By Eric Wilkins, Communities United 

People from my neighborhood and other Black and Brown communities in Chicago are hurting. This is because of police abuse that is common in our communities—like the humiliating raid on Anjanette Young, a Black social worker. 

This is why I work as an organizer with Communities United. We organize diverse communities on a lot of issues, including violence prevention, and access to healthcare, housing and mental health services. We want to make sure that Black and Brown voices and people with lived experience are included in finding solutions to problems—including police violence that impacts our lives and families. 

This is why my organization joined a coalition of groups to sue Chicago police. We challenged police excessive force that hurts Black and Brown people, and people with disabilities. Because of our lawsuit, we now are involved with a coalition that has the power to help enforce a consent decree governing Chicago Police. It requires changes in how police treat communities, including when and how they use force against us. Communities United joined this effort because we hope that the consent decree can bring our voices to the table to help end the type of policing that has brutalized our people for centuries. 

The video showing Ms. Young being handcuffed and naked in front of police with guns drawn while wrongfully raiding her home is hard to watch. But it is nothing new in my community. When we tell police that they cannot come to our homes, that they have the wrong place or the wrong people, they ignore us. Worse, they attack us. Ms. Young told the officers in her house over and over again that they had the wrong house! But they stayed. That was an assault on her person. 

The trauma this caused is also not new for my community. For us, these home raids are just another predatory police tactic that harasses and degrades us.

Police raid and search our homes, often without warrants. They stop and harass us in the streets. This is part of daily life. This has broken my community. In Englewood and Roseland Southside Neighborhoods, police don’t just raid the wrong address. They often raid people’s homes without any warrants or paperwork at all. When they do it, they tear apart our homes, and our families. 

My community is afraid because this is what policing is to us. The message is to just accept that this is “the way it is.” 

But my community has been pushing back. In August 2020, Communities United and the coalition that enforces the Chicago Police consent decree sent a letter to the City telling them that police home raids traumatize Black and Brown children and families. We explained how raids often target the wrong home. We also connected them to violations of the consent decree. We identified specific cases, including the raid on Anjanette Young. We also identified some of the things that needed to change and asked the City to meet with us.

But the City never responded. Rather than meet with community organizations, the City ignored us. This is what Chicago did last summer. More than 30 of us served on a working group to create a new use-of-force policy for Chicago police. But our recommendations were basically ignored by the City and continue to be ignored. 

This is why Communities United, Community Renewal Society, One Northside, Next Steps, and the ACLU of Illinois worked with the coalition and our lawyers to take action. Yesterday, we filed a motion asking a federal court to make the City take this matter seriously and work with the communities directly impacted by police home raids. We want real reform—not just talk. 

We should never have had to do this. The City should have just responded to our requests to meet as they promised in the consent decree. Instead, we need the court’s help to be part of a solution. 

Things have to change. I have two small Black boys. I want to make sure Chicago is a better place for my sons. The consent decree requires the City of Chicago and Chicago police to meet and work with communities about policing that is illegal and hurts us. This is not simply so we can have a meeting. It is because our City can only fix problems with policing with input from communities—like mine—that experience abuse and humiliation from police every day. 

We are ready to have that discussion. We now call on the court to help enforce our rights. 

The following can be attributed to Nusrat Choudhury, Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois:

“The Supreme Court’s decision in the Fulton v. Chicago case is a real disappointment and fails to recognize that states and cities, including Chicago, are crushing residents with exorbitant fines and fees in order to balance the budgets. Chicago’s reliance on fines and fees buries people under mountains of debt, drives them to bankruptcy, and then keeps people from the vehicles needed to work their way out. 

This problem will only get worse and continue to especially harm Black and Brown communities due to the pressures of COVID-related losses in revenue. We already see the City is seeking more revenue from drivers – and going after those found driving 6 miles an hour over the speed limit on traffic cameras – while allowing a mega-corporation like the Chicago Cubs to delay paying its own debts back the City.
 
It is disappointing that the Supreme Court’s decision will make this problem worse. As Justice Sotomayor’s concurrence recognizes, drivers in low-income communities across the country face similar vicious cycles of steep fines and fees, debt, and loss of their ability to drive to earn money, access medical care, care for their families, and repay their creditors. 

As our country grapples with an economic recession that has plunged millions of people into financial crisis—with Black and Brown communities hardest hit—these practices in Chicago and elsewhere will continue to hurt communities, employers, and the broader public.”
 

A week ago, we watched in horror as an angry mob attacked our US Capitol, killing a police officer and threatening the lives of elected members of Congress and the Vice President of the United States. The assault was an orchestrated effort to disrupt the certification of the votes in the Electoral College, a process established by the Constitution and federal law that stands at the center of the peaceful transfer of power, seeking to overturn the will of the American people as expressed in the November 2020 election. 

This attack was the violent product resulting from a weeks-long campaign by the sitting President to spread lies about fraud in the 2020 election, lies that have been rejected by courts across the country. The baseless campaign to overturn the election specifically targeted Black and Brown votes, suggesting that those votes were undeserving of being counted and considered. This campaign of lies has spread across the country, and shamefully has been adopted by public officials who know that the president’s claims are specious. 

Unfortunately, two members of the Illinois congressional delegation – Representative Mike Bost and Representative Mary Miller – blithely embraced this torrent of lies and voted to challenge lawfully-submitted electoral votes from Arizona and Georgia. These two elected officials cast these offensive votes even after the mob descended on the Capitol, literally after this mob murdered a Capitol police officer and desecrated our nation’s symbol representative government.  

The ACLU of Illinois condemns these votes by Representative Bost and Representative Miller. And, we call on all Illinois residents and voters to hold their elected officials accountable, to resist the allure of elevating fiction over fact, and to demand that everyone sent to represent our state in the Congress of the United States ignore conspiracy theories and lies, and focus on truth and respecting our democratic system of government.