The settlement agreement between the city and the estate of Joshua Beal was announced last Friday, just days before the civil trial was set to commence at the Richard J. Daley Center. The terms were not known Monday, and a spokesperson for the city’s Law Department declined to comment. An attorney for Beal’s estate could not be reached.

The shooting occurred on West 111th Street on an unseasonably warm weekend afternoon in early November 2016 — just days before the presidential election — after Beal, of Indianapolis, and members of his family had left a funeral nearby.

The eruption of gunfire in the Far Southwest Side neighborhood prompted several protests by local Black Lives Matter demonstrators, who were met with racial hostility and derision by residents of Mount Greenwood.

On Nov. 6, 2016, Beal and his family were traveling west on 111th Street after attending a funeral at Mount Hope Cemetery. Moments later, off-duty Chicago police Officer Joseph Treacy became involved in a road-rage incident with members of Beal’s family, who were going to visit an ailing relative in the hospital.

Beal’s family alleged that Treacy “was screaming racial obscenities at Beal and at other funeral attendees prior to the shooting.”

Treacy, who denied using any racial epithets, soon separated from the group and the convoy eventually came to a stop outside the Chicago Fire Department firehouse at 111th and Troy. Two vehicles carrying Beal and other family members had stopped in the firehouse’s “apron,” and an off-duty CFD recruit stopped his vehicle to tell them to move out of the way.

That recruit, Ryne Kinsella, allegedly screamed more racial epithets at the group, and members of Beal’s family soon physically attacked Kinsella in the middle of 111th Street, leaving him with bloody wounds on his face and neck. Treacy — no longer a CPD officer — saw the attack on Kinsella and exited his vehicle with his gun drawn.

“Plaintiff’s family responded to Kinsella’s verbal statements, including any racial epithet, by descending upon, attacking, and battering him for about 10 seconds,” the attorney for Kinsella’s estate wrote in a recent court filing. “About forty seconds later, after the physical attack on Kinsella concluded, decedent Beal (not Kinsella) ‘ended’ the chain of events by starting a new assault on Treacy by criminally racking, raising, and pointing his firearm at him, after Treacy holstered his gun and posed no threat.”

Video of the shooting previously released by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability shows Treacy also holding his badge while announcing his office as he came to Kinsella’s aid. A woman who witnessed the fight called 911 as she stood on a nearby sidewalk, and she was also attacked by members of Beal’s family.

Another off-duty CPD officer, Sgt. Thomas Derouin, was driving to work at the Morgan Park District station when he, too, happened upon the brawl. Treacy then holstered his weapon.

Moments later, Beal retrieved his own gun from inside his car and pointed it at the officers. Treacy and Derouin both opened fire, killing Beal. Video footage shows Kinsella attempting CPR on Beal after he was shot.

COPA eventually found the shooting to be within CPD policy, writing:

“COPA recognizes the racially charged and tense nature surrounding the tragic events. Video evidence captured Officer Treacy announcing he was a police officer after a Chicago Fire Department member was being beaten by several members of the group,” the agency found. “Officer Treacy initially responded (by) lowering and raising his weapon consistent with the advancement and de-escalation of the crowd. Video evidence does also display a raised weapon in the hand of Joshua Beal prior to the officers discharging their firearms.”

Treacy was later suspended for 90 days for failing to register a gun with CPD.

But after anti-war, pro-Palestinian demonstrations roiled college campuses this spring and led to clashes between protesters and police, the specter of the chaos surrounding that summer’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago looms as the party returns in August to mark the renomination of President Joe Biden.

To be sure, the landscape is vastly different than it was in the late 1960s, even amid resurgent political violence driven predominantly by the far right. Nevertheless, the influx of potentially tens of thousands of protesters into Chicago during the Aug. 19-22 convention, some of whom have vowed to take to the streets without city permits, raises questions about how prepared Chicago police are for any ensuing unrest.

While similar concerns arose ahead of the last Chicago DNC in 1996, as well as the NATO summit in 2012, divisions among the Democratic coalition are deeper this year, with progressives upset over Biden’s ongoing support for Israel in its war against Hamas as well as his recent order clamping down on migrant crossings at the southern border.

Policing has changed substantially over the past several decades, especially for large gatherings such as national political conventions.

Still, with the whole world watching Chicago once again, avoiding any echoes of 1968 — when blue-helmeted officers beat protesting Yippies and working journalists alike in what a government report later termed a “police riot” — will be an important test for a department that remains under a federal consent decree over its long-running “pattern and practice” of civil rights violations.

In the lead-up to this year’s convention, organizers and police officials have downplayed concerns about possible unrest and sought to dispel any comparisons to the events that culminated in the infamous “Battle of Michigan Avenue.”

“This will not be 1968,” said Chicago police Superintendent Larry Snelling while acknowledging he understands the comparison given national protests of the Israel-Hamas war. “Our response as a Chicago Police Department will be a lot more deliberate … a lot more controlled because our officers are being trained in the best way possible to respond to any level of civil unrest.”

It’s not just the Police Department that has a lot riding on a peaceful convention.

The political stakes are high, both for Biden as he seeks to again defeat former Republican President Donald Trump and for local Democrats who will play prominent roles at the party gathering and in managing the situation outside.

That’s particularly true for Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who was pivotal in bringing the convention to Chicago and will use the event to elevate his national profile as a key Biden surrogate and potential future White House contender, as well as Mayor Brandon Johnson, who has perhaps a greater affinity with those planning to protest than with the police under his command who are charged with keeping order.

“If you’re Biden and the Democratic Party and the mayor of Chicago, you just want peace and calm and stability,” said Andrew Baer, a University of Alabama at Birmingham history professor who studies policing and social movements. “You don’t want the bad optics of either suppressing a protest or the protest embarrassing the coronation of Biden.”

Despite changes in both policing practices and the political environment, “there’s clearly a through line from ’68, through the (Cmdr. Jon) Burge era, into the 2000s and up to the present day,” said Baer, author of “Beyond the Usual Beating: The Jon Burge Police Torture Scandal and Social Movements for Police Accountability in Chicago.”

Today, as then, there is a sense among many police of feeling “misunderstood and kind of unnecessarily tampered with” by outside forces, Baer said.

“That degree of always-simmering resentment felt by police rank and file, and the Fraternal Order of Police and the unions, and the supervisors and administrators of the Police Department always makes for a potentially explosive environment, whether it’s at a street arrest or a public protest or national political convention,” he said.

‘2020 snuck up on us’

One need not look all the way back to 1968 to see what can go wrong when hordes of protesters and lines of cops meet in the streets.

