Author: NoCopAcademy

To: The Boys & Girls Club of Chicago

Cc: Mimi LeClair

From: The youth of #NoCopAcademy and of Chicago        

Of course we want investments in young people. But this isn’t it.

For Black youth from the West and South Sides of the city, police are a frequent source of our trauma. From the oversurviellence of our communities, to the day to day contact we make with them in Chicago Public Schools, to seeing our family targeted in the streets and tortured in police stations and jails. Police are not a source of safety for us. So, adding a Boys & Girls club, which are meant to be sanctuaries for Black and Brown youth, on the site of a cop academy is absurd. As the Boys and Girls Club of Chicago, you say you want to “ provide members with emotional, educational, physical, and cultural resources that allow them to enjoy their childhood and thrive in adulthood.” But we already know the opposite is what will happen.

Why are Black youth only given resources from the city when they are tied to more policing? When the #NoCopAcademy campaign surveyed West Garfield Park residents, 95% of community members said they wanted investments made into something other than the Chicago Police Department. It is frustrating to see the city pretending to meet the demands and dire needs of residents, when it is actually sinking even more funding into the department that kills them on the regular.

The young people who need these after school resources the most will be alienated from the Boys & Girls Club of Chicago because of the lack of safety that comes with interacting with police on a daily basis. Police are already in our homes, in our schools and our streets. We don’t need them in our after school programs as well. We need money for housing, we need money for our schools and money to fund our futures all over the West Side and an investment into a cop academy isn’t an investment into the futures of Black youth.

This is $8 million being invested in PR for the police. Not for young people.  

Anthony Alvarez was 22 years old and Adam Toledo was nothing more than a child, only 13 years old at the time of his murder by CPD earlier this spring. This Boys & Girls club center announcement is damage control for these murders along with all the other misuages of law carried out by the Chicago Police Department. More and more people across the city of Chicago are recognizing the need for change the very way we define safety—not as punishment and control, but sharing resources and building community.

For Lightfoot and the CPD, this move is a PR strategy to ease those rising tensions between the general public and police. Black and Brown youth are being used as props that are dangled in front of the media and it’s sad that the Boys & Girls club is a willing participant. Now the mayor can paint any opposition as the antagonistic individuals trying to stop progress by opposing the cop academy and its new ornaments; without actually addressing our concerns for how to achieve meaningful safety. We know that police are reactionary, not preventative.Community centers with after school programs are preventative and restorative. Young people need after school programs that nurture our passions, without becoming photo ops for the police state.

This cop academy club is disrespectful to our ancestors, to the lineage of liberation struggles folks like Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers led on the West Side in the 60’s, and to all of us who have been demanding resources be brought to our communities in the form of funding for schools, housing programs, community centers, and after school programs for decades. West Side youth have been marching, protesting, and demanding real investments be made in our lives for years! But we know this Boys & Girls club is an investment in the police, not us.

Shame on you, Boys & Girls Club.  If you really support Black youth, stop collaborating with the police and build this club somewhere it can actually serve us – without strings (or cops) attached.  

Sincerely,

Destiny H., 19
Avery S., 18
Dontay G., 21, East Garfield
Mahogany, 21, South Shore
Laila R.L., 19, Humboldt Park
Christine J., 20, North Lawndale
Jalen K., 20, Albany Park
Asha E., 20, Hyde Park
Kayla M., 20, Summit
Zaria B., 21, KTown (Westside)
Chris H., 37, Humboldt
Gwendolyn., 45, Austin
Sandra Y., 48, Westside
Ling Y.
Alyicia K.
Cristal B.,
Abigail W.,

Veronica Rodriguez

Marlenne Garcia

Diana Guzman Rivera

Citlali Pérez

Karina Martinez

Alyssa Befumo

Andrea Mendiola

Esmeralda Montesinos

cristal bedolla

Sydney Pauta

Alycia Kamil

Ling Young

Deyana Atanasova

Robert Vanecko

Rachel Brustein

Jason Guthartz

Jennifer Diaz

Nancy Rodriguez

Jamie Cernek

Iris Postma

Tony Alvarado-Rivera

Trinity Thompkins

Erin Marie Barker

Jocelyn Nelson

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William Smiljanić-Pérez

Subrianakhem Kheperu

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Click here to SIGN ON in support: http://bit.ly/nocopclub

For nearly two years, we have been protesting against the expansion of the Chicago Police Department’s occupation of black and brown communities, and calling for resource investment in our communities instead. Although the original motive for the #NoCopAcademy campaign was the city’s intentionally sneaky announcement of a $95 million dollar cop academy to be built on the Westside without meaningful community input, our campaign expands beyond efforts at preventing construction of one building. It has been a campaign rallying around divestment from and demilitarization of the police. The final votes on the cop academy may have passed last Spring, but many of us are still out here mobilizing our communities and countering the destructive narrative that policing brings about community safety; and as young people we see a huge part of that as removing police from our schools.  

The #NoCopAcademy campaign has taught us a lot about how the city of Chicago, spearheaded by the mayor, operates and makes all kinds of decisions that affect our daily lives, under the public’s nose without real ways for the people most impacted by those decisions to have any say over them.  Under Rahm’s reign we experienced the closure of more than 50 Chicago Public Schools and half of the city’s mental health clinics, most of which were in black and brown communities on the south and west side. Then he proposed the “investment” of a $95 million cop academy, as though a new building for police will solve anything that’s making life unlivable for our communities.  At every step of the way, massive opposition to these plans was ignored and repressed.

Already, Lori Lightfoot has continued Rahm’s agenda of police expansion, by suggesting to turn closed CPS schools into mini cop academies and promising to make the cop academy that Rahm proposed twice as large. And just last week, her newly appointed not-elected school board voted to give $33 million (nearly double what CPS spent last year) to expand and formalize the role of cops in schools.  

