The Massey Commission’s law enforcement work group met Aug. 4 and tried to finalize recommendations to offer up to the full commission, largely focusing on how to strengthen the SAFE-T Act’s transparency provisions.
Work groups are submitting their final recommendations to the full commission by Oct. 1, with a full report from the commission to follow. Earlier this week, the Law Enforcement Hiring, Training, Wellness and Cultural Competency work group deliberated over the recommendations to offer up to the full commission, which meets Aug. 11.
“Despite the SAFE-T Act’s reforms, there are gaps in the enforcement of the decertification process, and we heard that through multiple platforms,” Sunshine Clemons, founder of Black Lives Matter Springfield, said at the Aug. 4 work group meeting. “We want to focus on that if we’re going prepare to talk to legislators about it in September.”
The SAFE-T Act, which featured a sweeping set of criminal justice reforms, was signed into law in 2021, but didn’t fully take effect until 2023. Most press coverage of the bill has focused on the elimination of cash bail, but the act featured hundreds of pages of alterations to Illinois criminal code and policing standards.
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A more digestible report on the changes enacted by the law can be found through the Illinois Sentencing Policy Advisory Council, a 20-person board mostly comprised of state legislators, lawyers and police officers. The council was “unable to determine how many misconduct cases would be charged” through at least one of the SAFE-T Act’s increased oversight measures – a section of the law made it a felony offense for police officers to not comply with body camera laws.
Impact for Equity, a racial justice policy center based in Chicago, wrote last year that the discretionary decertification provision, which allows civilians and police departments to submit complaints about actions that could be grounds for decertifying a police officer, within the SAFE-T Act was “not fully functional” despite hundreds of complaints filed.
Even with more than 100 open cases, the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board held zero hearings for discretionary decertification in 2024, according to the Board’s 2024 report on police misconduct, as it weighed finalizing rules on administrative hearings. The Board finalized rules in April 2025 and the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board informed Illinois Times that the goal is to begin hearings by the end of the month, though no dates have been finalized.
Amy Thompson, a policy expert at Impact for Equity, wrote that the lack of progress on a law signed more than four-and-a-half years ago hurts trust in the criminal justice system.
“The discretionary decertification system has faced such a prolonged delay, stalling what is a key element in this accountability system,” Thompson wrote. “Hopefully, with the recent passage of these rules, hearings will begin soon.”
Jorge Camacho, policy director of Yale Law School’s Justice Collaboratory and editor of multiple reports submitted to the commission’s work groups, told IT the ideas floated in those papers – which can be found on the Massey Commission homepage – represent widely accepted best policy practices. Because of that, Camacho said, there may be some redundancies between SAFE-T Act reforms and the recommendations discussed by the commission.
“Our recommendations were really intended to provide a snapshot of what the most immediate best practices and best policy recommendations are out there. A lot of it was based on what other jurisdictions have done,” he said. “So, there might be areas where our recommendations either depart from the reality of what’s going on in Illinois or might be repetitive.”
But Camacho said that isn’t necessarily a concern, since the commission should be restrained in what it ultimately advises the Sangamon County Board to act on.
“I know that they are cognizant of some of the limitations that that come with this responsibility, namely that you can’t just go and recommend everything under the sun, right? There has to be some type of screening process,” he said. “It has to be responsive to what the needs are – and to an extent – what the political realities are within Sangamon County.”
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Massey Commission makes plans for work to continue
The next Massey Commission hearing will take place Monday, Aug. 11 at the Ruby Recreational Community Center where members of the Ferguson Commission, now the nonprofit Forward Through Ferguson, will be in attendance. Work group information and more can be found at sangamonil.gov/masseycommission.
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This article appears in Aug 7-13, 2025.
