In July, Chicago’s city council passed a modified version of police accountability legislation that activists have spent years fighting for, backed by major public sector unions and Black labor leaders. Though stripped of some of its stronger measures, the new law is one of the most prominent pieces of police reform legislation to pass since last year’s uprisings after George
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Letâs Celebrate Mothers Who Are Fighting to Set Their Loved Ones Free
MAMAS members Denice Bronis, Armanda Shackelford, and Rosemary Cade join American Friends Service Committee-Chicago and the End IL Prison Lockdown Coalition for the Mother s Day Action to #FreethemAll, Tell JB to Set our Loved Ones Free on May 7, 2021. Soapbox Productions and Organizing âSome problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up and join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying.â âAudre Lorde
My Child Is Incarcerated. One Second in This Unjust System Is Too Much.
Esther and Rosendo Hernández visit with their son Juan Hernández at Lawrence Correctional Center in 2020 right before the pandemic when the Illinois Department of Corrections shut down visits.
Courtesy of Lawrence Correctional Center
By
For several years, I have met weekly with a remarkable group of mothers and one father who, like me, are fighting for the release of their adult children from Chicago-area prisons. We call ourselves the Mothers of the Kidnapped. My new sisters and brother, all in a group no parent wants to join, speak powerfully to the loss of their children and to the agony of being caught up in a police and trial process that actively works against us and the supposed rights of our children to access a transparent and even-handed legal system.
In the last decade, high-profile police killings â including George Floyd in 2020 â have shaken the nation and led to widespread protests and calls for reform, including hiring more nonwhite and female officers.
But there was little research to back that up. Now, a new study published last week in the journal Science, suggests that diversity in law enforcement can indeed lead to improvements in how police treat people of color.
âItâs a system that very clearly needs reforming,â said study co-author Dean Knox, an assistant professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. âWe just havenât had good data on what reforms work.â