Some community organizations were part of a multiyear political campaign to put City Hall’s policing powers into a Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC). CPAC would be an elected, representative body of eleven officials who would appoint the CPD’s superintendent, set its rules, and approve its budget. In doing so, it would take complete control of the CPD away from the mayor and the mayor-appointed Police Board.
Activists had been fighting for CPAC since 2016, when they tried to include it in the City’s new set of policing reforms. Instead, they got a new police oversight agency, COPA, in what Paru called a cynical attempt by the government to block their proposal. Since then, an ordinance to establish CPAC had gained nineteen sponsors in City Council, but was still seven supporters short of passage and did not have Mayor Lightfoot’s approval.
The organization leading this campaign, the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (CAARPR), was run by Frank Chapman, who believed CPAC would make policing more democratic.
“We wanted complete community control of police taken out of the hands of City Hall, taken out of the hands of the police department, and put directly into the hands of the people.”
— Frank Chapman, executive director, CAARPR
Community control of the police was not a goal that Chicago organizers started fighting for in 2016, he said, but in 1973, when CAARPR was founded, to fulfill one of the main objectives of the Black Panther Party. Controlling law enforcement, Chapman believed, was the key to controlling the resources that the City had long denied to communities on the South Side. Instead of helping these communities, politicians had catered to the needs of the rich and powerful in the city’s white North Side neighborhoods, creating the economic and social disadvantage that defined non-white communities. But when activist groups from those neglected neighborhoods organized to secure resources for places like the South Side, they had been suppressed by the police.
With CPAC, Chapman said, those groups could lobby the City to reduce the size of the CPD. For organizations in the pro-CPAC coalition that believed in police abolition, their neighborhoods could decide that they no longer needed the CPD’s services and develop alternative methods of crime control. Then activists could work together to demand the City invest in the South Side, free from fear of racist or political repression.
To achieve that goal, CAARPR members made phone calls to every ward in the city, counting CPAC supporters and encouraging them to call their aldermen to tell them to vote to make CPAC a reality. Every month, CAARPR organizers also went to public meetings of the Police Board, where Board members deliberated on ongoing police misconduct cases. Towards the end of these meetings, when the members of the public could make comments, CAARPR delegates told the Board that the only way to truly solve police misconduct was through CPAC.