Late yesterday, the Independent Monitor overseeing Chicago Police reform issued the sixth report on the City’s progress toward achieving constitutional policing in Chicago. The report continued to show that CPD is failing to meet many of the goals under the federal court supervised consent decree.
The following can be attributed to Alexandra Block, Senior Supervising Attorney at the ACLU of Illinois:
The Independent Monitor’s latest report confirms that the Chicago Police Department is still failing to commit itself to the transformational changes needed to comply with the Constitution and regain the community’s trust. More than 3 years after the Monitor first found the City to be failing in doing the work necessary to improve policing in our City, little has changed. The City boasts that they are partially complying with a growing percentage of requirements of the decree. That obscures the reality that the City has achieved full compliance with just 5% of the paragraphs of the consent decree – the same as the last six-month reporting period. Preliminary compliance has barely progressed since 2021. Worse, CPD went backwards and lost compliance levels with 6 paragraphs because of inadequate staffing in the unit that reviews incidents where police use force against community members.
In short, the City still has not committed itself to overhauling the culture of violence, racism, and impunity in CPD.
Instead, CPD continues to view the consent decree as an exercise in box-checking and public relations. Emblematic of this failure is the fact that in 2022, CPD had approximately twice as many personnel employed in communications and public relations as in its Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform.
It is time for the Mayor and CPD leadership to cease the public statements and actually do the work necessary for reform.