At Issue: Regime change in Washington
In Washington D.C., Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions told a Senate committee he believes crime rates in places like Chicago and Baltimore have been “impacted” by falling police morale resulting from efforts to hold police departments responsible for the misconduct of individual officers.
The Chicago Sun-Times noted that Sessions could “decide not to implement reforms” recommended for the Chicago Police Department in the Justice Department investigation released on Jan. 13.
Asked by Sen. Richard Durbin whether he would commit to honoring a letter of agreement to negotiate a consent decree between Chicago and DOJ, Sessions said, “I think there are concerns with the impact of using consent decrees for policy purposes,” but agreed to “carefully evaluate this agreement.”
A statement on the White House website, posted on Inauguration Day, said, “The dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America is wrong. The Trump Administration will end it.”
Mayor Rahm Emanuel rejected the Trump administration’s “bipolar” analysis, saying that while there’s been “a reaction to what happened, across thecountry,…the choice isn’t just go back to stop and frisk.” He added: “We need our police to have high professional standards and training and support them in those high professional standards.”
In Baltimore, Justice Department attorneys won a postponement for a hearing on a consent decree with the city. Federal and local officials announced theconsent decree on Jan. 12. It resulted from an investigation launched after theApril 2015 death of Freddie Gray in police custody.
“The United States requires additional time in order to brief the new leadership of the [Justice] Department on the case at bar and the proposed consent decree before making any representations to the court,” according to DOJ’s motion.
Reaction to DOJ report
In Chicago, County Board President Toni Preckwinkle cited Sessions’ “very troubled past when it comes to racial issues” and the lack of evidence that he has “transformed himself,” arguing “the burden is on the mayor to push thereforms that are necessary.”
She called on Emanuel to be “aggressive in his efforts to improve the quality of policing in our communities, particularly black and brown communities,” the Chicago Tribune reported. She said she’s “pleased that the mayor has said he’ll push ahead,” but added, “I would have wished that he would have responded to some of the difficulties sooner than he did.”
While praising the majority of Chicago’s officers, Preckwinkle said “there’s a pervasive racism that afflicts the department institutionally and too many of its officers individually, and [the DOJ] report confirms this.”
(The Chicago Reporter has published an annotated version of the DOJ report, providing details for many of the cases it discusses.)
Emanuel must “take ownership and lead,” said Police Board President Lori Lightfoot. She called for a team functioning “almost like a SWAT team” with thepower to work across branches of the city to address a range of issues, including training, accountability, recruitment and promotion.
Supt. Eddie Johnson said what he found most troubling about the DOJ report was the charge that officers are not receiving adequate training.
“We owe it to our police officers to give them the best possible training,” he told the press. “And to think that we failed them is a difficult pill to swallow.”
Asked about the need to improve training as the department ramps up hiring, Johnson said, “I don’t think the focus should be on making reforms quick enough. I think we should focus on making reforms the right way.”
The Sun-Times featured two articles on efforts to improve training at CPD, one on an eight-hour training for police officers, paramedics, and 911 operators on dealing with people in mental health crises — presented as an attempt “to address glaring deficiencies laid bare by the Justice Department” — and an eight-hour training on procedural justice, presented as an effort “to showcase an aspect of police training [CPD] says it’s doing well.”
McCarthy speaks out
Former Supt. Garry McCarthy delivered his assessment of the DOJ report in a meeting with the Tribune editorial board, where he defended his record — pointing out that the Police Board overturned 75 percent of his disciplinary recommendations — and suggested the investigation had a pre-ordained outcome and was politically motivated.
(As the Chicago Justice Project points out, in recent months McCarthy has become a “go-to source for media,” opening “a floodgate of McCarthy comments about how politicians are putting restrictions on the police and that is responsible for the increase in homicides” – an analysis CJP terms “a false narrative.” CJP notes that McCarthy is the only law enforcement leader to have two departments he headed investigated by DOJ, with findings of widespread constitutional violations in both departments.)
