#NoCopAcademy organizers Sammy Aly Ortega, Destiny Harris, and Ardamis Sims at the #NoCopReport release at Bethel Lutheran Church in West Garfield Park (#NoCopAcademy / Twitter)
Does police spending reduce harm or cause greater harm?
Dan Rowell
Tania Unzueta is a fierce advocate for the rights of undocumented immigrants around the country. She helped found the three organizations that defend the rights of immigrants, including Organized Communities Against Deportation and its predecessor the Immigrant Youth Justice League, and Mijente, a national Latinx organization. She was first arrested for staging a sit-in in Senator John McCain’s office in 2010 in support of the Dream Act. These days, she continues to work with OCAD and serves as the policy director for Mijente, a political hub that calls itself pro-Latinx, pro-Black, pro-woman, pro-queer and pro-poor.
#CareNotCops organizers march to the occupation site (milo bosh)
On the night of April 3, an officer of the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) shot a student in the grips of a mental health crisis. Charles Thomas, who had been wielding a metal pole and smashing windows, and who the officer identified as undergoing a mental health crisis before shooting him in the shoulder, was taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Streeterville to receive treatment. Over the following two weeks, he was charged with eight felonies, including assaulting a police officer.
Maddie Anderson
Reparations Won!” a white sheet cake boasted in blue lettering. The names of survivors of torture by detectives within the Chicago Police Department hung from clotheslines draped across the walls. A dozen cardstock letters from CPD torture survivors who remain in prison dangled by pink string from the ceiling. On orange and pink post-it notes, questions like “What do you want the world to know about your mom?” and “What gives you hope?”—and corresponding answers like “Artists give me hope!”—colored the windows. A microphone stand arose from a makeshift stage set up in front of two large banners reading “Consent is Everything” and “You Are Never Alone.” Among all of this, over fifty activists, young and old—torture survivors, their mothers, and their allies—greeted each other, hugged, ate, and mingled.
Maddie Anderson
Fifty years after the Kerner Report, are we going backwards? This is the underlying question of “April 1968 and Today: Police and Military Occupation of Chicago” at the Uri-Eichen Gallery in Pilsen, part of the gallery’s five-month series “Unfinished Business: 1968-2018.”
Kiran Misra
Do Not Resist?,” For the People Artists Collective’s 2018 exhibition closed last Friday, February 9 after nearly a month of interdisciplinary generative installations and events across the city. From a training in the basics of cop watching to panels about topics including the abolition ofolf the prison industrial complex and reporting on police violence, the programming engaged thousands of Chicagoans in a conversation about the history of police violence in the city and alternatives to policing in Chicago.
Work from Larry Redmond's exhibit at Uri-Eichen gallery
Larry Redmond: My name is Larry Redmond. My nom de plume is Obi. So when people see the exhibit at the gallery people will see a little O-B-I on each of them, which would be me.
Ellen Hao
A gunshot is fired. Depending on where in the city it is, the sound might not just be picked up by human ears. By early next year, almost 130 square miles of Chicago will be monitored for gunshots by mechanical ears as well, via a technology called ShotSpotter.