Testimony on CPD Response to 2020 BLM Protests

August 18, 2020

Clerk of the Court
United States District Court
Everett McKinley Dirksen Federal Building
219 S. Dearborn St., 20th Floor
Chicago, IL 60604
Re: State of Illinois vs. City of Chicago, Case. №17-cv-6260

To the Honorable Robert M. Dow, Jr.:

My name is Bobby Vanecko and I am 25 years old. I am a member of the Loyola Chicago chapter of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), so I have been at many of the recent civil rights protests in support of the Movement for Black Lives. I have primarily been a general protestor, exercising my First Amendment rights to demand that Governor Pritzker free all torture survivors and decarcerate to prevent further coronavirus outbreaks in jails and prisons, and that the Chicago City Council pass the Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC) and defund the Chicago Police Department (CPD). I have also attended several protests as a neutral legal observer as a member of the NLG.

As both a law student and a Chicagoan, I have been appalled at the behavior of the officers of the Chicago Police Department during these protests against their violence. That does not mean that I have been surprised however, as I am very familiar with the role that the Chicago Police Department has played in upholding white supremacy in this city from the 1919 race riots, to the murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, to the Burge Torture scandal, to the murders of Laquan McDonald and Rekia Boyd, and continuing today. This history demonstrates that there is no reforming the CPD — the department must be defunded in the immediate term and made obsolete in the long term.

From what I have seen throughout the most recent uprisings, CPD is practically making the argument for their abolition themselves. Many speakers at the actions I have attended — from groups like Black Lives Matter Chicago, GoodKids MadCity, and the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, among others — have explicitly named policing as a fundamentally anti-Black institution that not only fails to prevent violence but actively exploits and disenfranchises Black people every day in this city. Further, as the 2016 Police Accountability Task Force concluded, “CPD’s own data gives validity to the widely held belief the police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color.”

Even though their own data validates the movement’s claims, CPD has unfortunately decided to respond to these protests against their violence with even more violence. I personally observed this at several actions, but it is also a matter of public record, thanks to the tireless work of Chicago organizers and local independent media. In particular, I recommend South Side Weekly’s coverage of the two most violent days thus far, May 30 and July 17, and their upcoming coverage of the brutality unleashed on youth protestors on August 15. (Full disclosure, I am a contributor). The behavior of both regular officers and white shirts at these protests demonstrated the same thing that CPD’s data does — Chicago police have no regard for the sanctity of Black life or the protestors’ demands that Black life be respected.

I experienced this violence first-hand on the 17th, and that day made it especially clear to me that the CPD cannot prevent violence; they only ever cause further bloodshed. Chicagoans know through experience what a police riot looks like — some would even say that CPD’s brutality at the 1968 Democratic National Convention is the origin of the term police riot as we know it today — and what happened at the youth-led Black and Indigenous solidarity rally to decolonize Zhigaagoong and defund CPD on that night can only be described as another police riot.

Protestors were indiscriminately hit with batons, tear gassed, pepper sprayed, punched, beaten, tackled, and arrested without cause. Bikes were violently ripped from people’s hands, slammed on the ground and piled several feet high on Columbus Drive. An eighteen-year old organizer with GoodKids MadCity, Miracle Boyd, was punched in the face and had her teeth knocked out for exercising her constitutional right to film police performing their duties in public, by a police officer who remains on active duty, as reported by South Side Weekly. Reporters with press badges were assaulted, gassed, and hit with batons, as were photographers, videographers, medics, and legal observers.

Because I am from the North side of Chicago where the police live but do not patrol like they do on the South and West sides, I had never personally experienced such horrifying police violence until that moment. I had already wholeheartedly believed in the movement to defund the CPD and invest in Black communities before the 17th, but that first-hand experience drove home the fact that CPD cannot be reformed. The CPD is a fundamentally racist, violent, and corrupt institution. It always has been, and it always will be, no matter how many new rules and incremental reforms are enacted.

The only way forward is to reduce the power and scope of the CPD and their contact with the public, while building and investing in restorative systems that actually address and repair harm, instead of perpetuating it. Given the historic and ongoing harm of mass criminalization and incarceration, unrelenting police violence, and segregation and disinvestment, which were and continue to be enacted by decades of city governments (including my great grandfather Richard J. Daley and great uncle Richard M. Daley) supported by mostly white residents, the city of Chicago has an obligation to provide what is necessary for true safety: fully-funded public schools, housing, mental and physical healthcare, transportation, job opportunities and training programs, and much more.

Unfortunately, the city of Chicago seems unlikely to take such steps under the current administration, even though the inspiring movement work has created significant opportunity for change. Many City Council Members now repeatedly advocate for the defunding of CPD, including Jeanette Taylor and Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez, among others in their socialist caucus and some in the progressive caucus. However, Mayor Lightfoot has rejected these calls and has instead called for more funding for police “training” and other moderate reforms that won’t shift power and resources from the carceral state to the communities most impacted by its devastation. Meanwhile, CPD is demonstrating that such reforms will fail to fundamentally change anything — they continue to treat the consent decree as a mere suggestion, missing over 70% of the deadlines thus far, and blatantly violating its requirements like those governing the use of force, as documented at these protests.

The current consent decree has proven to be insufficient. The city needs something more like the Chicago Community Consent Decree, which was proposed in 2018 by the Plaintiffs in Campell v. City of Chicago. This proposal included, “the removal of all CPD officers from Chicago Public Schools, the implementation of an all elected Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC), the creation of a Behavior Health Unit — as a non-carceral and independent entity from policing — organized to provide immediate psycho-social crisis intervention and treatment, the prohibition of police harassment of families [whose] loved ones have been killed by police, the creation of Rekia’s Fund to provide immediate payment to families [whose] loved ones were killed by police, prohibition of police trolling & dropping people in opposing gang territory, and a whole lot more,” according to Black Lives Matter Chicago’s website.

The people of Chicago need a real mechanism to hold police accountable when they violate the law, and nothing less than CPAC will do — the various mayoral-controlled oversight bodies 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. The city needs the Chicago Community Consent Decree because CPD continues to prove that it is fundamentally unable to be reformed.

Respectfully,
Robert D. Vanecko