McCarthy also gave a rather odd defense of CPD’s heavy emphasis on street stops during his tenure, which was not a major focus of the DOJ report; themayor’s Police Accountability Task Force gave it more attention. It was odd in part because it was McCarthy who negotiated and signed the agreement with the ACLU to increase data collection and monitoring of street stops, so he is criticizing his own policy.
McCarthy argued that African-Americans were stopped disproportionately because they live “where crime is happening.” But the ACLU study that precipitated the settlement showed that officers were unable to give reasons for street stops that met that legal standard set by the U.S. Supreme Court; in addition, even in white neighborhoods, blacks were stopped in far greater numbers than whites.
And the fact that a quarter of a million mainly black and Latino young people were stopped — without being arrested — over the period studied by ACLU shows the tactic was used inappropriately, said Ed Yohnka of the ACLU.
Patton resigns
Corporation Counsel Stephen Patton will be replaced by Edward Siskel, a former federal prosecutor and deputy White House counsel under President Obama.
Patton said he’d told the mayor last fall that he would leave his post after theDOJ investigation was completed.
Days before his announcement, the City Council Progressive Caucus called for Patton’s resignation when it asked the Justice Department to investigate the city’s law department, which has been sanctioned by judges eight times in the past six years for withholding evidence in police misconduct cases.
Patton was criticized for leading legal efforts to block release of video of thepolice shooting of Laquan McDonald in 2015. He maintained his goal was to protect ongoing investigations, although federal prosecutors did not request thevideo be kept under wraps, and Officer Jason van Dyke was indicted for murder one day after the video was ordered to be released.
Patton also negotiated agreements with civil rights lawyers to establish a reparations fund for victims of police torture, to release records of civilian complaints of police misconduct gong back decades, and to rein in street stops by police.
In the news
Police surveyed. A national survey of police by Pew Research Center has found that 86 percent say police work is harder following recent controversies over police killings of African Americans, and 72 percent say they are less willing to stop and question suspicious persons. Two-thirds say protests following police killings are at least in part motivated by police bias.
Among black officers, 69 percent say those protests have been motivated at least somewhat by a desire to hold police accountable, a view shared by 27 percent of white officers. Nearly all (92 percent) white officers say the country has made the changes needed to assure equal rights for blacks, a view shared by only 29 percent of black officers.
Video released. IPRA released surveillance video from three cameras showing Kajuan Raye sprinting away from Sgt. John Poulos, shortly before Poulos shot and killed him. None of the videos show Raye turning toward Poulos; Poulos reported Raye had turned and pointed a gun at him, but no gun was recovered from the scene, and Raye was shot in the back.
Poulos was relieved of his police duties shortly after the Nov. 23 incident. He is the defendant in two lawsuits, one by Raye’s mother, the other by the family of Rickey Rozelle, who died after being shot by Poulos in 2013.
Poulos figures in the DOJ report in its examination of unsound tactics by Chicago officers (page 29) and in its discussion of CPD’s failure to maintain a working early intervention system (at page 115), according to the Chicago Reporter’s analysis of the report.
Torture lawsuit. The City Council is set to consider a $4 million settlement in a lawsuit by a man who said he was tortured by officers under Cmdr. Jon Burge. Shawn Whirl served 25 years in prison before his conviction was overturned in 2015. The city has paid more than $111 million in settlements, judgments, reparations and legal fees stemming from Burge era torture, according to Flint Taylor of the People’s Law Office.
Thin red line. In a “code of silence” case, six officers have been suspended for giving favored treatment to a Chicago Fire Department deputy commissioner after a car crash last April which resulted two months later in a charge of misdemeanor DUI.
IPRA access. In its quarterly report, IPRA said police and 911 officials have agreed to streamline the process for reporting police-involved shootings after IPRA complained about receiving late and inaccurate notification. (In its report on its investigation of CPD, the DOJ called for giving IPRA investigators immediate access to the scene of officer-involved shootings.)
State commission. Governor Bruce Rauner’s Commission on Criminal Justice and Sentencing Reform released its final report, adding 13 recommendations to reduce incarceration and recidivism.
