In its current efforts to reform long-running patterns of civil rights abuses, the Chicago Police Department appears to be inching up from failure to “needs improvement.”
That’s the bottom line in the latest accounting by court-appointed independent monitor Margaret “Maggie” Hickey of the city’s court-ordered efforts to reform long-standing and pervasive patterns and practices of civil rights abuses.
“Constitutional and effective policing and the Consent Decree require more than a simple checklist,” she wrote in a letter accompanying her office’s latest biannual report last Tuesday.
CPD and related city entities “must become learning organizations, capable of identifying new and existing challenges and implementing corresponding solutions,” Hickey wrote, while also allowing that CPD has had to work on reform while also working through some extraordinary challenges, ranging from officer attrition to the spike in crime to the myriad challenges posed to the department by COVID-19.
It’s hard to argue with such simple wisdom, yet arguing over how those goals might best be achieved never seems to end.
Chicago’s police department has operated since 2019 under a consent decree, a series of court-mandated reforms, agreed to with the U.S. Department of Justice, after the killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014 by former Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke.
Hickey, a former federal prosecutor, attached a letter to the report that acknowledged “major changes” instituted by CPD under the guidance of the consent decree, but also highlighted persistent problems.
Its good news includes a welcome rise in the city and CPD’s compliance with the consent decree. That list includes 519 paragraphs of court-ordered reforms.
Full or partial compliance was achieved in more than 70% of the requirements reviewed, compared with barely more than 50% in the previous period last year. So that’s better.
But the report also scolded the department’s sluggish progress toward a crucial new foot-pursuit policy in the wake of the shooting death of 13-year-old Adam Toledo in March 2021. Although it has an interim policy, the department missed its deadline for formulating the new policy report. At least one official said they’ll have one later in the year.
The report also rapped the CPD’s recent focus on generating at least 1.5 million “positive community interactions.” That’s meant to build trust in the community, but the monitoring team said it might actually do more harm in reaching that goal than helping it. Counting interactions with the community as if they were widgets hardly feels like a good use of police time.
Yet, healthy community relations matter, Hickey said, and called on CPD to improve and show a “commitment” to community policing and other engagement efforts that “continue to frustrate members of Chicago’s communities.”
Police Superintendent David Brown agrees that effective reform efforts and crime reduction need to work hand in hand. Yet in achieving that goal, the report notes, CPD often gets in its own way.
The department is still too slow in seeking community input, it says, leaving too little time for feedback from the public as plans are being formed, and offices of community policing are understaffed.
The monitoring report cites an almost laughable redundancy in the CPD having two offices responsible for community policing — the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) and its Neighborhood Policing Initiative (NPI) — that would be better if merged into one.
Worse, the report notes, it’s not clear how CPD tells the difference between “community engagement, community partnerships, community relationships, community policing and community service.”
If that sounds like late-night television comedy, it is important to remember that community-oriented policing, by whatever label, is not a joke.
It’s a strategy that focuses on developing strong relationships between police officers and the residents, businesses and others in the communities they serve. Many police forces across the country have teams that focus specifically on community policing.
When it is done well, ample evidence and experience shows, it works. Some hardliners may scoff at what sounds to them like police doing social work or dropping buzzwords to get bureaucrats and pesky monitors off their backs while they do the real work of arresting criminals.
But wise police heads know that crime-fighting also relies on building stronger communities. We must not leave that off of our checklist.
