Committee on Budget and Government Operations
City Council November 16, 2020
ORDINANCE
WHEREAS, According to investigative reporting by the Guardian newspaper, over an 11-year period the Chicago Police Department has "disappeared" more than 7,000 people at an interrogation warehouse known as the Homan Square detention center. Many of the detainees at Homan Square were not allowed access to attorneys nor was public notice given of their whereabouts, which are both infringements on their constitutional rights. Data show that 82.2% of people detained at Homan Square were Black, while 32.9% of the Chicago population is Black, and only 5.5% of the detainees were white, while 31.7% of the population is white; and
WHEREAS, In the summer of 2016, the Let Us Breathe Collective launched Freedom Square, an encampment led by activists protesting the injustices occurring inside the Homan Square CPD facility. Since then, the encampment has grown into a community space for providing free clothes, books, meals, and arts programming for the children of North Lawndale, and free sleeping tents for community members, protestors, and neighborhood residents experiencing homelessness; and
WHEREAS, According to a 2016 Chicago Police Accountability Task Force investigation, the Chicago Police Department regularly engages in racist policing practices such as racial profiling of Black and Latinx drivers who were searched four times as often as white drivers, when in fact CPD data shows that contraband was found on white drivers twice as often as on Black and Latinx drivers; and
WHEREAS, As a city we can no longer accept these racist and unconstitutional policing practices, or allow them to continue to occur. It is time we take action to remove all such "black sites" as we reform our criminal justice system; now, therefore
BE IT ORDAINED BY THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF CHICAGO:
SECTION 1. The above recitals are incorporated herein by this reference.
SECTION 2. This ordinance shall be ...
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