Indeed, the training Snelling’s officers have been undergoing ahead of the DNC was spurred not only by Chicago’s selection as the host city but also by the department’s response to widespread civil unrest in 2020.

Officers in Chicago were unprepared for the simultaneous and unpredictable nature of large protests and chaos that erupted over three days after George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in late May of that year. While the department improved its response to other incidents in the weeks that followed, protests over the city’s Christopher Columbus statues and also high-profile police shootings highlighted similar struggles.

“2020 snuck up on us,” Snelling acknowledged in a recent Tribune interview. “Let’s tell the cold, hard truth. We did not have the level of preparedness to deal with something that was that random that popped up on us.”

The department is applying lessons learned from the 2020 response in preparation for the DNC, Snelling said.

While CPD took issue with some of the findings in a recent inspector general report on policy and training updates since the 2020 unrest, Snelling said any use of force or pepper spray during the DNC would be “proportional” to the reality on the ground.

“We’re not just going to walk in and spray a crowd of people. Even if they’re breaking the law, if they’re peaceful, we’re not going to use OC (pepper) spray,” Snelling said. “Now, if we have an all-out fight, where people are attacking police officers, are attacking each other, and we need to use OC spray, that call will be made by a higher authority based on the totality of circumstances and what’s occurring in the field in that time.”

The situation on the ground should be much different in August for a number of reasons, not least of which is the major role the U.S. Secret Service will play in controlling the areas surrounding the major convention venues, the United Center and McCormick Place.

Like every major party convention since 2000, this summer’s DNC — along with the Republican National Convention a month earlier in Milwaukee — is designated a National Special Security Event, making the Secret Service the lead agency for security planning. Each convention host city also received $75 million from Congress to help cover equipment and other security costs.

“We’ve got a tremendous working relationship with Chicago police, as well as a multitude of other agencies, both local and federal, that will be contributing to this whole-of-government approach that we’re taking,” Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle told reporters during a visit last week that included tours of the convention venues.

Outside the yet-to-be-finalized security zones around the venues, where most if not all the protests are expected to take place, Chicago police will be running the show, however. The convention will come near the end of what are typically more violent summer months as well as after large-scale events like Lollapalooza and the NASCAR street race.

In an effort to relieve some of the tension building ahead of the DNC, lawyers for the Johnson administration indicated in federal court Thursday they were preparing to offer a deal to protesters who’d sued the city over its alleged efforts to block marches within “sight and sound” of the convention venue.

While private negotiations remain ongoing, the city indicated protesters would be offered a “United Center-adjacent route.”

Regardless of the outcome of those discussions, the city will have to manage the movement of an estimated 50,000 delegates, staff and public officials to and from the convention venues south of downtown and on the West Side, in addition to handling security checkpoints and traffic rerouting to accommodate Biden, who is expected to attend the convention on the final day.

CPD’s task of working with other organizations and maintaining order will come with the city under a national and international spotlight it didn’t have to contend with in 2020 when protests were taking place across the country, said Cara Hendrickson, the former chief of the Illinois attorney general’s public interest division, where she helped negotiate the consent decree.

“The way CPD and other law enforcement agencies respond will be very visible to Chicagoans and the world,” she said. “It’s a very public test of law enforcement’s current ability to keep people safe.”

Trying to assure the public

Despite assurances of readiness from the top brass, one veteran CPD supervisor, speaking on a condition of anonymity for concern of reprisal, gave a blunt assessment of the department’s readiness to tamp down on summer gun violence on top of its DNC responsibilities.

“Our strategy is eight hours ahead, right?” the supervisor told the Tribune in mid-May. “It’s very short-term and there’s no long-term planning to this, but if you ask them then they’ll say there is, but they won’t tell you what.”

In 1968, of course, Mayor Richard J. Daley also sought to assure the public and his fellow Democrats the situation in Chicago would be under control, though he focused more on maintaining order than allowing room for dissenting voices.

That year’s gathering at the International Amphitheatre in the New City neighborhood came amid widespread protests over the Vietnam War, a backlash so strong that President Lyndon Johnson chose not to seek reelection. It also came just months after the assassination of Democratic presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy and violent uprisings that April in Chicago and elsewhere in the wake of the Rev. Martin Luther King’s assassination.

“Leading in, Daley was talking about how he was going to uphold law and order in Chicago,” said Heather Hendershot, a Northwestern University communications professor and author of the recent book “When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America.”

While Daley was “Mr. Democrat,” his rhetoric echoed that of GOP nominee Richard Nixon, whose campaign capitalized on the ensuing disorder in Chicago to win in November, Hendershot said.

“(Daley) sent out this message that, ‘We are prepared to do whatever we have to do to maintain order in Chicago. We will keep our city safe,’ this kind of thing,” she said. “And people knew there was going to be a lot of violence, and it really scared a lot of people away.”

The result was a crowd of only about 10,000 predominantly white protesters during the 1968 DNC, Hendershot said, a group that was outnumbered by police and members of the National Guard.

The protests this year could be substantially larger, Hendershot said, pointing to the more than 100,000 people who protested President George W. Bush and the Iraq War during the 2004 RNC in New York.

Somewhat encouraging, though, is that this year Johnson and police officials are “not releasing a bunch of press releases to scare people or to say, ‘We’re going to have law and order,’” she said. “They will occasionally say something like, ‘We will engage in constitutional policing, which, obviously, is what all policing should be.”

‘Whac-A-Mole’

But what policing should be doesn’t always match reality when officers are confronted with large groups of protesters in unpredictable settings.

The George Floyd protests in 2020 created a no-win for cops, protesters and nearby businesses, according to three separate reports — CPD’s own after-action report, a scathing probe by the city’s inspector general, and a 464-page special report covering the summer’s incidents from the independent monitoring team responsible for tracking the city’s progress in the court-ordered consent decree.

Cops were left vulnerable, exhausted and under-resourced, in part because the department had not prepared for that scale of unrest since 2012, when Chicago hosted the NATO summit.

Officers struggled to control disorganized crowds and distinguish between protesters protected under the First Amendment and those responsible for looting, vandalism or assaulting cops. Many cops were deployed without protective gear, radios or bullhorns to communicate dispersal orders. At times, equipment failed in the field during lengthy shifts. Some cops were left without adequate or timely transportation to transfer arrestees or move other cops to a place to rest, use restrooms, eat or drink.

One officer described the department’s strategy during the George Floyd protests as Whac-A-Mole, with self-guided platoons of officers putting out metaphorical fires while still leaving others smoldering.

