The court-appointed monitor overseeing broad reforms to the troubled Chicago Police Department said Friday that she will investigate and report on allegations that officers abused protesters.
Former federal prosecutor Maggie Hickey said that “to promote transparency,” she would get information from community members, police and other city departments. Hickey said she would then prepare a report on officers’ handling of the widespread street demonstrations sparked by the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.
The comments came during a Friday conference call hearing that followed a letter sent to Hickey by lawyers for activist groups including Black Lives Matter: Chicago demanding an investigation. Mayor Lori Lightfoot and representatives of Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul voiced support for the inquiry by Hickey, who is overseeing the city’s progress toward fulfilling a wide-ranging court order aimed at changing the way cops treat people.
City Hall’s halting progress toward fulfilling that order also came up at the hearing, as a lawyer for Raoul’s office blasted the city for missing 37 of its 50 deadlines during the first six months under the consent decree. Raoul followed up with a statement calling for the city to move more urgently.
“The city owes the community it serves meaningful reform, not lip service, not Band-Aids, and not politics,” Raoul wrote.
Asked to respond, Lightfoot’s office pointed to mayoral tweets, including one saying, “Our work towards reform has never been more important than it is today, and we look forward to working with the independent monitor to build on the progress we’ve made over the last several years.”
At Friday’s hearing, Hickey did not specifically address activists’ complaints of protesters detained without being able to contact lawyers. The groups had asked that Hickey set up a process for attorneys to communicate with arrested clients.
She also did not comment on demands for the use of alternatives to arrest, “particularly related to non-violent protest-related charges.” The groups want cops generally to have to get a supervisor’s sign-off before arresting anyone on charges of obstructing, assaulting or resisting an officer, disorderly conduct or a host of other offenses. The activists have called for the city to rely less on arrests and more on directing people to social programs, such as mental health services.
As it stands, the consent decree encourages the Police Department to explore “alternatives to arrest” and says the city is committed to them.
“If the independent monitoring team fails to take decisive, urgent action at this moment, the consent decree will be a historic failure,” the activists’ letter stated.
There was an influx of complaints to Chicago’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability in the wake of widespread local protests and separate property destruction. The police disciplinary agency took in 82 complaints from the morning of May 29 through the afternoon of June 1 , compared with 34 over Memorial Day weekend, according to COPA spokesman Ephraim Eaddy. He noted that the totals included complaints over all matters, but added that agency officials believed that more than half of the recent batch were “related to protests.”
Lightfoot said in a Tweet Friday that the city “will continue to vigorously investigate all reports of excessive force arising from this week.”
Activists have spent days in the streets calling for fundamental changes in the way the police operate. For example, they have demanded that the city pull cops out of schools and reduce funding for law enforcement to route money toward other services. Lightfoot dismissed the latter idea as “irresponsible.”
In contrast to protesters’ ambitions, change has come slowly to the Police Department over the course of decades. The police union has pushed back, and politicians have disagreed on the need for significant change. Overhauling the nation’s second-largest police force is a task of daunting scope.
Now, the coronavirus pandemic stands to slow reforms further. U.S. District Judge Robert Dow Jr., who is overseeing implementation of the consent decree, responded to COVID-19 by granting city lawyers a delay of all deadlines for as long as Illinois remained under a stay-at-home order, which lasted more than two months.
The consent decree is one of the most significant consequences of the controversy sparked in November 2015 by the release of video showing white Officer Jason Van Dyke shooting black teenager Laquan McDonald 16 times.
The footage led to a wide-ranging U.S. Department of Justice investigation that found Chicago police to be badly trained, loosely supervised and prone to excessive force, particularly against minorities. After then-Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan sued the administration of then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel to force court oversight of reforms, city officials signed a consent decree that calls for changes to training, discipline and supervision, among other measures.
It mandates various shifts in the use of force, including banning officers from deploying Taser electric shock devices on people who are simply running away, something that had not been specifically prohibited. More broadly, the decree repeatedly urges officers to respect “the sanctity of life.”
Beyond the court order, Lightfoot gave a televised speech Tuesday night and promised her own changes within 90 days. She talked about officer wellness programs, education for officers on neighborhood history and community relations, and training on procedural justice and handling people in crisis.
Both procedural justice and crisis intervention training already are required by the consent decree, and it was unclear from her speech how her new initiatives would differ.
