Vol. 2, Issue 37: Chicago's Criminal Justice Playbook

At Issue: 20 Years of Police Reform

With the Trump administration backing away from federal civil rights inquiries into local police departments, this may be an appropriate moment to review 20 years of “patterns and practices” investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).

“For the most part”—and despite some “backsliding”—those investigations and resulting legal agreements have “been successful in improving seriously troubled law enforcement agencies,” writes Sam Walker, professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, in a new report.

Congress authorized patterns and practices investigations in 1994, two years after riots in Los Angeles protesting the beating of Rodney King. The first investigation was initiated in Pittsburgh in 1997. Since then, the DOJ has opened 70 investigations and reached 40 consent decrees and legal settlements, primarily during the Clinton and Obama administrations.

Under Obama, the scope of these investigations and the reach of the settlements expanded significantly. Walker credits the Obama DOJ with several major advances, including the introduction of constitutional policing standards backed by best practices, a consistent focus on institutional failings underlying individual police misconduct, and the involvement of community residents, rank-and-file officers, and police unions in investigations and the implementation of settlements.

According to Walker, this unprecedented effort identified a key to the longstanding challenge of transforming “police culture.” The investigations consistently found inadequate reporting of use-of-force incidents and a failure of supervisors to critically review force reports. The DOJ’s recent report on the Chicago Police Department devotes extensive discussion to this issue, highlighting the non-specificity of CPD’s Tactical Response Reports—required after any incident involving lethal or non-lethal force by officers—and the automatic approval of these reports by sergeants and lieutenants.

Merely revising use-of-force policies is insufficient, Walker argues. To ensure officer compliance with new policies, departments must establish detailed reporting and review requirements. He describes this process as “the heart and soul” of accountability and departmental transformation.

While officers typically complain—at least initially—about burdensome paperwork, Walker contends that reporting and review requirements can drive “a fundamental shift in police culture, defined here as the accepted work norms of the job.”

In Chicago, rank-and-file officers objected to a new investigatory stops report form introduced under a legal settlement in January 2016, leading to a subsequent revision that shortened the form. A court-appointed monitor recently found that officers now provide legal justifications for street stops at a significantly higher rate than previously observed, though the stops still disproportionately target African Americans.

In its recent Next Steps for Reform framework, CPD stated that it plans to revise its Tactical Response Report and develop a system for supervisory review of reports in ways that appear to address the DOJ’s criticisms.

In another recent paper, Walker argues that while the Trump administration is retreating from efforts to reform local police departments, “de-escalation, procedural justice, greater police openness, and other new reform measures have been embraced by many police leaders across the country, and have acquired an impressive degree of momentum.”

SESSIONS MEMO

Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memo last week calling for a review of all “existing or contemplated consent decrees” between the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and local law enforcement agencies, casting further doubt on the prospects for a court-enforced agreement with Chicago. In response, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Superintendent Eddie Johnson released a statement reaffirming their commitment to reform.

“Now that the feds have backed off, we urge the mayor and the City Council to appoint an independent monitor of their own,” the Sun-Times editorial board wrote Wednesday.

At a forum at the Cultural Center on Tuesday, Sun-Times editorial page editor Tom McNamee raised that possibility with Emanuel, but the mayor’s response was noncommittal.

Sessions’ memo pushes the “false narrative” that “if you support reform and accountability, you’re somehow anti-police,” Chicago Police Board President Lori Lightfoot told the Sun-Times.

Discussing the steps the city now needs to take, Lightfoot stated, “Someone—whether it’s the mayor or his corporation counsel—needs to articulate what the values are that they’re going to bring to [contract] negotiations [with police unions].”

Sessions has said he has not read the DOJ’s reports on Chicago and Ferguson, Missouri, despite The Chicago Reporter noting that the Chicago report provides strong evidence contradicting his central arguments.

Sessions’ dismissal of the DOJ report on Ferguson, which “uncovered direct evidence of racial bias in the communications of influential Ferguson decision makers” and highlighted the criminalization of petty offenses by Black residents as a source of revenue, ignores “a crucial and near-unimpeachable witness to the abuse of black Americans by entities meant to protect and represent them,” The Atlantic wrote.

“Sessions’ memo reads as an announcement that it is no longer the business of the federal government if American citizens’ rights are violated by those sworn to protect them and empowered with lethal force to do so,” according to The Atlantic.

