CHICAGO (CBS)– Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is part of a group launching a new police reform initiative in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
The group will create guidelines to address police violence. However, the guidelines will not include defunding or disbanding police departments.
Instead, the group wants to emphasize transparency.
In addition to Lightfoot, the group includes Cincinnati and Tampa mayors as well as police chiefs from Phoenix and Baltimore.
They’ll be looking at police contracts and officer wellness programs. Another idea is developing cultural literacy.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot says officers in Chicago are often taught policing strategies and tactics, but nothing about the cultural history of neighborhoods.
This makes it difficult for them to build relationships. The group will be looking at ways to connect the police force with the community it serves.
“What we want to do is establish a baseline to call the question on cultural literacy and talk about why that’s so critically important,” Lightfoot said. “You can’t form authentic relationships with people that you don’t know that you have no sense of their background or history and you only view them through crime statistics.”
The group hopes to release, what they’re calling, actionable recommendations by next month.
