoral race by defeating Paul Vallas, who was backed by the city’s police union. Vallas, who predicted a less safe Chicago if voters picked Johnson, promised to beef up policing in the city while Johnson, by contrast, spoke about strengthening other public services to not rely on the police as a catch-all solution for public safety. 

During his inauguration on May 15, Johnson called for new investments in housing, mental health, and youth employment, with special attention to outlying neighborhoods that have long experienced divestment and violence. 

“We don’t want our story to be that Chicago became so traumatized by violence and despair that our residents felt no other choice but to leave us,” Johnson said in his speech to a joyous crowd of supporters at the Credit Union 1 Arena. “A safe Chicago means a safe Chicago for all, no matter what you look like, who you love, or where you live, we’ll do it together by investing in people.”

Since that celebratory day, Johnson has had to tackle the realities of governing, which have tripped up other progressive politicians who tried to deliver on their campaign planks while navigating the ire of cops. Chicago’s police union has already vowed to retaliate against his reforms, and similar threats have cowed many officials over the years. But the city’s activist community, whose support propelled him into office, now expects him to deliver on his ambitious plans. 

Over the last few months, several key policy and personnel decisions have already tested whether Johnson can chart a new course on public safety in the city, offering an early case study for how left-leaning officials try to sustain their commitments in the face of police opposition. Since May, Johnson has created a new “community safety” office, which is tasked with coordinating the mayor’s “root cause” approach to public safety.

But he also raised progressive groups’ eyebrows with his pick for an interim superintendent of the Chicago Police Department (CPD)—a member of the top brass who’s been critiqued for perpetuating a culture of protectionism and coverups—and when he left in place a controversial police surveillance contract that he’d pledged to end during his campaign. These were both temporary moves that he’ll get a chance to revisit soon. 

And Johnson is just now facing what may be his greatest test yet—summertime in Chicago, when gun violence has historically spiked, especially on the South and West sides, and when supporters and skeptics alike will be looking to see if the new mayor turns his lofty campaign promises into substance. 

“Johnson is quite right that dealing with jobs, social services, and mental health are things that can dramatically lower the crime problem that we have in Chicago,” Dick Simpson, a former alderman and professor emeritus in political science at the University of Illinois Chicago who is a longtime commentator on local politics, told Bolts.

“As long as things are going more or less in the correct direction, and you don’t have a Laquan McDonald’s shooting,” he said, referencing the 2014 killing of a 17-year-old at the hands of Chicago police which set off a national uproar that permanently marred Rahm Emmanuel’s administration. “[Johnson] has about two or three years to get it right.”

On his very first day in the 5th Floor office of City Hall, Johnson signed an executive order creating the new role of Deputy Mayor for Community Safety, who would be tasked with coordinating the city’s efforts to address the “the root causes of crime, violence, and harm, and to advance a holistic and comprehensive approach to community safety.” Four days later, Johnson appointed Garien Gatewood, director of the Illinois Justice Project, for the role.

Simpson called Gatewood’s appointment “a good step” in turning the mayor’s policy promises into action.

“The mayor needs an appointed person to filter out what comes in the massive [crime statistics] reports, or even the police superintendent waltzing in and saying things are going fine.” 

Johnson has called the “community safety” position a novel one, although Mayor Lori Lightfoot had a deputy mayor for public safety with the similar task of shifting the city beyond “law-enforcement driven solution(s).” Susan Lee, Lightfoot’s pick for the job, did so by directing funding to violence prevention organizations, but Lee was severely undermined by alderpeople who were skeptical of that approach amid rising homicides and shootings after the pandemic, and she eventually resigned. 

Gatewood has a staff of eight, but he admitted in an interview with WTTW that his office does not have the funding necessary to deliver on Johnson’s comprehensive approach to public safety alone and called for help from the city’s business and philanthropic communities. That approach involves pouring money into social services like job training, counseling and mental health services into Chicago’s most distressed areas, he also said.

Alongside key appointments, Johnson is now poised to implement the signature policy proposals for public safety that he touted during his campaign and included in his transition plan. Many of these policies are not entirely new, but have actually been introduced in the city council under past administrations. Before, they were blocked by unsupportive mayors, but Chicago progressives are now hoping that having a career organizer in the mayor’s office will now make a difference. 

Though Lightfoot counted herself as a supporter of the Bring Chicago Home policy to create new housing for more than 65,000 unhoused people in the city using real estate transfer taxes during her first campaign, she held up its passage during her term. Neither did she offer support for the Peace Book ordinance introduced in 2022, which would allocate 2 percent of the police department’s budget to create youth-led gun violence reduction programs.

Another of those stalled policies is the “Treatment Not Trauma” ordinance, which would invest $100 million to create non-police crisis response teams to 911 calls when people are experiencing mental health crises and reopen the city’s neighborhood mental health clinics that were closed under the administration of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Lightfoot’s predecessor. This measure is central to Johnson’s push, as expressed in his transition report, to “define violence overall as a public health issue,” and address it as such. 

Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, alderperson of the 35th Ward who was first elected in 2015, told Bolts the reasons why he and his fellow progressives in City Hall couldn’t get these measures passed before came down to mayoral priorities.

“[Lightfoot] pulled out all the stops to even prevent [them] from receiving a hearing under her administration,” Ramirez-Rosa said. “What we love about this new administration is that progressives don’t just have a seat at the table, but they are now leading and at the forefront of legislating in City Hall.”

While the city council’s Progressive Reform Caucus, which includes alderpeople from across the city like Ramirez-Rosa, Jeanette Taylor, and the driving force behind Treatment Not Trauma, Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez will back Johnson should he bring any of these measures up for a vote, their votes amount to 19 out of the 25 needed for passage, so he’ll need an additional six alderpeople on board before he can get them through the chamber. But Ramirez-Rosa is confident they can muster those.

“Between the number of progressives in City Council and also support from the mayor, I have no doubt that we’ll have the votes necessary to move these forward,” he said.

Critics of Johnson’s approach, like the editorial board of the Chicago Sun-Times, have raised concerns about funding these programs at a time when the city is facing a major fiscal shortfall. Even if he overcomes these hurdles, raises the necessary revenue, and passes all three programs in the coming months, which Ramirez-Rosa expects to happen, it will still take considerable time for them to have an effect, and so they won’t put a dent in the city’s violence until well after this summer is past.

Vaughn Bryant, executive director at Metropolitan Peace Initiatives who previously developed the citywide violence prevention program called Safe Passages, told the TRiiBE recently that the timeline for these long-term violence prevention efforts to succeed isn’t months or years but potentially decades.

“It took [Los Angeles] 20 years to get to a point where they are now,” Bryant said, describing Los Angeles’ current crime statistics, which is about one-third of the number of homicides per 100,000 people that occur every year in Chicago. And the more people are exposed to high-levels of neighborhood violence like in Chicago, the greater their likelihood of getting involved in violence themselves, which is especially true among the young. 

That’s why Ramirez-Rosa sees Johnson’s summer youth employment program as “critically important” in the interim, as a near-term solution. 

The city’s summer jobs program is employing close to 24,000 young people this year, up 2,000 jobs from 2022. But that total represents a little more than half of the 45,000 who applied to the program. Johnson has since vowed to ensure that every teen and young adult who wants a job through the program gets one. 

“We’ve already made some strides this summer in terms of increasing youth employment and youth employment opportunities,” Ramirez-Rosa told Bolts. “We’re going to continue to make progress in the coming years.”

Johnson has also had to address new crises that have surfaced since his inauguration. His first major piece of legislation was not one of the much-touted public safety ordinances but a $51 million package for immediate relief for asylum-seekers who began arriving in the city at a pace of 100 per day in May after being bused north from border states like Texas. 

While the mayor mustered the support necessary to secure its passage, it was not without a fight. Several alderpeople from wards that voted strongly in favor of Johnson over Vallas vociferously opposed this measure, as well as concurring plans to house asylum-seekers in closed-down public school buildings.

Besides navigating sudden crises, and all the routine politicking with fellow elected officials, Johnson will still need to engage with the city’s existing apparatus for public safety—the police. His biggest hurdle will likely be the police union, the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which opposes many of the reforms he has called for, such as strengthening mechanisms for police accountability. 

“It’s not like a wage dispute where one side wants 6 percent increase and the other side wants 2 percent and they agree on 4 percent,” Simpson told Bolts. “The leadership and membership [of the FOP], for the most part, are totally hostile to the ideas that Johnson has.” 

Besides constituting an important voting bloc and marshaling significant campaign funding to their preferred candidates, major municipal police unions have flexed their power over would-be reformers by staging dramatic acts of public disdain, like when CPD officers turned their backs to Lightfoot in 2021 as she was visiting two injured officers in the hospital, or, more seriously, conducting deliberate work slowdowns, like the New York Police Department allegedly did in response to the George Floyd protests that roiled the city even as shootings spiked in the year thereafter.

FOP President John Catanzara warned before the election that there would be “blood in the streets” of Chicago and a spate of resignations should Johnson assume office, and it remains to be seen if the FOP will make good on that threat. In an early effort to warm the relationship with rank-and-file police officers, Johnson expressed firm support for them while attending a recent swearing-in for rookie cops.

Johnson is already making leadership decisions for police. David Brown stepped down as superintendent after Lori Lightfoot was defeated in the mayoral race in the first round in February, and then her interim choice Eric Carter resigned unexpectedly after only two months on the job.

