The trial of Officer Jason Van Dyke for the murder of McDonald is scheduled to begin September 5 and promises to be a major media spectacle. It is all but certain that the city will await the verdict in the same state of collective tension that attended release of the video and with the same uncertainty about the consequences.

Concurrently, a consent decree negotiated by the Illinois attorney general and the Emanuel administration — a blueprint for police reform to be overseen by a federal judge — is moving toward being entered this fall. A draft of the decree was released on July 27. Although the period for public comment runs only until August 17, various provisions are destined to be debated for years.

A number of provisions in the consent decree were conditional on changes in the contract of the Fraternal Order of Police, which expired over a year ago. Under the terms of the decree, the city is to “use its best efforts” to negotiate changes in the collective bargaining agreement. The union is seeking to block implementation of the consent decree, which its president has characterized as “legally invalid” and “politically motivated.” So the prospects for constructive negotiations seem dim at best.

The next mayoral election is not until February 26, 2019 (and in the likely event of a run-off, April 2), but the campaign is fast gathering momentum. Among those challenging Emanuel are Garry McCarthy, his former police superintendent, and Lori Lightfoot, whom he appointed as chair of the police board and later, head of his Police Accountability Task Force. Given the presence of these two candidates in the field, policing and public safety issues will be central throughout the campaign.

Taken together, these developments ensure an extended period during which fundamental issues of racial justice will be intensely debated in multiple forums. A great deal turns on the quality of those debates. Will civil society and government voices sustain the public arguments necessary to realize the historic opportunity for fundamental change at hand? Or will the blood sport of the mayor’s race, the media circus of the Van Dyke trial, the complexity of the consent decree, and the intransigence of FOP yield a bruising, confusing public discourse that ultimately leaves Chicagoans more polarized, entrenched, and demoralized than they currently are?

A City Defined by a Killing

The city where these parallel processes are unfolding is on edge. Over the weekend of August 3, 74 people were shot in the city, 12 of them fatally. And several weeks earlier, community members and police clashed in a South Side neighborhood following the fatal police shooting of a resident, prompting anxious speculation about what will happen if Jason Van Dyke is acquitted.

The spasm of violence in early August dramatized the fundamental tension that shapes the discourse about police reform in Chicago. Over the several years that the city has been focused on curbing police abuse, there has been a spike in homicides and shootings in particular low-income black and brown neighborhoods, giving rise to an ongoing argument between those who claim reform measures impede the police and those who argue that accountability is a necessary condition for the police to be effective.

All of this is playing out against the backdrop of the narrative that now frames Chicago’s civic life: the police killing of Laquan McDonald. The centrality of that story is in some respects a mystery. Why this particular incident? This particular victim? A partial explanation is that the horror of the incident was compounded by the institutional response to it — by the knowledge that the city knew what happened and withheld that information from the public for over a year, while maintaining a patently false official account of the shooting that ultimately collapsed, exposing the machinery of the code of silence.

Whatever the reasons, the public narrative of McDonald now bears comparison to that of another child of Chicago, Emmett Till. The footage of McDonald curled in fetal position on the ground as Van Dyke fires again and again and again — 16 times — is akin to Till’s open casket: a portal through which the mutilated body of a child becomes the focal point for perceptions of underlying systemic pathologies.

The public narrative of Laquan McDonald now bears comparison to that of another child of Chicago, Emmett Till.

The cascade of events that followed the McDonald revelations — the firing of the police superintendent and the head of the Independent Police Review Authority, the mayor’s appointment of a task force on police accountability, the electoral defeat of the state’s attorney, and the intervention by the U.S. Department of Justice — was animated by the widely shared recognition that what had been exposed was intolerable and that fundamental reform was imperative.

On December 9, 2015, at the height of the political firestorm following the video’s release, Emanuel gave a speech to a special session of the Chicago City Council. It was arguably his finest moment as mayor. Visibly traumatized, he spoke with emotion and moral urgency. Chicago, he said, faces “a defining moment on the issues of crime and policing and even the larger issues of truth, justice, and race.” He acknowledged that a code of silence exists within the Chicago Police Department. And he committed his administration to a sustained process of reform, asking, in effect, that Chicagoans — and history — judge him by that single measure.

Addressing a shaken city, the mayor evoked a crisis of the civil order that demands we break with business as usual. What is required, he declared, is that we embark on a process of becoming a different kind of society — one, as he put it, in which a black child would be treated no differently by the police than his own children.

Chicago’s Path to a Consent Decree

The mayor has not consistently projected the sort of leadership he showed that day. Frequent wobbles and pivots have left him looking reactive and defensive. More often than not, he has appeared intensely tactical in the absence of a strategy. As a result, he has not told the story of reform in such a way that the public can clearly see particular measures as elements of a coherent larger plan.

At each successive stage in the reform process, the mayor’s first impulse, his political instinct, has been to balk. Then, as political pressure builds, he ultimately moves forward. This is not inspiring leadership, but it is a reasonably predictable political dynamic that advances the process, so long as sustained public pressure is applied.

Substantial progress has been made over the last three years. Among other things, a new agency — the Civilian Office of Police Accountability — has been established to investigate police shootings and allegations of excessive force, and the Inspector General of Chicago has been empowered to monitor the police department. Yet the reform process has often seemed becalmed and adrift, making it hard to assess progress. There are no firm coordinates. The sensation is akin to swimming across a large body of water and not being able to see either shore.

That will almost surely change now that the draft consent decree has been released. The complex, 233-page document includes provisions dealing with use of force, crisis intervention, supervision, accountability, transparency, hiring and promotion, and officer wellness. (According to the parties, the one outstanding issue they have not yet been able to resolve is whether officers will be required to file a report when they point a gun at someone.)

In order to grasp both the promise of the consent decree process and the challenges it faces, it is important to understand its history.

After Donald Trump was elected, the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice pushed to finalize the report on its investigation of the Chicago Police Department, releasing it a week before the inauguration. Once the new administration assumed office, it quickly became apparent that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had no intention of negotiating a consent decree on the basis of the report. He condemned such decrees as “politically expedient” measures “that will cost more lives by handcuffing the police instead of the criminals” and declared that Department of Justice would no longer enter into them.

Soon after the inauguration, Emanuel reached out to Sessions and sought to negotiate a nonbinding memorandum of agreement to govern police reform in Chicago. When word of the MOA negotiations leaked, it was widely derided as toothless, and the process ran aground.

The Chicago Police Department engages in an unconstitutional pattern and practice of excessive force, including deadly force, primarily against people of color.

In light of the new realities, civil rights lawyers at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University law schools developed a community-driven legal strategy for rebooting the consent decree process. In June 2017, they filed a class-action suit — Campbell v. City of Chicago — on behalf of a group of individual and organizational plaintiffs extending across the spectrum, from Black Lives Matter organizations to the NAACP and Urban League. They argued that their clients were at high risk of having their constitutional rights violated by the police and sought widespread injunctive relief and police oversight under the supervision of a federal judge. (Colleagues at the Invisible Institute provided statistical analysis for the Campbell lawsuit.)

The Campbell suit received immediate public support. It was endorsed by editorials in both Chicago newspapers and the New York Times and by various institutional players such as Chicago’s Inspector General. The American Civil Liberties Union subsequently filed a parallel suit seeking a consent decree on behalf of people with disabilities.

The Emanuel administration, however, declined the invitation to negotiate and sought to have the suit dismissed. It argued that the plaintiffs lacked standing and that a consent decree was unnecessary because the city was in the process of implementing the desired reforms.

That was the context in which, two months after the filing of the Campbell suit, Lisa Madigan, the state attorney general, sued the city seeking a consent decree on the basis of the patterns of unconstitutional policing documented in the DOJ report. And that was the context in which Emanuel took a step he had initially resisted and agreed to negotiate.

At that point, the process ceased to be public and became a matter of lawyers brokering an agreement behind closed doors. The Campbell and ACLU attorneys were not at the table, and so did not participate in crafting the decree. They did, however, succeed in securing a memorandum of agreement with the city and the attorney general under which their clients have a significant role in enforcing the terms of the decree.

The consent decree is a dense document. In assessing its provisions, it’s important not to allow the complexity of the prescription to obscure the stark simplicity of the diagnosis: The Chicago Police Department engages in an unconstitutional pattern and practice of excessive force, including deadly force, primarily against people of color. These patterns of unconstitutional police violence are enabled and shielded by systemic deficiencies in supervision, accountability, and training, and by the code of silence within the department.

That is the heart of the matter, the core problem that the array of reforms is designed to address. The sheer number of discreet measures invites a checklist approach that sees police reform as a matter of ticking off boxes on a long list. Such an approach fails to comprehend that some reforms have priority because they are foundational and must be securely in place for other measures to be credible and effective.

These patterns of unconstitutional police violence are enabled and shielded by systemic deficiencies in supervision, accountability, and training, and by the code of silence within the department.

One such area is use of force policy. Defining appropriate and excessive uses of force provides the basis for developing training, supervisory, and disciplinary systems. The section of the draft on use of force is a significant improvement over past policy and provides a sound foundation on which to build.

Equally fundamental to the operation of the decree is transparency with respect to the disciplinary process. Here the draft disappoints. Significant progress has been made in this area in recent years. The draft embodies those advances, but it misses an opportunity to go beyond them and build proactive transparency into the architecture, the DNA, of the reform process. The internal systems for managing disciplinary information are significantly improved. There is, however, no affirmative commitment to make that information publicly available. The public will be given aggregate numbers but not access to the underlying data.

This information is public under current law and can be accessed under the Freedom of Information Act. Why not then make it universally available? Against the background of the catastrophic suppression of public information in connection with the Laquan McDonald incident, a robust transparency regime of this nature would represent a dramatic institutional commitment to community participation in the reform process.

It is important to remember how we got here. The struggle for police reform has at every stage been driven by civil society energies moving against the undertow of official resistance. Central to that struggle has been the fight for access to information.

Just as information control is a tool of power, transparency is a way of redistributing power and so enabling community members to monitor the reform process and engage in joint problem-solving. To put the point another way, a measure of democratic renewal is essential, if we are to realize this historic opportunity. Only a process that exemplifies the qualities it seeks to institutionalize will establish true accountability and restore institutional legitimacy. In that sense, process is reform.

The Promise and Challenge of the Consent Decree

Whatever its strengths and limitations, the consent decree is a watershed. Christy Lopez, the lawyer in the Civil Rights Division who led the investigation of the Chicago Police Department (as well as the police departments in Ferguson, New Orleans, and a number of other jurisdictions), has hailed it as “a police reform milestone of unprecedented promise for Chicago” and “a beacon for people across the country who care about police reform and are discouraged by the federal government’s current refusal to protect people from abuse.”

If this promise is to be fully realized, both the public and police must engage with and invest in the effort over a period of years. The process thus hinges on two great questions.

What is the role of the public — especially the communities most affected by patterns of abuse — in police reform?

It is critically important that the institutionalization of reform via the consent decree not sideline participation of civil society, that the bureaucratic process not derail the political process. If Chicago can be said to be in the midst of a prolonged crisis of the civil order — reflected in the loss of legitimacy of key institutions, public distrust of civil authority, an intolerably high homicide rate, and an abysmally low police clearance rate in homicides and shootings — then the consent decree is best seen as an opportunity to reconstitute the relationship of Chicago residents to their government and its agents.

From one perspective, the document reflects this aspiration. Its central theme is “community policing.” Yet it is relatively silent on two critical conditions for effective community involvement in the process.

First, it affirms the need for some form of civilian oversight, but provides no parameters on what a civilian oversight board might look like and how it would be selected. This is a vexing issue that has divided activists. More guidance would have been welcome.

Second, to return to a theme touched on above, robust transparency is a necessary condition for community members to participate fully in the process. The consent decree draft falls short in this respect and so misses an opportunity for a paradigm shift in the stewardship of public information.

The years since the Laquan McDonald implosion have seen a remarkable upsurge of civic engagement with fundamental issues of racial justice in Chicago. Civil society — community groups across the spectrum, civic and religious organizations, philanthropy, and, of course, the civil rights bar — has mobilized on multiple fronts. It’s sometimes hard to see this in proper perspective, because engagement takes the form of challenging and criticizing each other, as well as the embattled Emanuel administration, which is precisely the point in a democratic polity.

