Police Accountability | Early Warning System | Chicago and Community Relations | Alternative Crime Prevention Funding
Criminal Justice Grades
“Every day our officers do a good job protecting the people of Chicago, and we will give them even more support. We will do that through the modern technology that gives Chicago’s police the ability to chart overnight crime, predict crime patterns, identify suspects more quickly and deploy personnel more efficiently….I challenge our leaders in the Police Department to take full advantage of these modern resources and develop new and bolder ways to fight crime—especially gangs, guns and drugs—in our city.”1
Mayor Daley, Inaugural speech May 2002
Since the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the acceptance of international human rights standards and legal instruments that apply to all nations has grown rapidly. These criteria are based on the principle that the protection and fulfillment of human rights are international responsibilities, not just domestic concerns.2 Many communities, however, have stumbled in the effort to provide for these basic rights. Chicago has floundered not only with specific communities, but also as a regulatory body.
Two years before the 40th anniversary of the police riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention, and decades after Lieutenant Jon Burge led the Chicago Police Department (CPD) in the torture of more than 100 African American men, police abuse continues to plague (and cost) the city of Chicago.
Routinely accused of racial bias, Chicago pays legal fees for defendants and pensions to t hose found guilty, even of torture. And when police misconduct is charged, city officials invariably trust officer’s word over t hat of an ordinary citizen. It protects t he department and its officers at any cost and makes it impossible to get details of investigations without a Freedom of Information Act request. Chicago’s citizen-complaint process is so complicated and intimidating that many aggrieved citizens forgo it altogether. Rather than commit the resources necessary to address these issues, Chicago would rather buy Segways for its community service officers and spend money on bomb-sniffing robots of questionable efficacy.3
The Chicago Police Department is notable for its lack of transparency, openness or willingness to share information, particularly as it relates to instances of serious misconduct. Faced wit h a “blue wall of silence” in which “fellow officers [turn] a blind eye to corruption and later [resist] cooperating with criminal investigations of their colleagues,”4 community organizers and academics often resort to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) filings to have any chance of getting the information they seek.
As with so many other issues in Chicago, promises of change are heard whenever a new scandal causes enough public furor to warrant it, whet her in the form of suspensions of specific officers, commissioning of reports, or pay-outs to families. Initial fury over the Burge torture cases forced a special prosecutor’s investigation, and pressure following release of its report resulted in resignation of the head of the Office of Professional Standards (OPS) at the Chicago Police Department. Members of an independent board conducting a national search for his replacement historically have been highly critical of t he police department, and it is anticipated “their search will be orchestrated in a thorough and autonomous manner.5 If Mayor Daley gives this new hire true authority to reform the antiquated OPS system, Chicago will have made a significant first step in addressing critical problems facing the police department and the city. But that day is not today, and Chicago continues to labor under a notoriously corrupt and insular Police Department.
Between 2001 and 2005, the city paid nearly $100 million to settle 864 civil lawsuits that alleged abuses such as excessive force, false arrest and improper searches by Chicago police officers.6 Most abuses are committed by a small percentage of officers, many of them members of gang tactical outfits, such as the Special Operations Unit, which works in low-income African-American and Latino neighborhoods.
