re: #150 Obdicut

Chicago PD is dirty all the way through. This study is a couple years old but it hasn’t gotten any better over the last few years:

Chicago Police Abuse Cases Exceed Average
nytimes.com

Chicago police officers are the subject of more brutality complaints per officer than the national average, and the Police Department is far less likely to pursue abuse cases seriously than the national norm, a legal team at the University of Chicago reported Wednesday.
….
According to the new report, rogue police officers abuse victims without fear of punishment, and the lack of accountability has tainted the entire department, resulting in a loss of public confidence. Patterns of abuse and disciplinary neglect were worst in low-income minority neighborhoods, said the authors, Craig B. Futterman, H. Melissa Mather and Melanie Miles.

The national average among large police departments for excessive-force complaints is 9.5 per 100 full-time officers. For a department of Chicago’s size (13,500, second only to New York), that would correspond to 1,283 complaints a year. From 1999 to 2004, however, citizens filed about 1,774 brutality complaints a year against Chicago officers. Less than 5 percent of the department was responsible for nearly half of abuse complaints, from 2001 to 2006.
….
Analyzing a broader array of complaints in another breakdown, the authors said that from 2002 to 2004 civilians filed 10,149 complaints accusing officers of excessive force, illegal searches and false arrests, and of abusing them sexually or because of race.

The rate at which the department found enough evidence to believe that the charge of abuse might have occurred in order to sustain a case was 1 percent (124 of the 10,149 complaints), the report said, compared with a national average of 8 percent from 2002, the most recent year for which national data is available.

Just 19 of the 10,149 complaints in Chicago led to suspensions of a week or more, said Mr. Futterman of the University of Chicago.