Defund CPD Public Comments

To the Joint Committee: Budget and Government Operations; Public Safety

Re: Subject Matter Hearing on the 2021 Chicago Police Department Budget

As a Chicago resident, I ask that this joint committee reject the city’s failed model of criminalization and incarceration, which has proven time and time again to only ever cause more violence, and instead reimagine public safety by investing in what we know truly keeps people safe: housing, mental and physical healthcare, schools, jobs programs, community gardens, restorative justice and violence prevention services, public transit, public monuments like the still-unfunded Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, and much more.

The 2020 CPD budget was appropriated $1.6 billion, which is around forty percent of the city’s general operating budget — many times more than any of these other essential social services that benefit peoples’ lives. I am asking that this joint committee recommend the defunding of the Chicago Police Department by a reduction in its budget by 75% for 2021, including the complete removal of CPD officers from CPS, CTA, and other public institutions, and the rest of the 11 demands put forward by the Black Abolitionist Network. This money and more should instead be invested in the aforementioned social services that actually keep people safe.

Further, because the people of Chicago need a real mechanism to hold police accountable when they inevitably violate people’s constitutional rights, I also ask that this committee recommend the enactment of the Civilian Police Accountability Council, O2019–8058. The city of Chicago’s various mayoral-controlled oversight bodies, including OPS, IPRA, and COPA, have proven fundamentally unable to adequately address instances of police misconduct. The disgraceful “code of silence” guarantees that CPD will never be able to prevent or address misconduct by its own officers. Therefore, the communities most impacted by the CPD’s violence deserve to have control over and meaningful input into the CPD’s budget, policy, and practice.

Ultimately, the CPD’s brutal and racist history, and continuing inability to be “reformed” as it treats consent decree requirements like mere suggestions, demonstrates that there is no “reforming” the CPD — the department must be defunded in the immediate term and made obsolete in the long term.

Sincerely,

Bobby Vanecko

60646–39th Ward