CHICAGO, ILLINOIS — While on spring break, a college student was cruising along Chicago’s South Western Avenue in her new silver Nissan Altima, about to turn right, then left to reach her mother’s house when she heard sirens and pulled the car over.
Two police officers got out of a squad car. They demanded to see her driver’s license. She couldn’t find it. Her teenage brother happened to walk by, saw the commotion and yelled out, “You left your driver’s license on the dining room table,” then quickly ran home to tell their mother, “Ma, ma… the police are arresting Linnette for no reason.”
Meanwhile, the male and female officer taunted the accounting major. They asked her, “What drug dealer do you go with?” and “How many kids do you have?” They threatened to break the key off in the ignition. The officers ordered her to get out of her car and proceeded to search inside the trunk. They charged her and took her to the police station.
The next day she was sitting on the porch when another officer from the district stopped by. He told her they would drop the charges if she agreed not to file a complaint against the officers who detained her.
“What drug dealer do you go with? How many kids do you have?”
Stories of police interactions that begin with harassment, progress to escalation and, ultimately, a cover-up attempt — like the one that happened to my little sister about a decade ago — are rampant across Chicago and span decades. In the light of that past, it’s no surprise activists are skeptical of the yet to be negotiated, independently monitored, court enforceable consent degree announced Friday by outgoing Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch.
The announcement was the result of a 13-month investigation into the Chicago Police Force by the Department of Justice, sparked by the release of videos documenting the shooting deaths of African American citizens by its law enforcement officers.
Footage showing an officer firing 16 bullets into Chicago teenager Laquan McDonald was the catalyst for the DOJ’s investigation which, Lynch said, found within the second largest non-federal law enforcement agency in the country “a pattern and practice of abuse and excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution.”
In remarks at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse on Friday, Lynch said the decades-long pattern or practice of unreasonable force resulted from severely deficient training procedures and accountability systems.
“CPD does not give its officers the training to do their jobs safely, effectively and lawfully. It fails to properly collect and analyze data, including data on misconduct reports and training deficiency and it does not adequately review use of force incidents to determine whether force was appropriate or lawful or whether the use of force could be avoided all together.”
While the contents of the 164-page report, detailing incidents between January 2011 and April 2016, have been called damning, it’s old news for Chicago residents.
“The report from the Department of Justice basically told us what we already knew — that the department was full of institutional racism, that it had an implicit bias, and that it is a system that is inherently violent toward poor and black and brown communities,” Kofi Ademola, a community organizer active with Black Lives Matter — Chicago said at a press conference outside the CPD’s first district station.
“We weren’t shocked at all when we heard the disturbing news of the excessive use of force, of the racial profiling, the negative stereotypes and lewd language used toward young black and brown people and the over 30,000 complaints and 98 percent of them not being acted upon,” Ademola said.
“When this DOJ report came out it didn’t tell any family, any person who has lived on the South or West sides of Chicago anything new,” activist Amika Tendaji said. “Our only hope is that instead of being told again and again we are playing the race card is that maybe now people will understand there’s some truth behind it.”
“We weren’t shocked at all.”
The investigation found that black and Latino communities were disproportionately burdened by excessive use of force by CPD officers and to remedy the problem “the race issue and issues of trust between communities of color and the police department have to be addressed head-on,” DOJ Civil Rights Division leader Vanita Gupta said.
The forthcoming consent decree between the Department of Justice and Chicago will call for increased training of police officers as well as community-oriented policing. Even as her tenure as the head of the DOJ ends on Friday, Lynch assured Chicagoans that reform work would continue.
“This agreement is not dependent upon one, or two or three people,” Lynch said. “It is dependent upon the career lawyers both here in Chicago and in Washington. Also, it is dependent on the partnership with the elected officials here, the police department here as well as the community residents here in Chicago… That work is carried on regardless of who sits at the top of the Department of Justice.”
During the announcement Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel — who has been accused of suppressing the release of the McDonald video — said Chicago officials would work with the Justice Department and the police department to provide adequate training, technology, and transparency to officers. He denounced elected officials who establish policies based on racism. However, in his remarks, Emanuel made no mention of how the city would engage family members of shooting victims or community activists in its plan to reform the police department.
“Every family we fought with and fought for we had to do a FOIA report asking for information and what was really disturbing is the mayor’s deflection and not taking ownership and responsibility for the murders that’s been happening in his city as well as the police killings,” Ademola said.
“Rahm Emanuel is a coward,” said Dorothy Holmes, whose son, Ronald Johnson III, was killed by a police officer in October 2014. “He still hasn’t faced me from day one. No type of way has this man came in contact with me — under no circumstance.”
“Rahm Emanuel is a coward.”
In December 2015, the Cook County State’s Attorney office announced that Johnson’s shooting was justified and that no charges would be filed against the officer who fired the fatal shot despite video that seemed to indicate that the father of five had his hands up in surrender to the police.
Holmes and other family members of victims, civil rights attorneys, activists, and community leaders are calling for the immediate firing of officers involved in police shooting deaths. They want to establish civilian police academy councils to give the community greater control over the city’s police.
While DOJ investigators reached out to more than 1,000 community members and more than 90 community organizations in its investigation, Ademola remains skeptical about the city’s willingness to engage them in reforming the police department.
“We’re asking for accountability,” he said. “That’s very scary to people who are used to the current models and see their power as being legitimate. That’s probably why you will rarely see that conversation happening because we’re not willing to compromise on our end and they’re not willing to compromise on their end.”