Each year Oak Park’s village board approves a work plan for each of the volunteer commissions that do work on its behalf. Zoning. Sustainability. Preservation. Community Relations. Farmers Market. There are nearly 20 of these commissions. Each one has a liaison from the village board and a staff member assigned to it.
Since the early 1990s, Oak Park has had a citizens commission to oversee the actions of the police department. Back then it was a radical concept and Oak Park was pioneering. After that, though, not much changed for the commission or for its carefully circumscribed work plan. Oak Park wanted oversight but not too much. And it wanted to minimize any tension between the commission and the police department and its leadership.
That began to change in recent years and Village President Vicki Scaman gets the primary credit for it. Other cities and villages across America had moved forward in understanding that the connection between policing and community needed to change, that police departments needed to be held to account by some combination of outside entities. The murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis sped efforts to increase police accountability.
Scaman and her fellow board members have moved steadily and on multiple fronts to change policing and accountability in this village. The ECHO program, which adds a layer of social work and mental health support for a subset of calls to police, is taking shape. And following the work of a consultant, now the Citizen Police Oversight Commission will have wider latitude and greater resources to monitor the work of our officers.
The work plan approved last week by the village board for the CPOC reflects those important changes.
This is where we say, again, that Oak Park has a strong police department that generates few citizen complaints. It has, over decades, evolved in its policing strategies and has a strong ethos of community policing. Our hope and expectation is that expanding the accountability role of CPOC is seen as a way to fortify that positive approach to policing while adding eyes to what we would all agree is a complex and sometimes fraught tension between service and authority.
