Chicago Police Board chair Lori Lightfoot is our guest this week.

Lightfoot is especially good at explaining complicated processes, such as the quest for a consent decree, agreed upon by the Mayor’s office, an assembly of powerful community groups, the ACLU, the Police Department and the Illinois Attorney General. And they have to do it before September. But she’s confident it can be done, and that the consent decree will lead the way to significant, sustainable reforms to our police department.

She also explains, in  great detail, the process of sorting out who’s accountable for the horrific shooting of Quintonio LeGrier and his neighbor Bettie Jones. They were killed by CPD officer Robert Rialmo, and the Civilian Office of Police Accountability found that Rialmo should be fired. The police superintendent reviewed the case and came to the opposite  conclusion. That opens multiple new layers of process, including possible new hearings before Lightfoot’s Board. Lightfoot tells us that she’s very disturbed with the leaks of documents to the media, including Supt. Johnson’s confidential memo to COPA. The public scrutiny of the documents long before anything was final has corrupted  and “delegitimized” the process, she tells us.

And the $95 million police training academy Rahm Emanuel has proposed for the far west side near Cicero and Roosevelt gets thumbs down from Lightfoot, despite her assertion that Chicago really needs a new training academy. “I just think putting this facility in one of the poorest neighborhoods of the City without having that community support and involvement and engagement, not having it be part of a larger economic development plan for that neighborhood, it’s just wrong-headed and frankly tone deaf,” she tells us.

If you care about police-community relations, and if, like Lightfoot, you have confidence that real reforms can be brought to the police department, you really should give this show a listen.

You can watch it by clicking the photo above

You can listen the the show in your earbuds HERE.

and you can read a full transcript HERE: cn transcript april 5 2018