| Summery of Study |
|
November 14, 2007
Contact: Craig B. Futterman Clinical Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School (773) 702-9611 Today legal scholars at the University of Chicago Law School released a major study of the Chicago Police Department’s supervisory and disciplinary practices. This study presents a comprehensive analysis, based on the most current statistics, of the CPD’s “broken system” for investigating complaints of civilian abuse. The full text is available here: http://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/brokensystem-111407.pdf. The study will be reprinted later this month in the Civil Rights Litigation Annual Handbook, published by Thomson/West. The lead author is Clinical Professor Craig Futterman, Director of the Police Accountability Project at the Edwin F. Mandel Legal Aid Clinic at the Law School. His colleagues Melissa Mather and Melanie Miles collaborated in the study. The primary source of the statistical data cited in the study is Bond v. Utreras, a recently settled federal civil rights suit in which Professor Futterman represented Diane Bond, a resident of the Stateway Gardens public housing development who alleges that she was repeatedly subjected to horrific abuse by a team of tactical officers assigned to the Public Housing South unit. Bond charged that these officers had engaged over a number of years in a pattern of racial abuse of public housing residents that went unaddressed by the CPD. Among the findings reported in the U of C Law School study: Discipline is Rarely Imposed Against Officers Charged with Civilian Abuse. During 2002-2004, citizens filed 10,149 complaints alleging police abuses in the categories of excessive force, illegal arrest, illegal searches, racial abuse and sexual abuse. Only 124 of these complaints were sustained—slightly more than one percent. To put this in perspective, a U. S. Department of Justice report determined that the national sustained rate for excessive force complaints filed with “large municipal police departments” in 2002 was 8 percent. By contrast, the CPD's sustained rate during 2004, the most recent year for which it has released figures, was less than half of one percent (0.48%). In other words, excessive force complaints are 94 percent less likely to be sustained by the CPD than they are by other large municipal police departments across the country. Only 19 of the 10,149 complaints resulted in meaningful discipline (a suspension of 7 days or more)—a rate of less than 2 per 1,000 complaints. Contrary to the City’s assertions that accountability has improved in recent years, the percentage of sustained complaints steadily declined during the period 1999-2004. The sustained rate for all civilian abuse complaints decreased from 3.7% in 1999 to 0.6% in 2004—a decline of 84%. The sustained rate for excessive force complaints decreased from 4.8% to 0.48%—a decline of 90%. The odds that a CPD officer who abuses a citizen will receive meaningful discipline are even less—far less—than 2 in 1,000. Citizens who believe they have been victims of police abuse often do not file formal complaints. Among the reasons are fear of reprisals and distrust of the investigatory process. A national survey conducted by the U. S. Department of Justice found that only 10% of those who believed they suffered excessive force in an encounter with the police reported the incident to the agency employing the officer. Shoddy Investigations The U of C Law School study describes in detail the investigatory practices that yield these results. According to the authors, CPD investigations violate every canon of professional investigatory technique. Investigators look for rationales not to go forward—to make findings of “not sustained” —rather than vigorously pursuing avenues open to them. In more than 85% of cases, the accused officers are not even interviewed beyond filling out a brief form, often months after the alleged abuse, which virtually invites them to coordinate their stories and cover for each other. The study quotes Joseph Stine, a former police chief: “If the Chicago Police Department investigated street crime the way it investigates police abuse, it would never solve a case.” The CPD has Failed to Address Patterns of Abuse. The study found that police abuse is a highly patterned, concentrated phenomenon. Patterns involve particular officers and police units, as well as particular victims. Abuse complaints are concentrated among certain officers who work together in particular units or teams and who police certain parts of the City—generally lower-income African-American and Latino communities. The authors further found: A relatively small percentage of the force is responsible for most of the abuse complaints. During the period May 2001 - May 2006, 10,387 officers had 0 to 3 complaints. Another 2,451 officers had 4 to 10 complaints. 662 officers had more than 10 complaints. These 662 "repeaters" were named in 10,733 complaints. Police abuse in Chicago cannot simply be attributed to the existence of a “few bad apples.” Chicago police data reveal a Department with a deeply ingrained culture of denial that enables certain officers to operate with impunity in certain areas of the city. Because the vast majority of police officers has not accumulated an extraordinary number of complaints, it is relatively easy to identify officers who may be engaging in abusive behavior. The CPD, however, has refused to examine and hid from the public data exposing potential patterns of abuse. Although they have the discretion to do so, police investigators do not examine patterns of abuse complaints among individual “repeaters” or groups of police officers. In other words, the CPD chooses not to know things within its power to know about patterns of police abuse. As a result, only 22 or 0.2% of the complaints against the “repeaters” resulted in meaningful discipline. In other words, a “repeater” can be 99.8% confident that no meaningful discipline will result when he is charged with abuse. 75% of the "repeaters" have never been subjected to discipline of any kind. The CPD has two programs that it describes as its “early warning system.” It is a measure of the inadequacy of this system that only 89 (13.4%) of the 662 "repeaters" have been identified by these programs. More than 86% of the "repeaters" have not been identified as needing intervention. There are officers who amassed 50 or more official misconduct complaints within the past five years who have never been disciplined or even identified by the CPD’s “early warning” programs. Taken together, these figures reveal a system that is “broken”—a system that allows officers with criminal tendencies to operate with impunity and denies meaningful recourse to those they abuse. Apartheid Justice? Police abuse is not, the authors observe, evenly distributed across the City. It tends to be concentrated among officers who work in low-income communities of color. The authors found, for example, that nearly 20 percent of the Chicago police officers assigned to patrol public housing neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side had each accumulated 11 or more official misconduct complaints over five years. “In exploring why this concentration exists,” they write, “the impact of race is impossible to ignore, and hard to discount.” They close by raising a series of difficult questions: Does a different Constitution apply in inner city minority communities? And if so, what are its implications? Have we really assessed the true impact of this division—the true cost of abusive police officers operating with impunity within an African-American community? How great is the loss of life, liberty, and property? The loss of hope and opportunity? The loss of family? Loss of justice? Loss of faith in our political institutions? Does institutional denial work to disguise the true nature of what we are doing from ourselves? Digg this content or Bookmark it using your favorite service below                            |