ABC News reports that the FBI is accusing the Chicago Police Department of having systematically and routinely violated the rights of Chicagoans, particularly black Chicagoans:
Chicago police have violated the constitutional rights of residents for years, permitting racial bias against blacks, using excessive force and shooting people who did not pose immediate threats, the Justice Department announced Friday after a yearlong investigation.
Officers endangered civilians, caused avoidable injuries and deaths and eroded community trust that is “the cornerstone of public safety,” said Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
The federal report blamed “systemic deficiencies” within the department and the city, including insufficient training and a failure to hold bad officers accountable for misconduct.
It is difficult to build trust again once it’s been violated and lost. It takes more than just a change of administrations, crying crocodile tears, and promising to do better. And it takes more than paying damages to people who’ve been maltreated. It’s Chicagoans at large who pay; the actual people doing the maltreatment somehow never end up paying.
Is this basically still Old Man Daley’s force? They’ve had a reputation since forever. I’m curious whether there was a time when the CPD ever had its act together, or is this essentially the same force we saw beating on Dan Rather in 1968?
In many ways it’s become worse under Ritchie Daley, first as States Attorney and then as mayor.
The blurb I heard on TV focused on training and gave an example of a decades old training video. This really is not a promising direction. The DOJ solution for Ferguson was poor training and the answer was to give the police force raises, gym-membership and more time-off for training. Insufficient training is the easy path for litigators because whatever training is given, there can always be more. And its really not true in the most outrageous cases where we might throw around words like “depraved heart.”
Holding “bad officers” accountable is interesting, but I’m curious how DOJ proposes to navigate the Constitutional, statutory, civil service and union issues. Fire them? Or give them paid leave for more training?
In honesty I don’t think it’s possible to do so. It’s a wicked problem. There is no solution. The most we can expect is a modus vivendi.
You’ve got to align incentives to encourage the behaviors you want and discourage those you don’t. Voters don’t recognize that there’s a trade-off between a corrupt police department and neighborhood schools and they don’t feel as though they’re paying the multi-million dollar penalties so they keep voting the same shnucks in year after year. The politicians’ interest is in preserving plausible deniability. The police don’t pay any penalties so they have no incentives to change.
The city that works……
Makes you think there is good reason people won’t snitch when crimes occur in the neighborhood.
The reason police officers don’t pay any penalties is that state or local government have agreed by statute or ordinance to indemnify them. That is not required by federal civil rights law. Municipalities (but not states) can be liable for compensatory, but not punitive, damages for their own negligence.
I think I would urge eliminating the indemnities and in cases involving death or serious injury replacing it with some sort of worker’s-compensation style program in which injured parties will receive a specified cash payment, unless an enumerated set of disqualifications are present. I think this probably reflects the reality of juror conduct, and I’m philosophically opposed to the government paying when a set sum when citizens are killed or injured, even by innocent action.
What I’m trying to do with this is to reinstate the incentive-forming goals of Section 1983 actions, by unbundling them from an unrelated social welfare function. Municipal liability without indemnification focuses on the actions of municipal policymakers. That’s part one.
Part II starts with recognizing that cops have twice the Constitutional protections of the ordinary citizen. They have the rights of the accused when the state is considering possible criminal actions. They also have the rights stemming from the employer-employee relationship that are unique to when the government is your employer.
In cases of police use of force, I think there needs to be a process that hastens and irreversibly channels some of these cases into noncriminal settings for noncriminal penalties. Most (99.9%) of these criminal lawsuits are not going to work, given the Constitution and the burden of proof, etc. This needs to be recognized as the reality and conceded in most cases by waiving criminal recourse to make room for noncriminal accountability. This would presumably require changes to state laws and collective bargaining agreements, so its more difficult than the first part.
Training is a default solution for large organizations even though its effectiveness is questionable (at best). It gives the appearance of doing something, provides (meaningless) metrics proving that something is being done, and is compatible with entrenched bureaucracies that resist any kind of meaningful change.