Daniel Wolk (Illinois)
From Ballotpedia
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Daniel Wolk ran for election to the Chicago Police District Council to represent District 24 in Illinois. He lost in the general election on February 28, 2023.
Wolk completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2023. Click here to read the survey answers.
Biography
Daniel Wolk was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He earned a graduate degree from the University of Chicago in 1981. His career experience includes being self employed. Wolk has been affiliated with City Bureau, the Institute for Nonviolence in Los Angeles, the Academy of Professional Dialogue, and the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation.[1][2]
Elections
2023
See also: City elections in Chicago, Illinois (2023)
General election
General election for Chicago Police District Council District 24 (3 seats)
The following candidates ran in the general election for Chicago Police District Council District 24 on February 28, 2023.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | Veronica Arreola (Nonpartisan) | 20.8 | 11,770 | |
| ✔ | Marilyn Pagán-Banks (Nonpartisan) | 17.0 | 9,598 | |
| ✔ | Edvette Jones (Nonpartisan) | 16.5 | 9,307 | |
| Cynthia McFadden (Nonpartisan) | 13.4 | 7,598 | ||
 | David Earl Williams III (Nonpartisan)  | 12.5 | 7,074 | |
 | Daniel Wolk (Nonpartisan) | 10.7 | 6,028 | |
| Mitchell Rose (Nonpartisan) | 9.1 | 5,155 | ||
| Total votes: 56,530 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
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Withdrawn or disqualified candidates
- Patrick Conlon (Nonpartisan)
Campaign themes
2023
Video for Ballotpedia
| Video submitted to Ballotpedia Released February 3, 2023 |
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Daniel Wolk completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2023. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Wolk's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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Trained as a sociocultural anthropologist, I have taught social sciences at several universities, most notably at the University of Chicago and the University of Kurdistan Hawler. In recent years, I have written numerous reports on public meetings in Chicago for City Bureau, including many on public safety issues. A professional dialogue facilitator, I have conducted many discussions with Los Angeles police, recruits, and community members. Other jobs I have held include writing program evaluations for the Cultural Connections Program at the Field Museum and for a newcomers’ “school within a school” in the Chicago Public Schools, and running a jobs program for Assyrian and Romanian refugees.
In recent years I have become active in organizations that promote an upgrading of civics in American society. I served as a Civic Saturday Fellow with Citizen University, and participated in Urban Rural Action United for Action program on the local media team.
I am an inveterate reader of social and political theory. My deep commitment to democracy and community empowerment has impelled me to run for Chicago Police District Council, where I can put my ideas into practice, drawing on the collective wisdom of local residents, with all their demographic diversity, and, more importantly, the diversity of their insights and viewpoints.- Police oversight requires the right mix of investigators with insider knowledge of policing and those who have insights on public safety from other perspectives, such as violence interrupters, crime victims, criminal justice experts, social workers and psychologists.
- Effective law enforcement requires the building of trust between police and local residents. This requires, among other things, confidential small group discussions between police and community officers about the moral dilemmas of law enforcement.
- Too much micromanagement of the police, or piling on protocols, is dispiriting to police and compromises their performance. Performance should be judged by outside evaluators and be based on how well police obey general directives such as maintaining respect for all, listening carefully, deescalating dangerous situations, and cultivating cooperation with residents. This requires a much more robust "customer" feedback system
Community Question Featured local question
Community Question Featured local question
I get statistics at CAPS meetings, and from the police district website. I sometimes check Clearmap, but there must be better ways of making the data there more accessible to residents.