There is now an opportunity for these energies to cohere around the consent decree process — for necessary arguments to advance within the framework it provides. If, however, the process does not make good on the promise of community inclusion, it will only deepen alienation in the neighborhoods most affected by both police abuse and violent crime, while inducing other concerned and mobilized Chicagoans to disengage. Moving forward on the long slough of reform under the consent decree, civic morale is a precious and highly perishable resource.

What impact will the stance of the Fraternal Order of Police have on the reform process?

It is essential that police reform, if it is to be effective, have buy-in from the police. Yet the FOP’s posture is one of blanket opposition to accountability measures as impediments to effective law enforcement.

In an effort to derail the consent decree process, the FOP has filed a motion to intervene in the case and a second motion challenging the role of the Illinois attorney general. Offered a memorandum of agreement granting enforcement powers such as the Campbell plaintiffs and the ACLU entered into, the union declined. When the attorney general’s office, in the course of developing the consent decree, reached out to officers to take part in focus groups, FOP discouraged them from participating.

Assuming the FOP is unable to legally block the consent decree process, it retains power to veto the implementation of certain provisions. The collective bargaining agreement — to use an unnerving verb in this context — trumps the consent decree. A number of desirable reforms in the draft decree can only be implemented if the FOP agrees to changes in the relevant provisions of its contract.

Perhaps the most disheartening thing about the FOP’s scorched-earth approach is that it denies the process the benefit of the perspectives, insights, and suggestions of the rank-and-file officers the union purports to represent. The effort to institute realistic, workable reforms would be greatly enriched, if those voices were audible, but they are largely displaced by the megaphone wielded by FOP’s leadership.

The public voice of the union is on a rhetorical offensive — demonizing Black Lives Matter groups, attacking the civil rights bar as the “wrongful conviction industry,” and assailing the press as purveyors of “fake news.” It is utterly uncompromising and projects an air of confidence that it’s on the right side of history. In May, Trump, for whom Chicago has long been a favorite target, tweeted support for a demonstration against Emanuel organized by FOP:

Chicago Police have every right to legally protest against the mayor and an administration that just won’t let them do their job. The killings are at a record pace and tough police work, which Chicago will not allow, would bring things back to order fast…the killings must stop!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 25, 2018

In view of Session’s open hostility to police reform, it’s not inconceivable that the Department of Justice will intervene in the consent decree case on behalf of the union. Whether or not that happens, the terms of engagement have been set. The argument is not over how best to address an acknowledged problem; it’s over whether a problem exists at all. Considered in light of massive documentation by the Obama DOJ and others of grave constitutional harms, the position the FOP — and the Trump administration — are pressing, though they wouldn’t phrase it quite this way, is that the only form of effective policing is unconstitutional policing.

That is the charged setting in which the trial of Jason Van Dyke for the murder of Laquan McDonald will take place. In the protracted run-up to the trial, we have seen previews of the defense team’s strategy, which will be to portray the murder charge against Van Dyke as the result not of his actions, but of an anti-police media campaign. (I figured in one of those previews, when the defense served me with a subpoena in an effort to compel me to reveal a key source for my reporting on the incident.) Thus, for a period of weeks, the FOP worldview will be presented by the defense and amplified by media coverage intent on maximizing the melodrama of the trial.

It’s all but certain that tension and polarization will build in the city as the trial proceeds toward a verdict. For many, the only true measure of progress in police accountability will be a guilty verdict. If that verdict is not forthcoming, the city will face a test under the pressure of the centrifugal forces released by an acquittal or a hung jury. Will the center hold, as it did after the release of the video in 2015, when activists channeled outrage into inspired Black Friday demonstrations in the Michigan Avenue shopping district, and the police protected the exercise of their First Amendment rights?

Claiming the Society We Need

As I have tried to bring the state of the city at this fateful moment into focus, my mind has returned again and again to a scene described to me by a friend.

On July 15, a police officer shot and killed Harith Augustus, a neighborhood barber, on 71st Street, a major commercial street in the South Shore neighborhood. The officer who shot him was on foot patrol with other officers in response to neighborhood concerns about gun violence. According to a CPD spokesperson, they observed a man “exhibiting characteristics of an armed person” and questioned him, at which point — note the passive tense — “a confrontation ensues and he is shot.”

Almost immediately, alerts went out via social media, and protesters appeared at the scene. My friend, a young African-American woman who grew up on the South Side, was alerted to the shooting by a text message from the Black Youth Project 100, an organization of which she is a member, and immediately went to the site of the shooting.

She described a tense scene, as demonstrators faced off with police. Standing opposite a cordon of officers, many of them black, she and others shouted out questions. “Why are you all doing this?” “What’s the name of the officer who did this?” “Shame on you. We don’t want you here. Why don’t you leave?”

She noticed two officers, both black, standing side by side. One was pumped up, handling his baton with keen anticipation like a batter in the on-deck circle. He would later strike a female protester. The other had tears streaking his face.

For me, this scene encapsulates the promise and peril of the current moment in Chicago. The officers on foot patrol to prevent gun violence who ended up committing gun violence — perhaps justified, perhaps not. The demonstrators who mobilized in a matter of minutes to bear witness. The police on the scene to preserve order, but also to protect the First Amendment rights of the protesters. The officer for whom what couldn’t be expressed issued as tears. The razor’s edge between violent disorder and civic dialogue.

The situation on 71st Street, a close observer of the South Side later remarked to me, was “one thrown bottle away from a riot.” No doubt. Such an outcome is all too easy to imagine. Can we also imagine a society in which those frozen in this tableau could sustain a conversation with each other, could argue with each other and learn from each other, a society in which their exchanges could enrich the larger discourse? It’s up to us, at this defining moment, to claim full citizenship in that society.

Top photo: People gather in front of the Chicago Police Department on Oct. 20, 2017, to protest the shooting of Laquan McDonald, 17, who was shot and killed by police officers in 2014.

The post Chicago Faces a Defining Moment in Police Reform and Civil Order appeared first on The Intercept.

The decadelong effort to gain access to this information is an important thread in the history of the struggle for civil rights under law in Chicago. It is also the story of how a style of on-the-ground reporting that Studs Terkel once characterized as “guerrilla journalism” matured into the Invisible Institute, a journalism production company based on the South Side of Chicago that has assumed the function of curating this category of public information on behalf of the public.

During the final chapter of high-rise public housing in Chicago — from 1994 until the final demolition in 2007 — I was a daily presence at Stateway Gardens, a development centrally located in the massive concentration of public housing along a three-mile stretch of South State Street. I had several roles there. I created a program of “grassroots public works” aimed at providing alternatives for ex-offenders and members of street gangs. I served as an adviser to the resident council. And with two colleagues — David Eads and Patricia Evans — I published occasional human rights reports on conditions in public housing under the title “The View From the Ground.”

The name “Invisible Institute” was first uttered in jest. Working out of a vacant, five-bedroom unit in a doomed public housing high-rise with an open-air drug market outside the door, we announced in the first issue of The View that it was published under the auspices of something called the Invisible Institute.

The name stuck. It came to refer not to a formal organization, but a loose network of collaborators and a certain style of inquiry, exploration, and relationship-building. From the start, the Invisible Institute created capacity through collaboration. A prime example is our partnership over the last 18 years with civil rights attorney Craig Futterman and his students at the Edwin F. Mandel Legal Aid Clinic of the University of Chicago Law School. Over time, the Mandel Clinic brought six federal lawsuits on behalf of public housing residents abused by the police.

Among the major stories we published on The View was a 17-part series titled “Kicking the Pigeon” on the case of Diane Bond, a Stateway resident repeatedly assaulted — physically, sexually, emotionally — by a team of gang tactical officers known on the street as the “skullcap crew.”

By this point, we had been documenting individual instances of human rights abuse for several years. Having experienced in the most direct and visceral way what impunity looks like on the ground, a question formed: What sorts of institutional conditions would have to exist for the patterns of abuse we had documented to be the case? Thus began the ascent of an analytic ladder — from human rights reporting on the abuses inflicted on particular victims by particular officers to the systems that enable and shield such abuse.

In the case of Diane Bond, we pursued that question via litigation. Futterman and his students brought a civil rights suit in which the city of Chicago and the police superintendent, as well as the individual officers who committed the abuses, were named as defendants on the grounds that the city had a de facto policy of “failing to properly supervise, monitor, discipline, counsel, and otherwise control its officers” and that top police officials were aware that “these practices would result in preventable police abuse.”

This framing of the case enabled Bond’s lawyers, in the course of civil discovery, to request documents that would shed light on the Chicago Police Department’s systems for monitoring, investigating, and disciplining officers. These included not only the complaint histories of the defendant officers, but also lists of officers with more than 10 complaints over a five-year period. This information was provided under a protective order — a judicial order under which the parties can freely share information with each other, but not the public.

In 2007, as the Bond case moved toward settlement, I formally intervened before Judge Joan Lefkow and asked her to lift the protective order on the grounds that it withheld public information from the public. Two categories of documents were at issue:

• Information about officers’ complaint histories — the nature of the complaint, co-accused officers, and the ultimate disposition of the complaint — derived from Chicago Police Department databases.

• Investigative files — known as “complaint registers” or CRs — containing the full record of the investigations undertaken in response to complaints.

In an eloquent opinion, Lefkow ruled in my favor. “Without such information,” she wrote, “the public would be unable to supervise the individuals and institutions it has entrusted with the extraordinary authority to arrest and detain people against their will. With so much at stake, defendants simply cannot be allowed to operate in secrecy.”

The city immediately moved to stay her order pending appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. On appeal, my position was joined by a majority of the Chicago City Council and major media organizations.

In 2009, a three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit overruled Lefkow in a harshly anti-press decision. She had erred, they ruled, in allowing me to intervene at all. They did not, however, reach the merits of the argument regarding public access to police disciplinary files.

A footnote in the opinion stated that their decision did not bar me from seeking the same documents under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. Represented by Loevy & Loevy, the People’s Law Office, as well as the Mandel Clinic, we took the court up on the invitation. Over seven years, we waged a legal campaign that culminated in the 2014 decision of the Illinois Court of Appeals in Kalven v. Chicago, holding that documents relating to allegations of police misconduct are public information in Illinois.

Heat map of Chicago police misconduct allegations. Map: Invisible Institute

Citizens Police Data Project

Following the decision in Kalven v. Chicago, the Invisible Institute incorporated as a nonprofit organization, engaged in sustained fundraising, and staffed up, in order to respond to the historic opportunity presented by the release of information long hidden behind a wall of official secrecy.

In contrast to many news organizations that would have treated such a trove of information as proprietary and harvested it for stories, our commitment from the start was to make the information universally available to the public. In one sense, we could have fulfilled that commitment by posting Excel spreadsheets, but that would have only served a small number of users.

The court had articulated a principle: Police disciplinary records belong to the public. That principle, however, was not self-executing. The Invisible Institute undertook the task of operationalizing transparency. For the last few years, a team of programmers, designers, and data scientists, coordinated by my Invisible Institute colleague Rajiv Sinclair, has been pursuing that objective. The result is the Citizens Police Data Project.

Soon after the Kalven decision came down, we were confronted with a legal counterattack by the police unions — the Fraternal Order of Police representing rank-and-file officers and several other unions representing supervisory personnel. They sought to block the city from releasing the police disciplinary documents on the grounds that such a release would violate their contracts, which provide that all files related to investigations of misconduct will be destroyed five years after the date of the complaint. A judge sympathetic to the union position imposed a temporary injunction limiting the city to releasing police disciplinary data for the previous four years.

Constrained by the injunction, we launched a limited preview of CPDP in 2015. Almost immediately, journalists, researchers, and lawyers made use of the data for their purposes. Beyond its utility to particular sets of users, CPDP served as a biopsy of the system, a statistical portrait of impunity, and a demonstration of how the Chicago Police Department goes about not connecting the dots about patterns of human rights abuse they have the means to identify.

Two weeks after the launch, the city released the video of the police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. In the political firestorm that ensued, CPDP provided critical context in the political firestorm that ensued, demonstrating with the police department’s own data how deficient the systems for investigating misconduct complaints are.

