Craig Futterman Appears On "Chicago Tonight" Special On Policing
Lawyers and Activists Blast Mayor, Police for Lack of Consent Decree Progress
Community activists and lawyers engaged in efforts to reform the Chicago Police Department have blasted Mayor Lori Lightfoot and CPD leadership for failing to move quickly on implementation of a court-mandated consent decree that is supposed to ensure change.
“The consent decree requires meaningful engagement between impacted communities and the solutions to violent and racist policing. I think that the city has shown that they don’t actually believe the community has input that is worth taking,” said Nusrat Choudhury, legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. “The mayor is not living up to her commitment as a candidate and that is deeply, deeply disappointing to communities of color in the city of Chicago.”
Chicago has a long history of racist and violent policing in Black and brown communities. The consent decree has been in place since the beginning of 2019 following a U.S. Department of Justice investigation that found the city’s police department “engage in a pattern and practice of using force, including deadly force, that is unreasonable.”
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University of Chicago Law professor Craig Futterman, who is a member of a community working group on police reform, says that had a foot pursuit policy been in place, Toledo might still be alive.
“The DOJ issued this report in 2017 and made these findings known to the police department and said that this was necessary,” said Futterman. “A third of the instances where police officers kill people began with a foot pursuit.”
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