But why can’t we just take the Officers “word” when he says things happened the way he claims? I mean, it can’t be all that bad right? Nope, it’s bad. Really real bad.
The City does not investigate the majority of cases it is required by law to investigate. Most of those cases are uninvestigated because they lack a supporting affidavit from the complaining party, but the City also fails to investigate anonymous and older misconduct complaints as well as those alleging lower level force and non-racial verbal abuse. Finally, and also contrary to legal mandates, IPRA does not investigate most Taser discharges and officer- involved shootings where no one is hit. Some of these investigations are ignored based on procedural hurdles in City agreements with its unions, but some are unilateral decisions by the accountability agencies to reduce caseloads and manage resources. And many misconduct complaints that avoid these investigative barriers are still not fully investigated because they are resolved through a defective mediation process, which is actually a plea bargain system used to dispose of serious misconduct claims in exchange for modest discipline. Regardless of the reasons, this failure to fully investigate almost half of all police misconduct cases seriously undermines accountability. These are all lost opportunities to identify misconduct, training deficiencies, and problematic trends, and to hold officers and CPD accountable when misconduct occurs. In order to address these ignored cases, the City must modify its own policies, and work with the unions to address certain CBA provisions, and in the meantime, it must aggressively investigate all complaints to the extent authorized under these contracts.
Those cases that are investigated suffer from serious investigative flaws that obstruct objective fact finding. Civilian and officer witnesses, and even the accused officers, are frequently not interviewed during an investigation. The potential for inappropriate coordination of testimony, risk of collusion, and witness coaching during interviews is built into the system, occurs routinely, and is not considered by investigators in evaluating the case. The questioning of officers is often cursory and aimed at eliciting favorable statements justifying the officer’s actions rather than seeking truth. Questioning is often marked by a failure to challenge inconsistencies and illogical officer explanations, as well as leading questions favorable to the officer. Investigators routinely fail to review and incorporate probative evidence from parallel civil and criminal proceedings based on the same police incident. And consistent with these biased investigative techniques, the investigator’s summary reports are often drafted in a manner favorable to the officer by omitting conflicts in testimony or with physical evidence that undermine the officer’s justification or by exaggerating evidence favorable to the officer, all of which frustrates a reviewer’s ability to evaluate for investigative quality and thoroughness.
Investigative fact-finding into police misconduct and attempts to hold officers accountable are also frustrated by police officers’ code of silence. The City, police officers, and leadership within CPD and its police officer union acknowledge that a code of silence among Chicago police officers exists, extending to lying and affirmative efforts to conceal evidence. Officers who may be inclined to cover up misconduct will be deterred from doing so if they understand that honesty is the most crucial component of their job and that the Department will aggressively seek to identify dishonest officers and appropriately discipline them. However, our investigation found that IPRA and BIA treat such efforts to hide evidence as ancillary and unexceptional misconduct, and often do not investigate it, causing officers to believe there is not much to lose if they lie to cover up misconduct.
Uh, nope.
According the FBI research the in house documentation on CPD use of force was shoddy and inaccurate. The city was not able to even provide a number of citizens who had been shot by police in recent years. After reviewing 170 IPRC files and a list of shooting incidents between 2011 and 2016 they found that nine additional incidents where citizens were struck by police gunfire. Ultimately they identified 203 Officer-involved shootings where 223 civilians were shot.
We constantly hear that these are just “isolated incidents” and it’s only a “handful” of cases — but seriously 223 civilians being shot is not “isolated” or a “handful”.
A recent analysis by the Bureau of Justice Statistics which now uses crowdsourced methods as well as media monitoring rather than expecting police departments around the nation to “self report” their arrest related deaths and shootings (ARD) — because they just don’t report them — has found that the number of ARDs per year are even higher than what the Washington Post and the Guardian had been able to discover. Via Mother Jones.
The bureau's researchers identified 1,348 arrest-related deaths from June 2015 through March 2016 using media reports and crowdsourced information—an average of about 135 deaths per month. For June through August 2015, they also surveyed police agencies and identified an additional 46 arrest-related deaths—or 12 percent more—than the number the bureau had tallied independently for that time period. Extrapolating the data, and correcting for the police-reporting disparity, the bureau estimated there were about 1,900 arrest-related deaths in the 12 months ending May 2016.
The lack of reliable federal data on police-involved deaths received national attention in August 2014 after Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen, was killed in Ferguson, Missouri. In the absence of reliable numbers, the Washington Post and the Guardian US began tracking officer-involved killing in 2015 using media reports and crowdsourced information, a model the Department of Justice drew on for its new program. The Guardian US determined that police killed 1,146 people last year during interactions on the street. By contrast, police departments reported just 444 police shootings to the FBI in 2014.
To recap, the police departments themselves reported just 444 fatal police shootings in 2014 — since then the Guardian has found 1,146 during 2015 which almost three times that, and the BJS is estimating the true number may be 1,900 in 2016 over four times what had been previously reported to the FBI. Some people might call a discrepancy that large an active “conspiracy” to deceive the public, or just really lazy and conveniently incompetent. Or both.
