W E D N E S D A Y
June 24, 2020 Vol. 40, No. 48 ONE DOLLAR @oakpark @wednesdayjournal
JOURNAL of Oak Park and River Forest
Police reform talk gets testy in Oak Park Village board orders conversations, consultant By STACEY SHERIDAN Staff Reporter
ALEX ROGALS/Staff Photographer
FLY THE FLAG: Oak Park’s celebration of a socially distant Juneteenth was a caravan, estimated at three miles long, which made its way through Oak Park and Austin. Anthony Clark, an event organizer, raised the Pan-African flag.
River Forest and Maywood make history Twin Cities Covenant binds neighboring villages By MICHAEL ROMAIN Staff Reporter
On June 14, as hundreds of demonstrators protesting against racism marched along Randolph Street from neighboring Maywood into River Forest, throngs of residents greeted them with bottles of water
and Black Lives Matter signs. River Forest Village President Cathy Adduci and several trustees were even among the marchers. The following week, another march coursed through the village, but this time demonstrators walked from Maywood to River Forest along Madison Street in recognition of Juneteenth and to protest police abuse. During a regular board meeting on June 22, the River Forest Village Board reinforced the pomp and circumstance of the
protests with concrete action — a Twin Villages Covenant between the village of River Forest and Maywood, its immediate neighbor to the west. The board voted unanimously in support of the Covenant, which Maywood Trustee Miguel Jones, who introduced the proposal, called “historic” and a “huge deal.” In an interview last week, Jones said he approached Adduci and other board memSee COVENANT on page 11
Oak Park’s village board clashed sharply Monday evening over how to approach police reform discussions in the village. Two votes, one early in the meeting and another at the end, delivered some direction to staff on next steps. In the first vote trustees agreed 6-1 to accept Mayor Anan Abu-Taleb’s June 8 pledge to the Obama Foundation to evaluate local police use-of-force policies, to address issues of police violence and systemic racism. That vote followed disagreements which started not even 10 minutes into the meeting. “I am not in support of this resolution as written for several reasons,” said Trustee Arti Walker-Peddakotla. “The first is that we cannot just have a resolution that speaks to the Obama Foundation pledge because in this moment, that pledge and taking that pledge is not enough.” Secondly, Walker-Peddakotla said the pledge had to acknowledge the harm done by the current and previous village boards of Oak Park for not listening and responding to complaints of racial profiling by local police officers. “We have to have some reparations language in this resolution because we’re not even acknowledging that, up until this point, this resolution, we have ignored as a village See REFORM on page 19
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