The impact of CPDP was not a matter of “big data” that promises to yield an algorithm for curbing police abuse. Rather, it resided precisely in its publicness. It served to disable the rhetorical use of official secrecy (“If you knew what we know … ”) and create the conditions for the ongoing debate about police reform in Chicago to be conducted with reference to a common body of evidence.

After a two-year legal battle, we ultimately prevailed over the police unions. Although it delayed release of the data we are making public today, that legal controversy also served to consolidate the precedent of the Kalven decision. We recognize, though, that this will be an ongoing struggle. We do not take the level of transparency that has been achieved for granted. We expect renewed legal and legislative attacks.

This litigation history has implications for efforts to achieve comparable transparency elsewhere, notably New York. For decades, the city of Chicago, the police department, and the police unions argued that various horrible consequences would ensue if officer names were made public — officers would be targeted, their families harassed, the security of police operations undermined, etc. In the three years since we made the first limited release of police disciplinary information, nothing of that nature has been reported.

The greatly expanded data set we release today powerfully corroborates three major patterns that emerged from the more limited data we released in 2015:

First, the data reveals a system pervaded by racial bias. Virtually anywhere you enter the data, you encounter sharp racial disparities. For example, those filing complaints are predominantly black, yet black people are dramatically underrepresented in cases of proven abuse. Perhaps most telling, racial disparities in the use of force have significantly increased over the last decade, even as Chicago’s black population has declined.

Second, excessive force complaints rarely result in discipline. Out of more than 8,700 excessive force claims from January 2007 to June 2016, investigators sustained only 1.5 percent of complaints. Nearly 74 percent of these complaints were filed by African-Americans.

Finally, it’s important to note that police abuse is a highly patterned phenomenon. Among officers who served at least a year between 2000 and 2016, 57 percent have fewer than five complaints, and 78 percent have fewer than 10. The 22 percent of officers who have 10 or more complaints account for 64 percent of all complaints during that period. Yet officers with the most complaints are less likely to be disciplined.

Articles by Rob Arthur and Andrew Fan published today describe other takeaways from the data. In the coming weeks, we will publish stories on individual officers and groups of officers that will demonstrate the power and utility of CPDP in the service of investigative reporting.

The expanded data set allows for new forms of analysis. It makes it possible to follow individual officers and cohorts of officers through their entire careers and do network analysis. In our excitement about these possibilities, it’s critically important to also recognize the limitations of the data — as the forensic statistician Patrick Ball puts it, “the silences in the data.” There is a large ghost phenomenon of individuals who feel they have had an abusive encounter with the police, but do not file a formal complaint. Recognizing the necessarily fragmentary nature of the data is the key to making effective use of it and developing strategies for investigating that which it does not reveal.

Central to the practice of the Invisible Institute is attention to the human context of the data. The patterns that emerge from the aggregate data are most illuminating when joined to other knowledge acquired through on-the-ground reporting. CPDP is thus best understood not only as a database but as a human rights archive — a collection of stories that Chicago residents, mostly from marginalized communities, told government officials in seeking redress for what they felt to be abuses of power. Every data point is a story.

Top photo: An interactive map showing police misconducts in Chicago.

The post Invisible Institute Relaunches the Citizens Police Data Project appeared first on The Intercept.

Yet there is little public data about most officers involved in fatal shootings, thanks in large part to the dedicated efforts of police unions. New data obtained by the Invisible Institute reveals that nearly a third — 29 percent — of Chicago’s shootings between January 2004 and March 2016 were committed by only 130 officers. Compared with a random sample of 1,000 CPD officers, these cops often exhibited troubling patterns of behavior before their shootings, including increasing counts of citizen complaints and uses of force. About 23 percent of those shootings could be predicted — and potentially prevented — by software widely used among police departments.

In 2009, the Invisible Institute sued the city of Chicago to obtain information on selected, high-complaint officers. After a long court battle in which the Fraternal Order of Police stepped in to raise objections, the court sided with the Invisible Institute, establishing a precedent that the data should be made publicly available. Subsequent requests acquired a complete duty roster of all officers in the department, their complaint histories, and use of force reports from January 2004 to March 2016.

Previous press reports from VICE News and the Washington Post have shown that police shootings are extremely rare for most officers. “If you have two in a 20- or 25-year career, you’re already an outlier,” said Mark Iris, a former member of Chicago’s civilian oversight board. In cities with lower rates of police shootings like New York, a roomful of officers might contain only one who had been involved in a shooting. But the Invisible Institute’s data reveals that for a handful of officers, shootings are all too common.

According to the Invisible Institute data, while more than 95 percent of all Chicago police officers never fired their gun from 2004 to 2016, 130 officers have done it more than once. At the upper extreme, 24 cops have participated in three or more shootings.

“It is important to not equate officer-involved shootings … with misconduct,” wrote Scott Wolfe, a professor of criminology at Michigan State University. “The officer may be placed in assignments or called out to particular situations because his/her colleagues know he/she is capable of handling dangerous situations.” But a large number of shootings can be indicative of problematic conduct. “When we have officers that have a high number of OIS compared to their colleagues, it provides reason to look deeper at the behavior,” Wolfe said. Many of the officers involved in two or more shootings also show troubling indicators in other ways. The 130 officers in this group tended to have citizen complaints filed against them at about twice the rate of other cops. And while any individual complaint may not be indicative of misconduct, these officers were also the subject of civil lawsuits requiring payouts twice as high as other officers, according to data gathered by the Chicago Reporter.

The most frequent shooter identified by the Invisible Institute’s data was a Chicago beat cop primarily assigned to the South Side 7th District named Gildardo Sierra. Sierra shot a record six people over the course of his 13 years in the department, a rate of fire almost 100 times higher than the departmental average. Two of those shootings attracted widespread media attention and later drew significant payouts from the city, totaling more than $7 million. In one case, Sierra admitted to drinking before his shift, during which he shot and killed an unarmed man named Flint Farmer. Sierra later resigned from the Chicago Police Department and subsequently took a job as a police officer in a nearby suburb’s parks department.

Sierra did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Cops like Sierra are often exonerated by oversight boards. The Chicago Police Department suspended Sierra for a grand total of six days for the 46 different allegations against him in seven separate complaints, finding that his actions conformed to departmental policy in every instance but two. Iris said that officers like Sierra can often skate by because the board could only consider each incident in isolation, without examining an officer’s past history, thanks to union and departmental regulations. Without that information, evaluators focused on a single instance may miss a troubling pattern of behavior. “In investigating police misconduct, the general pattern is to look at the tree, not the forest,” Iris said.

The Fraternal Order of Police insisted upon a provision in its most recent contract with the Chicago Police Department requiring the destruction of complaint records after five years to prevent their use in disciplinary hearings. Previous contracts have contained similar provisions. (The Invisible Institute prevailed in litigation requiring the department to turn over past complaint records despite those provisions.)

Like other repeat shooters, Sierra’s incidents occurred in a cluster. The two shootings for which successful civil suits were filed were separated by only five months. He was involved in a third shooting just three months before he killed Farmer.

Chicago police officers with the highest number of complaints. Graphic: Invisible Institute

Patterns like Sierra’s are common among police shooters. Prior to a shooting, officers typically register complaint rates about twice as high as their colleagues, according to the Invisible Institute data. They are three times more likely to have been involved in another shooting in the last year, and more likely to have been in an incident requiring a payout from the city because of a civil lawsuit.

Police supervisors are charged with detecting runs of bad behavior like this and taking the affected cops off the streets. Research from the University of Chicago has shown that an officer under pressure, be it familial, professional, or otherwise, may be at greater risk to use unnecessary force, including lethal force. “These are things that good supervision could find and try to correct,” said Sam Walker, a professor emeritus of criminology at the University of Nebraska and a frequent consultant to police departments.

Immediate supervisors are sometimes biased or lack the time to track officer behavior, so 73 percent of large police departments use computerized systems to flag officers with unusually high levels of complaints or use of force. If a cop exceeds some threshold defined by the system — for example, a certain number of complaints in a six-month span — he is flagged by the system and sent to have counseling, training, or a conversation with a supervisor. The number of departments using systems like these has rapidly increased in the last two decades, in part because the Department of Justice recommends them. “Most large and mid-sized cities have early intervention systems of some kind, but many departments do not use them well,” Walker said.

The most advanced early-warning systems use dozens of variables measuring each officer’s behavior. Police might be at greater risk for trouble if they suffer a rash of citizen complaints against them, or if they make arrests that are later dismissed in court. Indicators ranging from a cop’s personal life to their financial history can predict their behavior, and good departments take everything possible into account to develop accurate methods to predict misconduct.

But Chicago has a long and troubled history with these kinds of programs. An early effort to implement such a system was met with resistance from the police union and scrapped within two years because of due process concerns. Later on, the police department tried again, but according to a Justice Department investigation in the wake of the Laquan McDonald shooting, the new early-warning procedure was riddled with flaws. In many cases, the system simply failed to flag problematic records. In 2007, a study cited by the DOJ investigation concluded that the algorithm failed to identify 90 percent of officers with multiple complaints. Sierra, despite his extensive record of previous shootings and complaints, never triggered one of Chicago’s early-warning algorithms, the “Behavioral Intervention System.”

Even when departments do receive warnings that an officer may be at risk, managers often fail to act on those warnings. A Department of Justice investigation concluded that Chicago’s “supervisors do not understand what they are supposed to do” when an officer is flagged by the early intervention system. Another supervisor characterized the system as “garbage going in so you got garbage going out.”

Even when an intervention system provides a supervisor with clear evidence of a pattern of misconduct, lieutenants and sergeants sometimes recommend no more than an in-person conversation with a supervisor, rather than a formal program of counseling or investigation into the officer’s fitness. Between the lack of accuracy in the system and the lack of action on the rare occasions it is triggered, it’s easy to see how repeat shooters might escape notice. “The system was designed not to work,” Walker said.

It’s impossible to know whether an automated system could have prevented the shootings these officers committed, but many cops displayed clear warning signs in advance. A relatively simple system, based on whether an officer had two or more complaints or three or more uses of force in the prior year, could have flagged about 23 percent of the officers as high risk before their shootings. Those officers could have been sent to counseling or otherwise prevented from being in a position to shoot.

Early intervention systems feature prominently in the draft consent decree released on July 27. The document gives the police department two years to implement an advanced early-warning system, one that considers indicators like complaints, uses of force, and prior shooting incidents. Given Chicago’s checkered history with such systems, it’s too soon to say whether the new reform effort will yield a functioning algorithm. The court will task an independent monitor with making sure the police department upholds the requirements of the decree. If that monitor can succeed in helping the Chicago Police Department build an effective early-warning system, it’s possible that hundreds of shootings could be prevented.

Top photo: Chicago police officers surround a police vehicle as they watch demonstrators protesting the fatal police shooting of Laquan McDonald December 18, 2015 in Chicago, Illinois.

The post 130 Chicago Officers Account for 29 Percent of Police Shootings appeared first on The Intercept.

The data shows not only police shootings, but also thousands of regular police uses of force over more than a decade — involving an average of 10 people every day — documenting cases in which officers tackled, tased, or used other types of force on civilians, nearly 90 percent of whom were people of color. The data provides a more detailed look at the pattern of unconstitutional force discovered by the Justice Department investigation that opened shortly after the release of the McDonald video.

In late July, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan announced their plan to fix the Chicago Police Department. The 225-page draft document provides a detailed proposal for police reform, to be overseen by a federal judge.

As the Chicago Police Department confronts a potentially decade-long reform process, a new trove of data obtained by the Invisible Institute, and presented as part of the Citizens Police Data Project, provides the one of the most comprehensive looks at a big city police department’s use of force. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, the Invisible Institute obtained more than 67,000 “tactical response reports,” covering uses of force by Chicago police officers against adults between late January 2004 and April 2016.

Officers complete these reports after incidents in which an officer uses serious force, such as a firearm or Taser, to subdue civilians they perceive to be resisting arrest or threatening others, or when a civilian is injured or claims they were injured by officers. Less serious types of force, such as handcuffing a suspect, do not typically require a form.

A Stark Racial Disparity in Use of Force

The data shows the scope of the problem facing the Chicago Police Department as it pursues wide-ranging reforms under the oversight of a federal judge. Across Chicago, most victims of officer uses of force were African-American, even in several neighborhoods where the residents are predominately white. Young black men were about 14 times more likely to experience a CPD use of force than young white men.