That’s also more than twice the number of shootings deaths by alleged criminals (746) in the city of Chicago last year. And this Chicago PD — which as far as I’m concerned are a hair’s breath from being a criminal street gang themselves - on average only solves about 30 percent of those murders. But that figure includes crimes committed over multiple years, when you simply look at what has been committed in the most recent year that figure drops to just 21 percent.
In a year when Chicago's homicide rate has spiked by about 50 percent, the Police Department's increasing struggle to solve its most serious crime has only exacerbated the deadly surge.
And we all know who the victims probably are in the majority of those cases. Not only are police allowed, due to poor discipline and a lack of oversight, to unjustifiably murder, brutalize and terrorize hundreds in the community without just cause or serious consequence, they’re also pathetically ineffective at making a dent against the predators whom they’re supposed to be protecting the city from. That would be a double fail. Sure, some cops even on this department probably mean well, and some try hard to do the right thing, but frankly with a record like this, as an organization, they aren’t really accomplishing much good at this rate. If anything failing to capture or even identify 79% of the murder suspects is probably a very large factor in why their murder rate remains so frustratingly high. Something has to change, drastically.
Here are a few sample police shooting cases in specific, such as where the police swear the suspect was armed, or had attempted fire on the officers, but they weren’t and they didn’t.
In one case, a man had been walking down a residential street with a friend when officers drove up, shined a light on him, and ordered him to freeze, because he had been fidgeting with his waistband. The man ran. Three officers gave chase and began shooting as they ran. In total, the officers fired 45 rounds, including 28 rifle rounds, toward the man. Several rounds struck the man, killing him. The officers claimed the man fired at them during the pursuit. Officers found no gun on the man. However, officers reported recovering a handgun nearly one block away. The gun recovered in the vicinity, however, was later determined to be fully-loaded and inoperable, and forensic testing determined there was no gunshot residue on the man’s hands. IPRA found the officers’ actions were justified without addressing the efficacy of the pursuit or the number of shots fired.
In another case, a CPD officer chased and shot a man. The officer later claimed that during pursuit she ordered the man to stop, at which point the man turned and raised his right arm towards her. According to the officer, the man had pointed a gun at her earlier in the incident and, fearing he was doing so now, she fired. The only gunshot wounds were to the man’s buttocks. No weapon was found on the man, but a gun was found on a nearby roof gutter. IPRA found the shooting justified without accounting for the wounds to the man’s backside.
In another case, a CPD officer chased a man who ran when an officer told him to stop, and then shot the man in the back of the leg. The officer claimed the man had turned to point a gun. After a thorough search of the scene, no gun was recovered. The man, who denied ever turning to face the officer, was found only with a cell phone.
In another case, a CPD officer fatally shot a fleeing, unarmed suspect in the back. The officer told investigators the suspect had turned around to point a black object. This account did not square with the location of the shooting victim’s gunshot wounds and appeared contrary to video footage that showed the suspect running away from the officer. Again, IPRA accepted the officer’s account, despite the conflicting evidence. IPRA’s final report of the incident did not mention the existence of the video.
In another case, video evidence showed the tragic end of a foot pursuit of a man who was not a threat when an officer shot him in the back. The officer, who fired 16 shots, killing the man, claimed on his force report that the man was armed and the man “charged [him] with apparent firearm.” The officer shot the man during the foot pursuit, and dashboard-camera footage showed that as the unarmed man lay on the ground, the officer fired three shots into his back. CPD stripped the officer of his police powers after this shooting—his third that year—and the City paid the man’s family $4.1 million in settlement.
The report goes on the point out that CPD has made significant improvements and strides to address many of these concerns on their own since the DOJ began their investigation 13 months ago. Following this report a consent decree — a judicial feature that was installed following the Rodney King beating trial and verdict — will be filed, pending approval by a Federal Judge, to require them to continue to implement these improvements and many more suggested modifications, including community policing and stronger training and disciplinary structure, which are helpfully included in the report.
Thanks, Obama.
Whether or not a brand new incoming AG Sessions will pursue and to continue to push such reform efforts forward when he feels that blaming “an entire department” is itself the problem, one that puts them at “greater risk” by inspiring more crime in his view, remains to be seen.
But from his long history a harsh criticism of Police reform, the outlook is not rosey.
In a November 2015 Senate hearing called "The War on Police," Sessions, a former federal prosecutor, tore into the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, which under Obama has taken a more forceful approach to investigating systemic abuses of police power. He accused the department of overstepping its authority and undermining officers.
"There is a perception, not altogether unjustified, that this department, the Civil Rights Division, goes beyond fair and balanced treatment but has an agenda that's been a troubling issue for a number of years," Sessions said.
Sessions has also criticized consent decrees, the Justice Department's main tool to impose reforms. He once called them "one of the most dangerous, and rarely discussed, exercises of raw power" and "an end run around the democratic process."
Nope, not that rosey at all.