This decision was announced and carried out in under 24 hours, but followed a summer of fake ‘community input’ proceedings, so we weren’t surprised. She had the Local School Councils vote on keeping their cops in the schools throughout the month of July. Keeping in mind that the vote of student LSC representatives who are directly impacted by cops in schools do not count. When have we been asked how we feel about having police in our schools? 

Often times officers are placed in schools because they are too dangerous to be on the streets. It’s considered a form of “desk duty.” Through filing FOIAs we discovered by ourselves that CPS did not know the police in our schools. Once we did find their names and badge numbers we found that most cops at our schools have multiple complaints on their records. Such as Michael Boss #11417 stationed at Back of the Yards, who had been a police officer since 1993, has as many as 20 allegations, 4 of which are sustained. This is not uncommon, according to the Shriver Center, “In total, between 2012 and 2016, the police officers assigned to CPS accumulated $2,030,652 in misconduct settlements for activities on and off school grounds.” This is what our city claims safety in our schools looks like.

As we head back to school, we must remember that students will be entering the building and spending 7 hours a day with these cops carrying guns and tasers. Having police in our schools strengthens the school to prison pipeline, because it increases the probability of students having interactions with police officers and getting wrapped up in the criminal justice system. The so called ‘safety’ that the city claims to bring about by investing in police does not translate into actual safety, in communities where our schools have been closed or drained of resources.  We need more funding to be invested into under-resourced schools for full time nurses, social workers, and counselors, culturally relevant classes, and updated textbooks. We need wrap around services, not police. 

Removing police from our schools is just one small step towards a true sanctuary city, where all its residents are safe and cared for.  Our city still makes huge investments in other forms of surveillance, policing, and militarism that are solely focused on oppressing young Black people and people of color.  When we walk out of the classroom, police are at our festivals, in our malls, on the lakefront, at the parks, and on our blocks. Where can young Black people exist in Chicago without the specter of police watching us, waiting for a moment when they can catch us? 

We want #PoliceFreeSchools now.

Fund our communities, not policing.  

 

More info:

https://chalkbeat.org/posts/chicago/2019/03/13/204119/

https://www.chicagoreporter.com/lightfoots-cop-academy-bombshell-raises-questions-about-leadership-style/

https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/chicago/2019/08/28/chicago-approves-33-million-for-school-police-despite-student-criticism/

https://povertylaw.org/files/docs/handcuffs-in-hallways-final.pdf

#NoCopAcademy | nocopacademy.com

PRESS RELEASE: For Immediate Release

Contact: Debbie Southorn – 971-227-3829 – nocopacademy@gmail.com

Press Alert: #NoCopAcademy attorneys argue Mayor Emanuel should release over 400 pages of hidden documents.

As the 2019 elections approach and increasing numbers of mayoral & aldermanic candidates oppose construction of the JPSTA, full transparency around the funding and PR approaches to the academy take on increased urgency.

CHICAGO 2/4 — On February 4, 2019, attorneys from the People’s Law Office representing the #NoCopAcademy campaign will appear in front of Circuit Court Judge Sophia Hall to ask her to reconsider her decision allowing Mayor Emanuel and his administration to withhold over 400 pages of documents related to the  proposed $95 million Joint Public Safety Training Academy (JPTSA). Debbie Southorn and Erin Glasco, the plaintiffs and organizers with #NoCopAcademy, previously filed several FOIA requests seeking information regarding Mayor Emanuel’s plans to build the JPTSA, an excessively costly venture which many believe is wholly unnecessary and will not decrease police violence that destroys the lives of scores of Black and Latinx people in Chicago.  Further, given the daily headlines emerging from City Hall regarding FBI investigations of corruption amongst powerful Aldermen, and the proposed JPSTA’s financial connections to the controversial Lincoln Yards mega-development, the City’s refusal to release these documents is urgent cause for concern.

In describing why they brought the lawsuit, Plaintiff Glasco stated, “From the outset, Mayor Emanuel engaged in extensive planning and preparation to build this police academy without consulting the residents of the West side or Chicago.  We filed the lawsuit to get all the plans he has refused to disclose so that the civilians of Chicago can have all the necessary information to evaluate whether their taxpayer funds should be used to build a police academy or whether their money is better spent on school, mental health and other social services desperately needed.”  According to surveys taken by the #NoCopAcademy, 72% of surveyed residents in West Garfield Park, the location of the proposed JPTSA, do not want the JPSTA built in their neighborhood and 86% of surveyed residents said they do not believe JPTSA is the best use of $95 million on the West Side.

After filing the FOIA suit, City lawyers provided Southorn, Glasco and #NoCopAcademy close to 150 documents previously withheld improperly, but the attorneys for Mayor Emanuel convinced the Court that the remaining 400+ documents are shielded from disclosure by the “deliberative process privilege.”  The People’s Law Office is asking the Court to reconsider its decision in light of federal case law regarding this privilege, as well as the heightened public interest in the value and worth of the academy. Four of the Mayoral candidates and 30 aldermanic candidates oppose the creation of the police academy and several elected officials and candidates have requested the Mayor and City Council halt all votes on the JPTSA until people, through their newly elected officials, have an opportunity to weigh on the creation of the police academy.  The motion argues the public’s right to information about the development of the police academy substantially outweighs any interest Mayor Emanuel has in upholding his veil of secrecy around the facility.

Quote from #NoCopAcademy: “Mayor Emanuel and his administration have a history of refusing to disclose information about the Chicago Police Department, withholding the dashcam video of Laquan McDonald’s murder before the 2014-15 election, and now withholding information about the planning and preparations for the JPTSA before this election.  Mayor Emanuel should release this information and let the people of Chicago decide if we need a new police academy.”

 

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