The Invisible Institute’s analysis also suggests that Chicago’s use-of-force tracking — a central part of the proposed reform — is seriously incomplete. Both experts and the data provided by CPD suggest that police officers frequently underreport uses of force against civilians, a fact that could make it more difficult for the department to determine whether reform efforts are succeeding.

CPD’s data shows that reported force is applied unevenly across Chicago. African-Americans, Hispanics, and whites each make up about a third of the city’s population, but police report using force on these groups at sharply different rates. Between 2005 and 2015, roughly 72 percent of all CPD uses of force targeted African-Americans. A further 15 percent involved Hispanics, and 10 percent involved whites. Similar disparities exist in Taser uses and shootings, though most reports involve officers tackling, punching, or using open-hand strikes on civilians.

The racial disparities in reported uses of force are even more noticeable among younger people. African-American men between ages 20 and 34 experience police uses of force at a rate roughly 14 times their white peers. Black women in the same age range were about 10 times more likely to experience force than young white women and twice more likely to experience force than young white men.

The reported number of people who experienced force remained fairly steady between 2005 and 2015, rising from roughly 3,900 to about 4,200 in 2011 and declining to about 3,500 in 2015. The proportion of police force used against African-Americans remained steady even as black Chicagoans made up an increasingly smaller portion of the city’s population.

The racial disparities in the police department’s use-of-force reports exist across the city, including in largely white neighborhoods. The Jefferson Park police district on Chicago’s far northwest side is home to many city workers and includes some of the only precincts in the city to back Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. Although African-Americans make up only 1 percent of the district’s population, they comprise 14 percent of the people who experienced police use of force.

In Chicago’s Near North Side community area, home to high-rise apartments and dozens of night spots, African-Americans make up just 9 percent of the population, but make up nearly 60 percent of those subject to use of force.

The Violence Adds Up

These everyday uses of force add up. Researchers have pointed to daily police abuses and physical misconduct as a major element in creating community mistrust. Sam Walker, a policing expert at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, says that excessive force can have a huge impact on community relations, pointing out that “it doesn’t have to be serious uses of force, where some guy is hit with a billy club and there’s blood or something. I think it’s the little stuff, just shoving someone around, shoving some kid up against the wall, or throwing him to the ground, or up against a patrol car.”

David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in racial profiling, points out that force disparities can have corrosive effects on communities. “If you are a black person or a Hispanic person, you know you’re disproportionately likely to face a use of force, [and] you’re going to actually hesitate to call the police in the first place — and you need them — which of course makes the whole neighborhood, the whole area, more dangerous.”

Harris cautions that Chicago’s racial disparities in force reports do not prove police discrimination on their own, warning that “disparities by themselves do not necessarily equate to, or are not the same as, discrimination.”

The Justice Department investigation of the Chicago police placed racial disparities in use of force in the context of other problematic policing it uncovered in Chicago’s minority communities, declaring that “the impact of these widespread constitutional violations, combined with unaddressed abusive and racially discriminatory conduct, have undermined the legitimacy of CPD and police-community trust in these communities.”

The racial divides exposed in the police department’s own data are a major factor in efforts to reform the police department. Yet policing experts and an analysis of the data also suggest that the CPD’s own reports provide an incomplete picture of when officers use force.

Multiple Justice Department investigations have uncovered serious underreporting of use of force in departments around the country, including in Cleveland, Seattle, and Baltimore. The department’s review of the Newark Police Department found that officers did not fill out force reports in 30 percent of incidents in which they described themselves using force in another form.

Experts agree that underreporting force is a concern. Walker warned that “officers aren’t necessarily either filing reports at all, or are filing reports that seriously misrepresent what happened.” Philip Stinson, a professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University, pointed out that uses of force involving arrests or serious injuries are harder to hide, since they usually require police to work alongside hospital or jail staff, but he added that when officers underreport or misrepresent their uses of force, “it’s not Taser stuff that I think is the stuff that they fudge, it’s just the run-of-the-mill, routine police violence.”

Chicago police officers nearly always arrest the people they use force on. Officers reported arresting a person after using force on them roughly 94 percent of the time.

Data from Chicago’s stop-and-frisk program raises questions about the reported rate of use of force in cases without arrests. A 2015 survey of 1,450 Chicagoans, conducted by Northwestern University professor Wesley Skogan, found that 14 percent of African-Americans and 20 percent of Hispanics who were stopped and frisked but not arrested by Chicago police officers went on to report experiencing force, including being shoved or pushed around. In 2014 alone, internal CPD records, obtained by the nonprofit Lucy Parsons Labs, show that the department stopped more than 445,000 African-Americans and more than 102,000 Hispanics who were not arrested. Projecting the rates from Skogan’s study onto the CPD’s data, that equates to roughly 62,000 stops involving African-Americans and 20,000 stops involving Hispanics where the police used some level of force. Although not all instances of shoving and pushing require an official use-of-force report, those figures are vastly higher than the CPD’s force records. In all of 2014, Chicago police officers reported using force on about 170 African-Americans and 50 Hispanics who they did not arrest.

The proposed reform agreement between Emanuel and Madigan outlines major changes in the department’s use-of-force reporting, requiring officers to report any force “that is reasonably expected to cause pain or an injury,” versus current rules that require reporting for clear injuries but not for causing pain. These changes would bring Chicago closer to other cities whose departments have undergone intensive reforms overseen by a judge.

The proposed reform plan also requires the department to audit its use-of-force reports for inaccuracies and to search for trends in the department’s force data. The plan does not explicitly require the department to search for underreporting or missing use-of-force reports, beyond asking officers to notify a supervisor if a fellow officer does not file one.

Harris argues that missing and inaccurate uses of force are a vital concern as Chicago tries to gauge the impact of a wide range of use-of-force reforms. “It should be top of mind, absolutely top of mind in any agreement, and any agreement should include consideration of how well the current system is or is not working,” Harris said.

The 2017 Justice Department report sharply criticized the Chicago police, calling out a “culture in which officers expect to use force and never be carefully scrutinized about the propriety of that use.” Now, as Chicago’s leaders prepare to confront that entrenched police culture, they face not only the challenge of tackling the gaping racial disparities in CPD’s reported use of force, but also the question of whether those reports even capture the true scope of force used by the department’s officers.

Top photo: This frame grab from police body cam video provided by the Chicago Police Department shows authorities trying to apprehend a suspect, center, who appeared to be armed, Saturday, July 14, 2018, in Chicago. The suspect was fatally shot by police during the confrontation.

The post Chicago Police Are 14 Times More Likely to Use Force Against Young Black Men Than Against Whites appeared first on The Intercept.

Many of the most egregious examples of police misconduct arise from tightly knit groups of officers like these. That’s no accident. Recently released data from the Chicago police department shows that misconduct spreads from officer to officer like an infectious disease. And the same behavior that leads cops to violate the rules often predicts whether they will participate in a shooting.

In 2009, the Invisible Institute sued the city of Chicago to reveal in-depth information on the complaint histories of selected Chicago police officers. After a drawn-out legal battle, the Invisible Institute prevailed and acquired the complaint histories of all officers since 1988. They then processed, standardized, and augmented that data with information on police shootings, uses of force, and a complete duty roster of all officers. In total, the data covers more than 30,000 officers and almost 23,000 complaints between 2000 and 2018.

Because complaints can list multiple officers at once, it’s possible to determine that more than one cop was present at the scene at the same time. Complaints listing multiple officers link those cops together, and by assembling thousands of officers across tens of thousands of complaints, it’s possible to build a giant social network of police interactions.

Evolving social network of Officer Raymond Piwnicki.

About 1,300 of Chicago’s cops fall into clusters of linked police officers who together have been the subject of at least 100 citizen complaints against them. The list of police within this group reads like a Who’s Who of Chicago police misconduct: From Jerome Finnigan, who led a corrupt unit of cops and plotted to kill a fellow officer, to Raymond Piwnicki, who harassed black citizens using racist language. Officers within this group show not only higher rates of complaints, but also participate in more uses of force and even more shootings. On its own, such a pattern could simply mean that these particular officers are more likely to be street cops or assigned to high-crime divisions. But these central officers are also more than five times as likely to figure in an incident that results in a civil payout by the city for misconduct, according to data on lawsuits involving police officers gathered by the Chicago Reporter.

Within police departments, it’s often well-known that some cops break the rules. In the Chicago Police Department, it was an “open secret” that Burge and his crew extracted confessions using illegal means. Far less serious conduct, such as a reputation for pushing the boundaries, can also get around. Seth Stoughton, a former police officer turned college professor at the University of South Carolina, said “I learned that some, maybe one or two officers when I was [on the force], tended to do things right at the edge of what is acceptable procedure.”

Reputations like Stoughton’s colleagues in turn attract or repel other officers. For example, complaints tend to list officers with more similar use of force rates than if you were to pick officers at random from the department. That could be a result of cops seeking out assignments with others like them. Cops at the center of the Chicago network of 1,300 problem officers were about six times more likely than the department at large to work in one of Chicago’s gang units. Other cops who transferred to those units showed more use of force and greater total civil suit payouts than randomly selected officers. “It’s like magnets. And good officers don’t want to work with [bad ones], because they’ll get in trouble themselves,” said Sam Walker, a professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska and consultant to many police departments. Because high-complaint officers attract like-minded colleagues,  they tend to be surrounded within the network by others like them.

Officers prone to misconduct do more than draw in others like them. The data shows that they also may be teaching their colleagues bad habits. Using the Invisible Institute’s data I picked out all the more than 12,000 officers with low complaint rates before 2008 (the year the Independent Police Review Authority, a new police oversight board, became operational). Then I split those cops into two segments: the 863 who had been listed on a complaint with officers at the center of the network, and 12,815 who hadn’t. The officers who had been exposed to the contagious, misconduct-prone cops at the center of complaint networks went on to show complaint rates nine times higher over the next ten years than those who hadn’t.

Their behavior often escalates beyond complaints to more serious violence. The same cops who are exposed to other high complaint officers go on to be listed on four times as many uses of force per year in the next few years. They also commit shootings at rates more than five times higher than their colleagues who weren’t exposed to misbehaving officers.

Stoughton credited part of the infectious quality of misbehaving officers to the process of training young cops. While officers learn the rules of policing at the academy, the probationary period provides hands-on training in the first few months on the job. In that time, many of the procedures they were told to follow in the academy get discarded. “On their first day, every cop hears some variation of ‘Forget everything you learned at the academy’,” Stoughton said.

Bob Verry, a retired police chief and current internal affairs investigator in New Jersey, likened the process of learning misconduct to the “broken windows” theory of policing, in which small violations escalate to larger and larger crimes. “Officers start out with minor things — forgetting their tie clip — and then that becomes forgetting to shine their shoes. … They get away with one punch during an arrest and it just goes on from there,” Verry said.

The data is rich with examples of young officers whose trajectories bent toward misconduct after exposure to bad influences. One rookie cop joined the department in 2001 and was assigned to the 9th police district, on the South Side of the city, after training. In his first three years, he received two complaints; both times, he was exonerated.

In 2004, just after completing his third year on the job, that officer was accused of using excessive force. He was listed on the complaint with four other officers, two of whom had multiple other complaints to their names. From that point on, his complaint rate skyrocketed. Citizens filed several allegations against him over the next five years. His use-of-force rate increased as well, from less than two per year to six in 2014. That officer was Jason Van Dyke, who shot Laquan McDonald that same year and is now on trial for McDonald’s murder.

In theory, patterns of bad behavior like Van Dyke’s should be detected and corrected by supervisors. Complaints by civilians and other officers should trigger official investigations, and officers beset by numerous allegations should be sent to counseling or suspended. But the departmental investigation process is dysfunctional, and the vast majority of civilian complaints do not yield any discipline for the accused officer. When complaints are filed by other cops, discipline is much more likely, but according to data obtained by the Invisible Institute, officers at the center of the network are less likely than others to have complaints filed against them by other cops. The “blue wall of silence,” the tendency among cops to protect their own, appears to safeguard these officers more than others.

“We know that officers who are more in tune [with] or endorse the code of silence … are also more likely to use force, and less likely to use communication in interactions with the public,” said Scott Wolfe, a criminologist at Michigan State University, referring to published research. “They’re more likely to pull a gun and more likely to shoot a gun.”

