In the weeks leading up to the November 8 City Council vote that approved the $10 million purchase of a parcel of land for a new police and firefighter training academy, the organizers behind the #NoCopAcademy campaign stayed busy. Teens and adults from the campaign’s coalition of 50 groups have led a push to prevent the city from spending a total of $95 million on the new state-of-the-art facility, which is planned for West Garfield Park; they’ve been canvassing, calling aldermen, and showing up to ward nights. By November 8 they’d collected more than 1,800 signatures opposing the plan. A day before the vote, they reached out to Chance the Rapper for his support—to their surprise, he showed up at the hearing, and during the public comment period he pleaded with aldermen not to approve the land purchase.
The organizers led five canvassing outings in Alderman Emma Mitts’s 37th Ward, where construction of the academy is planned.
Their goal wasn’t just to be heard speaking on the issue directly but also to get some of the more progressive aldermen on the 15-member committee to ask the same questions the #NoCopAcademy campaign is asking. It was a formidable challenge, because Mitts, who’s championing the project, sits on the committee too. To their surprise, “[47th Ward alderman Ameya] Pawar and [33rd Ward alderman Deb] Mell both actually named some of our concerns,” Southorn says. Still, it didn’t come as a shock when the deal sailed through without a single dissenting vote.
It turns out that May wasn’t wrong that other aldermen were teetering on the brink of a “no” vote. One of them was 45th Ward alderman John Arena, and he says he knows of at least three others. Arena says he went along with the land purchase because he didn’t think it was worth forsaking an opportunity to follow through with one of the DOJ’s recommendations. He made it clear, however, that his ongoing support for the project would be contingent on progress in other areas of the police-reform agenda. “I wouldn’t support moving forward with the facility unless we had the civilian oversight [of the police department] in place,” Arena says. “We could use the land for something else, or we could sell it for a profit.”
“There’s no study that says if you build a new gleaming structure, [the police] will stop shooting black youth and mistreating civilians,” he says. “What’s required is real accountability and community oversight of the police.”
In the weeks following the vote, the Reader made multiple attempts to reach Mitts to discuss her perspective on the development and her thoughts about the #NoCopAcademy campaign. In the end she conceded only to make a written statement, emphasizing the academy as a precious development opportunity for her ward.
