In Du Page County, local police commanders are instructing their officers to reread department regulations on the use of force.
In Evanston, community leaders angrily accused the police of beating two young men during a recent arrest.
And at police stations in Chicago, officers are reporting tense exchanges with civilians during routine traffic stops.
Throughout the city and suburbs, publicity surrounding the videotape of a Los Angeles police beating has renewed concern over such violence among both police and residents. The incident also has focused new attention on an old question: How bad is police brutality here?
”I would obviously like to believe that something like that could not happen in Chicago,” Albert Maule, Chicago Police Board president, said of the Los Angeles beating. ”But I am not naive.”
Maule`s concern is underscored by a rise in local complaints against police. According to the office of professional standards, the Chicago Police Department`s investigative arm, there were 8,367 complaints last year, up from 7,229-a 14 percent increase.
Moreover, after investigating the charges, the office upheld 190 of the complaints last year-51 more than in 1989.
Some observers predict citizen complaints will swell as a result of the publicity surrounding the California case. ”We`re getting calls all the time now. It`s definitely an increase,” said David Kremin, an attorney who has several brutality cases pending in the local courts.
One of the problems in resolving brutality problems in Chicago has been the very office charged with investigating police conduct. Since 1985, the office of professional standards has been rocked by three internal police audits accusing the agency of losing investigative files, failing to interview key witnesses and housing an investigators` ”drinking club.”
Even the loudest critics of the office, however, say its deepest problem is not mismanagement, but regulations that stand in the way of its resolving a majority of its brutality cases.
According to attorneys, most brutality complaints boil down to credibility contests between a citizen and a police officer. In a traditional courtroom, judges and juries decide whom to believe. But at the standards office, statutes and the police union`s contract dictate that without independent witnesses or strong corroborating evidence, complaints must be ruled ”not sustained.”
Last year, 59 percent of the agency`s cases were ”not sustained.”
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According to court records, some Chicago police officers have had more than two dozen citizen complaints ruled unsustained by officials at the standards office.
”Not sustained really means we can`t figure out who is telling the truth,” said attorney Matthew Piers, a former city lawyer who once supervised many of the brutality cases brought against Chicago police. ”If you applied the same standard to a court of law, you`d never be able to make a test of credibility.”
Of the officers whose records show numerous such findings, Piers said,
”At the very least, these guys have a communication problem and might be better off behind a desk somewhere.”
Standards office Director Gayle Shines, a former prosecutor who took over the embattled agency in April, declined to comment.
When the standards office sustains a complaint, as it did in only 7 percent of its cases last year, it recommends disciplinary action to the police superintendent, whose decision is usually reviewed by the Police Board, a nine-member citizens` panel selected by the mayor.
Last year, 16 officers were dismissed from the force because of standards office investigations. In an additional 248 cases-some involving excessive force-officers were reprimanded or suspended for 30 days or less.
”We do get a significant number of excessive-force cases showing up in lesser-punishment categories,” said Police Board Executive Director Mark Iris.
On some area police forces, the brutality debate has proved a political lightning rod. In Aurora, Police Chief Robert Wadman has taken a tough stance on brutality since being recruited from Omaha two years ago; last year he recommended the firing of two officers accused of violence. Lost in the uproar over the Los Angeles videotape was a recently released tape showing an Aurora officer beating and kicking a prisoner in the Aurora City Jail last April.
Wadman`s public focus on the problem, however, has not proved popular with everyone. He has been criticized by the police union and has become an issue in the town`s coming election.
Law enforcement specialists caution against reading too much into last year`s rise in complaints against Chicago police. The numbers released by the department include allegations ranging from serious charges to relatively minor incidents of verbal abuse to about 200 cases of domestic violence involving police officers.
The office will not release the individual case files, making it difficult to assess the scope of the brutality issue. Also, Daley
administration officials last week denied access to routine law department reports that monthly summarize all police misconduct suits filed against the city.
One important factor to consider in judging the complaints is that the increase in allegations parallels the increase in the amount of dangerous police work performed last year. Chicago police made 45,936 more arrests in 1990 than 1989, a 15 percent jump. They also seized a record 19,669 guns last year, 1,950 more than in 1989.
”You have to be very skeptical of the numbers you usually see,” said Harvey Grossman, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Perhaps more revealing than the total complaints are statistics that show a minority of officers being responsible for a majority of complaints. Of Chicago`s 11,000-member police force, 437 officers had more than one excessive force complaint, according to 1989 department figures released to the Tribune. Of those, 278 officers had two complaints; 85 had three; 35 had four; and 39 had more than five.
Department statistics for 1989 also show that African-Americans were disproportionately likely to file complaints against police. Fifty-six percent of the charges that year were filed by blacks; in the same year, black officers were named in 43 percent of the complaints filed by blacks. That year black officers represented 23 percent of the police force.
Beyond the standards office, the available data on police brutality in Chicago is scattered throughout a dizzying array of courts and regulatory agencies and the FBI.
In the Chicago area, FBI statistics show that since Jan. 1, agents have opened 15 investigations into alleged police brutality. In 1990, agents investigated a total of 50 alleged brutality cases, though dispositions for these cases are unavailable.
In Chicago, FBI findings of alleged brutality are reviewed by a special prosecutions unit of veteran lawyers within the U.S. attorney`s office. First Assistant U.S. Atty. Thomas M. Durkin said proving a case of excessive force is a prosecutor`s toughest assignment.
”It`s often a one-on-one situation with no witnesses, in which the officer has a valid warrant to make an arrest,” Durkin says. ”In a majority of complaints, we find reasonable force, not excessive force.”
Brutality complaints also frequently bypass the standards office and the FBI and go directly to the state and federal courts. In the mid-1980s, there was a surge in civil rights lawsuits against local police. The suits were not prompted by a change in police conduct, but new court regulations allowing attorneys to collect larger fees more quickly.
”We had a cottage industry spring up,” said University of Illinois at Chicago professor David Fogel, former director of the office of professional standards.
Maule said that in the overwhelming majority of the cases where an officer is dismissed for brutality, ”drug use or alcoholism touched the case in some way.”
As public concern about brutality heightens, the primary challenge for the Police Board is not punishing more offenders but ”building bridges between the police and community groups,” Maule said.
Maule has been doing that by holding Police Board hearings in community centers throughout the city and attending morning roll calls in station houses.
He`s also made a habit of appearing somewhere else: at the funerals of the five officers slain in the line of duty since he took office 16 months ago.
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”Their deaths make me understand the context of these officers` lives:
They were called upon to make snap judgments in dangerous situations. The funerals really made me focus on that.”