Community Question Featured local question
Community Question Featured local question
It is extremely important to me to involve residents in the government's decision-making process. In fact, I believe that the virtual lack of participation is one of the USA's biggest problems now. We need a panoply of institutions to bring residents into the decision-making process. Crucial is dialogue, which is discussion that avoids debate or argument, and serves to explore the ideas of individuals with very different political outlooks. Once dialogue takes place with significant success in pushing individuals to hash out different ideas, this makes the job of deliberation over issues much more likely to be productive. I believe Americans are too impatient for results and this leads them to accept many shoddy and unsuccessful policies that are sloppy compromises between opposed greedy interests, and require starting over again. I think government should sponsor small group dialogues as a preliminary step to deliberation, such as in the form of participatory budgeting. I grew up in a small town in Connecticut where there were still town meetings. We need to bring neighborhood meetings even to big cities where certain important decisions on public safety, development, and housing can be made. I am unorthodox in my belief that I think well-designed caucuses, with actual discussion of candidates, is superior to primaries with woefully uninformed voters. But they need the infrastructure of small dialogue groups to succeed.
Community Question Featured local question
Crime statistics need to be more user-friendly. And we need more information on such crimes as firing a weapon, bank fraud, and business building code violations related to safety. It should be easier for members of the public to access police reports. We also have the controversial subject of citizen access to police scanners. We need more public discussions over this matter. The CPD has limited citizen access without any transparency in their decision-making process.
Community Question Featured local question
In addition to what I wrote above, I also have ideas about better ways for police and other professionals to cooperate. I support the co-responder model, in which police officers team up with paramedics and mental health professionals to respond to emergency calls that seem to have a mental health component (which is nearly half of such calls). The new Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement vans are a good step in this direction, and we should let these 3-person teams gain experience and experiment to see what works most effectively when and where. In addition, we need case managers at every police station, with whom patrol officers should have be able to have direct access.
Here are two ideas I have that run contrary to current practice: (1) We need to change the first step of police oversight, namely performance evaluation. Police officers should have to focus on general principles such as deescalation, reducing danger, maintaining respect, listening, referring to the right professionals. Outside experts, especially respected police from other jurisdictions, should be brought in to be in charge of evaluations. This would reduce conflicts of interest. (2) There should be much more focus on morality and ethics both in police training and practice. Police officers cannot escape from having to make difficult moral decisions, such as balancing the risks in pursuing a dangerous offender: the risk of killing or causing injury in the course of pursuit, vs. the risk of an innocent person getting killed or injured by a dangerous criminal. These difficult matters should be addressed far more in training and in dialogues with community members. There often is no "correct" answer, but rather moral dilemmas. But if they receive more open discussion, this will be better for everybody. I have other ideas as well.
Here are two ideas I have that run contrary to current practice: (1) We need to change the first step of police oversight, namely performance evaluation. Police officers should have to focus on general principles such as deescalation, reducing danger, maintaining respect, listening, referring to the right professionals. Outside experts, especially respected police from other jurisdictions, should be brought in to be in charge of evaluations. This would reduce conflicts of interest. (2) There should be much more focus on morality and ethics both in police training and practice. Police officers cannot escape from having to make difficult moral decisions, such as balancing the risks in pursuing a dangerous offender: the risk of killing or causing injury in the course of pursuit, vs. the risk of an innocent person getting killed or injured by a dangerous criminal. These difficult matters should be addressed far more in training and in dialogues with community members. There often is no "correct" answer, but rather moral dilemmas. But if they receive more open discussion, this will be better for everybody. I have other ideas as well.
Community Question Featured local question
Community Question Featured local question
Community Question Featured local question
While there are many good things about the current approach, there needs to be much improvement. There is too much paperwork, micromanagement, and piling on protocols — in short, overbureaucratization. Too many decisions are made internally without public discussion. Police need to be trained to be more responsible professionals, and policies should make it possible for them to continue developing a professional mindset. This is one of the most important recipes for building trust with residents. Then it will be possible to make police oversight more external, preventing police from covering up misconduct.
Community Question Featured local question
Community Question Featured local question
My previous answer can be seen as an answer to this.
Community Question Featured local question
See previous answers.
