Police reform in Chicago is on life support

The brutal execution of 17-year-old LaQuan McDonald in October 2014 by a crazed police officer led to a host of consequences for Chicago: the firing of a police chief, a court-monitored consent decree to implement a broad set of reforms, and the election of Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who had played a central role in chronicling racism and abuse in the department and overseeing police misconduct cases.

Six years later, Chicago has all but thrown in the towel on police reform.

This week, the Chicago Police Department announced that the office set up to drive police reforms no longer will be under the third highest-ranking police officer in the department. Instead, it will be under new leadership with a down-graded title that sits outside the department’s central chain of command. The signal to the rank and file is unambiguous: reform is no longer a top priority.

The previous occupant of the office, Barbara West, was the highest-ranking Black female police officer in the department’s history. It was a prestigious assignment for the 26-year veteran and likely would have led to a promising future as a big city police chief, perhaps even here in Chicago, which has never had a female superintendent.

West, however, resigned in October after less than a year in her new job and just a few months after a report from an independent monitor — assigned by a judge to oversee the consent decree — showed that the department had missed 70% of its deadlines.

Any illusion that police reform might ultimately seep into the rank and file was further shattered with the recent release of a bodycam video from 2019 showing a “wrong address” police raid in which a naked, 50-year-old Black, female social worker was handcuffed in her own apartment for more than 40 minutes while 10 male, mostly white cops calmly and callously searched for a drug dealer who happened to live in an adjacent apartment. Her desperate appeals for dignity are agonizing to watch and hear.

The video prompted an apology from Mayor Lightfoot, the resignation of the city’s top lawyer, who had tried to block release of the video, and a call for a special City Council meeting by outraged aldermen.

Their outrage over this horrific and tragic incident is more than justified, but it should be matched by outrage over this year’s surging gun violence, which may set a 25-year record for homicides and shootings. Chicago likely will close out 2020 with nearly 800 murders and more than 4,000 shootings, far more than any other city in America.

Meanwhile, Chicago’s new police superintendent, David Brown — just seven months into the job after a career in Dallas — is taking the department in exactly the wrong direction.

Brown’s temporary predecessor, former Los Angeles police chief Charlie Beck, rightly understood that local police commanders needed more authority to direct resources to the most violent areas of the city. Brown, on the other hand, has pulled more than 1,000 officers away from the districts to reestablish discredited and historically corrupt citywide gang and narcotics units.

It’s not working. Gun violence has remained high through the fall, and the department’s already low murder clearance rate is dropping even further. Violence begets violence and in the absence of real justice, street justice prevails. Chicago has also been way too slow to adopt proven strategies such as data-driven policing, trust-building community partnerships, and the kind of reforms spelled out in the consent decree around use of force and de-escalation tactics.

A proposed alternative response program in next year’s budget — in which mental health professionals respond to some 911 calls instead of armed police — is so modestly funded as to be almost irrelevant.

The Chicago Police Department is a siloed fortress run by change-resistant bureaucrats who are the products of the very system and culture that must change. They are therefore more focused on protecting themselves than protecting the people they serve. Institutionalized injustice is deeply embedded in the police labor contract, which has been designed over the years explicitly to protect abusive officers from accountability.

Police officers themselves are also victims of the system they zealously defend. Stress, depression, alcoholism, domestic abuse and suicide are increasing among Chicago police, and officer wellness is a growing concern. The rate of attrition for the 13,000-member department also has risen. The plain fact is that police spend most of their time on non-violent and non-criminal activity and too little time fighting serious crime.

Chicago’s reputation as an irredeemable hotbed of gun violence is well-established on multiple continents. Our history of abusive policing is extensive, from its roots in controlling a supposedly dangerous underclass and union-busting to modern-day torture, corruption and racial profiling. Our failure to address these issues is indefensible. Chicago needs to radically reimagine public safety and rebuild its police department from the ground up.

Peter Cunningham is a communications consultant in Chicago.

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