Using the same data from the Invisible Institute, researchers at the University of Southern California, Yale, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found in a working paper that networks of complaints and shootings can be used to tell that police violence is contagious. “Violence might spread when officers learn from each other scripts for trying to manage risky civilian encounters or encounters in which they lose control,” said Daria Roithmayr, a professor of law at USC and an author of the paper.

Previous results from two of the researchers had shown that violence behaved in a contagious fashion among citizens of Chicago. Without help or endorsement from those researchers, the Chicago police department used these results as the basis to build an algorithm that would predict which citizens were at higher risk of being involved in a shooting, and then contacted them to try to prevent that violence. The researchers believe that using the contagious nature of violence to target individuals — cops or citizens — is “extremely hard” and “just wouldn’t work well in practice.”

“Once we understand more about contagion, there might be implications for policymakers in terms of how police tasks are assigned or how police units are structured,” Roithmayr said. She cautioned, “There is much more to understand about contagion before we can begin meaningful policy prescription.” Currently, police departments do not formally take an officer’s social history into account when judging whether to reassign an officer or otherwise prevent them from engaging in misconduct. But Verry noted that internal affairs investigators typically look into the other officers on the scene of a complaint.

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan recently filed the draft of a legally binding document that would lay out a series of reforms for the Chicago Police Department to implement in the next few years. In this draft consent decree, one of the required improvements is that the department create a system to pick up on bad behavior before it becomes more serious. A required element for that system is the capacity “to identify group- and unit-level patterns of activity.” The special attention paid to identifying misconduct among cliques within the department suggests that the architects of the consent decree may be aware of the social nature of misbehavior exhibited by groups like Burge’s Midnight Crew.

Top photo: Police officer Jason Van Dyke arrives at the Leighton Criminal Court building in Chicago on Tuesday, Dec. 29, 2015. He plead not guilty in the shooting death of Laquan McDonald.

The post Bad Chicago Cops Spread Their Misconduct Like a Disease appeared first on The Intercept.

Viewed against the backdrop of the recently concluded trial of officer Jason Van Dyke for the murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, the release of the Hayes video is an occasion to ask what has and has not changed since the release of the McDonald video in the fall of 2015 precipitated a political upheaval and demands for reform.

At the time of the incident, Ricky Hayes was 19 years old, but apart from his height, everything about him was childlike. He is developmentally and intellectually disabled. He looks like a child and has the mind of a child. A ward of the state, he lives with a caretaker in a neighborhood on the far south side of the city.

According to his lawyer Gabriel Hardy, Hayes frequently sneaks out of the house and has a history of getting lost out in the city. At roughly 1:25 a.m. on August 13, 2017, his caretaker checked his room and found that he wasn’t there. She immediately called the police to report him missing. About half an hour later, police officers arrived. The caretaker filled out a missing person report and told the officers about Hayes’s disabilities.

In a civil suit against Muhammad and the city of Chicago, Hardy alleges that multiple surveillance cameras recorded Hayes as he wandered his neighborhood. Dressed in shorts, a short sleeve shirt, and sneakers, he can be seen skipping and singing to himself.

At about 5:00 a.m. Muhammad, who was off-duty and was driving his own pick-up truck, saw Hayes and began chasing him. At one point, he drove his truck up on the sidewalk within a few feet of Hayes. Frightened, the boy ran away. The officer continued the pursuit.

Eventually, Hayes stopped running and stood motionless with his hands at his sides on the front lawn of a house. What happened next was captured by a surveillance camera mounted on that house.

Muhammad pulled up and stopped roughly 20 feet from Hayes. Sitting in the cab of his truck, he opened fire with his service weapon, striking Hayes in his chest and arm. Wounded, Hayes again ran away. Muhammad pursued him in his truck, caught up with him, and ordered him to lie face down on the ground.

Muhammad then called 911 and requested an ambulance. I obtained an audio recording of the call through a Freedom of Information Act request. When the dispatcher asks what happened, Muhammad replies, “The guy pulled like he was about to pull a gun on me, walked up to the car, and I had to shoot.”

Audio from officer Khalil Muhammad’s 911 call after he shot Ricky Hayes on August 13, 2017. Credit: Office of Emergency Management and Communications of the City of Chicago

On the recording, you can hear Hayes’s frightened screams in the background.

Muhammad later stated in his report on the incident that he shot Hayes because the teen posed an imminent threat of battery.

Hayes’s gunshot wounds were relatively minor. It is not clear whether he was shot twice or if a single bullet did damage to both his chest and arm. He was treated at a nearby hospital and released. The psychological damage, says Hardy, has been enduring, requiring repeated psychiatric hospitalizations since the shooting.

The incident occurred over a year ago. How have various institutions — the Chicago Police Department, the city, COPA, and the State’s Attorney — responded? The institutional response to the Laquan McDonald incident has now been massively and minutely documented, revealing a concerted and immensely costly effort to sustain a patently false narrative about what has now been determined by a jury to be the police murder of a child. What has been learned? How have internal procedures and practices changed? Do institutional pathologies diagnosed in the aftermath of the McDonald revelations persist?

Unanswered Questions

On August 13, the Chicago Police Department issued a press release about the shooting under the letterhead of Superintendent Eddie Johnson:

Preliminary Statement on Police Involved Shooting

10000 block of S. Wood

CHICAGO – On Sunday, August 13, 2017, shortly before 6:00AM, an off-duty Chicago Police Sergeant observed a male subject behaving suspiciously on the 10000 block of S. Wood St. The Sergeant, who was in his personal vehicle at the time, began to question the individual who then became elusive and unresponsive. During questioning by the off-duty Sergeant, the encounter escalated prompting the Sergeant to discharge his service weapon, striking the individual in the arm. The man was transported to an area hospital where he was treated for his injuries and released. At this time, a weapon has not been recovered.

As is often the case in statements of this genre, the passive voice relieves the officer of agency and assigns it to the victim: “the encounter escalated prompting the Sergeant to discharge his service weapon.” The statement reflects the officer’s account of what happened, with one significant difference: It notes that no gun was found.

The day after the shooting, Johnson at a press conference essentially echoed the press release, stating that “Officer Muhammad continued to question the man, and the encounter escalated in some way which prompted the off-duty officer to discharge his weapon.”

In a departure from the customary practice of putting officers involved in shootings on desk duty for 30 days, the department stripped Muhammad of his police powers indefinitely.

“We still have,” Johnson observed, “many unanswered questions.”

Some of those questions may have been definitively answered by the surveillance video collected by COPA within days of the shooting. Yet the CPD was not moved to revise and update its “preliminary statement” in view of the new information. Whether by design or inattention, the original narrative — from the officer’s perspective — remains as the only account available to the public.

There is another telling phrase in the press release. The “male subject” is described not as aggressive but as “elusive and unresponsive.” Those are apt words perhaps to describe the behavior of an intellectually disabled child with limited powers of comprehension and expression, but they are hardly suggestive of a threat warranting the use of deadly force by the officer.

Soon after the Hayes incident, the issue of police use of force against people with disabilities was in the news, when the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit alleging that patterns of excessive force by the CPD are “magnified for people with disabilities” and that the city had not taken adequate steps to address this fundamental problem. According to the ACLU suit, an estimated 33 to 50 percent of those killed by the police in the United States have a disability and roughly 25 percent have a mental illness. Similar patterns, the suit argues, are apparent in nonlethal use of force by CPD officers. Situations, such as the Ricky Hayes case, in which people with disabilities are incapable of immediately complying with a police order often escalate unnecessarily. “When people with disabilities are subjected to CPD’s use of force,” argues the ACLU, “the role that their disability played is often either ignored or cited to blame the victim.”

A Confused Response

When the incident occurred, investigations of police-involved shootings were conducted by the Independent Police Review Authority, or IPRA, which was in the process of being reconstituted as COPA as part of the post-Laquan McDonald reforms. In both incarnations, the agency appears to have conducted a thorough, rigorous investigation, though it won’t be possible to know for sure until the investigative file is made public.

According to a source close to the investigation, Sharon Fairley, the chief administrator of IPRA at the time, was “mortified” when she saw the video and immediately referred the case to the Office of the State’s Attorney, which ultimately declined to bring criminal charges. There is a moment captured in the video when Hayes brings his hand close to his pocket. Given how difficult it is to successfully prosecute a police shooting case, this was, it appears, enough to deter the state’s attorney from bringing charges.

The most perplexing aspect of COPA’s management of the case is the fact that it did not release the video before now. In the aftermath of the controversy over suppression of the McDonald video for 13 months, the city adopted a policy that videos of police shootings are to be released within 60 days of the incident. This policy is widely viewed as inadequate. In any case, it was not followed in the Hayes case.

Gabriel Hardy describes a confusing sequence of interactions with COPA. Initially, the agency was disposed to release the video and other information about the case. Then, in a reversal, it took the position that the video could not be released. This was dictated by the City Law Office, which took the position that Hayes, although 19, should be regarded as a juvenile due to his disability and the fact that he is in foster care. More recently, COPA told Hardy that it could not release the video because of a “concurrent investigation,” an apparent reference to the Police Board review that follows a COPA recommendation that an officer be disciplined. And now COPA is about to release the video.

Does this history reflect an effort to suppress the video by the city? It’s difficult to say. What it clearly reveals is the constraints imposed on COPA by the City Law Office and the Police Board. Moreover, it demonstrates the incoherence of the current policy on video release. The flaws in that policy were dramatically illustrated over the summer in connection with the fatal police shooting of a man named Harith Augustus. Within 24 hours, the CPD released video that reinforced the official narrative by showing that Augustus was armed. It took a lawsuit to force the release a month later of additional video that revealed problematic details of the police encounter with Augustus. Dashcam video captures the officer who shot Augustus telling his sergeant that Augustus pulled a gun on him, and falsely stating that Augustus had fired at the police. Other video footage shows another officer removing Augustus’s gun from his holster as he lays on the ground.

The de facto policy is thus that the CPD releases video when it serves its purposes, while COPA’s aspirations to robust transparency are too often frustrated by other agencies with which it interfaces. The issue transcends the release of videos. The city of Chicago is at the threshold of committing to a consent decree that will govern police reform going forward. A robust and proactive transparency policy is a necessary condition if we are to realize the historic opening for fundamental, enduring change that is at hand. Access to the public information necessary to monitor and hold accountable government officials cannot be left to the discretion of those officials.

Update: October 16, 2018, 7:49 p.m. EDT

This article has been updated with the video footage of Chicago police officer Khalil Muhammad shooting Ricky Hayes. 

The post Chicago Finally Releases Video of Police Officer Shooting Unarmed and Disabled Ricky Hayes appeared first on The Intercept.

As police converged on the scene, Servin told his fellow officers that he had asked Boyd and her friends to quiet down as he drove out of the alley next to his house. According to Servin, a man in the group, Antonio Cross, responded by pointing a gun at him. Servin then fired five shots over his shoulder from inside his car. One hit Cross’s hand. Another hit Boyd, who fell to the ground.

Ambulances rushed both victims to the hospital while detectives prepared charges against Cross. Officers, including a canine team, spread out to look for the gun Servin claimed he had seen. Meanwhile, Servin freely wandered the scene, talking with a succession of detectives and police supervisors.

Soon, a deputy chief named Eddie Johnson took command of the crowd of officers outside Servin’s house. As the designated on-call incident commander, Johnson assumed responsibility for the department’s initial investigation of the shooting. The OCIC is a central part of the department’s response to police shootings, operating at the scene “with the authority of the superintendent of police,” according to Chicago Police Department regulations.

Johnson faced a difficult task. The first hours after the shooting were marked by conflicting accounts from Servin and multiple civilian witnesses. The undisputed facts of the case were also disturbing: An off-duty officer had shot an unarmed woman in the head. And he had fired into a group of civilians, typically a violation of department rules.

Yet Johnson and the officers under his direct command proceeded to make a number of troubling decisions. In the days after the shooting, witnesses told investigators that Servin appeared to have been drinking. When asked several months after the shooting if he had been drinking that night, Servin told a film crew, “That’s my damn business.” Police investigators waited six hours to administer a blood alcohol test.