In total, less than 5 percent of officers are responsible for nearly 50 percent of all complaints from civilians. Indeed, during the last five years, 662 officers—in a police force of roughly 13,500—received 11 or more complaints. From 2002 to 2004 the city investigated 18,077 misconduct allegations of which 44 percent name those same 662 officers.7
Despite these figures, repeat offenders are disciplined at the same rate as the officer population as a whole—each has a 1-in-500 chance of receiving meaningful discipline. None of the officers involved in any of these cases paid the damages awarded—the money came from the city’s already-strained budget.8
A recently released report by Lou Reiter, a former deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, contends that police officials, including Supt. Philip Cline, have continued a “practice of indifference” toward corruption that “makes officers who engage in misconduct feel protected,” and that police officials make “a conscious choice to not implement a reasonable system to identify and remediate officers who exhibit negative performance, behavior and/or attitudinal problems.”9
Although the department denies fostering a culture that tolerates corruption, little is done to discipline the officers whose behavior exacts such a toll on the city, or to deter others from following their example. Statistics provided by the city in a federal civil rights suit show, for example, that the 10,150 complaints of police abuse in the categories of excessive force, illegal arrest, illegal searches, and racial and sexual abuse from 2002 to 2004 resulted in only 18 officers receiving any “meaningful” discipline—a suspension of seven or more days.10
More disturbingly, the Chicago Police Department refuses to put in place a system that protects whistle-blowers, and police rules and regulations prohibit transferring or rewarding police who report misconduct by fellow officers.11
According to human-rights law, the state or governing body may be held accountable under international human rights standards when “abuses persist owing to the complicity, acquiescence or lack of due diligence of the authorities…. “Due diligence” describes the threshold of efforts a state must undertake to fulfill its responsibility to protect individuals from abuses of their rights.12 According to this standard, it is Chicago’s responsibility as a city to take effective measures against abuse, to investigate allegations of abuse and to prosecute and bring to justice through fair proceedings the alleged perpetrators. The victims of crimes—abuse by police is a crime—must be provided with adequate compensation and other forms of rectification. According to the most recent report and other publicized and anecdotal evidence, Chicago is largely failing in its due diligence.
Over the past decade, the city has embraced technology as a way to fight crime, investing heavily in a sustained effort to use information technology for that purpose. Central to this strategy is a criminal justice information system known as CLEAR—Citizen Law Enforcement Analysis and Reporting (now I-CLEAR).
I-CLEAR is an ever-expanding network of databases that provides access to a vast amount of information from multiple sources. It enables police personnel to search for relevant information organized according to a wide array of variables and guides deployment decisions by providing real-time data to help identify “hot spots.”13
I-CLEAR is designed to provide the officer on the street, as well as supervisors and crime analysts at headquarters, with immediate access to its universe of data. In the fall of 2004, Mayor Daley and Supt. Cline announced that the city would outfit some 1,200 squad cars with laptops to give officers on the street wireless access to I-CLEAR. He recently announced a pilot program to provide officers with Blackberry providing access to the database—a $2.7 million dollar project.14
The CPD credits I-CLEAR with reducing crime and increasing productivity, and it has been lauded around the country as an innovative and enterprising system.15 While the city and the CPD have embraced this technology to track criminals, it has been reluctant to use the system to analyze patterns of behavior in its own officers. I-CLEAR can detect patterns of criminality—it also has the ability to implement a personnel performance system that would hold all data related to officer behavior and performance. This software could assist management in early identification of potentially problematic officers through patterns of recurrent citizen complaints, pursuits and traffic accidents, firearm-discharge incidents and the like. Officers thus identified could be provided with intervention (counseling or training) designed to improve problem behavior before it becomes untenable. It also would provide the department with the means to rout out the “bad apples,” those officers whose habits have become so ingrained that they have become criminals themselves, and there is no other choice but to exorcise them from the force, and perhaps even take criminal action against them.
Not surprisingly, the department has not put a premium on monitoring t he behavior of its personnel. While a computerized personnel performance system today could assist the department in monitoring officers’ behavior, previous lack of technology should have not been an impediment. OPS long ago could have adopted a streamlined paper filing system that would have performed adequately, if not at quite the level as this automated system. And indeed, OPS was handling these activities on a manual basis, although the statistics cited earlier show very little intervention occurring in the system. Of 662 officers who have received 11 or more complaints, only about 10 percent have been enrolled in one of Chicago’s early intervention programs. Some officers with more than 50 complaints have never been identified. Disturbingly, Chicago never analyzes patterns of accusations against groups that work together, despite strong evidence that officers tend not to abuse alone.16
Assistant Deputy Supt. Deb Kirby, who took over the Internal Affairs Division 2 _ years ago, said the department is testing a new computerized system, explaining that “Most large law enforcement agencies are struggling to identify poor performance issues…most are doing it under mandates with the federal government…the Chicago Police Department is doing this on their own.”17 This statement, however, is misleading and even dishonest. In 2001, the U.S. Department of Justice went just shy of issuing a consent decree in “recommending” the institution of a personnel performance system that would widen the scope of the “data employed” and “systemize the problem-identification process.”18
And indeed, the police department has no problem creating soft ware that assists wit h administrative functions—currently the I-CLEAR system controls the Medical Services Section, and a system has been instituted to allow officers to update their emergency contacts. Yet another application automates the process of nominating officers for honorable mentions and awards—and even keeps track of star/badge/shield assignments so multi-generational police families can retain the same badge number.19 These are the programs given priority over development of the personnel-tracking system, an application that would help protect Chicagoans from t he “bad apples” in the Chicago Police Department. Decades of top-level decisions underscore the department’s blatant disregard for the needs of the citizenry and systemic agreement to ignore its ongoing and pervasive mistreatment of civilian suspects.
