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.
http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2018/04/17/chicago-police-misconduct-case-settlements/
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 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.”
“In all, federal judges have sanctioned the Law Department nine times for failing to turn over potential evidence in police misconduct cases since Mayor Rahm Emanuel took office in 2011….”
Here’s a link to another post I did on Prawfsblawg about the lost history of police misconduct in Chicago: http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2017/10/police-misconduct-in-chicago-the-forgotten-past.html
I’m posting on PrawfsBlawg this month, and wrote this on the DOJ report on Chicago police reform. http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2017/10/on-not-thinking-much-about-history.html
Two Chicago police detectives, Michael Neary and Michael Vaughn, were briefly suspended in 1919 after they arrested Keith Southern (Chicago Tribune, January 3, 1920, p. 13). Southern claimed that while investigating car thefts in November 1919, the two officers beat him at the detective bureau, breaking his ribs in the process (Chicago Tribune, December 8, 1919, p. 17; Chicago Tribune, January 4, 1920, p. A5).
Neary and Vaughn claimed that Southern’s ribs were broken when they had to subdue him to arrest him. Southern pressed charges, but in January 1920 the Civil Service Board dismissed his claims. “There is almost no evidence against Neary,” Captain Coffin, who served as president of the board explained. Coffin admitted that there was “some evidence” against Vaughn, “but it is not enough to sustain the charges”(Chicago Tribune, January 9, 1920).
To my colleague, Ibram Kendi, whose book, Stamped from the Beginning, just won the National Book Award for non-fiction. The book is one readers of this blog should be aware of.
Pattern & Practice: Reclaiming the Lost History of Police Torture in Chicago, 1871-1971 