Detectives also discovered cameras mounted on Servin’s house that looked directly over the scene of the shooting. When Servin said the cameras didn’t work, instead of insisting on inspecting them or obtaining a search warrant, detectives dropped the matter, eventually asking him to sign an affidavit swearing that the cameras were inoperable.

Detectives also quickly uncovered evidence that Cross had been unarmed. Civilian witnesses denied that Cross had a weapon, and although there was a trail of blood and dashcam footage clearly showing Cross’s path after the shooting, police were unable to find a gun. Despite these findings, police asked prosecutors to charge Cross with felony assault and issued a press release falsely claiming that Servin had fired only after Cross began to “approach him with a handgun” and “pointed the weapon in the direction of the detective.”

At 10:40 a.m., about nine hours after the shooting, Johnson concluded his initial investigation into Servin’s use of force and endorsed the detective’s account in his official use of force report. “Based on the facts available at this time, Officer Servin acted in compliance with department policy,” he wrote, approving Servin’s decision to open fire. “Officer Servin fired his weapon at the offender after the offender pointed a firearm at Officer Servin.” Johnson did not check the box in his report that would have recommended the case for further investigation. The official use of force report Johnson signed never mentioned Rekia Boyd.

Boyd died the next day. In the weeks that followed, the official police narrative unraveled. Search teams never found Cross’s alleged gun at the scene. Cross also continued to insist that he had been holding only his cellphone. Five people eventually testified that he was unarmed that night. Police dashcam video also shows that Cross flagged down a police car within moments of the shooting. “I wanted police to catch the person who shot me,” he later testified. Within a week, 200 protesters rallied in Douglas Park, and Boyd’s case helped fuel a national movement to end police violence against black women. Eventually, prosecutors dropped charges against Cross, and the city paid Boyd’s family a $4.5 million settlement. Servin was eventually indicted for involuntary manslaughter, but charges were abruptly dismissed after a judge ruled that prosecutors should have charged him with murder.

On November 23, 2015 — three and a half years after the shooting — Superintendent Garry McCarthy initiated the process of firing Servin. Less than 24 hours later, faced with a court order, his department also released video footage of the police killing of Laquan McDonald.

That grainy dashcam footage of Officer Jason Van Dyke firing 16 shots into a teenager upended Chicago, sending thousands of protesters into the streets. Mayor Rahm Emanuel fired McCarthy and delivered an emotional speech, in which he apologized for McDonald’s death and acknowledged the existence of a police “code of silence” — a stunning admission in a city where the political establishment has long paid deference to the police. Emanuel promised that the CPD’s next leader would be a transformational figure, declaring that he was “looking for a new leader for the Chicago Police Department to address the problems at the very heart of the policing profession.”

Four months later, Emanuel announced his choice: Eddie Johnson, the 27-year police veteran who had approved Rekia Boyd’s shooting as a justified use of force.

A Pattern of Unlawful Force

In early 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a comprehensive report on the Chicago Police Department, concluding an investigation opened in the aftermath of the Laquan McDonald video release. Finding a “pattern of unlawful force” by officers, the DOJ declared that “the failure to review and investigate officer use of force has helped create a culture in which officers expect to use force and not be questioned about the need for or propriety of that use.”

Craig Futterman, a civil rights attorney and law professor at the University of Chicago Law School who helped lead a lawsuit that sought to force the CPD to undergo court-monitored reform, said that Johnson’s actions on the night of Rekia Boyd’s shooting could be described as “investigation as cover-up.”

“My assessment is that he did indeed in this case endorse a false report in affirmatively writing and documenting, despite the absence of evidence of a gun, that this is a justified shooting because the person had been pointing a gun,” Futterman said.

At least one CPD official has been punished for making a similar decision: Chicago’s inspector general recommended that Deputy Chief David McNaughton be fired in part for signing off on a false use of force form in the killing of Laquan McDonald. McNaughton quietly retired soon after.

In an interview with CBS Chicago shortly after his selection as superintendent, Johnson insisted that he could direct Chicago’s police reforms, declaring, “I’ve actually never encountered police misconduct, ’cause you got to understand, officers that commit misconduct don’t do it in front of people that they think are going to hold them accountable for it.”

The statement was widely mocked, with one columnist questioning whether the superintendent had “come down with a case of temporary misconduct blindness.” But few publicly considered another explanation for the baffling statement — that Johnson was telling the truth and saw shootings like Boyd’s not as misconduct, but as acceptable police procedure.

In fact, the Rekia Boyd case was not an aberration. An investigation of Johnson’s record, drawing on documents obtained by the Invisible Institute via litigation and included in the Citizens Police Data Project, shows that he repeatedly approved police shootings or ignored allegations of excessive force over his years as a supervisor, consistently finding that they did not qualify as misconduct.

Dante Servin’s use of force report from the night of Rekia Boyd’s shooting. Servin did not mention Boyd in his report. Eddie Johnson approved Servin’s decision to use force about nine hours after the shooting.

In a decade as a senior CPD supervisor, Johnson personally investigated or commanded the officers responsible for six controversial shootings that left five people dead — all young African-Americans — and cost Chicago more than $13 million in misconduct payments. Moreover, Johnson’s tenure as commander of Chicago’s 6th Police District from 2008 to 2011 was marred by serious allegations of misconduct by an elite tactical squad led by a scandal-plagued lieutenant named Glenn Evans. During six months in 2010, members of the roughly 45-person team participated in the fatal shootings of three men, all unarmed or fleeing. During the same period, the entire rest of the CPD killed four people. Another of Johnson’s officers was credibly accused of killing a teenager and planting a gun on his body. After his promotion to deputy chief in 2011, Johnson reviewed and approved more disputed shootings, including the killing of Boyd and a case in which an officer fatally shot a teenager in the back. Johnson was recently called to testify in that final case, but otherwise neither Johnson nor Emanuel has ever acknowledged the superintendent’s involvement in some of the department’s most notorious recent police shootings.

Johnson’s history in the department raises troubling questions about the future of police reform in Chicago. Although Emanuel has announced that he won’t be seeking re-election, he will nonetheless wield considerable power over Chicago’s new police oversight agreement during his remaining half-year in office. Emanuel also appointed Johnson with the unanimous approval of Chicago’s City Council, circumventing the official process and ignoring two outside reformers carefully vetted by Chicago’s Police Board. No politician or newspaper raised the issue of Johnson’s involvement in some of the department’s most notorious scandals. Can a man whose career embodies the CPD’s failure to rigorously review and investigate officers’ use of force — the unlawful pattern the recent Department of Justice report placed at the center of the reform agenda — transform the department?

A Guideline and Nothing More

Johnson first took charge of Chicago’s 6th District in March 2008. The predominately African-American district stretches from blocks along West 79th Street that rank among the city’s poorest to the tidy, middle-class bungalows of Chatham that have been home to generations of the city’s black political, business, and civic leaders.

Johnson had risen quickly through the ranks of the CPD. Just a year earlier, he had been a sergeant, a position that typically directs up to a few dozen officers. As a district commander, he was now responsible for approximately 350 police officers serving 105,000 residents.

As the CPD — like departments nationwide — places increasing emphasis on data-driven policing, its commanders face relentless pressure to produce good numbers: high arrest figures and declining reports of crimes. Upon assuming his new post, Johnson made changes, picking a new leader for his tactical team. Such teams — usually composed of roving plainclothes officers — handle more aggressive police work, serving warrants and targeting high-crime corners. The size of the tactical team varied slightly over time, but typically there were between 40 and 45 officers. Assignment to a tactical team is often a step up for patrol officers, but it also brings extra risks. Johnson chose a hard-charging lieutenant named Glenn Evans to lead his tactical team.

“These kinds of units are almost by definition likely to be involved in more use of force incidents,” said Sam Walker, a policing expert from the University of Nebraska who consults with police departments, including the CPD. “Departments have to take special precautions in terms of clear policies, much closer supervision, than would be the case with just regular patrol units.”

Many officers and residents respected Evans’s dedication to police work — he was known to sleep in his office and patrolled the streets alongside his officers — but he also racked up dozens of complaints and several lawsuits as he rose through the ranks. A formal investigation into a 2005 complaint by Evans’s ex-girlfriend found that he called her a “whore” and damaged her car. The city also paid a nearly $100,000 settlement after a partially paralyzed city worker accused Evans of beating him up. Those cases were not outliers. A report on 1,500 CPD officers compiled by a former epidemiologist and obtained by WBEZ showed that Evans garnered more excessive force complaints than any other officer between 1988 and 2008.

In a sworn deposition taken in 2015, Evans displayed a cavalier attitude toward CPD procedures, declaring that “department orders are a guideline and nothing more.”

Johnson knew Evans long before he moved him to the tactical team. Early in their careers, the two served together as patrolmen in the 6th District. Both were also among the small number of black officers in the CPD’s upper ranks. Johnson explained his support for Evans in a 2017 deposition: “He had a reputation as being a good aggressive officer.”

Evans’s approach to policing soon triggered a backlash, and allegations of excessive force began to swirl around his tactical team as a cadre of younger officers with lengthy complaint records joined the squad. Among the new additions was Jason Landrum, who had shot three people in five years, including a man he shot in the stomach after his partner handcuffed him to a fence.

The new officers appear to have had a major impact on the squad. By mid-2011, toward the end of Johnson’s tenure as commander, officers serving on his tactical team had received an average of seven complaints each over the previous three years, a 70 percent increase from when he took over the district and four times that of the average CPD officer.

A string of lawsuits accompanied the complaints. The city paid a settlement of nearly $500,000 after allegations that a 6th District officer shoved a man down a flight of stairs — fracturing his leg — and a tactical officer shot his dog. A nearly $41,000 settlement followed allegations that tactical officers handcuffed a man with a heart condition and then tased him twice, and a $60,000 settlement came after a man alleged that tactical officers illegally searched him and then harassed him after he filed a complaint. A woman named Rita King alleged that Evans fractured her nose inside the 6th District headquarters, repeatedly telling her, “I’m going to push your nose through your brain.” The city of Chicago paid King $100,000 to settle her case.

Beyond the lawsuits, Johnson reviewed many of the formal complaints in his capacity as commander. In one case, a woman accused Evans of unjustly shooting her dog. Investigators cleared Evans despite acknowledging that all five non-police witnesses had provided accounts that “drastically contradict” Evans’s explanation of the shooting. Johnson affirmed that the shooting was justified.

The growing stream of brutality complaints and lawsuits against the tactical team reached its peak in 2010, when tactical officers were involved in three fatal shootings — all of which killed young men who were unarmed or fleeing — in just six months.

The first took place in July, when two tactical officers approached a young black motorist named William Hope Jr., who was parked outside of a Popeyes around lunchtime. According to the officers, Hope responded by trying to run over one of the officers with his car. The officer’s partner then fired four shots, fatally wounding the 24-year-old.

A lawsuit brought by Hope’s family presented a starkly different account. On the witness stand, one of the officers admitted that Hope’s car had been moving at three miles per hour, matching eyewitnesses who claimed that Hope presented no danger to the officers. Ultimately, the jury ruled that the shooting was unjustified and awarded Hope’s family over $4.5 million. The verdict also ordered the officers to present the case to police recruits as an example of bad policing.

Less than two months later, officers took off in pursuit of a motorist named Garfield King. King had fled a routine traffic stop, worried that officers would find his illegal gun. The multi-car pursuit ended in a collision between King’s vehicle and a police car. King’s car caught fire, and two officers suffered fractured bones. Seven officers, including three tactical officers and two 6th District patrolmen, then opened fire, killing King and wounding his girlfriend, one of three unarmed passengers who had been trying to convince King to surrender. She later told investigators that King never tried to use the gun. The officers who chased King and fired 30 shots into his car knew only that he had fled a traffic stop.

Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority, or IPRA, ruled the shooting justified, but the department’s policy at the time stated that “when confronted with an oncoming vehicle and that vehicle is the only force used against them, sworn members will move out of the vehicle’s path.” The Department of Justice later raised concerns about shootings of motorists as well, pointing out that “shooting at a moving vehicle is inherently dangerous and almost always counterproductive.”

Troubling details also emerged about the third tactical team shooting, when tactical officer Tracey Williams shot and killed Ontario Billups in December 2010. Williams claimed that Billups menaced her with a dark object, possibly a handgun. Investigators eventually confirmed that Billups was unarmed. The dark object Williams saw was likely a plastic bag of marijuana. The city paid Billups’s family $500,000 to avoid a trial.

