How to Clean Up a Cover-Up Culture
That's according to data posted online by the Invisible Institute, an investigative journalism project that petitioned the courts for a decade to have the data released.
Even though the numbers showed a small percentage of the 12,000 officers on the force had generated the most complaints, department officials had made shockingly little use of the data they had.
For example, only 10 percent of the officers who had received complaints generated 30 percent of the total departmental complaints since 2011. One of those repeat cases was Van Dyke. Yet the department offered little accountability for officers or early-warning interventions to help allegedly repeat-offender officers to improve.
In fact, there's little doubt that the McDonald case would quietly have gone away had the shocking video not been released to the public.
The task force offers more than 100 recommendations, including scrapping the IPRA, which the task force found to be too "biased toward police officers," for a new oversight agency under civilian control. You already can hear the backlash against that idea coming from police unions, who have been opposing civilian review boards for decades.
Yet Chicago's system has swung too far in the other direction, the task force said, including provisions in union contracts that have "essentially turned the code of silence into official policy." The task force calls for changing those provisions.
While we must not forget that most officers appear to be doing their jobs without complaints from the public, dismissing offenders as a "few bad apples" understates the influence that a few bad cops can have by "normalizing misconduct," as Jamie Kalven, an independent journalist who founded the Invisible Institute, told me.
Perhaps now Chicago can become a model for curing police corruption instead of causing it? I'm waiting to hear Mayor Emanuel's answer to his own very important question: What are he and other city leaders going to do about it?
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)
(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
