CHICAGO (AP) — Chicago police have violated the constitutional rights of residents for years, permitting
racial bias against blacks, using excessive force and shooting people who did not pose immediate
threats, the Justice Department announced Friday after a yearlong investigation.
The practices endanger civilians and officers, cause avoidable injuries and deaths and erode community
trust that is "the cornerstone of public safety," said Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice
Department’s civil rights division.
The report concluded that the pattern was attributable to "systemic deficiencies" within the
department and the city, including insufficient training and a failure to hold bad officers accountable
for misconduct.
The findings come just days before a change in administration, from a White House that strongly backed
the federal review process to President-elect Donald Trump’s, whose commitment to the system is unclear.
The Justice Department began investigating the nation’s third-largest police force in December 2015 after
the release of dashcam video showing a white police officer shooting a black teenager named Laquan
McDonald, who was hit 16 times as he walked away holding a small folded knife. The video of the 2014
shooting, which the city fought to keep secret, inspired large protests and cost the city’s police
commissioner his job.
The city paid more than a half billion dollars to pay or settle claims of police misconduct since 2004,
but police did not conduct disciplinary investigations in half of those cases, according to the federal
report. Of 409 police shootings that happened over a five-year period, police found only two were
unjustified.
The Justice Department criticized the city for setting up barriers to getting to the bottom of police
misconduct, including provisions in union agreements, a failure to investigate anonymous complaints or
those submitted without a supporting affidavit and a "pervasive cover-up culture."
It said witnesses and accused officers were frequently never interviewed at all, that evidence went
uncollected and that witnesses were routinely coached by union lawyers — "a dynamic neither we nor
our law enforcement experts had seen to nearly such an extent in other agencies."
"The procedures surrounding investigations allow for ample opportunity for collusion among officers
and are devoid of any rules prohibiting such coordination," the report said.
When discipline is imposed, according to the report, it’s often for behavior that’s less serious than
what triggered the investigation in the first place.
Under President Barack Obama, the Justice Department has conducted 25 civil rights investigations of
police departments, including in Cleveland, Baltimore and Seattle. The release of a report is one step
in a long process that, in recent years, has typically led to talks between the Justice Department and a
city, followed by an agreed upon reform plan that’s enforceable by a federal judge.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the report lays "the groundwork for the difficult but necessary
work of building a stronger, safer, and more united Chicago for all who call it home."
Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s pick for attorney general, expressed ambivalence at his confirmation
hearing this week about the federal review process. He said he was concerned that broad investigations
of police departments risk smearing an entire agency and harming officer morale.
The perception that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel badly mishandled the McDonald shooting hurt the former
Obama chief of staff politically, and he may feel pressure to address many of the Justice Department’s
findings to restore his political fortunes.
The Chicago department, with 12,000 officers, has long had a reputation for brutality, particularly in
minority communities. The most notorious example was Jon Burge, a commander of a detective unit on the
South Side. Burge and his men beat, suffocated and used electric shock for decades starting in the 1970s
to get black men to confess to crimes they did not commit.
The McDonald video, which showed officer Jason Van Dyke continuing to shoot the teen even after he
slumped to the ground, provoked widespread outrage. It was not until the day the video was released,
which was more than a year after the shooting, that Van Dyke was charged with murder. He has pleaded not
guilty. Police reports of the shooting later suggested a possible cover-up by other officers who were at
the scene.
