Why Chicago Hasn’t Seen Police Reform Progress — ProPublica

In the five and a half years since the Chicago Police Department agreed to extensive oversight from a federal judge, there have been bursts of activity to address the brutality and civil rights violations that led to the agreement.

Court hearings: more than a hundred. Meetings: hundreds. Money: hundreds of millions in Chicago taxpayer dollars allocated to making the court-ordered reforms, known as a consent decree, a reality.

But the record of actual accomplishment is meager.

Chicago police haven’t crafted a system for officers to work with residents to address threats to public safety.

They haven’t completed a mandatory study of where officers are assigned throughout the city and whether changes would help thwart crime.

And they have failed to move forward with a plan to alert police brass about which officers have been accused of misconduct more than once and might need counseling, retraining or discipline.

In fact, all told, police have fully complied with just 9% of the agreement’s requirements. And while excessive force complaints from citizens have dropped, complaints about all forms of misconduct have risen.

Sheila Bedi, an attorney who represented the coalition of police reform groups that sued the city years ago, called the faltering reform effort a “tragedy.”

“It has been a waste of time and money,” said Bedi, a Northwestern University law professor. “It has been nothing more than an exercise in pushing paper.”

A review by WTTW News and ProPublica of the efforts in Chicago since 2019 shows Bedi’s bleak view is supported by a range of assessments produced for the court and is also widely held among advocates, academics and officials following the process.

The goal is to emerge from the consent decree by 2027 with a police force finally ready to move beyond a long history of civil rights violations targeting Black and Latino Chicagoans. But the city is now on a path to devote substantial resources and large amounts of money to the reform effort for years beyond that. It’s a trajectory that echoes what happened in Oakland, where the police department continues to be marred by scandal and remains under federal court oversight more than 20 years into its consent decree.

No one in a position of power or oversight has pushed forcefully or effectively to make the process move faster, WTTW News and ProPublica found. Six permanent and interim superintendents have led CPD since 2019 and the city has had three mayors, all of whom vowed to implement the consent decree but failed to make good on those promises with money and other resources.

In addition, the Chicago City Council has repeatedly failed to exercise its authority to oversee CPD’s operations and demand quicker change. The council has approved $667 million to go toward implementing the decree since 2020, but at least a quarter of the city’s annual allotment goes unspent each year, a WTTW News analysis found.

At the same time, inside the federal courtroom, the court-appointed monitoring team has never demanded sanctions for the city’s slow pace. Similarly, judges overseeing the decree have not expressed concerns about the lack of significant advances.

No major city exemplifies the stubborn problems of police misconduct more than Chicago, where a series of civil cases and wrongful convictions have led to expensive court settlements that regularly cost the city more than $80 million a year. Distrust in the community now makes attacking the city’s crime rate even harder.

Now many of the city’s reform advocates have lost faith in the process and are increasingly concerned that the opportunity for lasting reform is slipping away. Surveys of Chicagoans completed as part of the consent decree show a clear drop in confidence that there will be lasting and positive change.

The process has its defenders, including current Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, whose predecessor sued the city to force it to agree to federal court oversight. Raoul still believes the consent decree is the best way of “making these necessary reforms a reality.”

But he also appears to be losing patience. Raoul warned last week that he would seek sanctions against the city if Mayor Brandon Johnson did not reverse the planned cuts. “I must remind you that the consent decree is not optional,” Raoul wrote to the mayor. “The City of Chicago must deliver on its consent decree obligations.”

Johnson rarely speaks publicly about the need to reform the police department, instead focusing on efforts to improve officer morale and reduce crime. He declined to be interviewed for this story but has told reporters he is committed to ensuring CPD “engages in constitutional policing.”

Porscha Banks, whose brother Dexter Reed was shot and killed in a barrage of police gunfire during a March 21 traffic stop, is among those who are frustrated by Chicago’s lack of progress toward meaningful reform. Four officers fired 96 shots at Reed in 41 seconds, hitting him 13 times, shortly after he shot and wounded an officer, according to a preliminary investigation.

The Civilian Office of Police Accountability has not completed its inquiry into the shooting and has not ruled whether the officers’ actions were justified. But reform advocates immediately seized on the incident as an example of how police tactics can lead to dangerous situations for both civilians and officers.

“Unless something changes, it is going to keep happening,” Banks said. “They are failing Black people. They are failing all of us.”

How Police Helped Stall the Process

At its core, the consent decree is designed to fix the shattered relationship between police and Chicago communities.

The goal is to increase communication and familiarity by having officers patrol the same geographic area of the city and report to the same supervisor on a consistent basis, instead of moving throughout the city to chase crime. As a first step, the consent decree required CPD to complete a study to determine whether officers are efficiently deployed to stop crime and respond to calls for help.

But it took more than five years to authorize the study. And now, more than five months after the Chicago City Council ordered it, the police department acknowledges it has yet to start in earnest.

“It is deeply embarrassing,” said Alderperson Matt Martin, who represents the North Side’s 47th Ward and authored the measure requiring the staffing study. He said that police leaders simply ignored the May 21 deadline set by aldermen. The contract to perform the study was not finalized until Oct. 24, according to records obtained by WTTW News.

It’s not the first time Chicago has missed an opportunity to align the department with community needs.

In 2019, former Los Angeles Police Department Chief Charlie Beck took over as the city’s interim police superintendent for Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Beck’s first order of business was to reassign more than 1,100 detectives and gang intelligence and narcotics officers from citywide teams to work in Chicago’s 22 police districts.

The goal was to tie each of those officers directly to one of Chicago’s 77 community areas, a necessary change to make community policing a reality, said Beck, who led the LAPD through its own reform push that was widely hailed as lightning fast and successful.

But Beck was only an interim chief and led the CPD for less than six months before Lightfoot replaced him with former Dallas Police Chief David Brown. Brown quickly reversed those changes and reestablished teams of specialized officers that moved throughout the city to address crime hot spots.

Beck declined to comment for this article; Brown did not respond to requests for interviews.

Brown’s successor, Larry Snelling, who has been at the helm of CPD for more than a year, has not attempted to reorganize the department. While acknowledging that the reform effort is far from complete, Snelling often emphasizes that the department is making progress on most goals laid out in the consent decree.

CPD now has written policies addressing just under half the items included in the consent decree. It also has trained a majority of its officers on the new policies involving a little over a third of the items. To be in full compliance, CPD must prove to the monitoring team that officers are following the new policies over a sustained period of time. The most significant victory for the city has been providing officers with annual training on the department’s policies for use of force, the latest report from the monitoring team found.

But CPD has yet to reach full compliance on any part of the consent decree that involves community policing, unbiased policing or crisis intervention, records show.

Community trust is at the heart of another consent-decree misstep by the department, which for decades has failed to hold its officers accountable for misconduct, according to the federal probe that led to the decree. An early-warning system that would identify problematic officers and get them off the street was drawn up near the beginning of the consent-decree process but has yet to be implemented.

Police reform advocates say that Snelling is more committed to reform than his predecessor, but he rarely talks publicly about the consent decree. Snelling declined to be interviewed for this story.

As a candidate for mayor, Johnson promised to succeed where his predecessors failed and quickly implement the consent decree. But his main policing focus since taking office has been on reducing the number of people killed and shot in Chicago following a surge that coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic. Homicide rates have dropped in the last two years.

Johnson’s latest budget proposal, which closed a projected budget gap of $982 million, slashes the number of employees assigned to implementing the decree by 13%.

Questioned by WTTW News at a press conference, Johnson acknowledged Chicago’s long history of police violence against Black Chicagoans.

“Unfortunately, we’ve had a trail of destruction over the course of decades where there has been an erosion of the relationship between community and policing,” Johnson said. “What I can say is that it has gotten considerably better from where we started.”

Despite such assertions, critics of the reform push contend the mayor is ultimately responsible for the lack of progress during his time in office.

“I expected to see much more of the mayor and his administration step up and be present and be at the table,” said Craig Futterman, a professor of law at the University of Chicago who represented one of the coalition of groups that sued the city to force it to agree to judicial oversight.

“It’s been left to the police department, and that’s again like the fox guarding the henhouse.”

Delays Come Without Consequences in Court

What frustrates observers like Futterman is not just that police have dragged their feet; it’s that the formal mechanism for oversight hasn’t led to meaningful progress.

For instance, the monitoring team — which is made up of lawyers and public safety specialists — has the power to recommend to the judge that the city and CPD be punished for failing to meet the terms of the consent decree. While it has repeatedly highlighted the slow pace of reforms in its reports, the monitoring team has never demanded sanctions, despite pleas from the coalition of reform groups.

Barry Friedman, a professor at New York University who studies police reform and has advised CPD on implementing community policing policies, said he is baffled by this.

He cited the monitors’ unique position of power and the money going to their efforts. Chicago taxpayers have paid the monitoring team more than $20.4 million from the beginning of the decree through March 31, 2024, records show.

“For that amount of money, you should have a consent decree that is working,” Friedman said. “Five years in, one is entitled to ask what the city is getting out of the consent decree.”

Members of the consent decree monitoring team and the judge overseeing the case declined to be interviewed. The spokesperson for the judge and the team said they’re prohibited from doing so under the decree.

