Report: Chicago police use excessive force and often treat people "as animals or subhum... - 0 views
-
The Chicago Police Department routinely violates civil rights, uses unnecessary force, discriminates against minority residents, and fails to hold officers accountable — creating a climate of distrust, violence, and fear that makes residents and cops unsafe. That’s according to a massive new report that the US Department of Justice released on Friday.
-
The investigation followed the police shooting of Laquan McDonald in October 2014. Officer Jason Van Dyke, who shot McDonald, initially claimed that the black 17-year-old lunged at police officers and posed a dangerous threat. But a dashboard camera video released in 2015 showed that McDonald was at least 10 feet away from the officers and didn’t move toward police. The revelation worsened already-tense community relations with the police, leading the Justice Department to get involved in its biggest investigation of a local police department yet.
-
For example, raw statistics show that Chicago police officers use force almost 10 times more often against black residents than against their white counterparts.
- ...7 more annotations...
-
The report is likely the Justice Department’s last major investigation before President-elect Donald Trump takes office. During President Barack Obama’s tenure, the Justice Department has aggressively investigated nearly two dozen police departments and pushed for reform, particularly after high-profile police killings. But Trump and his attorney general nominee, Jeff Sessions, have voiced skepticism of the investigations, suggesting that the Trump administration will do less to hold local police departments accountable through the Justice Department.
-
Yet just 1.3 percent of complaints over racist language between 2011 and March 2016 were sustained by internal investigators, the Justice Department found.
-
We found that officers engage in tactically unsound and unnecessary foot pursuits, and that these foot pursuits too often end with officers unreasonably shooting someone — including unarmed individuals.
-
CPD has not provided officers with adequate guidance to understand how and when they may use force, or how to safely and effectively control and resolve encounters to reduce the need to use force
-
But it’s not just tolerance; at times the police department appears to engage in an active cover-up — particularly through “a code of silence” and by hiding evidence.
-
One particularly striking statistic: More than 30,000 complaints are made against the Chicago Police Department every year. But while the department sustains less than 2 percent of those complaints, most are never investigated at all.
-
Still, it’s worth emphasizing that these findings may not be exclusive to Chicago. Whether it’s Baltimore, Cleveland, New Orleans, or Ferguson, Missouri, the Justice Department has found horrific constitutional violations in how police use force, how they target minority residents, how they stop and ticket people, and virtually every other aspect of policing. These issues come up time and time again, no matter the city that federal investigators look at.In that sense, it’s not just Chicago policing that’s flawed, but American policing as a whole.