Reached by phone, Glenn Evans said that both his lawyer and the CPD superintendent’s office, “told me not to speak, but I will until they give me a direct order not to.” Evans proceeded to defend his officers, highlighting a 2010 case in which a suspect opened fire on tactical officers, including Evans. Officers resolved the situation peacefully. “We were able to talk it out. … We didn’t beat anyone up, we didn’t torture anyone, we didn’t abuse anyone.”

Evans said that the officers involved in the three fatal shootings in 2010 were “exceptional officers, exceptionally decorated … extremely good officers.” When asked about the names of the three men killed by his officers — Ontario Billups, William Hope Jr., and Garfield King — Evans said, “I don’t even know who these guys are.”

Chicago Police officers serving on the 6th District Tactical Team in May 2011. Graphic: Invisible Institute

The killings of Billups, Hope, and King within a six-month period by members of a single squad of 45 officers was highly unusual. During the second half of 2010, the other members of the CPD — nearly 13,000 officers — killed just four people. “If [a tactical squad] has more of these incidents compared with other tactical squads, there’s an obvious issue there related to supervision,” said Walker, the policing expert.

Commanders are generally “very aware” of misconduct investigations involving their officers and have wide authority over their tactical teams, said Robert Lombardo, a 30-year CPD veteran who later served as deputy chief of the Cook County Sheriff’s Police Department and is now a criminal justice professor at Loyola University Chicago. “If they have a personal concern, as they’re called, you put them back in uniform. You take them off the TACT team,” he said. “They have no right to the TACT team, it’s not in the contract. You serve at the pleasure of the commander, so if he doesn’t like the way you’re working, you go back in uniform and he puts someone else there.”

Following the fatal shootings, none of the officers were moved off the squad or off the street. Nor was Evans, their supervisor, reassigned, choices that had serious consequences. Over the next five years, the seven 6th District officers who fired shots in the three fatal shootings would open fire another eight times — nearly 30 times the CPD average. Those subsequent shootings, many in the 6th District, wounded four people and left 19-year-old Niko Husband dead.

The officer who shot Husband was Marco Proano, a non-tactical officer who had also fired shots in the killing of Garfield King. Proano was one of a number of regular patrol officers accused of serious misconduct while serving under Eddie Johnson.

Proano killed Husband outside a South Side dance hall in July 2011. Officers claimed that the teenager was holding a young woman hostage and brandishing a gun. The same woman testified in court that she was a childhood friend of Husband’s and that the two had been hugging when the officers approached. She also denied that her friend had a gun. A jury awarded Husband’s family $3.5 million after a trial in which the family’s lawyer alleged that Proano and two other officers had planted a gun on Husband’s body after killing him. Under Johnson, Proano was not punished. The CPD instead awarded him a medal for valor for the shooting.

In November 2017, a federal jury convicted Proano on charges of using excessive force for firing multiple shots into a car full of unarmed black teenagers, injuring two, while on patrol in the 6th District in 2013, after Johnson had left his role as commander. Charges against Proano came after a retiring judge in a criminal case involving one of the teenagers leaked video of him shooting into the car to the Chicago Reporter, calling Proano’s actions one of the worst things he’d seen in over 30 years as a judge and public defender. He told the Reporter that “I’ve seen lots of gruesome, grisly crimes, but this is disturbing on a whole different level.”

Proano’s shooting of Husband was one of four controversial shootings by non-tactical officers working in the 6th District under Johnson. These cases included two other fatal shootings in which either the autopsy or eyewitnesses raised questions about the police account. The city also paid a man $100,000 after he claimed that two 6th District officers shot him and then planted a gun on him.

Abuses by 6th District officers outside the tactical team during Johnson’s time as commander also led to major misconduct payments and criminal cases. A jury awarded $750,000 to a woman beaten by a 6th District officer who accused the 20-year-old of violating curfew. An Internal Affairs investigation also found that 6th District officers, including a lieutenant, covered for a drunk officer named Richard Bolling — the son of a retired CPD commander — after he struck and killed a 13-year-old out riding his bike. One unidentified officer promised Bolling that “I’m gonna try to help you out as much as possible.” Sixth District officers on the scene waited over two hours to administer a sobriety test. Bolling was eventually sentenced to three years in prison.

The shootings and other misconduct allegations cost taxpayers millions. The Invisible Institute analyzed unit assignment data and a Chicago Reporter database that tracks all police misconduct payments from 2011 through 2016. Johnson’s 6th District was just one of 25 police districts but accounted for roughly $8 million, fully one-sixth of the entire CPD’s misconduct payments during his time as commander. Since the end of 2016, Chicago has paid at least another $3.7 million related to misconduct by 6th District officers during Johnson’s time as commander.

Over Johnson’s tenure, dozens of officers serving on the tactical team were involved in lawsuits that led to settlements totaling $6 million. That total accounted for a huge share of overall CPD misconduct payments, costing the city about $130,000 for each of the team’s roughly 45 officers — nearly 40 times the average for all other CPD officers.

Walker, the University of Nebraska police accountability expert, argues that Johnson’s handling of misconduct as a commander has a strong bearing on his role as superintendent. “It’s another reason why he’s probably not qualified for his current job,” he said. “He just doesn’t think in terms of these kind of problems or see them as problems and take corrective action. … He’s just not qualified to be the chief executive of a police department, especially one as large and complex as Chicago.”

Get the Officer’s Back

Johnson left the 6th District in August 2011, and from 2012 to 2014, he served as deputy chief of patrol for Area Central, directly supervising nine district commanders.

Johnson’s time as a deputy chief followed a similar pattern as his tenure as commander. He was credited with major reductions in gun crime and murders in 2013 (though only after a spike in 2012), while continuing to sign off on cases like the shooting of 17-year-old Christian Green. As the on-call incident commander in that shooting, Johnson took aside the four officers who witnessed the shooting and interviewed them one by one. The officers all gave Johnson similar accounts: Green had turned around and pointed a gun at pursuing officers, prompting one to return fire. Johnson also conferred with detectives on the scene. He did not speak with any civilian witnesses, he said in a deposition.

Security cameras captured images of Green running from the police and carrying a gun. At one point, Green tried to throw the weapon in a trash can, but it bounced out. Green hurried back to collect it before sprinting off again. Green and his police pursuers then moved out of the cameras’ view. Moments later, he was dead.

One of the pursuing officers had fired 11 shots at the teenager. An eyewitness later testified that the officer stood over Green’s body and shouted, “Motherfucker! You wanna run? Huh? Huh? … You see how fucking far you got?” The same witness said that Green was running away and not facing the officer when he opened fire. Green’s gun was found in an abandoned lot, 75 feet from his body.

Johnson approved the officers’ use of force. While on the scene, he also gave a walkthrough to investigators from IPRA, telling them that Green had been shot in the chest when he turned to point his gun at officers. An autopsy would later reveal that Green had been shot in the back.

In 2017, a jury found that the officer who killed Green had shot without cause and awarded his family $350,000. After the trial, the family’s attorney criticized the investigation overseen by Johnson, declaring that it “fell short on every level.”

Prior to the trial, Johnson testified in a deposition that he did not know that the shooter had previously belonged to a notorious crew led by Sgt. Ronald Watts. Just a year before Green’s shooting, Watts and his partner had been arrested for stealing money from an FBI drug informant. After Watts’s arrest, some questioned why the rest of his team — which included three of the four officers Johnson interviewed — remained on the street. Years later, as superintendent, Johnson placed all three on desk duty after Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s office found serious problems with over a dozen cases tied to Watts’s team, leading to the largest mass exoneration in Cook County history.

Aggressive officers like Glenn Evans also continued to receive Johnson’s support, even as allegations of excessive force followed him as he entered the highest ranks of the CPD. Evans took charge of the 3rd District in August 2012, becoming one of the nine district commanders who reported directly to Johnson. Former CPD Superintendent Garry McCarthy said in a deposition obtained by WBEZ that he likely promoted Evans based on a recommendation from Johnson, though Johnson has disputed this.

Evans ultimately garnered nine complaints in two years as a commander, an exceptional amount for a senior official, who tend to receive far fewer complaints than street-level officers. Only 23 of Chicago’s roughly 13,000 officers received more complaints. One of the complaints against Evans concerned a man named Ricky Williams, who claimed that in 2013, Evans cornered him in an abandoned building and shoved his gun down his throat. Johnson directly supervised Evans at the time, but he and McCarthy took no action — even when IPRA recommended Evans be stripped of police powers after finding Williams’s DNA on his gun.

Evans was eventually indicted over the Williams incident in the summer of 2014. After a controversial acquittal the next year, the department demoted him to lieutenant. During Evans’s brief time as a commander, his subordinates killed two teenagers in troubling circumstances. Investigators ruled one shooting unjustified — though Chicago’s Police Board recently overturned their ruling — and recently reopened an investigation of the second after finding video contradicting officer accounts from the scene. The first shooting — a 15-year-old named Dakota Bright shot in the back of the head — took place while Evans reported directly to Johnson and led to a $925,000 settlement paid to Bright’s family.

“CPD standard operating procedure is, and has been for years, when an officer is accused of misconduct, when an officer uses force, it’s to justify it and circle the wagons and get the officer’s back,” said civil rights attorney Craig Futterman. “You don’t even need a conspiracy, it’s just standard operating procedures, and [Eddie Johnson] has been a part of that for 30 years.”

In response to a detailed list of questions for this article, Johnson provided the following statement:

During my entire career with the Chicago Police Department I have and will always approach every decision, action and investigation with the highest level of integrity and thoughtful deliberation of available facts and evidence. The trust between police and the community is paramount to everything we do and it is vitally important to me as the Police Superintendent and as a lifelong resident of Chicago. Since becoming Superintendent, I implemented a comprehensive reform agenda to solidify CPD’s path toward becoming a model agency that all of Chicago could be proud of. I support the federal consent decree and have embraced and advocated for investments into our police officers including, better training, support and mentoring. I also reinvigorated our community policing philosophy because CPD is only as strong as the community’s faith in our officers and we cannot create a safer Chicago without standing shoulder to shoulder with the people that live and work here.

All of the use of force incidents you reference have gone through an independent use of force investigation, a review by state or federal prosecutorial agency and independent deliberation by the then-Superintendent and Chicago Police Board. All of the answers to your inquiries can be found in the publicly available case records and court transcripts for those incidents.

Gestures at Reform

Johnson took charge of the CPD in 2016, the same year Chicago endured a massive increase in homicides, with the murder rate jumping nearly 60 percent. Though homicides declined in 2017, they remained well above historic levels. Other types of crime also rose, with reported carjackings more than doubling between 2015 and 2017.

In the first months of his tenure, Johnson moved to implement some of the mayor’s key reform promises, greatly expanding the use of body cameras and supplying Tasers to more officers. The department rewrote its use of force rules, which reform advocates largely praised. Johnson also responded to some police shootings more forcefully than his predecessors, immediately suspending officers in a handful of officer-involved shootings, including a case in which an officer killed an unarmed teenager named Paul O’Neal.

But in the context of rising violence, calls to let the police return to their old ways are growing louder. Addressing the possibility of court oversight of the CPD, Fraternal Order of Police President Kevin Graham last year declared, “Already facing an explosion of crime because the police have been so handcuffed from doing their job by the intense anti-police movement in the city, this consent decree will only handcuff the police even further.”

Former CPD Superintendent Garry McCarthy, now running for mayor, has voiced similar sentiments, denouncing the DOJ report and insisting that “the problem in Chicago is not the police.”

Faced with pressure from within his own ranks, Johnson has returned to a familiar approach to police shootings. He defended Officer Robert Rialmo, who shot and killed Quintonio LeGrier, a college student in the midst of an emotional disturbance, and Bettie Jones, a 55-year-old bystander, sparking pushback from several African-American aldermen. Johnson’s move to prevent Rialmo’s firing came after he also sought to block the firing of the officer who shot and killed 15-year-old Dakota Bright.