For its part, the Chicago City Council has not called out the CPD for its failures. The council had vowed to hold hearings about the progress of police reform every three months, but the last hearing took place in February. Alderperson Brian Hopkins, chair of the Public Safety Committee, and Alderperson Chris Taliaferro, chair of the Police and Fire Committee, did not respond to a request for comment about why no hearings have taken place for nine months.

Another factor in the slow pace is the structure of the oversight itself. To amend the agreement, all relevant parties must get involved — the state attorney general, the coalition of reform groups and City Hall. They have to exhaust efforts to negotiate a solution before asking the judge to resolve any stalemate.

The delays and compromises have led to unsatisfying results, as exemplified by the aftermath of the widely criticized raid on the home of Anjanette Young. In 2019, a group of male officers handcuffed Young, a social worker, inside her home while she was naked; they had raided the wrong address.

When Young and advocates for reform sought restrictions on raids, they ran into opposition from Lightfoot. They then asked that the consent decree be expanded to impose reforms.

That launched unfruitful negotiations between CPD’s leaders, city lawyers, attorneys for the coalition and the attorney general’s office that stretched for two years. U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer resolved the dispute by rejecting almost all of the demands made by reform groups. She didn’t add any significant restrictions on police raids and didn’t bar no-knock warrants. Young was bitterly disappointed.

Porscha Banks’ quest for reforms in the aftermath of her brother’s killing has been similarly frustrating. Dexter Reed, whose car had tinted windows that made it almost impossible to see inside, was pulled over for a safety belt violation, according to the preliminary investigation.

For groups that had been sounding the alarm for years that CPD was aggressively using traffic stops to target Black and Latino drivers, Reed’s death was heartbreaking evidence that such tactics inevitably lead to volatile encounters. Banks has demanded officials ban traffic stops like the one that led to her brother’s death.

CPD leaders and the monitoring team agreed just two months after Reed’s death to expand the consent decree to include traffic stops, but reform advocates and politicians pushed back. The consent decree is not capable of delivering the kind of urgent change the city needs, they told Pallmeyer; instead, the city’s new police oversight board should set the rules for traffic stops.

The request was a rejection of the consent decree process.

“I’m frustrated that despite what I have to believe is everyone’s best effort, it has not been good enough,” said Alderperson Daniel La Spata, whose ward is on the Northwest Side.

Pallmeyer has not ruled on that request yet.

Banks does not particularly care how reform is achieved. She just wants to see signs of hope.

“They just need to stop talking about it and fucking doing it,” Banks said.

An Opportunity May Be Slipping Away

Inside a room at Corliss High School on Chicago’s Far South Side, a few dozen residents assembled for a community meeting with police in a district that has long struggled with pervasive crime. These were people who care about their neighborhoods, the future of Chicago and the trajectory of policing here. And in interviews, many of them expressed skepticism.

Tony Little, who volunteers as a community liaison with CPD, said police today are more responsive to residents’ concerns than in the past, but there’s still room for improvement. “If they could just make sure officers, especially young officers, are aware of the community and get to know the neighborhood, that would build trust,” he said.

His wife, Malinda, is more pessimistic. Although the consent decree requires CPD to demonstrate that residents can trust officers to protect and serve them, those are no more than empty promises, she said. “Some of the individuals, they have an attitude that this is just a job. … They don’t care about the people.”

Such comments should come as no surprise to the police department or the monitoring team.

“By most indications, many Chicagoans are not feeling many of the changes that have been made by the city and the CPD so far,” the monitoring team wrote in its most recent assessment of the city’s progress.

The most recent survey conducted by the monitoring team, in 2022, found that 43.2% of Chicagoans were “doubtful” or “very doubtful” that police reform would have a lasting and positive effect, an increase of more than 10 percentage points since 2020.

The survey identified a similar decrease in the number of Chicagoans who said the police were doing a “good” or “very good” job in their neighborhood and citywide, while the number of Chicagoans who said the police were doing a “poor” or “very poor” job in the city as a whole grew to 42.7% in 2022, compared with 30.2% in 2020.

“Of course there’s a lack of trust in the police,” said Roxanne Smith, a West Side resident and police reform advocate who was part of the coalition that sued the city. “We’re in a new generation and some things still haven’t changed. These things need immediate attention.”

Chicago Inspector General Deborah Witzburg, whose office was the first, and so far only, city department to fully comply with its obligations under the consent decree, said the reform effort is at a tipping point, much like a bicycle ridden too slowly.

“The risk is that you tip over for a lack of forward momentum,” Witzburg said.

Anjanette Young is now among those in Chicago who feel the tipping point is past.

“The consent decree is not the answer,” Young said. “It is just oversight on paper. We need a plan B. We need to do something else.”