Vol. 2, Issue 30: Chicago's Criminal Justice Playbook
At Issue: Sending in the Feds
Ald. Anthony Beale of the Far South Side’s 9th Ward may have had the most relevant response to President Donald Trump’s threat to “send in the Feds” if Chicago fails to address its rising murder rate. “What does it even mean?” Beale asked. “It’s so vague.”
The Chicago Sun-Times reported that the White House “did not respond to a request for clarification on what he meant by ‘send in the Feds.’”
Trump may have intended nothing more than to stir controversy and distract attention from real policies his administration is implementing. If so, he succeeded—albeit briefly.
Reporters attempted to outline the potential options for federal intervention while also correcting Trump’s false claim that two people were killed in Chicago while former President Obama delivered his farewell address at McCormick Place on Jan. 10.
After Trump tweeted about the 24 percent increase in homicides so far this month, hundreds of police officers in tactical, gang, saturation, and mission teams had their regular days off canceled for the weekend. “If the number of killings for January were to come in lower than last year, that would allow [Mayor Rahm] Emanuel to try to counter Trump’s narrative,” The Chicago Tribune pointed out.
A police department spokesperson told The Tribune that “the staffing adjustment was unrelated to recent attention” from Trump.
Two days after Trump called on Emanuel to “smarten up” and “toughen up,” the mayor held a major media event at the 7th District police station in Englewood to promote a new “smart policing strategy” that includes new surveillance cameras and gunshot detection technology monitored at a “crime-fighting intel center” in the station.
Emanuel is allocating $1.1 million for two intelligence centers to monitor surveillance cameras in the 7th and 11th districts on the South and West Sides.
The ACLU cited a recent Inspector General report that found the city is not enforcing its own rules regarding surveillance cameras—particularly in police stations, where there is no oversight of who can access the footage. “Until the city has adequate privacy policies, follows them, and conducts audits to make sure they are followed, there should be a moratorium on new cameras,” spokesperson Ed Yohnka told View From the Ground. “In any case, there should be public hearings before new cameras are installed in any neighborhood.”
At The Intercept, Jamie Kalven of the Invisible Institute discussed Trump’s tweets and recent developments in Chicago, which he argues present “an opportunity for Mayor Emanuel to assume a national leadership role” on the issue of police reform.
VIOLENCE AND JOBLESSNESS
“The increase in gun violence from 2015 to 2016 was much larger than for other crimes, and the surge came suddenly,” with numbers rising sharply in January 2016, researchers from the University of Chicago Crime Lab wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times. The cause of this increase remains unclear—including the role played by a dramatic drop in the number of street stops by police officers that same month. However, reducing the number of stops has not impacted crime rates in other cities.
The Crime Lab researchers emphasize that reducing violence will require significant investments, potentially including hundreds of millions of dollars for social programs and tens of millions for improving policing.
A generation ago, New York and Chicago had similar murder rates, but since then, New York has experienced a sustained decrease, with its murder rate now almost 90 percent lower. “Many experts believe that a variety of policing changes were responsible for a large part of that drop, including big increases in the number of police and world-class training for both new and experienced officers.”
“The question is whether Chicago will make the investments necessary to address this problem,” the researchers write—specifically, “whether Chicago will follow in the footsteps of New York or go the way of struggling cities such as Baltimore, Detroit, and St. Louis, which suffer even higher murder rates than Chicago.”
Meanwhile, Chicago is “a national leader in joblessness among young people, particularly young Black people living in highly segregated neighborhoods wracked by violence,” The Chicago Tribune reports, citing a new study from the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois Chicago. The study also found that the city is making “scant progress” on the problem.
What sets Chicago apart from other large cities is its “severe racial disparities” in youth joblessness. In Chicago, the gap between African Americans and whites in their 20s who are out of work and out of school is three times the national average. Moreover, the city’s racial gap appears to have worsened over the past decade.
Five neighborhoods that accounted for a third of the homicides last year had teen jobless rates ranging from 79 to 92 percent and young adult jobless rates between 49 and 70 percent, The Tribune reported.
“If [President Trump] wants to involve the federal government in helping to address our problem of violence, then send us federal dollars for summer employment, jobs programs, and dollars to revitalize our neighborhoods,” said Teresa Cordova, director of the institute and co-author of the study.
IN THE NEWS
Field trainers: The Chicago Tribune reports that two officers currently in training to become field training officers were involved in fatal shootings that have cost the city millions of dollars in legal settlements. Both shootings appear to have violated CPD policy on shooting at vehicles.
The DOJ’s recent investigation of CPD found that its field training program “undermines effective and lawful policing,” in part due to a flawed selection process for field training officers that overlooks most disciplinary infractions.
Raoul Mosqueda shot and killed Darius Pinex as he attempted to drive away from a traffic stop in 2011. The city paid $3.5 million to Pinex’s family after Mosqueda’s testimony was contradicted by police dispatch recordings, raising doubts about the lawfulness of the traffic stop.
Michael St. Clair II shot and killed William Hope Jr. during a traffic stop in 2010. A federal jury awarded Hope’s family $4.6 million after ruling that officers unlawfully detained Hope and used unlawful force.
Pinex’s mother joined activists Monday to protest Mosqueda’s promotion.
Another torture case: The Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission has ruled that Javan Deloney, currently serving a life sentence for a 1991 triple murder, was tortured into confessing by detectives supervised by Cmdr. Jon Burge. Last year, the commission found that one of Deloney’s co-defendants, Ivan Smith, had also been tortured. The commission has 250 claims pending, including 74 related to Burge.
Among the dozens of wrongful conviction lawsuits currently pending against the city, at least two involve allegations from the Burge era, a city attorney told the City Council’s Finance Committee. The city has spent over $100 million on Burge-related litigation.
Murder clearance rate drops: CPD’s already-low murder clearance rate dropped further last year, WBEZ reports. Chicago detectives closed fewer than 20 percent of last year’s homicides—“an extraordinary figure” and a “very low clearance rate,” according to one criminologist. The rate has steadily declined since the 1990s, when CPD closed two-thirds of its murders within a year, a rate close to the national average.
Cellphone surveillance: Attorney Jerry Boyle filed a federal lawsuit on Jan. 12, charging that CPD’s secret cellphone tracking system violates individual privacy and should require a warrant. Police intercepted information from Boyle’s cellphone during a protest in 2015, according to the lawsuit. CPD spent more than half a million dollars on cellphone tracking technology between 2005 and 2010, Boyle stated.
Law Department sanctioned: A lawsuit in which city attorneys once again face sanctions for failing to produce evidence is raising questions about the thoroughness of a recent review of the department by former U.S. Attorney Dan Webb—and whether the changes implemented since then go far enough.
Consent decrees: In the wake of Trump’s nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions as attorney general, local police unions across the country say they want to renegotiate consent decrees, which they decry as ineffective and burdensome, Reuters reports. However, according to a former Justice Department attorney writing for The Marshall Project, that would be a mistake. The attorney cites comments by rank-and-file officers as evidence that consent decrees work to improve policing.