Accountability measures lapsed as well. Some officers were unfamiliar with the department’s mass arrest policies, resulting in some arrestees suspected of looting, arson or violence being released or having charges dropped. Some officers also covered or removed their name tags or badges, turned off their body-worn cameras, were deployed without them or had the camera batteries die on them in the field.

The independent monitoring team reported hearing from community members that “officers were verbally abusive toward them; pushed and shoved them; tackled them to the ground; pushed them down stairs; pulled their hair; struck them with batons, fists, or other nearby objects; hit them after they were ‘kettled’ with nowhere to go or after being handcuffed; and sprayed them with pepper spray (OC spray) without reason.”

Misconduct settlements stemming from the protests have been costly for taxpayers.

On top of tens of millions spent on overtime and damage to local businesses, a WTTW analysis found the city had paid $5.6 for settlements and attorney fees. As of April, 32 lawsuits related to officer misconduct had been paid out. Thirteen were pending in federal court.

Following 2020, CPD has been “training, working, preparing, revising orders,” and working with parties involved in the consent decree to update mass arrest and use of force policies, Snelling said. The department is also working to ensure officers “get as much time off as possible” in the weeks leading up to the DNC to ensure “we have the maximum manpower that we can have out there” while not pulling officers from the city’s most violent neighborhood beats.

Command staff members have been through “multiple days of training for field force operations” to know how to guide manpower. The department has set aside 1,370 “flex” body cameras across several area offices, purchased 40 passenger vans, and additional radios to distribute to each police district.

Lessons of 2020

Even so, the city’s inspector general recently highlighted shortcomings in those plans, including opaque written policies about the use of pepper spray and kettling, which is the act of corralling crowds into a closed space. The city’s crowd-control policies also contain “outdated” theories that assume bad actors are present and that people in mass gatherings are inclined to act like a mob, the IG said.

Snelling denied the department used kettling tactics but nonetheless said the lessons of 2020 are being applied to this summer’s preparations.

DNC training has already been tested at protests, including at several college campuses across the city, Snelling said, noting that most “ended with no violence.”

“Even in situations where we’ve had to make arrests, we gave these people multiple, multiple opportunities to voluntarily comply and leave,” Snelling said. “Only as a last resort we made arrests.”

CPD on Thursday invited members of the press to McCormick Place to observe about 150 officers take part in training exercises tailored for the expected protests and potential unrest during the DNC. Drills focused on defensive tactics, crowd control and medical aid, as well as officer wellness.

Snelling said the department also will use a “line relief” tactic to provide cops reprieves when needed.

“These are human beings who are standing out here, having insults hurled at them, probably things thrown at them,” Snelling said Thursday. “At some point, the human nature kicks in and the possibility or the likelihood of making a mistake becomes greater. This is why now we have that line relief where we can take those officers off the front line and bring in a fresh batch of officers who can deal with the situation.”

Given the possibility of mass arrests, officers also are receiving training on properly processing suspects taken into custody in potentially volatile situations.

Will there be mass arrests?

But some planning to protest the convention are taking issue with comments Snelling made at a separate media briefing earlier last week.

“First Amendment protection is only there if you’re not committing a crime,” Snelling said. “You can be acting out peacefully and still breaking the law.”

Hatem Abudayyeh, executive director of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, said after a court hearing Thursday that Snelling’s words were “very concerning.”

“This sounds like nothing more than a threat from a police department that has a history of violence against protesters,” said Abudayyeh, whose group is one of the organizations suing the city over its previous plans to keep protesters away from the main convention sites.

Civil liberties advocates also have taken issue with the department’s latest policy on mass arrests. In April, a coalition of the community groups that triggered the consent decree asked the judge overseeing the agreement to block the Police Department from implementing the mass arrest policy drafted earlier this year.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois and other groups argue the new proposal is overly broad, fails to make proper accommodations for people with disabilities and non-English speakers, and marks a step back from a First Amendment policy negotiated after the “violent and unconstitutional response” to the 2020 protests, according to the filing.

The groups are asking Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer to intervene swiftly because “CPD officers are already being trained on the infirm policy for the DNC.”

Meanwhile, Hendrickson, now the executive director of the public interest group Impact for Equity, notes that police leaders will have the complex task of not only coordinating with other city departments but other law enforcement entities.

CPD “is going to be called upon to make difficult judgment calls rapidly, in real time, over the course of many days or weeks. And understanding who has responsibility for making those decisions, who is the backup to the person who has the responsibility to make those decisions if they’re not available. … I don’t know the answers to those questions at this point,” Hendrickson said.

Snelling said plans are still being worked out for the role outside agencies — the National Guard, the Cook County sheriff’s office, Illinois State Police or other local police departments — would play, but said they would not be charged with managing crowds.

“We want to put them in other areas where they can protect certain venues,” he said. “That frees up Chicago police officers who have been very well trained to go out there and deal with the possibility of civil unrest.”

‘We’re ready’

If the past is precedent, Johnson — an organizer who has said he values demonstrations — would be directly in charge of making major decisions on how to respond to potential unrest.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot made the final call to raise downtown bridges, use pepper spray, enact a citywide curfew, and call in the National Guard during the 2020 protests. Johnson has repeatedly said violence or vandalism would not be tolerated, but has emphasized “the fundamental right of our democracy, the First Amendment, is protected.”

Snelling said he is in “constant contact” about preparations with Johnson and his deputy mayor for community safety, Garien Gatewood. Raising bridges and enacting curfews in 2020 were a response to riot activity, not protected First Amendment protests, he said.

“We will not allow people to come here and destroy our city,” Snelling said. “We’re ready. We’re prepared to deal with whatever comes our way. But we would love for everything to end peacefully. Do we expect that that’s going to happen? No. That’s our wish.”

On the political side, Democrats have been quick to voice their support for Chicago police and the larger security effort — and to shift the focus to the GOP convention in Milwaukee, which could attract some of the same right-wing groups that instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

The Democratic National Convention Committee declined to make convention chair Minyon Moore available for an interview. But in a statement, convention spokeswoman Emily Soong echoed what organizers have been saying for months in response to questions about protests and possible disruptions:

“Peaceful protest has been a fixture of political conventions for decades, and while Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans stoke political violence, we will continue to support the ongoing security coordination at all levels of government to keep the city safe for delegates, visitors, media, and all Chicagoans, including those exercising their right to make their voices heard.”

For Pritzker, who courted the convention before the deadly Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel sparked a war that has divided Democrats, the gathering is a chance to show his mettle on the national stage, said Chris Mooney, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

That will be particularly true in the face of possible mass protests, he said.

