After a Year of Victories, Renew Your CAARPR Membership for 2024
Friends and comrades
2023 has been yet another year in which the Chicago Alliance has made history. It’s now that time of year where we reflect on our victories and prepare for another year of struggle in 2024. This 50th year of our existence as an organization was made possible by the engagement and support of our members, and that same support will get us more wins in year 51.
We are asking people to renew or start their CAARPR membership, remain active with the organization, and donate what they can monthly.
We started this year working to get out the vote for local police District Council elections. We continued and increased our canvassing across the city, which led to pro accountability candidates winning the majority of seats in 14 of Chicago’s 22 police districts in the February 2023 Elections. Candidates backed by the Fraternal Order of Police only won the majority in 3 districts. Our office was also a base for the campaign of Brandon Johnson, who beat corporate Chicago and the FOP’s candidate Paul Vallas in the mayoral race this April. Our movement recently defeated the FOP for the third time in one year with the majority of City Council voting against an arbitration ruling that would have undermined ECPS by allowing police misconduct to be investigated behind closed doors.
We spent the latter half of 2023 consolidating the gains of the District Council and Mayoral elections, as well as the establishment of ECPS itself. We have pushed for a meeting between Mayor Johnson and the District Councilors to ensure that CPD is made to comply with the democratically elected District Councilors. We have been organizing communities around Chicago to participate in their District Council meetings and participate in holding the police accountable. The Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability (CCPSA) set up by ECPS permanently scrapped the racist gang database in September, demonstrating the ability of ECPS to create structural changes in public safety.
The Campaign to Free Incarcerated Survivors of police Torture (CFIST) has built momentum over the past year. We kept fighting for the freedom of survivors and the wrongfully convicted through court support, rallies, call in campaigns, banner drops, and more. We organized the fourth People's Hearing on Police Crimes in June where survivors and their families spoke on the fight against the injustice system. We continued to work with the families of survivors and other organizations in the movement against mass incarceration, and we began building ties with other families and organizations that we hadn't met before this year. We kept up the pressure on the State's Attorney’s Office, demanding that they drop the charges against survivors and stop allowing torture cops to testify. CFIST won many victories this year, most recently we learned that corrupt sergeant Brian P Forberg retired after one of our press conferences in November and shortly before a video came out proving that Forberg had coerced false testimony resulting in a wrongful conviction. We are increasing the pressure on the SAO, the judges, Governor Pritzker, and the entire injustice system as we move into 2024. We encourage all members to donate to and share the CFIST winter fundraiser to support our work in the new year.
This year we continued to act in solidarity with the struggles of oppressed people around the world, most notably in Palestine. We have joined our affiliate organization, the US Palestinian Community Network (USPCN) at dozens of protests and actions since October 7th, and we have mobilized our members to call their representatives and demand an end to the genocide in Gaza and US financial and military support for the apartheid occupation of Palestine. We continued joining the Arab American Action Network (AAAN) in demanding justice for Murod Kurdi and Hadi Abuatelah in the Oak Lawn Police and Fire Commission meetings. We organized Black and Brown solidarity actions together with District Councilors in the 10th District. We attended every protest of our kasamas in the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns. Together with Students for a Democratic Society we organized demonstrations in solidarity with the Tampa 5, who recently won their battle against repression from Ron Desantis’ government over their advocacy for Black enrollment in higher education. We supported the labor actions of the United Auto Workers (UAW), the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), the Loretto Hospital strike with SEIU HCII, and Starbucks Workers United among other unions.
In November we hosted organizers from all over the country in the 50th Anniversary Conference of the National Alliance. We summed up our work in the campaign for community control of the police and CFIST. We shared lessons from the struggle with NAARPR Chapters who have built up their own campaigns and those who were just getting started. The conference showed the strides we have taken both as an organization and as a movement since the refounding in 2019. We came away from the conference with resolutions that will direct our national work for the next two years, and attendees were reinvigorated by the knowledge that the movement will continue to grow and the people will win.
Thank you for participating in the formidable work of the Chicago Alliance. We are building a movement that has already taken on this city's white supremacist power structure and won. We have made Chicago the headlights of a movement for community control of the police and against mass incarceration all over the country.
In order to continue this momentum, we call on all CAARPR members to renew their membership in the coming year. Annual membership dues are $25, $15 for students and the unemployed, and free for the incarcerated. We encourage those who can give more to donate at, and to give monthly donations to sustain CAARPR’s work with consistent income. Most of all we want people to get involved. Come to the Stop Police Crimes meetings every Monday at 6pm over zoom and see what part of our incredible work you can join.
Please share this letter with anyone who you think would be interested in joining and supporting the Chicago Alliance.