Ear Hustle

Chicago: A City Torn Apart, A Severely Troubled Police Department; How Much More Can The Windy City Take?

Chicago’s police department has had problems long before the Laquan McDonald shooting and unfortunately it goes as far back to the days of Al Capone and maybe further.  While the issues against the department keep increasing, the corrective actions to prevent further problems has never taken place against those with several complaints.  Funny thing though it seems that the black officers have had more actions taken against them when the department is primarily white.

Any behavior unbecoming by a police officer whether in uniform or out is an officer that should find a new line of work!! EarHustle411 came across an article discussing the many complaints made against Chicago police officers and all we have to say it SHAME ON CPD…if they had address the complaints accurately and effectively and rid the department of their “rogue” officers, some of their problems may not have come to pass.  There has to be a high level of NO TOLERANCE when officers rack up complaints but are still walking a beat in the very communities they are getting complaints from.  After so many complaints it’s time to start doing things differently.

Read more as reported by The Chicagoist

chicagp police

photo credit: NBC

Complaints against Chicago police officers have been made public after a long battle by the city to keep the information from ever seeing the light of day.

The searchable database has over 55,000 rows of data that provide an extraordinary look into the force’s power, according to WBEZ.
The database release was catalyzed by local journalist, writer and social worker Jamie Kalven, who noticed that the police in Stateway Gardens on the far South Side treated the neighborhood’s residents very differently than they treated him—a middle-class white guy.

He was witnessing police beatings, so he called in University of Chicago law professor Craig Futterman, whose students started spending time documenting police abuse in Kalven’s office in Stateway Gardens.

Futterman filed several lawsuits against law enforcement, including a lawsuit on behalf of Diane Bond, who alleged a group of cops repeatedly broke into her home, forced to undress and wrecked some of her possessions.

The City of Chicago settled her lawsuit in 2007 but admitted no wrongdoing. It is common for the city to settle lawsuits rather than fight them in court.
Futterman managed to get the city to release police records for all officers who had ten or more complaints against them, including John J. Gorman, who is accused of firing shots at an off-duty suburban cop who believed he saw him drinking and driving last year. Some officers, like Gorman, had dozens of complaints but no action had been taken against them. The database shows over 100 officers have 30 or more complaints agains them—and the majority of them have been disciplined once or zero times.
“We got the information under a court protective order,” Futterman told WBEZ. “We didn’t know what it was going to show until we actually analyzed it and then what we saw-that’s what was incredibly shocking, and then that’s when we had this information and I felt like, oh my gosh, my hands are completely tied behind my back. We knew it. Not allowed to share it.”
Futterman sued to make the information public and Kalven acted as his client. After seven years of litigation, they finally won the legal battle and published the complaints on a searchable website.

Shockingly for 27,000 complaints, there was only significant punishment, more than a week of suspension, for 80 cases. The database also shows another disturbing trend: black police officers are much more likely to be censured than white officers.

Source: The Chicagoist

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