At Issue: Changes in Police Union Contract Sought
The city is coordinating with Justice Department investigators over changes being sought in contract talks with the Fraternal Order of Police in order to improve “discipline and accountability,” Corporation Counsel Steve Patton said last week during City Council budget hearings.
Changes “follow very closely what was in the [Police Accountability] Task Force report,” Patton said.
In its April report, the mayor’s task force argued that existing collective bargaining agreements “create unnecessary barriers to identifying and addressing police misconduct” and called for eliminating provisions that:
- require affidavits from complainants and require that officers be informed of complainants’ names;
- give officers involved in shootings a 24-hour waiting period before submitting to questioning by outside investigators, dictate interrogation procedures, and give officers a chance to amend statements that conflict with video evidence before they can be charged with making false statements; and
- mandate destruction of most disciplinary records after five years, bar investigations of older complaints, and prevent investigators from considering older complaints or complaints that were sustained but resulted in minor discipline.
“I’m just hoping that cooler heads prevail and we…stop protecting wrongdoing,” commented Ald. Anthony Beale (9th).
Also in budget hearings last week, Supt. Eddie Johnson said the department has hired consultants to develop a “fair, transparent, and objective methodology” to “ensure equity across the city” in deployment of police officers, and that he’s convening an advisory panel on community policing.
The Chicago Sun-Times reported Sunday that while Mayor Emanuel maintained that the philosophy of community policing permeates CPD, “community policing in Chicago has been withering in Chicago for years,” with funding dropping steadily – and that the city’s federal grant applications acknowledged that trend.
Open data projects
Out of a growing number of police accountability groups which are developing misconduct history databases, the Invisible Institute’s Citizens Police Data Project is the most comprehensive, thanks to a long court battle which established that such records are public information.
Other such efforts highlighted by the Intercept last week include New York Legal Aid Society’s Cop Accountability Project, which aggregates data from lawsuits and media reports and is available only to defense lawyers; and the Southern Coalition for Social Justice’s Open Data Policing NC, which aggregates information from 25 million traffic stops in North Carolina since 2002.
Flex Your Rights, a civil liberties group focused on increasing constitutional literacy, is in the process of launching Open Police Complaints, a national database in which individuals can upload their misconduct complaints.
Last week in Chicago, the Lucy Parsons Lab launched Open Oversight, which uses public and crowd-sourced data to create a digital gallery of police officers in order to help the public file complaints. (About a quarter of complaints in Chicago are dismissed because individuals can’t identify officers.) Invisible Institute recently created a Twitter bot that allows people to retrieve public information on the complaint histories of particular police officers.
Invisible Institute is expanding the scope of its project with new data sources including use of force records, tactical response reports, and a broader set of misconduct complaints recently released by CPD. With additional contextual data regarding individual officers, “the ambition is to be able to follow problem officers through their careers, to see how patterns change as they move between units and commanders, and to explore the intricate networks of relationships that model the Chicago Police Department’s behavior,” the Intercept reports.
Continuing cases
Jose Maysonet had his 1995 murder conviction vacated last Wednesday. It’s thesixth murder conviction based on investigations by disgraced Chicago Det. Reynaldo Guevara to be overturned. Maysonet maintained he confessed after being beaten by Guevara while he was chained to a wall; his confession was the only evidence against him. The Cook County State’s Attorney moved that Maysonet be granted a new trial following an investigation by its Conviction Integrity Unit.
Bernard Mims was released last Thursday — after spending twelve years in prison — when prosecutors dismissed his conviction for the October 2000 killing of an off-duty Cook County Jail officer. Mims’ attorney argued he was bedridden from a recent shooting injury at the time of the killing. The only evidence linking Mims to the killing was the testimony of two eyewitnesses who identified him years later, according to attorney Kathleen Zellner.
Former Det. Dante Servin has filed for disability pay, arguing he is suffering frompost-traumatic stress disorder resulting from his fatal shooting of Rekia Boyd in 2012. In a bizarre twist, Servin was found not guilty of involuntary manslaughter last year, when Judge Dennis Porter said he should have been charged with first-degree murder. Servin resigned earlier this year, days before a hearing on a recommendation that he be fired for violating CPD’s policy on use of force by firing into a crowd. Servin will have to show that he acted “in the performance of an act of duty.”
The cost of criminalization
Increases in funding in Illinois for the criminal justice system, driven by “mass incarceration and criminalization,” amounted to $83 billion over the past three decades, according to a report by Reinvest for Justice and the Northwest Side group Communities United. Annual spending in Illinois is roughly $4.5 billion more than it was in 1983, according to the report, which argues the money “could have instead been used to more effectively address the root causes of crime and meet critical community needs.”