Two and a half years into Johnson’s appointment, Chicago’s police department is far from reformed. Three separate lawsuits filed last year — one by a broad civil rights coalition, including the Chicago branches of Black Lives Matter, the NAACP, and the Urban League, represented by civil rights attorneys Craig Futterman and Sheila Bedi; one from the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois and community groups such as the Community Renewal Society; and one from Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s office — all insisted that only court-overseen reforms will truly change the department. (Andrew Fan provided pro bono data analysis of a CPD use of force database to the first coalition suing the CPD).

The Madigan lawsuit pushed Mayor Rahm Emanuel to begin negotiations to accept formal court oversight of police reforms in Chicago. In July, Madigan and Emanuel announced a 225-page draft consent decree that outlines sweeping changes that the department must complete in the coming years.

In early September, Emanuel’s announcement that he would not run for re-election jolted the mayoral race, prompting many of Chicago’s most prominent politicians to consider jumping into the contest. Many observers pointed to the approaching trial of Jason Van Dyke, the officer who killed Laquan McDonald, and the likelihood of renewed public attention toward Emanuel’s record on police misconduct as a key factor in his decision to step down.

Still, Emanuel will remain in office for over six months, during which time the city will finalize and begin to implement its historic court-ordered reforms. Emanuel’s unwillingness to embrace police reform is now as important as ever, with the mayor in a position of power but unconstrained by the threat of an election. Despite his repeated reform promises, in the wake of Donald Trump’s inauguration, Emanuel sought to strike a deal with then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions that would have staved off court oversight of the CPD. Even after public pressure ended that effort, Emanuel spoke openly of his fear that reform could worsen the city’s crime rate, worrying that “other cities have done this to the police department and it’s come at the expense of public safety.”

The support of Emanuel and Johnson is crucial even with a formal consent decree. Chiraag Bains, a former DOJ attorney who worked on the federal investigation of the Ferguson, Missouri, police department, argues that “the orientation of the political leadership and the leadership of the police department are key to whether the reform process is successful or not.”

Futterman echoed Bains’s point, but lamented that “sadly under this administration, I’m seeing the antithesis of that. A failure to own [the problem] and a lack of genuine commitment to address the realities that brought the DOJ to Chicago in the first place.”

The problems posed by Eddie Johnson’s leadership extend far beyond the mayor who appointed him. When Emanuel appointed Johnson in early 2016, his hold on the mayor’s office was in jeopardy. After the release of the Laquan McDonald video, one poll showed that a majority of Chicago voters wanted him to resign. The selection process was a rare opportunity for Chicago’s City Council and the media to check the mayor during a moment of weakness, especially after the mayor picked an insider to run the police department even as he promised Chicago “nothing less than complete and total reform of the system.”

Rather than digging into Johnson’s record, political leaders and media outlets, in a deeply familiar Chicago process, instead fixated on Johnson’s political ties and loyalties. A Chicago Tribune editorial congratulated Emanuel on the politics of the pick, noting that “the mayor scored the support of the Black and Latino caucuses and the Fraternal Order of Police, a rare trifecta.”

None of the city’s major news outlets connected Johnson to his role in approving Rekia Boyd’s killing, despite devoting major coverage to Dante Servin’s trial less than a year prior. Chicago media also failed to report on Johnson’s record as a senior CPD leader, including the troubling pattern of killings hanging over his time as commander of the 6th District. Chicago’s aldermen, fresh from helping to push out McCarthy for his role in the McDonald shooting, approved Johnson by a vote of 50-0.

Chicago will soon decide on new leadership for the city and its police. With Emanuel’s retirement, voters have a wide range of options, including Garry McCarthy, Bill Daley — brother and son of former Chicago mayors — and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, a supporter of police reform who once condemned McCarthy as a “racist bully boy.” With neither an incumbent nor an obvious frontrunner, the city faces perhaps its most wide-open mayoral contest since 1983.

Six years after Rekia Boyd’s killing jolted Chicago activists and three years after video of Laquan McDonald’s shooting channeled activist anger into a citywide movement, Chicagoans face a momentous choice on police reform.

How to fix Chicago’s police is a longstanding and difficult question, but this time the decision lies not in the hands of a powerful mayor, but with the people of Chicago.

This story will appear on the cover of next week’s issue of South Side Weekly, a nonprofit newspaper based on Chicago’s South Side.

Roman Rivera contributed data analysis.

The post Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson’s Long Record of Justifying Police Misconduct and Shootings appeared first on The Intercept.

Established by a city council ordinance in the fall of 2016, COPA officially opened its doors in the fall of 2017. It is tasked with investigating police shootings and complaints alleging, among other things, excessive force, domestic violence, improper search or seizure, and denial of access to counsel.

COPA replaced the Independent Police Review Authority, or IPRA, which had been discredited in the aftermath of the McDonald revelations, and which, in its own turn, had in 2007 replaced the Office of Professional Standards, or OPS, in the midst of an earlier police scandal.

Inevitable jokes about alphabet soup disguised as police reform notwithstanding, it is hard to overstate the centrality of COPA to the emerging edifice of police reform. It is foundational. Until citizens are confident that complaints of police misconduct will be vigorously investigated, that findings will be based on the evidence, and that appropriate discipline will be imposed when complaints are sustained, other aspects of the reform agenda will be impeded, if not subverted.

What then are we to make of COPA’s handling of the August 13, 2017, shooting of 19-year-old Ricardo Hayes by Sgt. Khalil Muhammad — a case which, on its facts, invites comparison to the McDonald incident? I reported on the Hayes case last fall. Since then, COPA has issued its investigative report and its recommendation of discipline. Taken together, they constitute a biopsy of the current condition of the agency. The prognosis is not encouraging.

The Shooting

Developmentally and intellectually disabled, Ricky Hayes is a ward of the state and lives with a caretaker on the far south side of the city. A lawsuit filed on his behalf states that he “functions at the cognitive level of a child,” “has difficulty communicating,” “looks much younger than his age,” and has disabilities that “are immediately recognizable.”

At about 1:25 a.m. on August 13, 2017, his caretaker checked his room and found that Hayes was not there. She called the police to report him missing. This had happened before; he has a history of slipping out of the house and wandering the neighborhood.

About half an hour later, police officers arrived. The caretaker filled out a missing person report and told the officers about Hayes’s disabilities.

Multiple surveillance cameras recorded Hayes as he wandered the neighborhood. Dressed in shorts, a short-sleeve shirt, and sneakers, he can be seen skipping and singing to himself.

Shortly before his encounter with Muhammad, two on-duty police officers saw someone they believe to have been Hayes running through the neighborhood. They didn’t stop him, one of them explained later, because “at the moment he really hadn’t done anything.”

At about 5:00 a.m., Muhammad, who was off-duty and was driving his girlfriend’s Chevy Tahoe, saw Hayes and began chasing him. Frightened, the boy ran away. The officer continued the pursuit.

Eventually, Hayes stopped running and stood motionless with his hands at his sides on the front lawn of a house. A surveillance camera mounted on the house captured their interaction.

Muhammad pulled up and stopped roughly 20 feet from Hayes. He spoke to Hayes, who took several steps toward the vehicle, while reaching toward his back pocket for what proved to be his cellphone. Sitting in the cab of his truck, Muhammad opened fire with his service weapon, striking Hayes in his chest and arm. Wounded, Hayes again ran away. Muhammad caught up with him and ordered him to lie face down on the ground.

Muhammad then called 911 and requested an ambulance. When the dispatcher asked what happened, Muhammad replied, “The guy pulled like he was about to pull a gun on me, walked up to the car, and I had to shoot.”

Muhammad later stated in his report on the incident that he shot Hayes because the teen posed an imminent threat of battery.

The Investigation

Sgt. Isaac Lambert, the detective assigned to prepare a final report on the Hayes matter, alleges in a whistleblower lawsuit filed in March that he was ordered by superiors to support Muhammad’s account by classifying the incident as an aggravated assault on a police officer. When he refused, Lambert claims, the chief of detectives demoted him from detective to patrol in an act of retaliation.

If Lambert’s allegations prove true, they will demonstrate how little has changed in CPD’s internal practices since the McDonald implosion. The department will be shown to have been engaged — even after the public release of the Hayes video — in the construction of a false, self-serving narrative in which the incident is seen solely from the point of view of the accused officer.

The persistence of this dynamic underscores the critical importance of COPA’s role in bringing civilian oversight to bear on allegations of police misconduct. IPRA — and OPS before it — all too often operated as cogs in the police department’s narrative machinery rather than as independent checks on it.

At the height of the political firestorm following the release of the McDonald video, Mayor Rahm Emanuel fired the chief administrator of IPRA and appointed Sharon Fairley, a lawyer with experience as a state and federal prosecutor, in his place. When the city council established COPA, Fairley took on the challenging task of navigating the transition from one agency to the other, while seeking to build public confidence in the quality of police misconduct investigations. She and her leadership team made a major effort to recruit and train a new cohort of investigators committed to the civilian oversight model of police accountability.

That effort was still a work in progress when Fairley abruptly stepped down in September 2017 to run for Illinois attorney general. With a caretaker interim director, COPA was essentially leaderless until April 2018 when Sydney Roberts, a former police executive, was appointed chief administrator.

The investigation of Muhammad’s shooting of Hayes began while Fairley was still at COPA. According to a source close to the investigation, she was “mortified” when she saw the video and immediately referred the case to the state’s attorney, who declined to bring criminal charges. The quality of the investigation COPA conducted testifies to what has been built at the agency. The investigative report is exemplary in its clarity, rigor, and thoroughness. It establishes:

• Because Muhammad was off-duty and driving a civilian vehicle, he was not identifiable as a police officer and therefore could not reasonably expect Hayes “to submit to his authority.”
• He “did not have probable cause to believe Hayes had committed any crime, let alone a violent crime.”
• He “did not have any reason to believe that Hayes was armed and dangerous.”
• Hayes “did not reasonably pose an immediate threat of death and/or great bodily harm” to Muhammad.

The finding flows inexorably from the analysis:

In its totality, the evidence demonstrates that an officer with similar training and experience as Sgt. Muhammad would not have reasonably believed that Hayes posed an immediate threat of death or serious bodily harm and/or that the use of deadly force was otherwise justified.

The Political Calculation

According to several former COPA investigators and supervisors, who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity, it never occurred to them that there could be any other outcome but termination. The ultimate decision with respect to recommendations of discipline, however, resides with the chief administrator. The superintendent then responds to the COPA recommendation, and if there is disagreement, they seek to reach a resolution.

Stunning her investigators, Roberts recommended that Muhammad receive a 60-day suspension. In other words, an officer who used deadly force against a child who had committed no crime and posed no threat is, in the judgment of COPA’s chief administrator, fit to continue carrying a gun as a member of the Chicago Police Department.

The disconnect between the substance of the investigation and the recommended discipline roiled the COPA staff. Several of my sources said that Roberts on more than one occasion had questioned the finding that the shooting was unjustified. In the end, they said, she accepted the finding but recommended the lesser discipline. A former supervisor characterized Roberts as having “a law enforcement outlook” rather than “a civilian outlook” and said she was more interested in building her relationship with the superintendent than in maintaining the agency’s independence.

“If it was a political calculation,” a former COPA employee said of Roberts’s handling of the Hayes case, “it was a bad one. It didn’t please anyone.” In a reversal of roles — usually CPD seeks to reduce the proposed discipline — the superintendent doubled the suspension to 180 days. This strongly suggests that the department would have accepted termination.

Roberts’s handling of the Hayes case was a flashpoint. It became the focus of staff anxieties about the direction of the agency. One former COPA supervisor described “a crisis of confidence in leadership.” The most telling expression of that crisis is that a number of staff members, roughly 30, most of them investigators, have left the agency during the last year. “That’s an incredible waste of resources,” a former supervisor observed, reflecting on the cost of recruitment and training.

In response to a request for comment, a COPA spokesperson stated that “COPA continues to efficiently respond to complaints filed by members of the public and law enforcement while building their trust. Although we experience turnover as an agency like many others, we are not deterred from the opportunity to be the agency Chicago needs as we embark on the journey to true police reform.”

The former investigators and supervisors I spoke with were intensely protective of the agency and its mission. They expressed concern that leadership issues might be misread as an organizational failure, rendering COPA vulnerable to attack by those hostile to the principle of civilian oversight of law enforcement. That principle is indeed at risk at the very moment — with a new mayor assuming office and a federal consent decree in place — when it might be fully realized as the cornerstone of the emerging police accountability regime.

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