Chicago police and city officials are still working on the mandated reform

Five years after promising to improve records of incidents in which police officers point their guns at people while carrying out their duties, the Chicago Police Department and other city officials appear to have failed to meet the goals outlined in a federal consent decree on landmark reform, according to reports found the tribune.

This consent decree requires CPD officers to notify the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications any time they point a gun at someone. OEMC is then required to notify the officer’s supervisor, and these records are reportedly available to the public under the Freedom of Information Act.

But in response to a FOIA filed by the Tribune seeking those records during the five-year period since CPD agreed to the stricter disclosure requirement, OEMC initially produced records that pointed to just 12 incidents in which officials made such a notification had made. The bureau later provided a spreadsheet with nearly 17,000 rows listing “firearm display incidents,” or FPIR reports, reported since early 2019.

However, it is unclear how many raw incidents there were because many lines of data are repeated and OEMC did not provide associated police incident report numbers indicating the reports were forwarded.

The consent decree makes clear how such information is to move up the chain of command after it is captured by the OEMC, stating: “Notified CPD supervisors shall ensure that documentation of investigative stops or arrests and the OEMC record of the pointing of a firearm are promptly reviewed in accordance with CPD policy.”

The Consent Decree Monitoring Team noted in a recent progress report that internal CPD statistics showed thousands of such gun violence incidents in recent years. In fact, there were more than 2,000 in the first six months of last year alone, the most recent period available.

And the error comes at a time when the number of such incidents is increasing. Citing data provided, the monitoring team’s report found 2,562 incidents for all of 2021 and 2,925 in 2022.

While the number of incidents involving targeted gun use has increased, the number of police shootings has not. Data from the Civilian Office of Police Accountability shows that in 2022, the agency’s investigators responded to 34 cases in which CPD officers fired their weapons. Last year, COPA responded to 19 shootings involving CPD officers.

In response to questions about the reporting process, a police spokeswoman said that all officers were trained.

“Training and supervision are critical to ensure officers comply with firearms incident policy, including promptly notifying the OEMC after a firearms display incident is complete,” she said.

Chicago Police Commissioner Larry Snelling has not addressed the gunpoint incidents but has said the CPD is committed to complying with the settlement and increasing transparency. In his recent comments on reform, however, he has also highlighted other areas where he sees success.

Snelling noted that traffic stops by CPD officers decreased slightly compared to last year, while the number of felony arrests and illegal gun seizures increased. Homicides and non-fatal shootings are also down, even as the city grapples with the proliferation of automatic weapons.

“I don’t think we’ve done a very good job of explaining what true constitutional, proactive policing looks like,” Snelling told the Tribune last year. “The way we balance this is, firstly, by being transparent about what we do. Sometimes police work doesn’t look good. But if we can explain the constitutionality of stops and our interactions with individuals, I think it will be a lot more palatable to those who just don’t understand what they’re seeing.”

Little follow-up

The independent monitoring team said CPD supervisors have rarely taken corrective action on gun violence incidents reported by the department’s tactical review and assessment division.

A 2022 year-end report cited by the monitoring team shows that of the nearly 3,000 incidents reviewed, “(the Tactical Review and Assessment Division) made a training recommendation for 1,023 reviews (34%).” In contrast, supervisors made a training recommendation in 1% of the Debriefings indicated they had taken corrective action at the time of the incident.”

The vast majority of these training recommendations from the Tactical Review Division concerned officers’ activation of body-worn cameras – a long-standing problem. In theory, an officer who pulled out a gun during an interaction with a civilian should have activated his camera.

“During a June meeting with the CPD, the IMT raised concerns about the ability to review use-of-force incidents when body-worn camera footage was not available in 12% of cases, according to the Tactical Review Division’s 2022 year-end report “, the monitoring team recently reported. “The IMT requested that the CPD develop a plan to address the ongoing issues of late activation and non-activation.”

CPD’s slow compliance with the settlement is not limited to deficiencies in reporting and evaluating cases in which officers point guns. Staffing levels and data collection and retention continue to hamper the department’s reform efforts, according to the monitoring team.

“Overall, the City and CPD’s compliance efforts continue to lag and, after several reporting periods with minimal progress, call into question the City and CPD’s commitment to implementing reforms in municipal policing practices as required by the consent decree,” the team wrote last year.

For more than two years, the police department has maintained secondary compliance with the section of the consent decree that requires notifications of drawing a weapon, according to the monitoring team’s most recent report. The next report is expected to be released sometime this summer and will be the first to assess the CPD’s compliance efforts under Snelling.

Slow implementation of the reform

The consent decree was enacted in January 2019 after nearly a year of negotiations between the city and the Illinois Attorney General’s Office – perhaps the most consequential fallout from the 2014 killing of Laquan McDonald by former CPD officer Jason Van Dyke.

The policy to report incidents involving threats of gun violence to the OEMC came about after a conflict between then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel and then-Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan. The designation agreement came a day after Emanuel announced he would not run for a third term as mayor.

It is not clear from the independent monitor’s report and the CPD statistics cited therein where or under what circumstances the gun-displaying incidents occurred. The monitoring team reiterated that CPD’s data collection, retention and analysis policies pose a barrier to the city’s overall compliance with the consent decree.

Josh Levin, an ACLU attorney representing a coalition of citizen groups, said last week during a hearing on the status of the monthly settlement order that the slow data collection was just a symptom of deeper problems in the department.

“It’s just hard to take CPD seriously (saying) that every police officer is a community cop when we see what’s happening in our communities as CPD continues to flood Black and Latino neighborhoods with heavily armed, plainclothes tactical teams, that jump out and terrorize our community members as they simply try to go about their daily lives,said Levin. “This is happening in communities, particularly to the west and south of our city, and this is the fundamental breach of trust that needs to be repaired. And no amount of data tracking, collection, analysis or surveying will solve this problem until the actual behavior of our police officers toward our community members changes.”

The bulk of the settlement applies to CPD, but changes to policies from the OEMC, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, the Chicago Police Board and the Office of Inspector General are also required. The monitoring team’s most recent report assessed the police department’s compliance with the settlement between Jan. 1, 2023 and June 30, 2023, a transition period during which three superintendents led the department for different periods of time.

Former Superintendent David Brown announced his resignation from CPD in March after Lori Lightfoot failed to qualify for the mayoral runoff election. After Brown left, Eric Carter, the first assistant superintendent, led the department on an interim basis until he retired in early May.

After Brandon Johnson was sworn in as mayor, he hired retired CPD patrol chief Fred Waller to lead the department. Last September, the City Council confirmed Snelling as permanent superintendent.

Most recently, the monitoring team assessed CPD’s compliance with each of the 552 paragraphs of the consent decree applicable to the department between January and June 2023. There are three levels of compliance: preliminary, secondary and full. Preliminary compliance means CPD has developed a training curriculum; secondary compliance means that training has been provided; and full compliance means that the policy is fully part of the day-to-day operations of the CPD.

In the first half of 2023, the monitoring team found that the department was preliminarily in compliance with 279 of the decree’s 552 monitorable paragraphs. Secondary compliance was found in 160 paragraphs, while the CPD was in full compliance with 33 paragraphs. According to the monitoring team, 74 paragraphs failed to achieve compliance and six more are still under review.