WZRD News: Serious concerns' remain after CPD revises mass arrest policy ahead of DNC

WZRD News: 6/28/2024

'Serious concerns' remain after CPD revises mass arrest policy ahead of Democratic Convention

By Tom Schuba Jun 28, 2024, 7:07am CDT

A coalition of community organizations voiced “serious concerns” about the Chicago Police Department’s newly revised mass arrest policy.

The overhaul stems from closed-door meetings authorized by the federal judge presiding over the department’s court-ordered reform push after the so-called consent decree coalition warned that an earlier version of the policy “eviscerates protections” that are otherwise granted to protesters.

In a court filing, the coalition acknowledges the latest draft policy contains various “improvements,” including changes that ban the controversial containment tactic known as “kettling” and prohibit officers from arresting protesters for minor offenses unless they pose a public safety threat, damage property or disobey a dispersal order.

The coalition notes that “serious deficiencies remain.”

The policy fails to draw a line between crowds protected under the First Amendment and those engaged in illegal activity such as looting.

It doesn’t “distinguish between unlawful but nonviolent civil disobedience and unlawful actions that could result in physical harm to people or property.”

The filing raises alarms about the policy’s delayed use of force reporting procedure, which the coalition says encourages officers to use force and “conflicts with best practices.”

The new policy doesn’t sufficiently restrict the use of pepper spray on protesters.

A police spokesperson said the policy is the product of months of collaboration and is “rooted in constitutional policing.”

The city’s inspector general and the monitor overseeing the department’s reform efforts wrote scathing reports detailing the department’s operational breakdowns and widespread abuses after the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020.

Police Supt. Larry Snelling has said that training ahead of the convention in August 2024 has been built around lessons learned, but the coalition pushed back on that claim.

“CPD’s over-emphasis on mass arrests as a response to large groups of people exercising their First Amendment rights demonstrates that it has failed to learn from and operationalize the lessons that the department should have implemented after its violent and unlawful response to the protests of summer 2020,” the court filing says.

The coalition’s renewed concerns come just weeks after Inspector General Deborah Witzburg followed her office’s blistering analysis that CPD had been “outflanked, under-equipped and unprepared to respond to the scale of the protests and unrest” in 2020.

While Witzburg’s criticism was far more tempered in the new report, she also identified pressing issues with CPD’s preparation ahead of the convention.

Among other things, she slammed the department for training officers on a draft policy.

Snelling disagreed with many of Witzburg’s harshest findings and insisted that CPD “has made considerable progress with respect to its mass gathering policy since the events in 2020.”

11 days later, the department posted the new mass arrest policy that was negotiated with the coalition and the Illinois attorney general’s office.

The coalition is comprised of community groups that fought for the court order mandating police reforms, known as the Consent Decree.

In the new filing, the coalition expressed anger about being elbowed out of the mass arrest policymaking process.

“The Coalition’s enforcement process and the subsequent court-ordered negotiations resulted in improvements to the original version of the policy,” the filing states, “but this is no substitute for deep and sustained engagement with impacted communities on the front end of major changes to CPD policy and the Consent Decree.

“This engagement is a requirement of the Consent Decree, and it is imperative going forward to ensure CPD policies reflect best practices and community priorities, and to avoid last-minute negotiations in advance of major events or deadlines like the DNC.”

Source: WBEZ Chicago, June 28, 2024.

https://www.wbez.org/2024-democratic-national-convention/2024/06/28/serious-concerns-chicago-police-mass-arrest-democratic-convention

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