Interview: Policing and the Urbana Budget

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This interview was aired on WEFT Champaign 90.1 FM on the “Catch the Beat” program on July 3, 2024. It has been edited for style, clarity, and space.

Cope Cumpston: I’m pleased to welcome three guests for the show, Urbana residents who have been active on issues around allocating money for policing and programs for the 2025 Urbana city budget which was just voted on last week. There was an impressive amount of organizing for community input and discussion about contentious issues in the budget, and my guests were all right in the middle of the action. Miriam Larson is the executive director of the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center, which has been at the center of providing information and forums around these issues. Jane McClintock is a longtime Urbana resident and currently serves on the board of the IMC and on the Champaign County American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) steering committee. And Sana Saboowala is active in the CU Muslim Action Committee. I’m delighted to have you here with such a current and pressing issue, because it took a lot to get that budget passed. How did you get involved in organizing and advocating to oppose the police budget? Why is it important to you to pay attention to the Urbana city budget and police?

Miriam Larson: I got involved because of Jane and others who really got me to start thinking about what could we do to educate ourselves about both the city budget and the police budget. For me the biggest hook is around the budget, and really thinking about what are our priorities, what do we want to use city funds on? I wasn’t interested personally in prioritizing police, and in the big picture, I wanted to see us invest in other things like community services. So that got me interested in organizing a forum back in December, and that’s one of my starting points.

Jane McClintock: I got involved in thinking about the Urbana Police Department several years ago when I saw a YouTube video of a young woman being brutalized by Urbana police. And I thought, this will be a wonderful opportunity for us to all have better accountability from and better feedback for our police department. In my volunteering in homeless services, I’ve really noticed that there’s a lot of needs in our community, material needs that we really need to focus on. We really should be investing in services and supports for families and individuals having a hard time, and not asking police officers to do that kind of work that they’re not trained to do.

Sana Saboowala: I came to know about police budget issues in Urbana through organizing around passing a ceasefire resolution regarding the conflict or genocide in Gaza, and attending city council meetings for the ceasefire resolution really opened my eyes to how much power city government has and how much local politics can impact our lives, including with policing. I met a lot of like-minded people who cared about making this community a better place, and through those people like Miriam and Jane, we realized we had similar goals in making our community safer.

CC: So a lot of community groups had good reason to come together to work on this issue. Can you describe how you organized, because you had a real program—by the end, you were circulating a petition widely and getting input from people and running forums. Can you talk about how you brought all that together?

ML: There was an amendment put forward in December to add funds to the budget for additional police. And the amendment was the first thing that we began to think about: how do we educate ourselves about whether we want to spend funds this way? And then we did a second forum in March, where we invited the Law Enforcement Action Partnership to come and speak about alternative response methods to crisis. And as we approached the dates for the budget to be decided on, I started thinking, “Okay, let me just look and see what is in our city funds.” I started reviewing those documents, and we began to formulate a petition.

JM: One thing that we could explain more, is that back in 2020 when there were a lot of protests around the country around Black Lives Matter, and locally around the police brutality I mentioned earlier, the city of Urbana determined that it would undertake a public safety study to reduce racialized harm and to ensure that we were doing everything we could to improve the outcomes for people of color with our police department, and also to study the possibility of alternatives to traditional policing. We had done a lot of idea gathering during those public forums, and we took some of the highlights that we heard in those forums and put them together in a petition that we could circulate widely in the community, because we saw that our city council members were not really hearing a lot from community members.

ML: And then could you describe the last two weeks and what we ended up with?

JM: In terms of the petition, I think we ended up with 650 signers, and the request from the police department was to add 11 more staff. We ended up with two new permanent police positions, which were in the executive branch—a deputy chief and a training sergeant—and then some temporary positions: two for community engagement officers, which is a three-year pilot project, as suggested by the chief [of police]; and an office on Philo Road, which is yet to be determined. And then for one year, the city proposed to fund a social worker. We also got quite a bit of funds set aside for alternative response, which we’re really excited about. The way that those funds are going to be used is yet to be determined, but it will be led by a task force, which will be appointed by the mayor and approved by the council, and hopefully will include a lot of the community organizations that are already doing this work.

ML: [The petition] specifically said that the vast majority of 911 calls for Urbana police are noncriminal or nonviolent, that crime in Urbana is at a historic low while housing insecurity and hunger are on the rise, and that dozens of cities have dispatched community responders to nonviolent calls for service in a safe trauma-informed way that reduces racialized harm. Given that this council has approved significant increases in the Urbana police budget while defunding community programs, we do not support hiring more police officers at this time. We will vote for officials who invest in community response models and support services like housing, which have been proven to reduce crime.

A real eye-opening moment too was being at the [Gaza] encampment [on campus] and seeing the police response in this community, but also across the country, and realizing just how much we activate police in the face of protest, and that isn’t always done in a way that lifts up people’s free speech. [We saw] this response that was four to five different police departments who came to watch over an encampment of young people, largely Black and brown folks, who had set up tents on the quad because they wanted to speak out about an issue.

Sana, do you want to say something about Muslim Action Committee organizing? I think just last night there was a call for people to submit comments and show up to city council.

SS: CU Muslim Action Committee is a local group that formed around organizing for Palestinian rights and self-determination and other issues important to the local Muslim community. We also want the [city] council to pass a resolution telling the federal government that we want to end military aid to Israel, to reinstate UNWRA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East] funding, and to have a permanent and immediate ceasefire.

 ML: Jane, what do you think is next for the city of Urbana? What do people need to stay alert for with regards to the budget and police expansion?

JM: There’s a lot of conversation around what this community engagement officer project is going to be at the Urbana Police Department. The other really exciting project that has a lot more potential to really positively affect folks’ lives is that we are looking to build community response. This would include having mental health providers, social workers, and experts in a field being able to respond to calls for service, where you know that that kind of concern is present. That task force is being developed right now. In the coming weeks, we’re going to see nominations to the council, and really keeping an eye on that, listening into the meetings, making nominations if you know someone, and supporting those organizations.

CC: Thank you so much for being here and for your time, Miriam, Jane, and Sana.

Transcribed by otter.ai with editing help by Brian Graves.

Cope Cumpston lives in Urbana, and is a founding funder of the IMC, WEFT airshifter, UIUC Altgeld Hall bellringer, and retired art director of the University of Illinois Press.

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