Explaining The Chicago Solution

I’m pretty busy today between work, prepping for the monthly statistical report, manning the news feed, and working on city/county statistics as well… but I decided it would be a good idea to explain what the problems in Chicago that I hinted at in my last post really mean.

First, we know about the Chicago Justice Project study into police discipline that has found that the Civilian Police Review Board overturns the police superintendent in about 66% of cases, often preventing officers recommended for termination from being fired.

While most people are familiar with Civilian Review Boards as a component of civilian police oversight, the Chicago Civilian Police Review Board isn’t like that. It’s more akin to a civil service review board which are committees set up to ensure that civil employees aren’t being disciplined without just cause.

Now, while that civil service review board responded to the report by typifying itself as “a judge” with the police department being “a prosecutor” and the accused police officer “a defendant”, it’s not really like that.

Why?

One has to consider such review boards as “a defense council” which is designed to presume that an accused officer is innocent and starts from that assumption to find any way possible to disprove the city’s case against the officer. After all, the civil service board’s function is to ensure that police officers are not unduly disciplined.

How does that not make it a “judge”? Because the officer stands nothing to lose in the process since the review board is not designed to increase punishments or assign punishments when disciplinary action was not requested. So, by going in front of such boards, officers can only win, not lose…

worst case is that the disciplinary action is upheld. So, the review board is not a court, it is an appeal mechanism… one of several layers of appeal that regular people don’t have. (similar to Seattle’s disciplinary system which has five layers of appeal for officers, which I’ve talked about here)

…an appeal mechanism in a system where accused officers already have at least 4 other appeal avenues within the disciplinary process itself. (the criminal process is entirely separate). It’s exactly the same as the problem with arbitrators (which I talked about here) who’s job it is to save the accused officer’s job if there’s any way to do so. Both bodies have no interest in public safety, just the officer’s job.

So, it’s little wonder that the research found that the disciplinary recommendations of the police department were overturned so often… that’s the review board’s job, to find reasons to overturn disciplinary action in favor of a police officer… it is that board’s sole reason for existence. To find a reason to overturn disciplinary action against cops accused of misconduct.

Now, how does this play into the same-day announcement that the city is taking a hard-line against people who complain about police misconduct?

Well, the public has been told, in a single day, that:

1. Police officers will probably not be disciplined even if an internal investigation, which is already biased in favor of the officer, finds that a complaint is true.
2. When an investigation, already perceived as biased and ineffectual, doesn’t find the officer did anything wrong, then the city may prosecute and punish the complainer.
3. That even if you decide to bypass the “official complaint” route that has now been gamed, that you will be fought tooth and nail if you try to find justice via the courts since the city will not settle any more police misconduct lawsuits.

The city is essentially telling the public that you might as well suck it up and let police officers beat you down and stay quiet about it or else the city will beat you down even more if you complain about it.

After all, if you already know that a police officer who harms you won’t be punished even if your complaint is sustained and that if that officer convinces his friends, who are investigating him, that you lied about your complaint, then you have nothing to gain and everything to lose by complaining about police misconduct… It’s a lose/lose for you and a win/win for the city and the police.

So, as you see, the Chicago solution to police misconduct is to make it as repressive and unproductive as possible to complain about misconduct and the fact that these two issues were announced on the same day is, at the least, quite possibly the worst-timed police accountability public relations mess up that I’ve ever seen.

Or, at the worst, it’s a blatant effort to inform the public that they best keep quiet about police misconduct because complaining about it will only make it worse… for them.