In Chicago, gang violence and gun deaths have reached crisis levels. It is fitting, then, that Mayor Rahm Emanuel proposed to build a $95 million police training academy to better govern the chaos.
However, social justice activists and community organizers feel those funds would be better spent on public school students, and last week around 50 teenagers held a sit-in at Chicago City Hall to protest the proposal. The students held mock tombstones to represent the victims of police shootings, even though gang violence is by far a larger problem in Chicago.
According to Mic, the students are participating in the “#NoCopAcademy, a campaign to combat Chicago’s investment in law enforcement and divestment from public education and community services.” Unsurprisingly, the coalition behind the protest includes groups like the Black Youth Project 100, Black Lives Matter Chicago, and For the People Artists Collective.
From the No Cop Academy website:
Mayor Rahm Emanuel wants to spend $95 million to build a Police & Fire training center in West Garfield Park. The city’s quiet unveiling suggests they are trying to avoid public scrutiny of this latest spending scheme, but we will not be robbed of our resources quietly. We refuse any expansion of policing in Chicago, and demand accountability for decades of violence. We will fight for funding for our communities, and support each other in building genuine community safety in the face of escalating attacks.
The initiative launched in September, before Chicago’s City Council voted 48-1 to purchase land in the predominantly black neighborhood of West Garfield Park. In February, when the Chicago school board announced that four predominantly black schools would be closing, the protests only worsened.
“When I was informed that there were more schools closing down in Englewood to help build the cop academy, it interested me because I was a victim of school closings, and I had to go to school in a whole different neighborhood that I knew nothing about,” said Nerica Johnson, a 16-year-old junior at Simeon Career Academy. “I want to help change how they’re not funding schools or art programs, but they’re using all this money for a police academy that’s really not needed.”
“It’s more important to fund schools than police academies because most of us kids feel like we don’t have any opportunities.,” Johnson said. “All the schools [Emanuel is] planning on closing down and all the things he’s not planning on funding, I feel like it’s discouraging kids. There’s so many kids out here with so many different talents, like drawing, dancing, architecture, but we can’t display them if we have no programs teaching us how.”
In Chicago, the two initiatives come out of separate budgets. While the police academy is funded from the city’s coffers, sparsely populated schools are being closed or combined to preserve precious education funds.