Holding banners that read “Treatment, not trauma,” about 100 youth protesters filled the City Hall lobby Friday to push for more mental health clinics in impoverished parts of the city while demanding less money for police officers.
The protesters were drawing attention to a question on the ballot this November asking voters in the 20th and 33rd wards, as well as in four precincts of the 6th Ward, if the mental health clinics closed in 2012 by then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel should be reopened.
The protest occurred as the City Council is considering Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s proposed $16.4 billion budget for 2023. That includes a $100 million increase for the Chicago Police Department; the money would go toward, among other items, new police helicopters and replacing other aging CPD vehicles.
Asha Ransby-Sporn, an activist with the Treatment, Not Trauma Campaign, said her conversations with people in Chicago’s predominantly Black and Brown communities reveal they don’t necessarily want more police.
“When you talk to people about why they’re asking sometimes for more police, really what it is, is that there are problems in our communities, and police are one of the only things we’ve seen presented as a real option,” Ransby-Sporn said.
Carlos Reyes, a sixth-grader at Brighton Park Elementary School, said money was being wasted on the police.
“With mental health clinics, there won’t be as much violence,” Reyes said. “Some people are mad or sad because of the things that happen in their lives, and they need help, not to be detained.”
Said Asha Edwards, a student at the University of Illinois Chicago: “I shouldn’t be terrified that I or a loved one may lose their life or get brutalized by the police due to having a mental health crisis. Police are not trained mental health professionals and are trigger-happy to control the situation through violence, which simply doesn’t work and just stresses us more.”
Edwards has had “terrible” experiences calling police to get help.
“They asked us if we wanted my loved one charged, and then they questioned to see if we were on meth; we were not,” Edwards said. “Another time, I was being escorted by the police to a hospital. It was humiliating, being put in the back seat of a police vehicle with police in uniforms, with their guns. And then to hear the nurse say, ‘Patient or suspect?’”
