Book Description

This is the complete report of the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and the office of the District Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, into the long, brutal history of the Chicago Police Department. On Dec. 7, 2015, Attorney General Lynch announced the investigation into the CPD and the city's Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA). The investigation focused on CPD's use of force, including racial, ethnic and other disparities in use of force, and its systems of accountability.In the course of its pattern or practice investigation, the department interviewed and met with city leaders, current and former police officials, and numerous officers throughout all ranks of CPD. The department also accompanied line officers on over 60 ride-alongs in every police district; heard from over 1,000 community members and more than 90 community organizations; reviewed thousands of pages of police documents, including all relevant policies, procedures, training and materials; and analyzed a randomized, representative sample of force reports and the investigative files for incidents that occurred between January 2011 and April 2016, including over 170 officer-involved shooting investigations and documents related to over 400 additional force incidents.The department found that CPD's pattern or practice of unconstitutional force is largely attributable to deficiencies in its accountability systems and in how it investigates uses of force, responds to allegations of misconduct, trains and supervises officers, and collects and reports data on officer use of force. The department also found that the lack of effective community-oriented policing strategies and insufficient support for officer wellness and safety contributed to the pattern or practice of unconstitutional force.In addition, the department also identified serious concerns about the prevalence of racially discriminatory conduct by some CPD officers and the degree to which that conduct is tolerated and in some respects caused by deficiencies in CPD's systems of training, supervision and accountability. The department's findings further note that the impact of CPD's pattern or practice of unreasonable force falls heaviest on predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods, such that restoring police-community trust will require remedies addressing both discriminatory conduct and the disproportionality of illegal and unconstitutional patterns of force on minority communities.Similar to recent Justice Department reports into police brutality and misconduct in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, this book traces the long history of police abuse (and failures of leadership, for decades) to the present day, in an attempt to make sense of the outbreak of violence--and to explain the basis for new, enforceable actions the police department must take in order to change.