“Even though he … didn’t expect this, didn’t think of it when he was lobbying for this (convention), he has earned himself the opportunity to show how excellent he is as a public leader,” Mooney said.

Chicago Tribune’s Jake Sheridan contributed. 

Bookending the first week of Gun Violence Awareness Month, the report issued by the Violence Policy Center and One Aim Illinois found that nearly 1,800 deaths in Illinois in 2022 were caused by firearms. Of those, 1,091 were homicides and 676 were suicides. The overwhelming majority of homicide victims — 76.4% — were Black, while the lion’s share of suicide victims — 79.9% — were white.

At a news conference Friday morning, Yolanda Androzzo, executive director of One Aim Illinois, said the report’s findings should serve as an “urgent reminder to address gun violence, which continues to devastate our communities, even more so in Black and brown communities.”

Androzzo and others called on the Illinois legislature to pass more “common sense” gun laws to minimize future fatalities.

In analyzing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the report found that, in 2022, “Black Illinois residents were more than 39 times more likely to die by firearm homicide compared with white residents — the Black firearm homicide rate was 47.2 per 100,000 and the white firearm homicide rate was 1.2 per 100,000.”

Androzzo was joined by other gun violence survivors and families of those killed, including Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton, mother of Hadiya Pendleton, a 15-year-old girl shot and killed in a South Side park in early 2013 shortly after she performed at the second inauguration of President Barack Obama.

“When this happened in 2013, a piece of me died too,” Cowley-Pendleton said. “The issue of gun violence is not small. You’re not a small, minute population of people. It affects everyone. Whether your blood, your family’s blood, has been shed or not there’s a potential for that. And the fact that there’s a potential for it means that something needs to be done.”

Eric Wilkins was paralyzed from the waist down after he was shot 25 years ago. Since then, he founded Broken Winggz, an advocacy group for gun violence survivors.

“My story is a reminder of the lasting impact of gun violence,” Wilkins said. “It’s not just for the immediate victims, but the families are also impacted, and the futures of countless individuals. That’s why advocacy is so crucial. We need to push the policies to prevent these life-altering tragedies.”

One guessed two minutes. Another guessed five.

“You’re all wrong,” Douglas said. “You get hit in the right spot, you can bleed out in seconds.”

Such are the lessons taught to some teenagers in Chicago, a city just beginning another summer and preparing to grapple with the violence it can bring.

Douglas moved on to the names of the major arteries and how to pressure and pack a wound, hoping to equip the boys with some knowledge of how to respond should somebody be shot where they were standing.

Along with city leaders and public safety advocates, Douglas and his colleagues at the University of Chicago trauma center have spent months preparing. And this summer will bring extra challenges as the city prepares to welcome waves of tourists, delegates and party officials for the Democratic National Convention in late August.

While doctors, nurses and surgeons have made sure they have what they need to treat the wounded in their emergency rooms, city leaders say they are prepared with law enforcement strategies as well as violence interruption and emergency response plans.

Then there are the civilian groups who try to prepare people if they are present for an act of violence, and who try to help those affected by it put their lives back together after the worst has happened. Chicago is increasingly relying on them to step in and aid a city with an uphill road in front of it.

A new police boss

For his first summer at the helm of the Chicago Police Department, Superintendent Larry Snelling faces a balancing act: a major political convention in the middle of the city, along with a host of other large and small summer activities throughout Chicago’s 77 community areas. Meanwhile, CPD faces roughly 2,000 vacant police officer positions.

Police officer scheduling and staffing levels are a frequent point of contention between the city and the Fraternal Order of Police, and this summer figures to be no different. Snelling has said CPD officers will likely have their shifts extended and some days off canceled during the late-August DNC — often the most violent time of the year in Chicago.

According to the Office of Inspector General, the Police Department currently has about 12,000 of its roughly 14,000 positions filled.

Despite the vacancy rate, Snelling said the department would give “as much time off as possible” for officers ahead of the DNC and will dedicate cops to the convention area that week. Then there are the rest of the city’s needs to contend with.

“However, that does not mean we’re going to deplete neighborhoods because we still have a city to protect,” Snelling said.

He said the department will rely on a “neighborhood safety plan” with community groups and update the department’s list of the 35 beats that see the most violence, deploying officers accordingly.

“We’ll make sure that we have an appropriate amount of manpower within those areas to work on those most violent locations,” he said.

Work on the street

Mayor Brandon Johnson announced late last month that the city would train 100 “youth peacekeepers” as part of the effort to quell interpersonal violence over the summer. More than 900 people applied for the positions, according to city officials.

One who is part of that work is Cedric Hawkins. He said his top priority was making sure that the nonaggression agreements between different street gangs on the Far South Side would hold, protecting the lives of some of the city’s highest-risk people.

Hawkins, the strategic initiatives manager at the anti-gun violence organization Chicago CRED, said the agreements are fragile. They’re brokered between gangs and mediated through CRED workers, he said this spring, intended to keep a lid on the bloodshed in the Roseland and Pullman neighborhoods on the Far South Side.

One misplaced threat or misunderstanding can jeopardize a pact, he said. Many of Hawkins’ colleagues spend their years communicating back and forth with different groups to maintain those agreements.

Increasingly common and sometimes just as dangerous are the conflicts that involve members of the same group — trickier to deal with in some ways, he said, because “they (are) looking at you like ‘Why the (expletive) is you in our business?’”

Should a nonaggression agreement break or an argument escalate to shooting, a shot person could get routed to one of the half-dozen trauma centers in and around Chicago that treat the majority of the city’s gunshot wounds.

Preparing early

Days after a pair of springlike days in February saw mass shootings in Rogers Park, Chatham and Grand Crossing, a small group of people formed a circle at a first-aid workshop run by the mutual aid group Ujimaa Medics in Galewood’s Amundsen Park fieldhouse.

The clinic began with an exercise where participants stepped in and out of the circle in response to statements read out loud by a trainer.

“I live in a neighborhood where someone has been shot.” Most participants took a step.

“I know someone who has been shot.” A handful of people stepped in.

“I am afraid I could be shot.” The entire circle took a step inward.

Firearm violence is mostly concentrated among certain populations: A Tribune analysis of city violence data found that since Jan. 1, 2019, the city has recorded more than 3,600 homicides, and more than 14,500 other people were wounded in nonfatal shootings. The data show that in that time more than half of all homicide and aggravated battery victims in the city were Black men less than 40 years old.

On a relatively quiet shift on a Friday this spring, Dr. Abdullah Pratt was sitting in the emergency room at University of Chicago Medical Center wondering what kind of summer it was going to be. That night, Pratt was uneasy.

