Specific endeavors that engage school-aged children, support street outreach workers, reclaim public spaces, promote job preparation and job growth and others go underfunded as a result of our reliance on traditional law enforcement spending and WHEREAS, interventions that would reduce the need for traditional law enforcement have been seen by too many officials with the power to allocate public resources as secondary efforts to maintain community peace. There is little focus on the root causes of violence or engaging in the restorative processes that actually address harm and generate needed accountability, healing, and repair for survivors of violence and They are presumed innocent but still sit locked in cages because they are Black and poor. WHEREAS, almost all people incarcerated in the jail are there while awaiting trial, and many hundreds specifically because they cannot afford to pay a money bond. For example, despite a 50% decrease in the number of people incarcerated in the Cook County Jail between 20, the Cook County Department of Corrections budget grew 26% over the same time period and WHEREAS, across the country, spending on traditional law enforcement and incarceration has escalated with no correlation to metrics of success such as clearance rates or sense of safety. Given the choice, many crime survivors choose nothing at all or accountability outside of criminal prosecution rather than seek help from our current justice system and The majority of sexual assaults and roughly half of robberies and aggravated assaults are never reported to police. WHEREAS, currently most crimes are not resolved within the criminal justice system. WHEREAS, despite centuries-long increased spending on traditional law enforcement, violence remains a problem in many communities, and there is little positive correlation between residents’ feeling of safety and the degree of law enforcement presence in those communities and WHEREAS, the brutality of law enforcement has become so commonplace in Black life that it is an ever-present cultural rite of passage in Black families to teach their children how to not be killed by law enforcement before they become adults and WHEREAS, the historic resistance to acknowledge problems in policing remains prevalent, illustrated by the alleged social media posts made by active Cook County Sheriff’s Officers in response to the peaceful protesting by attorneys in the Law Office of the Cook County Public Defender on June 12th and WHEREAS, policing has had a troubled history in Cook County, most conspicuously visible in the wrongful conviction of more than 125 Black people over dozens of years as a result of the police work enabled by disgraced Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge and his associates, thereby permanently damaging the lives of hundreds of accused people, their family members, and Black communities at large and WHEREAS, policing was in part developed as a tool to preserve the institution of slavery in the 1700’s, focusing on chasing down runaway slaves and shutting down slave revolts, grew into a weapon to disrupt labor uprisings in the 1800s, and matured in the 1900s to be used as the single most effective tool in repressing the civil rights movement and WHEREAS, throughout the history of the United States, policing, criminalization, and incarceration have been used as tools of violence and retribution against marginalized groups seeking safety, especially Black people and Read the testimony CCBF submitted to the County Board here. You can read news coverage of the resolution and our joint action outside the jail in the Chicago Sun-Times ( action) ( resolution), Chicago Tribune, Block Club Chicago, and Injustice Watch. Now that the resolution is passed, we will be working with our partners at SOUL, The People’s Lobby, National Nurses United, and the Shriver Center on Poverty Law to implement it through the budgeting process this summer and fall. The “Justice for Black Lives” resolution was passed by the Cook County Board of Commissioners today! This is an important first step in the fight to defund Cook County Jail and invest in our communities!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |