Tell Chicago Police Their Policies Don’t Go Far Enough To Protect Human Rights And Stop Biased Policing

There is an opportunity to comment on two critically important Chicago Police Department (CPD) policies that do not adequately prevent human rights violations or biased policing. CPD is accepting public comments on its new Human Rights and Biased Policing policies (General Orders G02-01 and G02-04). The Department wrote these policies without real community input, and the drafts do not go far enough to protect people from biased and racist police practices.

Make your voice heard! Go to the CPD policy comment portal and share your own thoughts or simply copy and paste the message below. The deadline to submit comments is Friday, January 28, 2022.

The revised Chicago Police Department (CPD) General Orders on Human Rights and Biased Policing (G02-01 and G02-04) fail to provide Chicago’s communities with sufficient protection from biased and racist police practices. Further, the CPD developed these policies without meaningful community engagement—and particularly without sufficient input from those communities most affected by police violence and bias. The CPD should rescind these drafts and launch a focused community engagement process similar to the one used for the Use of Force Policy Suite.

As the Fourth Independent Monitoring Report said, the CPD must turn around its community engagement efforts or else “community members may become discouraged from continuing to provide feedback.” Improving community engagement will require that the CPD stop relying on Community Conversations and Deliberative Dialogues because they do not allow meaningful community input.

Given the need for deep and meaningful community engagement, the feedback below is preliminary and includes only initial recommendations and concerns about the CPD’s Human Rights and Biased Policing policies. These policies must:

• Stop Chicago police from targeting communities, events, people, and/or places based on race or ethnicity.
• Teach all Chicago police supervisors and officers that having “probable cause” or “reasonable suspicion” is not the same as being free of bias.
• Take “observed behaviors” out of the Biased Policing Policy’s definition of “Reasonable Articulable Suspicion.” It wrongly says officers can stop someone based on their looks combined with some other undefined behavior.
• Add protections for gender bias, sexual assault, and LGBTQ+ bias.
• Stop biased policing based on all the protected traits (including age) in the Consent Decree for the Chicago Police.
• Stop Chicago police from dumping people in places where they have enemies or face threats that the officers know about.
• Make officers give people info cards with their rights and other important information on them. The cards should be in multiple languages and formats.
• Teach officers to offer free interpretation services, even when giving Miranda warnings.
• Make Chicago police give reasonable accommodations to people with disabilities who communicate in different ways.
• Stop officers from abusing people who come forward after experiencing or seeing biased policing.
• Require all abuses of human rights and biased policing to be reported right away.
• Punish all Chicago police supervisors and officers who engage in biased policing, up to and including firing.
• Review all Human Rights and Biased Policing policies, procedures and trainings every year. Make the results public.