“We’re seeing the changes in volatility, that’s the way I would describe it,” he said.

In addition to working as an emergency room physician, Pratt runs the organization MedCEEP, an emergency preparedness and violence prevention program aimed at young people on the South and West sides. The group offers EMS and other basic first aid training, trying to offer not only practical skills but also create a sense of agency and calm for participants who may be bystanders to a shooting.

Pratt said that just having the training could help bring down participants’ likelihood of being involved in violence.

“If you teach someone how to save a life, that reduces their chances of taking someone’s life by teaching them ‘Hey, this is what happens when you shoot someone, this is how you save a life,’” he said. “Knowing what to do helps them feel like they can cope.”

Passing knowledge and skills on is also a way to cope for Anthony Douglas, the University of Chicago surgical resident who helped lead the “stop the bleed” training through MedCEEP at Englewood STEM.

Medical professionals ‘hunkering down’

Douglas, speaking shortly after the training in May, said he was bracing himself for the coming months. So was everyone he worked with, he added.

“We’re hunkering down,” he said. “We’re like ‘Wow, it’s summertime and that means that we’re going to see premature deaths and preventable deaths.’”

It means sleepless nights and grieving families. It means blood drives beginning in late winter to make sure patients losing biological reserves can survive. During a shift, he said, it’s hard to process what’s going on, but the weight of the lives can come down hard afterward.

“The more you understand how preventable it is, the more infuriating it is,” he said.

At the MedCEEP clinic, R’Mani Thomas, 15, stuck his hand in the air as far as he could reach and leaned over his desk while he waited his turn to ask a question or three.

“Say you get hit in the head,” he said, putting a palm to the side of his forehead. “Boom.”

Later, he said he enjoyed the training because he thought it was cool, but also because “we might need it, God forbid any situation like that happens.”

Like many of the boys in the room with Pratt and Douglas, R’Mani said he has seen someone get shot or known someone who has been shot.

R’Mani wants to study nursing for his college major, he said. His inspiration came from his late mother, who obtained a nursing certification shortly before she died in 2023.

“She made it look so easy,” he said. “I was like, ‘Alright, I want to do it.’”

“For him to pursue that in the name of his mom, I can’t even put it in words how I feel about that,” said R’Mani’s father, Rico Thomas. “He’s a very ambitious and compassionate person.”

He’d seen someone use a tourniquet on TikTok but hadn’t used one himself before the clinic, he said.

He worries about his friends most of the time, he said — both their physical safety, about “little mishaps that could lead to something” and about their mental health.

“It’s not normal to worry, but it is normal to care,” he said.

Douglas, who had demonstrated many of the first-aid techniques that R’Mani and his classmates had learned, said the “stop the bleed” trainings were part of what help him cope with the destruction a trauma center shift can contain. They are a way for him to meet young people before they wind up in the trauma bay.

Convention complicates matters

Officials said they will look to strike a balance between keeping order in the city and running afoul of people’s rights to protest and freedom of movement throughout the convention area and avoid draining the rest of the city of public safety resources.

Deputy Mayor for Community Safety Garien Gatewood said different city agencies would be collaborating on the approach to balancing neighborhood safety with the needs of the DNC. He didn’t offer many specifics about a plan, instead promising further information soon from the mayor’s office and CPD about “what the plans are for particular neighborhoods.”

In response to a recent OIG report that raised concerns about CPD’s level of readiness for the convention, Gatewood said the department would continue training and preparedness.

The report acknowledged CPD has improved its written policies and procedures after the fumbled response to unrest in 2020. But OIG also homed in on a lack of community input in those policies and “outdated concepts and tactics” in CPD’s plans to manage crowds.

CPD officials countered that the report is “based only on documents” and did not account for interviews or observation of training sessions in advance of the DNC. The police department disagreed with several findings, arguing it had worked with the parties overseeing compliance with the consent decree to put those updated policies together.

“​​What we want to see is the safest convention possible, and that’s what CPD wants to see as well,” Gatewood said.

Gatewood said he expected police officers would work with community violence interrupters and other on-the-ground outreach workers who try to prevent and deescalate conflict.

Asked how the city would gauge the success of those programs, Gatewood emphasized a particular metric. It is about “how people feel safe,” he said.

“If you look at the numbers year over year, you see a lot of things moving in the right direction, but still, there’s a need to really invest in more people,” he said. “I think this is how we get there.”

Despite all the work, Chicago got off to a choppy start, perhaps signaling how tough the challenge will be.

Memorial Day Weekend, considered the unofficial start of summer, saw the shootings of 41 people and the deaths of 10, among them 5-year-old Reign Ware. Fifty-three people were shot over the same holiday weekend in 2023.

Work has been picking up for a while for Wilson, a violence interrupter with the organization Public Equity. The organization works to divert people from getting involved in violence and support victims of violent crime through street outreach, case management and other services.

The spring and summer spike in violence is part of the rhythm of his year.

“We already know when it starts,” he said. “When the weather breaks, everyone’s outside.”

“With two months left until the convention, we’re finalizing plans and making sure all of our operations are safe,” CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling told reporters ahead of a meeting with Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle. “Make no mistake, we are ready. The partnership, collaboration and open communication between everyone involved is why we are ready.”

Cheatle at the news conference touted the links between her agency and CPD.

“We’ve got a tremendous working relationship with Chicago police, as well as a multitude of other agencies, both local and federal, that will be contributing to this whole-of-government approach that we’re taking” with the DNC, Cheatle said Tuesday.

The Secret Service will be in charge of security at the United Center and McCormick Place, where the official DNC events will be held. CPD will retain its jurisdiction across the city and be tasked with handling the expected protests. Other law enforcement agencies — FBI, ATF, Illinois State Police, Cook County sheriff’s police — will also assist.

Cheatle conceded that traveling in and around the downtown area will be more of a challenge for residents and those trying to get to work, but added that the Secret Service has conducted “an extraordinary amount of outreach with the local community and we’ve made very sure that the footprint that we have for security is as minimal an impact to residents, businesses (and) neighborhoods as possible.”

In recent months, Snelling has said repeatedly that CPD officers are undergoing First Amendment training to ensure safety and protect the rights of any demonstrators. Criminal activity, though, won’t be tolerated.

“We want people to express their rights safely and responsibly and we will protect them, but we are not going to tolerate crime, violence and vandalism,” Snelling said. “We will always protect our city we are ready and we will continue to be ready as we head into August.”

The superintendent added that between 2,500 and 3,000 CPD officers are receiving extra training to respond to potential civil unrest and protests. Extended shifts and canceled days off for officers are a near certainty too.

