In the five and a half years since the Chicago Police Department agreed to oversight from a federal judge, there have been bursts of activity to address the brutality and civil rights violations that led to the agreement: More than a hundred court hearings and hundreds of millions in Chicago taxpayer dollars allocated to making the court-ordered reforms, known as a consent decree, a reality. The record of actual accomplishment is meager, ProPublica reports. Chicago police haven’t crafted a system for officers to work with residents to address threats to public safety. They haven’t completed a mandatory study of where officers are assigned throughout the city and whether changes would help thwart crime. They have failed to move forward with a plan to alert police brass about which officers have been accused of misconduct more than once and might need counseling, retraining or discipline.
Aold, police have fully complied with just 9% of the agreement’s requirements. And while excessive force complaints from citizens have dropped, complaints about all forms of misconduct have risen. Sheila Bedi, an attorney who represented the coalition of police reform groups that sued the city years ago, called the faltering reform effort a “tragedy.” “It has been a waste of time and money,” said Bedi, a Northwestern University law professor. “It has been nothing more than an exercise in pushing paper.” A review by WTTW News and ProPublica of the efforts in Chicago since 2019 shows Bedi’s bleak view is supported by a range of assessments produced for the court and is also widely held among advocates, academics and officials following the process. The goal is to emerge from the consent decree by 2027 with a police force finally ready to move beyond a long history of civil rights violations targeting Black and Latino Chicagoans. The city is now on a path to devote substantial resources and large amounts of money to the reform effort for years beyond that. It’s a trajectory that echoes what happened in Oakland, where the police department continues to be marred by scandal and remains under federal court oversight more than 20 years into its consent decree.
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