NATIONAL RESPONSE

A federal judge approved a consent decree between Baltimore and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) on Friday, denying a DOJ request to postpone action for 30 days. The order by U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar is effective immediately, The Baltimore Sun reported

“The case is no longer in a phase where any party is unilaterally entitled to reconsider the terms of the settlement; the parties are bound to each other by their prior agreement,” Bredar wrote in his order.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions stated that he has “grave concerns that some provisions of this decree will reduce the lawful powers of the police department and result in a less safe city.”

Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis welcomed the decision, asserting that it “will support and in fact accelerate many needed reforms in the areas of training, technology, and internal accountability systems.”

Earlier in the week, Bredar denied a DOJ motion seeking a 90-day postponement, allowing a public hearing to proceed the next day. At the hearing, dozens of community residents testified in favor of the consent decree. The city’s attorney stated that the agreement was crafted with deep input from the community, careful consideration of public safety, and measures to better train and equip police officers, The Baltimore Sun reported.

Elsewhere, the lead monitor for a consent decree with the New Orleans Police Department confirmed that the agreement remains in place. “The court will continue to monitor the implementation of the decree that benefits the citizens of New Orleans and is supported by the city and the police department,” said Jonathan Aronie.

“They can’t undo the consent decree in Seattle,” said City Attorney Pete Holmes, as plans for expanded oversight were unveiled.

Tucson Police Chief Chris Magnus noted that Sessions argues it is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage local agencies—yet he demands that local police departments enforce federal immigration law.

PUBLIC SAFETY INSPECTOR GENERAL APPOINTED

Inspector General Joe Ferguson appointed criminologist Laura Kunard, a “veteran police reformer and researcher,” as deputy inspector general for public safety. This position was created by ordinance last year based on a recommendation from the mayor’s Police Accountability Task Force.

Kunard is currently part of the court-appointed independent monitoring team overseeing the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) consent decree with Albuquerque’s police department. She was the founding director of the Institute on Public Safety and Social Justice at Chicago’s Adler School of Psychology, where she focused on restorative justice and police interactions with individuals with mental illness.

The new deputy inspector general’s role—auditing police accountability systems and identifying patterns of constitutional violations—will be even more critical in the absence of a federal consent decree, Lori Lightfoot told The Tribune.

JOHNSON TESTIFIES

Testifying in a wrongful death lawsuit, Superintendent Eddie Johnson recalled being shot by a carjacking suspect in a 2005 incident as he described how a fleeing suspect can shoot a pursuer. Johnson stated that an officer could be justified in shooting a fleeing suspect in the back if the suspect had a gun.

The lawsuit concerns the 2013 fatal shooting of 17-year-old Christian Green by Officer Robert Gonzalez, who testified that Green turned and pointed a gun at him. Green was shot once in the back. Security footage showed Green attempting to discard a gun, picking it up when it bounced off the rim of a garbage can, and then running into the vacant lot where he was shot. A gun was later recovered 75 feet from Green’s body.

On Friday, an eyewitness contradicted Gonzalez’s claim that Green was armed when he was shot.

ANOTHER GUEVARA CASE

BuzzFeed provides an in-depth account of the career of Detective Reynaldo Guevara and the decades-long organizing efforts by relatives of men imprisoned based on Guevara’s investigations, focusing on the case of Roberto Almodovar. After hearing closing arguments on the motion for a new hearing by Almodovar and co-defendant William Negron, Judge James K. Linn stated that he expects to issue a ruling on April 20.

In December, State’s Attorney Kim Foxx dropped an appeal—filed by her predecessor, Anita Alvarez—of a court ruling granting a new hearing on a motion to suppress confessions by two other Guevara victims, Gabriel Solache and Arturo Reyes. However, Foxx’s office continues to defend their convictions. A status hearing on that case is scheduled for April 27.

WATTS UPDATE

At The Intercept, Jamie Kalven provides an update on the case of Sergeant Ronald Watts and the code of silence surrounding his extortion ring. Kalven covers several key developments, including the settlement of a lawsuit filed by Chicago Police Department (CPD) whistleblowers Shannon Spaulding and Daniel Echeverria, after key CPD witnesses were found to have falsified official reports in other cases. He also discusses the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate wrongful convictions orchestrated by Watts, following the exoneration of Ben Baker and Lionel White. In both cases, a Watts associate, Alvin Jones, played a key role; Jones has since been promoted to sergeant. Additionally, Kalven highlights the uncertainty of federal support for police reform, emphasizing that the Watts investigation is critical to “deepen our understanding of the operation of the code of silence.”

Join the Invisible Institute on Thursday, April 13, for a conversation between former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper and Jamie Kalven on Stamper’s new book, To Protect and Serve: How to Fix America’s Police, at the Experimental Station, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave., at 7 p.m.