Along with the DNC, the department also faces the annual uptick in violence that Chicago sees each summer, though shooting levels are down so far this year. Over Memorial Day weekend, the city recorded nine homicides while more than three dozen others suffered nonfatal gunshot wounds.

The Accountability Dashboard currently allows searches by internal affairs case number, but the department will soon expand the dashboard to let members of the public query by an officer’s name or badge number, as well.

“We need to explain what good, constitutional policing looks like. We need to be clear and open when we get it right and when we get it wrong,” CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling said in a statement. “And when someone makes a complaint about one of our officers, they deserve to know how that case got resolved. Transparency benefits everyone and makes us a better department.”

Beyond the enhanced search features of the dashboard, CPD also planned to publicly release “the full closing summary reports for all investigations,” which detail the evidence reviewed in a case and BIA’s findings and recommendations.

While the Civilian Office of Police Accountability serves as the main intake for all CPD misconduct complaints, more than half of those received in 2023 — 3,007 out of 5,281 — were referred to internal affairs.

“This is a huge step forward for transparency. BIA handles some of the most serious cases of alleged police misconduct and for decades, we’ve been kept in the dark about those cases,” CCPSA President Anthony Driver said in a statement. “But going forward, we’ll have much more information about BIA’s decisions in individual cases, and that will allow us to better understand the accountability system and assess how well it is working.”

The announcement comes about two months after a Cook County judge ruled that CPD officers accused of serious misconduct have the right to have their cases adjudicated either by a third-party arbitrator or the Chicago Police Board. However, the judge ruled, those arbitration hearings would remain public.

The Fraternal Order of Police, the union representing rank-and-file CPD officers and detectives, has indicated it will appeal the ruling. Union President John Catanzara did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.

While the fight over police discipline hearings has carried on, the City Council last year approved the lion’s share of the new collective bargaining agreement with the FOP. The new package provides CPD officers with a 20% raise over four years, while also creating a new disciplinary mechanism to more quickly adjudicate minor misconduct cases.

While the report from Inspector General Deborah Witzburg acknowledged several of the department’s strides — improving its written policies and procedures after the fumbled response to unrest in 2020 — it highlighted a lack of community input in those policies and “outdated concepts and tactics” in CPD’s plans to manage crowds.

CPD officials shot back that the report is “based only on documents” and did not include interviews or observation of training sessions in advance of the DNC. The Police Department disagreed with several findings, arguing it had worked with the parties overseeing compliance with the consent decree to put those updated policies together.

Thursday’s 50-page inquiry follows up on a scathing 2021 review of the department’s actions during the unrest in the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd.

That report found CPD “was under-equipped and unprepared to respond to the scale of the protests” and “identified failures within intelligence assessment, major event planning, field communication and operation, administrative systems, and, most significantly, from CPD’s senior leadership.”

That lack of preparedness endangered cops and protesters and allowed some of those accused of serious crimes to evade arrest or accountability, the review and CPD’s own after-action report concluded.

In May 2020, as looting and violence flared up across the city, the Police Department designated a parking lot near Guaranteed Rate Field as its “mobilization center.” Resources for officers were far from adequate, though.

Cops were ordered to start their tours of duty at the parking lot instead of their normal district station, hindering them from picking up certain pieces of equipment. As many as four officers had to share a single radio, and none of the officers assigned to the mobilization center had a body-worn camera — “a must” for the 2024 DNC, police Superintendent Larry Snelling told the Tribune Thursday.

CPD leaders at the mobilization center didn’t have a roster of personnel assigned to be there, so they relied on rank-and-file cops to form their own “platoons” to be dispatched across the city. One CPD deputy chief said the command structure in the parking lot was “sketchy.”

In the four years since, the IG acknowledged CPD improved its planning with other city departments to respond to large-scale events, practiced for those events and beefed up its inventory of cameras, encrypted radios and passenger vans to transport officers during emergencies.

“There’s better infrastructure in place for a coordinated city response, interdepartmental plans, clarity in the new proposed policies around mass arrest procedures and use of force reporting,”  Witzburg told the Tribune. “I also think there are some areas of concern, candidly.”

For one, the department is already training members on policies while it is still gathering community input, she said. The department also “lacks comprehensive guidance” for roll calls during a mass event — where the department should be communicating clear and consistent information to cops about to take to the street, Witzburg said.

The report says some of the city’s training materials related to crowd responses rely on old theories from the 1960s and 1990s that assume crowds have a tendency to affect individuals negatively and can lead to conflictual or criminal behavior. That belief — along with an assumption that bad actors are present — can risk “inducing or escalating” CPD’s response, the report said. More updated theories caution that police response can trigger people in the crowd to act more resistant and disorderly.

CPD’s guidance also “continues to permit the use of OC spray on passive resistors in a mass gathering setting,” she said, while other departments, like Philadelphia, “have very explicit guidance” that pepper spray “shall not be used” in a First Amendment gathering against “passive resistors.”

Department policy also lacks specifics about when the department can use corralling tactics sometimes known as kettling, Witzburg said. “Neither do they say that they are prohibited, nor do they offer guidance on when they might be permitted,” she said.

“We don’t do kettling,” Snelling said. The department uses “encirclement” to either rescue someone injured within a crowd or apprehend a target of arrest, he said.

“When we have a group of peaceful protesters who are sitting, and even if they’re breaking the law, we do not spray those people. … We have a different way of removing those people without using that level of force,” Snelling said. “If we have an all-out fight where people are attacking police officers or attacking each other and we need to use OC (pepper) spray, that call will be made by a higher authority based on the totality of circumstances and what’s occurring in the field.”

CPD’s response also said department training — including a recent course from the Federal Emergency Management Agency — includes the more updated and nuanced crowd behavior theories.

In 2020, the IG found cops were deployed without cameras, covered them up, had cameras with batteries run low or depleted after being deployed for so long, or didn’t turn them on, “leaving member-civilian interactions to go unrecorded or unreported.” That meant identifying cops accused of misconduct or corroborating conflicting narratives “were severely compromised,” the IG found. In some cases, cops couldn’t pick up cameras from their home districts.

Since then, the department has set aside 1,370 “flex” body cameras across several area offices and purchased 40 passenger vans. In 2020, several cop cars were smashed or had their tires slashed, stranding officers or making it difficult to transport arrestees.

At an unrelated news conference Thursday, Mayor Brandon Johnson said he had not seen the report but said the city “is committed to constitutional policing.”

“Look, we’re still assessing and reviewing all of our safety provisions and plans for the DNC. And again, keep in mind, we’re going to work with the Secret Service and other local law enforcement agencies to ensure a peaceful but yet energetic convention,” Johnson said. “I’m confident that we’ll be prepared and ready when the day comes.”

