Policing & Public Safety

The root causes of crime can be found in poverty, inequality, and disinvestment. Incarceration and punitive justice results primarily in exacerbating poverty and inequality and excuses disinvestment. Therefore, we support a radical reimagining of public safety that results in restorative justice and decarceration. The police should be subject to democratic community control and should be accountable to the public as embodied in the proposed Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC) ordinance; funds that support enforcement of city civil code and responsibility for social service responses, should be reallocated from the police budget to fully fund other departments within the city such as to provide for housing, health care, and decarbonization. Specifically, this could be enacted through proposals similar to the Treatment Not Trauma ordinance which would reallocate funding from the Chicago Police Department to have an emergency response service of trauma informed social workers and trained mental health professionals, as opposed to police, to calls of mental health crisis.