Abuses of Power

The Justice Department Report on Chicago Police Brutality Is Infuriating and Deeply Saddening

Inside the department’s shocking, 164-page report.
Rahm Emanuel
From left to right: U.S. attorney general Loretta Lynch, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and Chicago police superintendent Eddie Johnson at a news conference earlier today at the Dirksen Federal Building.By Tannen Maury/EPA/Rex/Shutterstock

The Department of Justice on Friday released the results of its 13-month investigation into the Chicago Police Department, revealing longstanding patterns of abuse, civil-rights violations, and evidence of unwarranted killings that should shake the conscience of the people of Chicago. With just one week remaining before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and U.S. attorney general Loretta Lynch announced an agreement to address the issues raised in the report, heading off any potential objection from attorney-general nominee Jeff Sessions, who has suggested that law-enforcement officers have been unjustly maligned by the Obama administration and is considered unlikely to continue similar investigations if he is confirmed.

The entire report is available online. Investigators found that officers do not effectively use proven crisis-intervention techniques; that supervisors do not provide sufficient direction “to ensure in lawful and effective policing”; that department policies impede investigations of officer misconduct; that the city’s discipline process is toothless and “lacks integrity”; and that the department’s data collection and transparency practices are inadequate. It is a picture of a department that does not enforce the law, but frequently operates outside of it.

Perhaps most shocking are findings regarding the Chicago Police Department’s use of both non-lethal and deadly force, which is described as being reckless and unconstitutional.

“Our review of C.P.D.’s deadly force practices identified several trends in C.P.D.’s deadly force incidents, including that C.P.D. engages in dangerous and unnecessary foot pursuits and other unsound tactics that result in C.P.D. shooting people, including those who are unarmed,” the report reads. “We also saw a trend in dangerous and unnecessary shootings at vehicles and other unsafe tactics that placed officers and others in danger of being shot.”

What do those practices mean, in real human terms? Consider the case of a man who was ordered to freeze “because he had been fidgeting with his waistband,” as described in the report. Here’s what happened next:

“The man ran. Three officers gave chase and began shooting as they ran. In total, the officers fired 45 rounds, including 28 rifle rounds, toward the man. Several rounds struck the man, killing him. The officers claimed the man fired at them during the pursuit. Officers found 26 no gun on the man. However, officers reported recovering a handgun nearly one block away. The gun recovered in the vicinity, however, was later determined to be fully-loaded and inoperable, and forensic testing determined there was no gunshot residue on the man’s hands.”

That’s a description of officers chasing, shooting, and killing an unarmed man. An investigation by Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority “found the officers’ actions were justified without addressing the efficacy of the pursuit or the number of shots fired.”

The I.P.R.A. did not earn high marks from the Department of Justice. “During subsequent review, almost without exception, officers’ reports of these events were accepted at face value, even where there was contrary evidence,” the investigators wrote.

There are many other examples. In one case, an officer chased and fired 16 shots at an unarmed man, including 3 fired into the man’s back as he lay dying on the ground. (That case resulted in a $4.1 million settlement to the victim’s family.) On page 29 of the report, investigators highlight the actions of one officer who needlessly shot and killed at least two unarmed men.

The report also includes basic advice and instructions for the C.P.D., which raise troubling questions about the state of training and the culture within the force. Here’s an example: “Shooting at a moving vehicle is inherently dangerous and almost always counterproductive.”

A complicating factor for those who claim that policing is largely free of racial bias is the words of officers themselves. As is often the case in such D.O.J. reports, a number of officers—including supervisors—were found to have posted blatantly bigoted comments on social media. From the report:

For example, one officer posted a status stating, “Hopefully one of these pictures will make the black lives matter activist organization feel a whole lot better!” with two photos attached, including one of two slain black men, in the front seats of a car, bloodied, covered in glass. Several C.P.D. officers posted social media posts contain disparaging remarks about Arabs and Muslims, with posts referring to them as “7th century Islamic goat humpers,” “Ragtop,” and making other anti-Islamic statements. One C.P.D. officer posted a photo of a dead Muslim soldier laying in a pool of his own blood with the caption: “The only good Muslim is a fucking dead one.” Supervisors posted many of the discriminatory posts we found, including one sergeant who posted at least 25 anti-Muslim statements and at least 43 other discriminatory posts, and a lieutenant who posted at least five anti-immigrant and anti-Latino statements. Given these statements, our observations and conversations with officers during the course of our investigation, and other publicly available commentary, such as the comments posted anonymously on popular C.P.D. officer blogs, it appears that more C.P.D. officers have made similarly derogatory statements, often without repercussion.

What happens when “overtly racist behavior” is identified? Not much, investigators found: “Even when C.P.D. learns of overtly discriminatory statements, its response reflects a lack of sufficient concern about such conduct.” The report cites a case in which the department learned in June 2015 that an officer “called for a race war” on social media. The case was still “pending” a year and a half later—a period in which the officer continued to post “nearly 100 troubling public posts.”

This is not the first time the nation has been scandalized by police behavior of this nature. High-profile cases such as the killing of Michael Brown by an officer in Ferguson, Missouri, have prompted D.O.J. investigations into police departments around the country, and often, the findings have been similarly grim. On Thursday, the Baltimore Police Department and the Department of Justice announced a consent decree—an agreement to reform policing—following a 2014 report that the city had settled more than 100 civil suits over allegations of police brutality and other misconduct by law-enforcement officers. In 2016, The Washington Post tallied 963 instances wherein police used lethal force nationally. (The Hive previously compiled 18 academic studies, legal rulings, and media investigations into the question of police and racial bias.)

Sessions, the attorney-general designate, spent much of the week trying to convince his skeptical colleagues that he does not personally harbor sentiments of racial animus, and that he would be an attorney general for all Americans. At the same time, he has criticized the efforts of the Civil Rights Division under President Barack Obama, and has described consent decrees as “one of the most dangerous, and rarely discussed, exercises of raw power.”

Some of the agreements reached between the Department of Justice and police departments would continue under a Trump administration, but there is no requirement that the department continue to investigate police abuses of power.