What’s DC’s Police Problem?

The editors of the Washington Post lament Chicago’s “police problem”:

The violence, reminiscent of the crack-cocaine epidemic that drove murders in cities across the nation in the 1990s, seems to have left officials flummoxed. Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said Tuesday that his department is doing all it can to combat violence. “It’s not a police issue, it’s a society issue,” he said, pointing the finger instead at “impoverished neighborhoods” where “people without hope do these kinds of things.”

That sounded like an evasion. No doubt the chief is right about the complexities that give root to crime and violence. But it is clear — as evidenced by the success New York and other cities have had in curtailing homicides — that Chicago has a unique set of problems in which the police play their part. Foremost among them are the tumult and distrust that pervade police-community relations in the wake of the fatal shooting of black teen Laquan McDonald by an officer in October 2014 and the belated release of a troubling video a year later. That the police union urged its members to refuse voluntary overtime over the recent holiday weekend — when they were most needed — suggests there may be a morale problem, the “Ferguson effect” of police not doing all they can.

That verges on being self-refuting. Was the “crack-cocaine epidemic” also a police problem? Or did it reflect a societal problem?

I look forward to an in-depth investigative report from the Post on the subject. Actually, it might be cheaper for the Post to investigate the District of Columbia Police Department. In 2015 DC experienced a more than 50% increase in the number of homicides over the previous year and 2016 is on track to approximate the same number of homicides as last year. The DC police attribute the problem to guns.

The reality is actually pretty clear. The problem in both Chicago and the District is black street gangs. The factors that promote the growth in power of street gangs is one I’ll leave to those more expert than I. I doubt that either poor policing or guns are dispositive.

Here in Chicago it doesn’t help that politicians are in bed with the street gangs and that goes all the way to the top.

If you want to increase police accountability, it might help if the police were, well, accountable. Police officers who break the law and/or city policy still receive their pensions. The city pays the legal and court costs for offending police officers and on top of that pays damages to the victims of police misconduct. When police officers are violating the law and/or city policy, that Chicago’s taxpayers who by definition can have no impact on the misconduct (particularly when it’s been covered up for years or decades) is a cruel irony.

In the case of the Laquan McDonald case, despite video evidence of complicity on the part of a number of police officers, those police officers still hold their jobs quite literally years later and remain eligible for their pensions.