Chicago's Police Accountability Task Force, which was created by Mayor Rahm Emanuel late last year in response to the shooting of Laquan McDonald and subsequent community anger, has released its final report. It is scathing.
The Task Force heard over and over again from a range of voices, particularly from African-Americans, that some CPD officers are racist, have no respect for the lives and experiences of people of color and approach every encounter with people of color as if the person, regardless of age, gender or circumstance, is a criminal. [...]
CPD’s own data gives validity to the widely held belief the police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color. [...]
A 2015 survey of 1,200 Chicago residents, ages 16 and older, also found significant racial disparities in the number of police-initiated stops and the perception of abusive police behavior. The survey found that almost 70% of young African-American males reported being stopped by police in the past 12 months, and 56% reported being stopped on foot.
The report notes that three quarters of police shootings and taser discharges were against black Americans, though only 33 percent of the city population is black, and that black Chicagoans were singled out for "encounters not leading to arrests" at a rate many times above the city's other residents. And it puts the blame on Chicago police department leadership.
[T]aken together, the only conclusion that can be reached is that there is no serious embrace by CPD leadership of the need to make accountability a core value. These statistics give real credibility to the widespread perception that there is a deeply entrenched code of silence supported not just by individual officers, but by the very institution itself.
Recommendations by the task force are numerous, including the creation of an independent inspector general to monitor CPD behavior, body cameras, and ending the CPD's "significantly damaged" Community Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) program in favor of revised approaches. It asks the mayor and city council "in the next 90 to 180 days to take aggressive steps to implement the recommendations within this Report."