In Runoff Campaign's Final Push, Rahm Faces Police Critics
By Rachel Cromidas in News on Apr 7, 2015 6:30PM
Photo credit: 2014 City of Chicago/Brooke Collins
Police accountability has long been a hot button for Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration, stoked in recent months by national stories of police brutality and ongoing demonstrations.
On Saturday morning, in the final days of his tense runoff election campaign, Emanuel sat down with a coalition of social justice groups who say they have been trying since October to get a meeting with the mayor, according to WBEZ.
The mayor was joined by several senior staff members, but not police chief Garry McCarthy. On the other side of the table were leaders from the Community Renewal Society, the Jane Addams Senior Caucus and the Chicago Religious Leadership Network on Latin America.
Their criticisms spanned some of the department's most controversial policing tactics and the value of police body-cameras.
The coalition demanded the mayor set stricter policies around body-cameras to make sure officers wearing them are recording every interaction they have with the public and that the department never has the authority to erase the tapes. They also demanded a "complete" overhaul of the Independent Police Review Authority, the city agency that audits some police activities, to make it more independent. It is currently led by former law-enforcement officers.
The coalition also took aim at the city’s use of so-called “stop and frisk” tactics, which have come under fire after an Illinois ACLU report showed Chicagoans are being stopped more than 4 times as often as people in New York.
Coalition representatives said data on every stop should be collected and made available to the public, police officers should receive more legal training before engaging in stop-and-frisk and those who are stopped should be given detailed receipts of what happened.
Emanuel's office called the meeting "positive and productive," in a statement to WBEZ and noted that the city is already disciplining officers who fail to use their body cameras. But some activists who were at the meeting said they were hoping for more. Coalition leaders said mayoral challenger Jesus "Chuy" Garcia has told them he would be more “sensitive” to police accountability if elected, though few specifics have come out.
A different group of community activists rallied outside of City Hall last month after failing to get a meeting with the mayor on police accountability, among them several parents and family members of youth who were fatally shot by Chicago police officers.