Chicago Justice Podcast

Chicago Justice Podcast


Community Commission on Public Safety

April 13, 2021

The Community Commission on Public Safety (Commission) is one of the campaign promises that Mayor Lightfoot just has not been able to deliver on and seems to do nothing but take wrong step after wrong step trying to implement this legislation. Recently, the Mayor announced she was walking away from the negotiating table with the various community and reforms groups behind the Grassroots Alliance for Police Accountability (GAPA) and the Citizen Police Accountability Council (CPAC) versions of the Commission and she would be submitting her own version in to City Council.

On today's show we play part 1 of our interview with Tamer Abouzeid, a representative from the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, the organization behind the CPAC version of the ordinance. He joins us to discuss a recent announcement that the groups behind GAPA and CPAC have come together after Mayor Lightfoot walked away from the table a few months ago to author a compromise version of their ordinances that will create the Commission and allow the public to vote on a binding referendum on exactly how much power they want the Commission to have.

In this episode we also cover:

the revelations in court this weekend that prosecutors have seen the body camera video in the Adam Toledo shooting and they confirmed it showed Toledo had the gun in his had as he turned towards the officer.

an article by Chip Mitchell from WBEZ looking at just how white the leadership of Chicago's Fraternal Order of Police has been for the last 20 years.

a report by NPR about an alternative crisis response system that does not involve the police responding to certain types of calls for service. (Here is a link to our recent interview with two leaders of the CAHOOTS program in Eugene, OR that the Denver program is modeled after)

Images from today's show