Johnson in early May tapped Fred Waller as a new interim police chief, provoking complaints that Johnson was reneging on his commitments to reform the scandal-ridden department. Waller is known for having promoted Alvin Jones in 2012, an officer implicated in a sweeping police corruption and extortion racket, 10 months after an investigation by CPD’s Internal Affairs Department and the FBI caught two of his closest team members red handed in a sting operation. 

Waller has since claimed he didn’t know about Jones’ misdeeds at the time he promoted him, but critics accuse him of being complicit in the department’s “code of silence,” not just overlooking serious misconduct but sometimes actively covering up for it when calls for accountability arise.

In addition, Waller was suspended in 2020 for saying “grope me, don’t rape me,” in a meeting about the decision to move officers from police districts to other units. He used banked vacation time to serve the 28-day penalty, so he did not miss a day of paid work, but still decided to resign from the force a few months later.

According to Simpson, Johnson likely chose Waller, despite his questionable history, because “he’s not viewed as shaking the boat.”

“Police aren’t going to be unhappy with him, even if he makes adjustments,” Simpson continued. “That’s a pretty good interim solution, assuming that a new police superintendent is appointed long term and that is someone who can actually handle the job.”

Waller’s tenure is likely to be short-lived, though. Johnson will soon make a permanent selection for CPD’s superintendent from the list of three nominees selected by the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability last week. That newly created police oversight body, which includes members directly elected by the public, evaluated the applications of 54 candidates who applied for the position in May, and narrowed it down to a list of three candidates, two from within the ranks of CPD, and one from outside. 

In an initial public meeting after the announcement, some community members were more hopeful in the internal candidates’ abilities to implement reforms, while others remained skeptical of the entire police department’s ability to change, the Triibe reports. The FOP, for their part, commended the selection process.

“This process is 100 times better than when the police board was conducting it,” Catanzara said. “It’s much more fair and inclusive.”

 The mayor now has 30 days to review the candidates, but can also ask the commission to go back to the drawing board and give him new names. Whatever nominee he ultimately picks will also need to be approved by the city council.

Johnson has also faced criticism that he has backtracked on a campaign pledge to immediately terminate CPD’s contract for a controversial gunfire detection technology called ShotSpotter.

Jose Manuel Almanza, director of advocacy and movement building at Equiticity, has been at the forefront of the movement to end the ShotSpotter agreement. According to Almanza, it started in 2021 when a group of organizers in the working-class neighborhood of Little Village convened to develop a response to the police shooting of 13-year-old Adam Toledo. 

In that nationally publicized case, CPD officers responded to the scene after receiving a ShotSpotter notification that a gun was fired in the neighborhood. An officer pursued Toledo into an alley, shooting him as he turned around and raised his hands in apparent surrender.

Recent studies by the MacArthur Justice Center and the city’s Office of the Inspector General found that CPD officers responding to ShotSpotter alerts rarely collect evidence relating to gun crimes but do engage in discriminatory practices of stopping and frisking Black and Latinx folks.

“It changes the CPD’s behavior,” Almanza told Bolts. “They find me walking down the block to my friend’s house, or they find my neighbors hanging out in front of a friend’s house, or they find my cousin walking to the corner store, and because ShotSpotter is telling them that [a shot was fired in the area], they treat us as suspects.” 

When Johnson pledged on his campaign website to “end the ShotSpotter contract and invest in new resources that go after illegal guns without physically stopping and frisking Chicagoans on the street,” Almanza was on board as a supporter, even going so far as to volunteer his time as an unpaid canvasser for Johnson. 

“Past administrations, not just here in Chicago, but in any major city and the federal government, there’s never really been a big effort to address those issues,” he said. “It’s always been addressing the symptoms of crime, reacting to the symptoms of crime, and not really solving what’s really causing these things so they don’t happen.” 

That’s why Almaza was enraged to see that the city would not be canceling the contract early. Instead, Johnson’s signature appeared on a document authorizing a $10 million extension payment to SoundThinking, the organization that runs the ShotSpotter technology. A spokesperson for the mayor’s office told WBEZ that Johnson may have had no choice but to approve the payment Lightfoot had already authorized, but that his automatic signature placed on the document was a mistake. 

Almanza worries about the influence of SoundThinking, whose deal with the city represents 11 percent of their overall revenues.

“They’re co-opting the movement’s language, talking about equity, trying to gain support from community members [by] changing the way they’re talking about ShotSpotter,” Almanza said.

Activists like Almanza feel betrayed about this delay, as well as the mayor’s decision not to remove armed officers from Chicago Public Schools after saying that police “have no place in schools.” But he’s not giving up on Johnson just yet.

“It’s up to us to hold him accountable to those things,” he continued. “That’s not to say it in a negative way, that’s saying it in a coalition, base-building kind of way, where we all have the same goal in mind.Johnson’s only been in office for like, what, a [couple] month[s]. Right now, we’re giving him the benefit of the doubt.”

The post On Policing, Brandon Johnson’s Progressive Promises Meet Their First Tests appeared first on Bolts.