Community Question Featured local question
I am most committed to building up democracy "from below" in order to solve problems. The overwhelming problem for those involved in public safety is to reduce crime, capture and incapacitate perpetrators of crimes, and help crime victims heal and gain restitution. Aside from the obvious costs of crime, it creates a perception of danger. People in effect barricade themselves in their homes and offices, and this inhibits the flourishing of healthy communities. It also breeds cynicism, and undermines civic engagement. Such attitudes give free rein to corrupt practices, and this is part of a vicious circle that undermines governing across the board. I believe that the only way to break this vicious circle is to give all residents a sense of responsible ownership, and to this we must practice "democracy as discussion." We need to put into practice the many ideas of experts on dialogue and deliberation to promote more efficient ways to hash out new policy ideas through democratic discussion.
In the realm of public safety, I have a special interest in several issues: (1) improving the system by which we refer troubled or at-risk individuals and families to the right social or health services, (2) upgrading our knowledge of organized crime, including high-end white collar crime, (3) preventing police misconduct by reforming police training and performance evaluation, and (4) designing a more robustly led community policing program.
In the realm of public safety, I have a special interest in several issues: (1) improving the system by which we refer troubled or at-risk individuals and families to the right social or health services, (2) upgrading our knowledge of organized crime, including high-end white collar crime, (3) preventing police misconduct by reforming police training and performance evaluation, and (4) designing a more robustly led community policing program.
Bold independence, courage/audacity, even-keeled temperament (temperance), openness, and good listening skills. Very importantly, it requires a willingness to try new approaches. We will be the first elected public servants in this new oversight system, and we will have to be ready to modify the ordinance and establish new customs. For example, how will we cooperate with the CAPS program and the District Advisory Councils? Will the 22 district councils elect their own city-wide leadership? How will we initiate policy discussions? And many more.
Tough question! Lately I have been thinking a lot of a lamentably unknown Baltic German philosopher, Kurt Stavenhagen. He plugged on boldly and independently in spite of monumental challenges of war and displacement. He got his Ph.D. in what we call "classics" at the University of Göttingen in 1909. He won a gold medal for his studies at one of the world's finest universities at the time. He declined academic positions in Germany in favor of going back to his home country, Latvia. There he taught high school, was one of the co-founders of a German-speaking university, became a professor, and was the chief of staff for the German community in the Latvian parliament. At the beginning of World War II, the Russians ethnically cleansed the Baltic Germans from Latvia, and he went to Germany as a refugee. He managed to become a philosophy professor at a top university. The Nazis viciously protested his classes on account of his refusal to join the Nazi party and his insistence on condemning racism. After the war, he taught at his alma mater, Göttingen, but died suddenly a few years later.
All through his he pressed on publishing work on community and nationalism. I have been reading academic work on community for over 30 years, and in my opinion he is the most insightful writer on community, period. Healthy community requires both respect for tradition and a sense of personal responsibility for the flourishing of one's group. Marching in lockstep as part of social movement is the antithesis of community, because individuals forfeit their responsibility to the collective, and this leads them to carry out bad actions they never would if they maintained their own sense of responsibility.I admire him because he was able to press on with his brilliant work with virtually no hope of attracting a large readership (in spite of his accessible writing style). He never followed blindly anyone else's ideas and always followed his own intellectual path.
I have two to mention: (1) the works of Hannah Arendt. Perhaps the most relevant is her ON REVOLUTION. (2) Philip K. Howard, TRY COMMON SENSE.
Almost nobody realizes that will have a role in policy and analysis. Or that the three council members will have different jobs.
Yes, but there are innumerable ways they could gain such knowledge.
Independent Voters of Illinois - Independent Precinct Organization
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Note: Community Questions were submitted by the public and chosen for inclusion by a volunteer advisory board. The chosen questions were modified by staff to adhere to Ballotpedia’s neutrality standards. To learn more about Ballotpedia’s Candidate Connection Expansion Project, click here.
Note: Wolk submitted the above survey responses to Ballotpedia on February 21, 2023.
See also
2023 Elections
External links
Footnotes
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