Policing for the People: The Chicago Campaign for Community Control of Police and the Struggle for a More Humane Chicago

Saturday, January 7, 2017: 4:30 PM
Room 601 (Colorado Convention Center)
Simon Balto, Ball State University
In August of 1972, the Chicago Black Panther Party announced a far-reaching, grassroots police reform effort known as the Campaign for Community Control of Police (CCCP). Working via community organizing and ballot initiatives, the Panthers and collaborating community groups sought to achieve “a more humane, effective community controlled police.” Their vision was capacious. They sought to transfer large measures of control and oversight of the police force out of the hands of city administrators, and directly into the hands of the people. Among other things, they advocated for the creation of citizen-elected, citizen-led district-level police boards, complete with hiring and firing powers, and similar levels of citizen control at the city level for purposes of police policy-making and training. All told, over one hundred different organizations signed on to support the basic principles of the CCCP’s document, including the NAACP, Operation P.U.S.H, the American Indian Movement, and the Midwest Latino Conference. Their inaugural conference drew black freedom struggle luminaries like Julian Bond, Fannie Lou Hamer, Huey Newton, and others to Chicago to express their support.

This paper explores the rise, fall, and appeal of the CCCP, using it as a window for thinking about the long arc of the criminal justice crisis and the nature of community activism surrounding that crisis. The CCCP was ultimately unsuccessful. But in the breadth of its appeal and the particulars of its demands, it tells us much about the crisis of confidence that Chicagoans of color had long had in their police force, in and prior to the early 1970s. In exploring the CCCP and the context from which it arose, this paper emphasizes the importance of community-level police reform activism within the black freedom struggle, and deepens our understanding of the role of street-level policing in shaping black urban life at this juncture.

<< Previous Presentation | Next Presentation