Chicagoans who appear on the city’s controversial gang database will have a way to try to get their names removed under a plan backed by Mayor Lori Lightfoot that the City Council passed Wednesday, over the objections of several aldermen who said the change doesn’t go far enough to fix the deeply flawed list.

       The 29-18 vote clears the way for residents to petition the Police Board that they don’t belong on the database, which reports have described as an error-laden tool of racial discrimination that includes the names of thousands of people who aren’t affiliated with gangs.

       Lightfoot promised Wednesday that “the Police Department and others will be making sure that there’s outreach through a variety of channels to make sure individuals have the information they need” to file a report with the Police Board to have their names pulled.

       But South Side Ald. Leslie Hairston, 5th, argued it’s “backwards” to give people a way to try to get off the database without first addressing its wholesale drawbacks.

       Activists call for an end to the Chicago police gang database in 2019. (Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune)

       “Since we know that there are problems, why not fix them?” Hairston said. “We always want to come in with the broom afterwards, sweeping it up, and it’s time that we do something different.”

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       And North Side Ald. Andre Vasquez, 40th, worried people whose names are wrongly included will have a hard time figuring out how to mount a challenge under the new policy.

       The Police Department has been under fire for years over its use of the gang database, which includes well over 100,000 names, 95% of them African Americans and Latinos.

       Lightfoot ran for mayor in 2019 on a pledge to replace it with a system strictly containing information that is “relevant and credible,” but that hasn’t yet happened.

       Still, she defended Wednesday’s ordinance as a step in the right direction. The Police Department “has completely changed the criteria by which anyone could be put into a criminal enterprise system,” Lightfoot said before the vote.

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       Lightfoot also followed up the City Council meeting by signing an order creating a working group to help residents returning to society from prison. The mayor said her budget includes $13 million for a workforce reentry program and legal services including expungement and record sealing.

       Also Wednesday, Lightfoot’s nomination of Andrea Kersten to be chief administrator of the Community Office of Police Accountability got shunted to the Rules Committee by Ald. Raymond Lopez, 15th. Twenty aldermen opposed the nomination in a letter this week because they’re angry Kersten signed off on a COPA report recommending slain police Officer Ella French be suspended for her role in the wrongful Anjanette Young police raid.

       Lightfoot will need to convince the Rules Committee to pass the nomination on to another committee before it can get a hearing.

       After the meeting, the mayor said Kersten, who has been serving as interim COPA administrator, “deserves a hearing” and that she was the best-qualified applicant for the post, while again criticizing her for the report.

       “I thought it didn’t make sense for her, for COPA, to put out a recent report that had Officer French’s name in it,” Lightfoot said.

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       The report was authored before French’s line-of-duty death.

       jebyrne@chicagotribune.com

       gpratt@chicagotribune.com

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