When I was elected as village trustee in April 2019, I knew that I wanted to push forward racial equity initiatives that had stalled at the village. As part of those efforts, I reached out to community organizers and heard story after story of incidents with Oak Park police that didn’t match up with what I was hearing at the board table from other trustees, or even the Chief of Police. Over and over again, I heard stories of young Black and Latinx people being stopped by the police for things like, riding a bike, or “matching the description” of someone the police were looking for, or they were being too loud - in every case, in every story, the stop made no sense, and the person stopped was traumatized. In every incident, that young person was made to feel like they didn’t belong in our community. 

I am not a Black person. I will never, ever know what it feels like to be Black in America, or what it feels like to be stopped by the police for simply living your life. I do however, connect deeply with the feeling that you don’t belong, for I felt that deeply as a child who grew up the daughter of Indian immigrants in an all-white neighborhood, and as someone who grew up with child abuse and never felt accepted or loved by the people in my life that were supposed to protect me. 

Hearing these young people’s stories, and meeting the incredible organizers like Kevin Barnhart, who was already working independently on researching policing in Oak Park, is what led to the creation of Freedom to Thrive Oak Park. It’s been one year since Freedom to Thrive Oak Park had our first meeting, and in that time, we’ve released two sets of research, both of which have changed the conversation on policing in Oak Park. Our first report showed the disproportionate amount spent on policing by our Village government in comparison to community services, the lack of an progressive Citizen Police Oversight policy, and the use of a problematic company called Lexipol to write the Village’s policing policies. 

Our second report showed the racial disparities in field stops made by the Oak Park police. Freedom to Thrive Oak Park researchers found that of the 102 youth stopped by Oak Park police between January 2015 and June 2020, 96 of those young people were Black and 91 of these young Black people were Black males. Only one young man of the 102 youth stopped by police in field stops was white. 

Freedom to Thrive Oak Park’s work challenges the definition of community safety and forces you to ask the question, “who is it that we’re keeping safe?” I often hear, as rebuttals to the Freedom to Thrive Oak Park reports, that “Oak Park is next to the most crime ridden neighborhood in Chicago (Austin),” or, “We’ve had an increase in carjackings,” or “We’ve had an increase in the number of calls for service and therefore we need more police.” As I’ve done this work, however, I’ve learned that what I know of crime is really an image that has been painted by our government so that we reduce it to the good person/bad person simplistic narrative that it has become, and buy into the narrative that more police equals less crime. A recent article by Dr. David Stovall, who is a Professor of African-American Studies and Criminology, Law & Justice at UIC, touched on this point brilliantly:  

“These narratives about Chicago’s “dangerousness” tend to erase long-standing structural violence. Mainstream media outlets often limit discussions of violence to interpersonal interactions or damage to property. People are steered toward visceral images of “looting,” a gang brawl, or a shooting, and many accept these glimpses as the general narrative on how violence operates, and accept the perceived need to suppress and arrest the perpetrators.

While this imagery serves as fodder for the “law and order” rhetoric of politicians, it wrongly reduces the problem to the actions of a few people behaving in ways that the mainstream deem to be unruly or inappropriate. Missing from these conversations is an understanding of violence at the structural or institutional level. Because structural considerations are viewed as “too complex” or “too big” to address, we are still offered the same tired solutions that do not consider violence as a series of processes that are often state-sanctioned and structural, and that deepen violence at the interpersonal level.”

When we reduce crime to the binary, simplistic story that so many of those in power often use as arguments against moving away from our current public safety structures, we also increase the harm that will be done to people in order to enact these surveillance and “safety” measures. Across America, and in Oak Park, it is clear that our current system of public safety isn’t working. If it was, well wouldn’t Oak Park, with its current ratio of police officers per resident, be a crime-free community? Wouldn’t Chicago, one of the most heavily policed cities in America have less crime than it does today? It’s become clear to me that, despite the story America has built up and wants us so desperately to believe, more policing does not equal more safety. I’ve learned that safety instead comes in the form of having a home, being able to stay in your home, having access to mental health care, enacting a housing-first policy for homelessness so that anyone who needs isolated shelter has it - a definitive need given the COVID-19 pandemic. 

This journey of unlearning and educating myself has led me to introduce the Freedom to Thrive Resolution that calls for a commitment to defund the Oak Park police department in the 2021 Oak Park Village budget. I put forward the motion for the resolution this week, and the motion was seconded by Trustee Buchanan. The the Village Trustees will discuss the resolution at their board meeting on August 25, 2020. 

The resolution I put forth calls for a reimagining of safety in Oak Park. Yes, it calls for a commitment to defund the Oak Park police department, and to use that money to create non-police alternatives to community health and safety - like other cities in America have already enacted. The resolution also calls for the rescinding of laws and ordinances that are used needlessly to disproportionately punish Black children - such as parts of the Village’s bicycle ordinance. Finally, the resolution calls for truly independent oversight of our police, so that if anyone is harmed by police, they have a trusted, transparent, and fully independent process by which to seek justice. 

Change can be scary, and people may be afraid of changes like this. It is beyond time, however, that we acknowledge that our current system of public safety isn’t working. And that it is actually doing more harm than good. It is time that we finally right this wrong, and create a community where everyone feels like they don’t just belong here and can live here, but that they can really thrive here - freely - without question and without fear. That’s the Oak Park we need to build today. Another Oak Park is not only possible, it is on its way. 

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Do you support the Freedom to Thrive Resolution?
Email the Village Board and ask them to adopt it.