After Laquan McDonald: the key takeaways for why police reform failed
For City Bureau, Charles Preston and I asked a simple but important question: After the city and the world found out about the police shooting of Laquan McDonald after the court-ordered release of the dashcam video in November 2015, why did efforts to form a truly independent agency to hold police officers accountable largely fail?
Civil rights advocates and those who want to ensure police officers who betray the public trust are held accountable know the kind of reforms that make sense and ensure a fair process. The mayor and City Council’s solution — the newly-launched Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA)— fell far short, experts and civil rights advocates agree.
So why did the political process fail after the Laquan McDonald video forced the woeful inadequacy of police oversight into the light? In short, we found:
- Politics as usual, despite a call for independence from City Council. Mayor Rahm Emanuel had to go through a runoff and couldn’t get his chosen candidates elected to City Council in 2015. Still, it seems, aldermen on City Council didn’t want to stand up to him — and perhaps didn’t know how. “The thing you have to understand about when an ordinance comes out, it’s basically for the press,” said a former staffer of the City Council’s process. “And people just sign onto it [as sponsors]. A lot of them aren’t even planning to vote for it.”
- A do-little City Council. Most don’t know it but aldermen mostly pass laws, or ordinances, that pertain to routine matters that could be handled by the city’s administration. Together with Datamade, a civic data transparency group, we analyzed what aldermen had done since November 2015. Mostly handicapped parking permits and allowances for doing stuff in the public way. They did this thousands of times. But the data point that really tells the story is the fact that under 2 percent of the laws that City Council passes amend the municipal code — the main body of law that affects the lives of Chicagoans.
- Power comes in voting blocs — and aldermen don’t stick together, especially the Black Caucus. As former political reporter Charles Thomas of ABC7 put it: “What do they do? To be honest, not much,” he said of the Black Caucus. He believes the biggest issue for the Black Caucus is an informal rule known as “aldermanic privilege.” Essentially, aldermen are usually unwilling to interfere with projects and issues in their colleagues’ wards. In practice, it means Black aldermen do not stand together on issues where they should be aligned, such as school closings and minority hiring for big projects since aldermen won’t go against each other.
- Aldermen long ago ceded their power. Ald. Roderick Sawyer said that when his father was at the helm in the district he now represents, aldermen had far more influence. Now, anti-corruption rulings called the Shakman Decress mean that they can’t help their constituents in the way they used to. “Patronage was not all bad; there were bad parts of patronage,” Sawyer said. “I equate the demise of our communities with the advent of Shakman. Things started happening when we were not able to provide jobs for our communities.”
