Chicago residents have good reason to protest the atrocities some police have committed against the city’s people. In September of 2022, two Chicago police officers were charged with shooting and injuring an unarmed civilian; this is just one of many such incidents. A lot of people believe there is something  seriously wrong with CPD's policies, and we need to fix it. 

The mayor created a Community Working Group to help craft better standards for the police, and the police rejected 150 of their 155 suggestions. It just goes to show that the police department has no intention of taking the community’s concerns seriously. One of the members of the working group, Amika Tendaji, is an organizer of #BlackLivesMatter Chicago who believes the whole process was nothing but a sham. She stated, “I am in no way satisfied. The spirit of what the working group tried to come up with is that police should have a stronger duty than the average Chicagoan to not hurt people, to not shoot people, and to not beat people.” 

Craig Futterman, another member of the community working group, is a Law Professor at the University of Chicago. He showed his disappointment against the rejections of their pragmatic recommendations. As he said, “It was designed to use us, to use a group of folks with credibility with the community … to allow [the city] to check the community engagement box, I can’t describe the anger and disenchantment of the folks who really put themselves into this.” 

Approving a drastically insufficient number of recommendations indicates that the police did not have a sincere vision of negotiating real changes with the community members. The five ideas which they did accept are mainly just changes in the wording of policies, such as using the word ‘person’ instead of 'subject.” The changes in these words have no effect whatsoever on police use of force on the public. 

Chicago Police are clearly not ready to negotiate or reconsider their practices when it comes to using force on the public. This is an alarming situation where an entity that is supposed to protect the public instead defends its own right to beat and brutalize people. How is it even considered reasonable to reject 150 recommendations out of 155? It only exhibits that the police never had any genuine intention to cooperate with the community working group or accept their input in the police reform process.