Tribune reporter Alice Yin contributed.

aquig@chicagotribune.com

scharles@chicagotribune.com

That consent decree calls for CPD officers to notify the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications each time they point a weapon at someone. OEMC is then required to notify the officer’s supervisor, and those records ostensibly are available to the public through the Freedom of Information Act.

But in a response to a FOIA filed by the Tribune seeking those records during the five-year window since CPD agreed to the more stringent disclosure requirement, OEMC first provided records that indicated just 12 incidents where officers had made such a notification. Later, the office provided a spreadsheet with nearly 17,000 rows listing “firearm-pointing incident reports,” or FPIR notifications, made since early 2019.

It is unclear though how many raw incidents there were since many data lines repeat, and OEMC did not provide associated police incident report numbers which would indicate the reports had been forwarded.

The consent decree makes it clear how such information is supposed to move up the chain of command after it is gathered by OEMC, saying “notified CPD supervisors will ensure that the investigatory stop or arrest documentation and the OEMC recordation of the pointing of a firearm are promptly reviewed in accordance with CPD policy.”

The consent-decree monitoring team in a recent progress report noted that internal CPD statistics showed thousands of such gun-pointing incidents in recent years. In fact, there were more than 2,000 just in the first six months of last year, the latest period available.

And the lapse comes at a time when the number of those incidents is on the rise. Citing data provided, the monitoring team’s report found 2,562 incidents during the entirety of 2021 and 2,925 in 2022.

While gun-pointing incidents have increased, police shootings have not. Data from the Civilian Office of Police Accountability show agency investigators responded to 34 instances of CPD officers firing their guns in 2022. Last year, COPA responded to 19 shootings involving CPD officers.

Answering questions about the reporting process, a police spokeswoman said all officers receive training.

“Training and supervision are vital to ensuring officers adhere to the firearm pointing incident policy, including promptly notifying OEMC after a firearm pointing incident has concluded,” she said.

Chicago police Superintendent Larry Snelling hasn’t addressed gun-pointing incidents but has said CPD is committed to complying with the consent decree and enhancing transparency. In recent remarks on reform, but he has highlighted other areas where he sees success.

Snelling has noted that traffic stops by CPD officers are down slightly year-over-year, while arrests for felony offenses and illegal gun seizures are up. Homicides and nonfatal shootings are trending down, too, even as the city grapples with a proliferation of automatic weapons.

“I don’t think we’ve done a very good job of explaining what real constitutional, proactive police work looks like,” Snelling told the Tribune last year. “The way that we balance this is to, one, be transparent about what we do. Sometimes police work does not look good. But if we can explain the constitutionality of stops, of our interactions with individuals, I think it’ll be a lot more palatable for those who just don’t understand what they’re looking at.”

Little follow up  

The independent monitoring team said CPD supervisors have, so far, rarely taken corrective action in gun-pointing incidents flagged by the department’s tactical review and evaluation division.

A 2022 year-end report, cited by the monitoring team, indicated that of the nearly 3,000 incidents reviewed, “(The tactical review and evaluation division)  made a training recommendation for 1,023 reviews (34%). In contrast, supervisors indicated that they took corrective action at the time of the incident in 1% of debriefings.”

The vast majority of those training recommendations from the tactical review division concerned officers activating their body-worn cameras — a long-standing problem. Theoretically, an officer who has drawn a weapon during an interaction with a civilian should have activated their camera.

“During a June meeting with the CPD, the IMT expressed concerns about the ability to review use of force incidents when no body-worn camera footage was available 12% of the time, according to the tactical review division’s 2022 year-end Report,” the monitoring team recently reported. “The IMT requested that CPD come up with a game plan to address the continuing problems of late activation and no activation.”

CPD’s slow compliance with the consent decree is not limited to shortcomings in reporting and assessing when officers point weapons. Staffing levels, along with data collection and retention, continue to plague the department’s reform efforts, according to the monitoring team.

“Overall, the city’s and the CPD’s compliance efforts continue to lag and, after several reporting periods of minimal progress, bring into question the city’s and the CPD’s commitment to implementing reforms in community policing practices as required by the consent decree,” the team wrote last year.

For more than two years, the Police Department has maintained secondary compliance with the consent decree paragraph that requires notifications of drawing a weapon, according to the monitoring team’s most recent report. Its next report is expected to be released some time this summer, and that will be the first to gauge the CPD’s compliance efforts under Snelling.

Slow to adopt reform

The consent decree was ordered into effect in January 2019 after nearly a year of negotiations between the city and the Illinois attorney general’s office — perhaps the most consequential byproduct of the 2014 killing of Laquan McDonald by former CPD officer Jason Van Dyke.

The guideline for reporting gun-pointing incidents to OEMC came after a standoff between then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel and then-Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, and the provision was agreed upon a day after Emanuel announced he would not seek a third term as mayor.

The independent monitor’s report and the CPD stats cited therein do not make clear where or under what circumstances the firearm-pointing incidents occurred. The monitoring team again pointed to the CPD’s data collection, retention and analysis policies as hindrances to the city’s overall compliance with the consent decree.

Last week during a monthly consent-decree status hearing, Josh Levin, an ACLU attorney who represents a coalition of community groups, said lagging data collection is only a symptom of deeper issues at the department.

“It’s just hard to take CPD seriously (when it’s said) that every officer is a community policing officer when we see what happens in our communities, when CPD is continuing to swarm Black and Latino neighborhoods with heavily armed, plainclothes tactical teams that jump out and terrorize our community members when they’re just simply trying to go about their day,” Levin said. “That’s what happens in communities particularly on the West and the South side of our city, and that is the fundamental break in trust that needs to be repaired. And no amount of data tracking or collection or analysis or surveys is going to solve that until the actual conduct of our police officers toward our community members changes.”

The bulk of the consent decree applies to CPD, but changes to policies in OEMC, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, the Chicago Police Board and Office of Inspector General are also required. The monitoring team’s latest report gauged the Police Department’s adherence to the consent decree between Jan. 1, 2023, and June 30, 2023, a period of transition that saw three superintendents lead the department for various lengths of time.

Former Superintendent David Brown announced his resignation from CPD in March after Lori Lightfoot failed to qualify for the mayoral runoff election. After Brown left, Eric Carter, the first deputy superintendent, led the department on an interim basis until he retired in early May.

Once Brandon Johnson was sworn in as mayor, he tapped retired CPD Chief of Patrol Fred Waller to helm the department. The City Council last September confirmed Snelling as permanent superintendent.