Chicago and Community Relations
Chicago police receive about 5 million emergency, or 911, calls a year, and 59 percent of adult Chicagoans have personal contact with a police officer each year.20 This level of personal contact ensures that Chicago residents have strong opinions about their police department.
CPD, to its credit, has rigorous outreach programs designed to establish relationships with community members and, indeed, opinions of police improved steadily during the ’90s, in part due to these outreach activities.21
Improved perceptions of police conduct, however, may be due in part to a general decline in crime. Chicago’s crime rate peaked in 1991, but declined sharply after that. From 1991 to 2002, violent crime declined by 49 percent, property crime by 36 percent, robbery by 58 percent, and murder by 30 percent. In fact, crime rates have dropped across the nation, but Chicago’s decline has been attributed to improved neighborhood conditions, decreased availability of guns, changes in drug markets, growing capacity of the city’s neighborhoods to defend themselves and changes in police effectiveness. African American communities have seen the most dramatic decrease in criminal activity, while predominantly white areas, where crime levels weren’t high to begin with, experienced less of a decrease.22
CAPS—Chicago Alternative Policing Strategies has been the Chicago Police Department’s primary means of reaching out to the community. Initiated in 1993, the plan was to establish teams of officers with relatively long-term assignments in each of the city’s 279 districts. Teams were expected to spend more time responding to calls and working on prevention projects in assigned areas. To free them to do so, excess or low-priority calls are assigned to rapid response units, and they are supported by a coordinated system for delivering city services. Commitment to community involvement is reflected in the (usually) monthly beat and District Advisory Committees (DAC) committee meetings, a regular feature since 1995.23
CAPS meetings provide a forum for community residents to make service requests for their neighborhood. These get-togethers allow neighbors to request graffiti removal, towing of abandoned cars, tree trimming and elimination of potholes (Department of Streets and Sanitation); action on abandoned and troubled properties (Department of Buildings); and replacement of missing or damaged signage (Department of Transportation).24 This integration of city services has been one of CAPS’ most important successes.
Intriguingly, CAPS meetings have given residents an unexpected source of power. Political clout historically has been the principal way of getting things done in Chicago, but beat meetings provided an alternative political system, a “new and non-traditional way” of securing government benefits. Reports document that beat meeting attendance and concerns expressed by participants affect the distribution of some city services, including graffiti cleanup and the tow-rate of abandoned cars.25
Police departments, particularly Chicago’s, generally are not the most transparent of institutions. “They expect the public to be their “eyes and ears” but give back as little information as possible about their activities or effectiveness.” This general pattern is discussed elsewhere in this section. To a degree, CAPS meetings break that pattern. They allow residents to hold local police accountable and to monitor their actions—to track whether the police are “holding up their end of the partnership” and following through on their promises.
