CLA Fellow Profile: Eliza Solowiej Makes Inroads on Chicago’s Police Accountability Task Force

Civic Leadership Academy is a leadership development program for emerging and high potential leaders in non-profit and local government agencies within the city of Chicago and Cook County. Managed as part of Harris Public Policy’s broad scope of urban and academic initiatives, CLA counts 119 fellows as program alumni among its growing network, and will admit its fifth cohort in November 2018. 

One of the most-familiar images from TV cop shows is the Miranda warning — police advising a suspect, upon arrest, that they have the right to an attorney. 

But in Chicago, for every 500 people held by police in 2013, only one got to meet with an attorney before being formally charged, according to Chicago Police Department data collected by First Defense Legal Aid.

“One hundred percent of people arrested have the right to counsel. Point two percent had it,” said FDLA’s executive director, Eliza Solowiej, a 2016 Civic Leadership Academy fellow.  “Policy issues need to be resolved for people to actually access their rights.” 

Expanding access to those rights is her group’s mission. FDLA’s advocacy has produced small fixes in the last several years, Solowiej said, and the number of detainees who see counsel has increased five-fold— to one percent.

Solowiej said she sees more progress coming, and she gives some credit to CLA.  

In 2016, after starting her fellowship, she joined a working group for the City of Chicago’s Police Accountability Task Force. 

“She was quite effective in that group,” said Craig Futterman, clinical professor of law at the University of Chicago and a member of the working group. “The core substance of recommendations she made there were supported widely, and adopted wholesale by the entire task force.” 

First among those recommendations: Giving people the right to make a phone call within an hour of being arrested. According to Solowiej, Chicago police typically don’t let arrestees make phone calls until after they’ve been interrogated. “While the investigation is going on, and you’re in custody, you have the right to counsel every single minute,” she said. “But if you can’t use the phone, how do you access counsel?” 

Now, thanks to Solowiej’s advocacy, the Task Force has officially challenged the city to provide that access. 

However, if not for CLA, Solowiej said she probably wouldn’t have participated in the Task Force working group at all.

“Before CLA — really, truly, bottom-line — I may not have had faith that it would have made a difference,” she said. Her previous human rights work, she said, focused more on grassroots organizing and direct action like protests, than participating in government commissions.

“The CLA experience was wonderful,” she said, “and it really shifted my understanding of the different ways I could lead and interact in the public sector.” That shift started on the very first day, she said, when participants— including government officials— worked with Court Theater artistic director Charles Newell to role play situations they were struggling with in their work.

“The level of realness that city and county leaders leaders brought to that really surpassed my expectations of how authentic our relationships in our learning community was going to be,” she said. “And that was before we took a 24-hour plane ride to the other side of the planet together.”

“So, that was very pivotal, that day,” she said. “It just swelled the hope in me.” 

That same hope then led her to accept the invitation to take part in the Police Accountability Task Force and to fully engage with its process. “I showed up and really was present,” she said. “And I got the same kind of surprise, in terms of the way that was able to influence people’s knowledge, imagination, and understanding of values like accountability to the community.”