Most recently, the monitoring team assessed CPD’s compliance with each of the 552 consent decree paragraphs that apply to the department between January and June 2023. There are three levels of compliance: Preliminary, secondary and full. Preliminary compliance signifies CPD has developed a training curriculum; secondary compliance means training has been implemented; and full compliance means that the policy is fully part of the CPD’s day-to-day operations.

In the first half of 2023, the monitoring team found the department to be in preliminary compliance with 279 of the decree’s 552 monitorable paragraphs. Secondary compliance was found in 160 paragraphs, while the CPD was in full compliance with 33 paragraphs. No compliance was reached in 74 paragraphs, while six more remain under assessment, according to the monitoring team.

On Saturday, university leaders said they had reached an impasse in negotiations with protest organizers but did not intervene.

The encampment, erected April 30, had been Chicago’s last-standing university demonstration against the ongoing war in Gaza. Around 100 tents were on the university’s main quad in Lincoln Park. Encampments were previously erected at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

On Thursday morning, about two dozen police officers were on West Fullerton Avenue outside the main quad. They stood their bikes in a line to make a barricade while a group of organizers faced them and yelled messages in protest.

“Let’s wake up the neighborhood,” said one.

No protesters or police officers were injured during the clearing, though two people were arrested afterward for blocking traffic, according to CPD spokesman Tom Ahern.

President Rob Manuel alerted the DePaul community of the removal in an email at 5:30 a.m., which said that student leaders were uncompromising as the encampment “steadily escalated.” All protesters were given the opportunity to leave peacefully without arrest, he said.

“From the beginning of the encampment, I have said that we would protect free speech and the ability to dissent until it either prevented us from carrying out the operations of our university or threatened the safety of the members of our community,” Manuel said. “I am deeply saddened to say the encampment has crossed that line.”

The university said that it received more than 1,000 complaints of discrimination and harassment over the course of the encampment, including one death threat. Some protesters vandalized buildings and other structures in the quad, causing an estimated $180,000 in damage, according to Manuel.

Video taken by DePaul student body president Parveen Mundi shows Chicago police clearing DePaul University’s pro-Palestinian encampment. (Parveen Mundi)

The DePaul Divestment Coalition, which organized the demonstration, said in a statement that police were “brutally arresting at least two students, pulling off the hijab of one, and injuring others.”

At a news conference at the scene, CPD Chief of Patrol Jon Hein said the clearing was peaceful.

“There were no confrontations,” Hein said. “As we approached, all the subjects voluntarily left the area.”

Thursday afternoon, the university briefly issued an alert advising students to avoid the area of the Lincoln Park Student Center because of continued protests outside. Officials said earlier that classes were proceeding as scheduled.

Rumors of a possible raid had been circulating through the encampment for days. Early Thursday, organizers warned international students and those who didn’t want to risk getting arrested to get off campus, senior Simran Bains said.

“The platitudes about keeping people safe … it was all a lie,” she said.

Parveen Mundi, DePaul student body president, woke up at 5:30 a.m. to protesters warning of the raid through megaphones. When police arrived, students were forced off the lawn, she said. Later, DePaul staff loaded tent frames, signs, clothes and trash into garbage truck compressors.

“The cops had already surrounded the camp by the time I woke up,” Mundi said. “The biggest question we all had was whether this university would have the decency and personalism to say whether or not they would use police to intervene.”

The DePaul Divestment Coalition said students will continue to protest the war in Gaza.

Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League Midwest praised DePaul’s decision to dismantle the site, citing an “unsafe environment for Jewish students.” The university released photos of several weapons found at the encampment, including a pellet gun and knives.

“We appreciate (that DePaul) took the necessary steps to finally clear out the campus encampment,” the nonprofit said in a statement. “For more than two weeks, the encampment has been marked by antisemitism and the celebration of violence against Jews. It’s about time the encampment came down.”

When the encampment went up, DePaul said that although the tents violate “a variety of university policies,” the administration remained “steadfastly devoted to academic freedom and free speech.”

Since then, campus unrest has become more widespread. Aside from the raid last week at the University of Chicago last Saturday, Chicago police arrested nearly 70 protesters last Saturday at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Loop.

Mayor Brandon Johnson’s press office released a statement Thursday afternoon distancing him from the CPD response without answering what role his administration had in the final authorization to sweep the encampment.

“On Thursday morning, DePaul University officials signed a criminal trespassing complaint asking the Chicago Police Department to clear an on-campus encampment,” the statement read. “The Johnson administration supports the right to lawful and peaceful protest and will continue to work with stakeholders to ensure the safety of all those involved.”

News of the sweep garnered criticism from progressive Aldermen Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez, 33rd, and Andre Vasquez, 40th.

Rodriguez Sanchez, a Johnson ally who was one of City Council’s first to condemn Israel in the wake of the Gaza war, said the police response was “shameful” in a tweet, while Vasquez said it was “egregious” and “not the direction the city needs to be going in.”

“Arresting students for ‘trespassing’ at institutions they pay so much to attend that they remain in debt for decades is absolutely insane,” Rodriguez Sanchez wrote.

Meanwhile Lincoln Park Ald. Timmy Knudsen, 43rd, sent an email blast to constituents with a link to DePaul’s statement on clearing the encampment.

“As the conflict in the Middle East continues, we will continue to advocate for the city to balance a commitment to upholding First Amendment rights to protest, while ensuring our neighborhoods remain safe,” Knudsen wrote.

Israel launched its bombardment of Gaza after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, in which the group killed some 1,200 people and took 250 hostages. Since then, more than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Chicago Tribune’s Alice Yin contributed.

Ashley Burrell, 37, was charged May 8 with five counts of aggravated cruelty to animals following an investigation by the city’s Department of Animal Care and Control, according to Cook County court records.

Records from the Illinois secretary of state show Burrell owns “Nikki’s Ferals,” a not-for-profit organization founded in 2022 that focuses on “(trap, neuter, release) for feral and community cats” while also providing food, shelter and “help (to) injured feral and community cats.”

Court records show a supervisor with Animal Care and Control went to Burrell’s Auburn Gresham home in early April to follow up on an investigation into Burrell.

Once inside, officials “observed several cats that had no access to clean water, they were covered in feces and urine, had discharge coming from out of their eyes, emaciated, underweight, and appeared to have upper respiratory problems,” according to Burrell’s arrest report.

Five dead cats were eventually found in the basement, police records allege, and Burrell told investigators that 26 cats and three dogs lived in the home.

Burrell, who could not be reached for comment, is scheduled to make her next court appearance Tuesday.