In a sweeping investigative piece for The Intercept, reporter Jamie Kalven writes in detail about rogue Chicago Police Department officers beating and humiliating Black residents over the past 20 years “as sport,” protected from discipline by meaningless police-department investigations. “Most of the citizen complaints against him allege not corruption, but racist abuse – something which the accountability system, then and now, largely ignores," Kalven writes about one officer who racked up dozens of complaints.
Kalven notes that the U.S. Department of Justice report on its investigation of the CPD, undertaken in the wake of the police murder of Laquan McDonald: “We have serious concerns about the prevalence of racially discriminatory conduct by some CPD officers and the degree to which that conduct is tolerated and, in some respects, caused by deficiencies in CPD’s systems of training, supervision and accountability.” The Citizens Police Data Project, a public database created by the Invisible Institute currently contains information about 250,000 investigations of allegations of misconduct and the disciplinary histories of 34,000 officers.