Organizers of a protest planned for outside of Jacksonville City Hall Wednesday evening are calling for more police oversight.
Jacksonville Community Action Committee (JCAC) co-founder Christina Kittle said the post-election demonstration is part of a national day of protest organized by the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression.
“Whether we have four more years of Trump or we have a new president in Biden, we still need to let them know that police accountability is a huge issue that we have to continue to organize around,” she said.
Kittle said they’re calling for the city of Jacksonville to create a democratically elected police accountability council.
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“The difference between that and already existing review boards is that already existing review boards only have the power to review the internal investigations that the police launched on themselves. We kind of want to change that model,” she explained. “Instead of having people appointed by the mayor to sit on these review boards, we want to hold democratic elections in each police district so that the people can choose who sits on the council. Once we've chosen the people who sit on the council, then they would actually have the power to do external investigations.”
Legislation that would have created an appointed citizens’ oversight committee failed to gain any traction with City Council after being introduced last month.
Kittle is expecting at least 200 people to join in the Downtown protest at 6 this evening.
Brendan Rivers can be reached at brivers@wjct.org, 904-358-6396 or on Twitter at @BrendanRivers.
