Ed Yohnka, director of communications and public policy for the ACLU of Illinois, cited findings from the Department of Justice’s 2017 report on the Chicago Police Department that the CPD “routinely” files charges against citizens who complain as a form of retaliation or intimidation.
From part of an article on the defeat of a bill that would have limited FOIA requests to police departments in Illinois.
The chief of the state’s attorney’s Criminal Prosecutions Bureau determined after review that “the 10 officers who worked closely with Watts could no longer be used as witnesses in pending or future criminal prosecutions”
… to help honor Ida B. Wells, an activist who (among other things) watched the Chicago police in the early twentieth century and pressed for change: http://www.idabwellsmonument.org/
“The records I obtained from the department don’t inspire much confidence.”
Chicago’s so-called gang database includes some people in their 70s and 80s. This article suggests there are a host of other problems.
Chicago has paid $20 million in police misconduct claims in 2018. And it’s not yet May.
About half of that taxpayer money is for cases marked: excessive force, false arrest and illegal search and seizure.
City Pays $20 Million So Far In 2018 For Police Misconduct Cases
From an article in the Tribune.
“The suit alleged police detectives “concocted and coerced” a false confession from Gray after hours of illegal interrogation while refusing to allow him to see his mother and brother, who were at the station trying to talk to him.”
CPD’s so-called gang database is being questioned…
According to the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Policing in Chicago Research Group, CPD identifies more than 128,000 individuals as part of a gang. Three-quarters are African-American, one-quarter are Hispanic and about 5 percent are Caucasian. Information is gleaned from investigatory street stops and arrest records, and the police department can use criteria like someone’s tattoos or clothing choices to determine whether they are affiliated with a gang.
At the same time as CPD got a huge donation to fund more high tech policing strategies.
“the scope of Guevara’s alleged misdeeds tells only part of the story. Chicago’s police brass, its prosecutors, its judges, police oversight commissions, and even federal authorities had ample warnings about Guevara”
The problems of collecting data on police misconduct are acute. This important article in Granta helps identify some of the issues in one area of misconduct (police killing) and suggests some solutions.
The Supreme Court, as Justice Sotomayor recently noted in a dissent, has done little to check police use of force. Instead, she argues, recently it has used the doctrine of qualified immunity to weaken 4th Amendment protections.
As I have previously noted, this Court routinely displays an unflinching willingness “to summarily reverse courts for wrongly denying officers the protection of qualified immunity” but “rarely intervene[s] where courts wrongly afford officers the benefit of qualified immunity in these same cases.”
Pattern & Practice: Reclaiming the Lost History of Police Torture in Chicago, 1871-1971 