Community Safety Coordination Center
Good afternoon, Chicago! I’ll be live-tweeting the North/North West Side Community Safety Town Hall Meeting at 6pm for @CHIdocumenters #chidocumenters
Follow along! ⬇️🧵
05:21 PM Apr 5, 2022 CDT
This meeting one of the several regional town halls on community safety and violence prevention recently hosted by the Mayor’s Office. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/community-safety-town-halls-tickets-288801201167 https://t.co/0hmpYHG8KL
Reps from the Community Safety Coordination Center and the Chicago Police will discuss efforts to reduce violence, and @chicagosmayor will be in attendance. Participants will have an opportunity to ask questions and give feedback.
The meetings were initially scheduled to be held virtually, but after a show of high interest, the Mayor’s Office decided they wanted to reschedule for in-person events.
I was planning to be there by now but thanks to major delays on the red line (@cta 😔), I’ll likely be late… 32 bus stops left!
Okay, here we go! We’re in a discussion about strategies for community safety. https://t.co/md5qw9qeYT
In about 30ish minutes they’ll begin the Q&A portion of the meeting. Attendees each have a paper slip to write a community safety-focused question to be answered later. https://t.co/Y55ztz22hj
Now we’re in smaller table discussions. My table is focused on how they’re looking for personal accountability by city officials, and for root causes to not be repeatedly brought up and never actually addressed.
A resident of Portage Park at my table brought up foot chases, mentioning specifically the death of Anthony Alvarez.
.@JamesCappleman is here, “I was attacked on the train” for pressing the emergency signal, he said. “There’s an app that other cities have that signals what car you’re in and they can track that,” he said, it would cost $150,000 to install that in the city of Chicago. https://t.co/HXspTSwZj2
Someone at my table brought up the issue of not knowing what the delays on the CTA are from. Another brought up people who jump over the turnstile.
One of our table mates has a homeless and schizophrenic brother, who she said won’t go to a shelter because of his mental health. “What are the options out there?” she said, “We need to fill the gap.”
Someone else at the table brought up the recent legislation around ghost guns, but they’re concerned legislators are more focused on anti-LGBTQ+ laws than ghost guns.
A tablemate brought up the piloting “co-responder model” in the 19th district where police officers de-escalate situations by working alongside mental health professionals.
They’re going to use data from these pilot studies to consider expanding the program citywide, “Were reinventing emergency response,” she said, “that cultural shift is hard.”
Lori Lightfoot is now speaking, “We ended the year in a place none of us want to be again,” she said. https://t.co/NX5Kx26vxx
“One thing that became very clear is we need to do more engagement with residents,” Lightfoot said.
“What we heard from our community partners was: more engagement, more engagement, more engagement,” she said.
“Every single department has been tasked with making sure they view their daily work through a community safety lens,” Lightfoot said.
She said that might be difficult to imagine for jobs like trash collection, but “Trash, vacant lots, they lower the quality of life,” she said.
“Fundamentally, what I want you to know is that public safety is the priority. Not among a list of things, the priority,” Lightfoot said.
“If we don’t get public safety right, all of the great things pale in comparison,” Lightfoot said. “We have to do a better job in 2022 to help you feel safe.”
Moving into questions! (right to left) Brandie Knazze (DFSS), Pedro Martinez (CPS), David Brown (CPD), Lightfoot, Tamara Mahal (Community Safety Coordination Center), Alison Arwady (CDPH) https://t.co/1pJsJX9h2b
“I’ve been very clear, I don’t support de-funding the police,” Lightfoot said. “Way over 90% of the police budget is personnel — so defunding means we cut the number of officers,” she said. “We don’t want less police, what we want is more responsible, constitutional policing.”
“We care deeply about making sure we’re addressing the trauma that so many people have felt,” Lightfoot said, which is why she’s “tripled” the budget for mental health services during her administration, she said.
Questions:
Why isn’t their police on Mag Mile? Why don’t we have beat officers in the community to check up on businesses and in general?
There’s three parts to policing, prevention, enforcement and investigation, David Brown said.
Brown said the carjackings are an instance where “prevention has to be a part” of the approach, “we have to intervene in these young peoples lives.”
“They go in and out of a revolving door of adjudication,” Brown said.
“We’ve learned that the easy solution, the quick solution, was mass incarceration,” Brown said, “We’re looking for a sustained prevention to violence across the city.”
“All the ecosystems of policing and criminal justice have to come into play in a collaboration,” Brown said
“If it’s just police trying to solve community safety, we are going to fail,” Brown said.
“We’ve got to reach these children before they do something that irreparably changes their life,” Lightfoot said.
“We have to step up if the county isn’t going to do its job,” Lightfoot said. “The programs and the investments that we’re making — we’re going to bring them to young people and their families.”
Question: What concrete actions are proposed to reduce police bias and misconduct?
“We are trying as best we can to identify officers,” Brown said. “No excuses for misconduct, but it is the most difficult time to be a police officer in this country.”
“The pressures of the job can lead to officer wellness issues,” Brown said. “Many people, when they’re stressed, make awful decisions.”
“We want these people to continue to risk their lives for us, we do,” Brown said. The way we handle misconduct has to be “serious and swift,” but “not enough to discourage officers that follow our rules,” he said.
Question; What is being done to solve the unsolved murders of Black and Brown women, transgender people?
Brown: They’ve set up a liaison to connect family members with the officer on their case to ensure they’re up to date on what’s happening, they’re also using data to see “where is the issue,” Brown said.
They’re also launching a video series that is focused on solving their cold cases. “This year we are seeing one of the highest levels of clearance rates of our homicides than we’ve seen in many, many years,” Brown said. 68% clearance for cases, he said.
“We are building the capacity to lower the case load per detective,” Brown said. “A lot more work to do, we’re not celebrating anything”
“We take for granted that when there is a violent crime, police will show up,” Arwady said…
“Were working to make it an expectation that, yes the investigation happened, but so does the support,” said Arwady.
Question: Can we make sure that CPS has a civic engagement class for elementary and high school students?
Martinez: Working to ensure every single school without exception has summer and after school programs, art programs.
There’s a Q from someone in Lakeview who wants liquor stores that are open late at night to close earlier.
Lightfoot suggests anyone with this issue to report the issue to Aldermen and CPD. “Aldermen have a lot of tools at their disposal to identify problem businesses,” Lightfoot said. “When necessary, we will shut them down.”
“Flag it for us and we will be all over it, I promise you that,” Lightfoot said.
“We know that when we improve lighting, we improve public safety,” Mahal said.
“We want more resources,” Brown said. “There’s gonna be more security officers that ride the trains,” in addition to CPD’s commitment to add officers to “problem spots.”
“We are doing operations on the CTA,” Brown said, “There are people who sell drugs in the CTA, other narcotics, or gang activities,” Brown said. “We’ve added some officers, we need to add more.”
“We are able to move officers around throughout the train system as we listen to you on where these issues are more predominantly,” Brown said.
“We have to escalate our resources in response to more ridership,” Brown said.
The meeting is scheduled to end at 8pm, but we’re continuing as police commanders are going around introducing themselves because there was a question on how residents can contact their local officers.
Well, that was “the last question” — mine wasn’t answered 😕 — and we’re moving to Lightfoot’s closing comments.
They’ll be posting the questions from all the town halls, with questions. “This is all about accountability, we’re holding ourselves accountable to make sure we’re bringing safety and peace to all the neighborhoods,” Lightfoot said.
With that, we’re done! The meeting wraps at 8:10pm. Thanks for following along.