Coordinating such a massive program in the nation’s third-largest city requires the commitment of cit y government, the police and multiple agencies. Chicago deserves credit for its huge commitment to community outreach and, in particularly for administering t he CAPS program and its significant resources fairly across t he city’s neighborhoods.26
In 2002, 67,300 Chicagoans attended 2,916 beat meetings. Between 1995 and 2003, more than 551,000 meetings were held. Testifying to the CAPS’ effectiveness, attendance at meetings is higher where it is needed most. Turnout is highest in poor areas with bad housing and high crime level, as well as areas where health programs and schools don’t effectively meet residents’ needs. Unfortunately, these meetings may not accurately represent the community—long-term residents, older adults and the higher educated are more likely to attend.27
Interestingly, attendance is especially high in places that are less influential politically. Participation is highest in beats offering the least support for the incumbent mayor—which, when taken into account that CAPS provides an alternative method for attaining city services, is significant.28
Awareness of CAPS, fostered by coordinated public relations campaigns, has grown swiftly since the programs inception. In the African American community, almost 90 percent are aware of their local CAPS meeting; awareness in white communities hovers around 80 percent; in Latino communities, however, there is a disheartening lack of awareness about this significant resource—only 56 percent were aware of their neighborhood meetings in 2003.29
Indeed, it is particularly among the Spanish-speaking population that CAPS seems to be failing. Although Chicago has funded publicity campaigns for this population, including paid promotional ads and a police-staffed talk show on Spanish language radio, Latinos’ views of the police remain negative, usually having to do with lack of trust, perceived police prejudice or racism, and communication problems. For instance, CAPS meetings, billed as Spanish-speaking, often have no Spanish-speaking officers or bilingual translators. One police sergeant noted, “[Latinos] don’t expect any great service from us, and a lot of officers are, frankly, a little racist…there are many officers that, once they have a negative stereotype formed, they treat all people with the same attitude.” He said this is the case in both the Latino and African-American communities.30
Clearly, there are distinct differences of opinions in how racial and ethnic communities (and age groups) relate to the police. The CAPS program has made an impact on those perceptions—before the program was launched; only 43 percent of Chicagoans were positive about police responsiveness; that figure increased to 56 percent by 2003. Those who thought police were doing a good job working with residents rose to 58 percent from 39 percent. Service perception increased to 51 percent in 2003 from 36 percent in 1994. Reports that police were doing a good or very good job with crime victims increased to 58 percent from 39 percent. The greatest gains were seen in the African-American and Latino communities, with increases of almost 20 percentage points in many categories (although it must be noted that white communities already had been quite positive). Despite these improvements, in 2003 only whites stood in the positive range for police approval ratings, and for blacks the most recent trend has been downward.31
While CAPS illustrates a positive movement in police community relations, many other police practices do nothing to build up trust.
Police treat crime witnesses the same way they treat criminals—those who observe a murder, for example, are brought to the station and stripped of their possessions and personal belongings, including cell phones, shoe laces, etc. They are searched from head to toe and placed in locked interrogation rooms, often for hours. Deputy Superintendent James Maloy has said publicly that he wouldn’t be surprised if more than 100 witnesses within the last two years had been held in these locked interrogation rooms for more than 24 hours. Further, when lawyers or family members come to the station, police often refuse to let them in and don’t report to the witness that the visitor was there.32
Obviously, this practice perpetuates resentment and discourages citizens from reporting crimes. It also hints that police are keeping witness in interrogation rooms until they receive the responses they desire, calling into question potentially thousands of accusations against accused criminals.
There continues to be great perception of racial discrimination and abuse in minority communities. While there is anecdotal evidence to support this feeling, a wealth of factual data substantiates this claim as well. In 2001, 26 percent of African Americans reported having been stopped by Chicago Police that year, compared with 20 percent of Latinos and 16 percent of whites. Reportedly, sixty-four percent of black males are stopped in the course of a year!33
A two-tiered system of police service also is evident. Examining 911 emergency response time, a WMAQ Channel 5 special report aired in November 2006 detailed how getting prompt service depends on where you live. The story involved a radio disposition called a RAP—radio assignments pending, a list of crimes in progress waiting for police to arrive. The report illustrated that south- and west-side communities that are heavily African-American and Latino have grossly more RAPs than white areas.34 While police generally blame the call center, others believe it is a resource-distribution issue—and a deliberate decision to assign more cars to affluent (and white) areas. Indeed, it is generally accepted in black and Latino communities that they will wait, sometimes hours or in vain, for police to arrive.
These perceptions and facts, coupled with the knowledge that African-Americans and Latinos are incarcerated at a much higher rate than whites, do little to establish a working relationship between citizens and police. This situation is exacerbated by absolute denial on the part of the police that racial bias exists and by a general unwillingness to catalogue and censure officers identified as abusive. Racial-profiling data, collected since 2004 as mandated by the state, cannot be used as a “disciplinary tool,” even when they supply evidence of racial bias.35 The CPD has even resisted putting video cameras in cop cars, citing cost. In October, CPD did install cameras in 30 squad cars, (out of a fleet of 2,900), but hasn’t announced plans to install more.36 The cost argument seems odd in light of the fact that the city of Chicago pays out millions of dollar each year to settle charges of abuse stemming from racial or ethnic bias.
