The independent monitor that assesses the Chicago Police Department’s reform efforts said the city needs to “urgently address” lingering issues with staffing, supervision and data collection if CPD is to achieve compliance with its federal consent decree.
“We urge the City — and its new administration — to immediately make short- and long-term efforts to ensure required reforms become daily practices,” the independent monitoring team, led by former federal prosecutor Maggie Hickey, said in its seventh semiannual report, which was released Thursday. “This will likely need to include urgent implementation of (1) a comprehensive staffing study, (2) an efficient reporting and data system, and (3) a consistent community policing strategy.”
The seventh semiannual report from the independent monitoring team covers CPD’s adherence to the consent decree between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2022. Each report grades the CPD’s level of compliance with the 552 “monitorable” paragraphs contained in the consent decree, which was approved by a federal judge and entered into in early 2019.
“Preliminary compliance” means that the department has developed a policy to comply with the consent decree; “secondary compliance” signals the department has started to train officers on that policy; and “full compliance” means that the policy is fully implemented into the department’s day-to-day operations.
In the second half of 2022, CPD achieved full compliance with 28 of the “monitorable” paragraphs in the consent decree — about 5%, the same number that were graded as fully compliant in the monitoring team’s sixth report.
More Top Picks Best Beverage Refrigerators
“In the seventh reporting period, the City, the CPD, and Chicago faced ongoing challenges, including high levels of certain violent crimes, significant attrition of officers and non-sworn personnel leading to staffing difficulties, and heartbreaking losses of officers to suicides,” the independent monitoring team wrote. “While the CPD has developed some plans to approach Consent Decree reforms, much more needs to be done to comprehensively demonstrate compliance efforts with officer wellness, community policing, impartial policing, community engagement, and crime-fighting strategies.”
The Police Department reached secondary compliance in 128 paragraphs, up from 96 in the previous report. Another 309 paragraphs were assessed to be in preliminary compliance — the same number as in the sixth report.
Another 79 paragraphs have yet to reach preliminary compliance, while 13 more paragraphs remain under assessment, according to the monitor’s report.
In a statement, interim police Superintendent Fred Waller highlighted that the department has achieved some level of compliance with more than 80% of monitorable paragraphs, but said “there is more to do as we continue working to achieve full compliance and fulfill our consent decree obligations.”
“To build trust with the people we serve, we have to listen to them and learn from them,” Waller added. “Their voices and vision are essential as we work to develop policies that affect all of us. We are thankful to our community partners who are on this reform journey with us.”
The statement also noted that the CPD has hired nearly 1,300 new officers since the start of 2022.
In August 2022, then-CPD Superintendent David Brown fired the executive director of the CPD’s Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform, Robert Boik, after he protested Brown’s plan to move officers out of the reform office and into patrol.
After Boik’s dismissal, longtime CPD supervisor Tina Skahill was tasked with leading reform efforts. She quit the department earlier this month, citing “retaliation.” The current chief of the Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform, Angel Novalez, is a semifinalist to become the next permanent CPD superintendent.
During a public forum last week, Hickey said the Police Department and the city still struggle to perform timely analyses of officer use-of-force incidents, a byproduct of staffing problems in the Tactical Review and Evaluation Division.
“They have a plan and they’re working on it, but it is very important to have that up-to-date because that’s where they spot trends,” Hickey said last week.
The independent monitoring team also said that city officials are sometimes slow to submit compliance data for evaluation, and those delays can sometimes snowball into larger problems.
“We have consistently encouraged the City to produce compliance records early and often in any given reporting period and had gotten into a better rhythm with such productions in past years,” the monitoring team wrote. “In the seventh reporting period, however, we returned to receiving an extremely large amount of information from the City in the last days of the reporting period, which presents a challenge for the IMT to properly review and consider all data within the tight timeframe. While too much data in a short time frame is challenging, no data is also problematic. The City has disputed several of the IMT’s requests for data.”
The consent decree is one of the byproducts of the 2014 murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by a CPD officer. Following a Cook County judge’s order that the city release video footage of the shooting, the U.S. Department of Justice opened a pattern-and-practice investigation of the Police Department.
“We found reasonable cause to believe that CPD has engaged in a pattern or practice of unreasonable force in violation of the Fourth Amendment and that the deficiencies in CPD’s training, supervision, accountability and other systems have contributed to that pattern or practice,” DOJ investigators wrote in 2017.
After the report was released, then-Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan brought a federal lawsuit against the city to force its entry into a federal consent decree. Ultimately, the team led by former federal prosecutor Hickey was selected to monitor the CPD’s compliance — as well as that of the Chicago Police Board, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability and the Office of Inspector General — with the sweeping, mandatory reforms.
Jason Van Dyke, the former CPD officer who was found guilty of second-degree murder in McDonald’s death, was released from prison in 2022 after serving three years.