Here’s a thread from today:
I served on the Early Intervention and Personnel Concerns working group of the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot chaired the task force and lead our small working group.
It was my experience there that led me to support Lightfoot for Mayor. Here’s an excerpt from that post:
The University of Chicago Crime Lab was there, too. They made the software launched yesterday. A private institution privately building software for the private use of people who have, for decades, shown they don’t want to be accountable.
Based on interviews with CPD human resources professionals, a review of CPD software expenditures, and an analysis of how people actually use tech in CPD, it was clear this wasn’t a software problem.
Behold Brainmaker, from *1994*, killed in *1997*:
The CPD clearly lacked was a desire or capacity to be held accountable to the people they serve. But what I saw was a move to spend more money on an early warning system, I vigorously opposed it in task force meetings.
The main recommendation of our working group was that the Chicago Police Department embark on the “design and implementation of a mandatory EIS that centrally collects data across a broad range of data points to capture information on the totality of officer activity”.
I made a corollary recommendation that ended up in the report but is nowhere to be seen in this launch– the idea that there be a public dashboard for this system, warning the people exactly which officers were behaving poorly, and where they serve. These are the warnings we need
Lori Lightfoot is now Mayor. The accountability report that she authored— and which brought her to the attention of mot voters for the first time– is nowhere to be seen in our public discourse.
The movement to defund the police is dismissed out of hand by this Mayor.
The movement to remove SROs from schools is blocked.
The Chicago Police violate the federal Consent Decree and have blown deadlines. That document is the most concrete plan for “reform” of the police that we have. Even this document, disparaged as half-measures by those who want radical, lasting change– is basically ignored .
But yesterday they launched new software costing millions, funded by billions. Mind-blowingly, painfully, inexcusably out of touch.