Alternative Crime Prevention Funding
Although violence and gang activity have been on the decline in Chicago, drive-by shootings and bloodshed continue, plaguing certain areas of the city. Ironically, Chicago—like other cities that have seen a drop in general crime—finds itself less able to solve homicide cases, most of which are gang- or drug-related.37
Although both crime and police misbehavior ultimately affect the entire city, albeit in different ways, perhaps those who suffer most are minority children who grow up in perpetual fear, even at home. Youngsters who witness violence (reportedly about 30 percent of children in Chicago) have a more difficult time concentrating in school, and have lower reading and IQ scores. Neighborhoods with high levels of violence have difficulty retaining teachers, businesses and good-quality housing.
While the city can and should begin to address the socio-economic issues at the heart of urban violence—poor education, prisoner re-entry issues, job training, drug addiction and more—existing programs have proven effective in crime-prevention.
CeaseFire is a strategic community-based effort to stop shootings and killings through street-level outreach, public education and community mobilization. It is an unusual program because many of its outreach workers are former gang members or ex-criminals. Communities in which CeaseFire worked saw an average 69 percent drop in shootings, compared with an overall 8 percent drop for the entire city.38 It is estimated the city saved $80,939,199 in medical and criminal-justice costs between 2000 and 2004.39
Despite its proven track-record and police confirmation of its effectiveness in helping the city curb homicides and shootings, Chicago has declined to fund the program. CeaseFire instead relies on funding from private foundations, Cook County, and the State of Illinois.
BUILD, the Broader Urban Involvement and Leadership Development program, is a comprehensive effort to decrease gang violence by offering positive alternatives to at-risk youth. In 2004, working with 297 at-risk and gang-affiliated youth BUILD effected a 59 percent decrease ins in-school disciplinary incidents; a 70 percent decrease in abusive/violent behaviors; and a 65 percent decrease in gang affiliation.40 Despite these impressive statistics, the city does not fund BUILD’s work.
Other promising prevention programs in Chicago should be evaluated and, if deemed successful, funded. Unfortunately, the city has chosen to put all its violence prevention resources into its own Chicago Alternative Policing Strategies program. While CAPS has its strengths, they do not lie in preventing drug- or gang related homicides. Programs such as CeaseFire and BUILD have effectively dealt with those issues, but are ignored. This is unfortunate for the city’s crime statistics and, more importantly, for the communities that deal with this bloodshed on a daily basis.
Police Accountability
Chicago has no effective system for police accountability. Its failure in this regard can not be understated, and the city and the CPD seem to have little interest in any real change.
Early Warning System
Chicago and the Chicago Police Department repeatedly have excused their failure to enact such a system. Their inaction indicates unwillingness to change and blatant disregard for the human rights of the citizenry.
Chicago Police and Community Relations
The CPD has done an immense amount of outreach with the CAPS program, providing historically underserved areas with an alternative means of getting city services. Unfortunately, a sense of racial bias continues in these areas, as does the belief that there are discrepancies in the way that police service is delivered.
Chicago Police and Community Relations
Chicago chooses not to fund the successful crime-prevention programs that have been effective in dealing with gang- and drug-related homicides, the single area of crime that CPD has been unable to address over the past decade.
Although Chicago has seen a reduction in violent crime that reflects national patterns, the city is do- ing an extremely poor job of acknowledging and correcting problems in the criminal justice system, and in involving citizens in oversight and crime prevention. Whereas the police department clearly has made an effort to initiate a community-policing program, the city has failed to support effective alternative crime-prevention models.
Chicago has not taken advantage of existing technology and resources to implement a viable early warning system which would help weed out rogue police officers, and has taken only a few small steps to involve community members in police oversight.
This report has focused on the relationship between Chicago’s criminal justice system and its residents. Despite solid evidence of rampant police torture and abuse, none of the parties involved has been prosecuted or punished. The Chicago Police Department has shown no interest in addressing the rampant abuse that still exists within their ranks.
The City of Chicago earns: F
With a continued commitment to progress and a tightening of the pollution rules on the coal plants by the state, Chicago’s environmental future looks good.