U of C lawyer uncovers police corruption

¶ Less than two in 1,000 officers accused of misconduct discilplined

The University of Chicago Law School has issued a study decrying the abuse of Stateway Gardens residents at the hands of a few corrupt Chicago police officers and how a mismanaged police review system allowed these officers to act without fear of being disciplined.

“There were certain groups of officers that everyone knew, and our law students knew, who would openly, brazenly act and abuse with impunity in these communities,” said Craig Futterman, co-author of the “The Use of Statistical Evidence to Address Police Supervisory and Disciplinary Practices: The Chicago Police Department’s Broken System” and a professor of law at U. of C. “So it led to these underlying questions that we were studying, the sort of how can this occur, … what were the underlying conditions that allowed a small group of officers act with impunity in a community like Stateway Gardens.”

The study found that a failure by the Chicago Police Department to follow up on accusations of police abuse allowed a small cadre of officers to wrack up a large number of complaints that went veritably unnoticed. Futterman and his students limited their research to what they considered the most serious categories of police misconduct over a five year period: excessive force, illegal searches, racial abuse, sexual abuse and false arrests (e.g. planting evidence).

“The study reports that the odds an officer is charged with one of those serious categories will be meaningfully disciplined was less than two in 1,000, and actually there’s reason to believe the odds are a lot lower than that — but two in 1,000 is awfully darn low,” Futterman said.

Futterman said that analysis of complaints against police officers showed that the vast majority of officers are never accused of a serious offense, so those that have multiple serious complaints filed against them stand out. The study reports that few serious accusations are ever investigated beyond requesting a written statement from the accused officer. The study shows that only 6 in 1,000 false arrest charges were investigated beyond requesting a response from the accused officer.

“The good news is that the vast majority of Chicago Police officers — 80 percent or more — weren’t amassing extraordinary numbers of complaints at all,” Futterman said. “A few percent are really easy to identify, they really jump off the page.”

Futterman said the small number of officers who are abusing their position caused serious damage to the face of law enforcement.

“The bad news is that, what we found and what stands out, is that rather than the problem of there’s always going to be a few bad apples, what we found is that the police department allowed those few bad apples or that small percentage of the force to act with impunity in these certain neighborhoods,” Futterman said.

They make the job of all the good, honorable police officers much more difficult and they hurt effective law enforcement and hurt innocent people, Futterman said. Futterman said a “code of silence prevented honest officers from policing their own organization without fear of reprisal.

“There’s the concern that when in a situation and they call for backup, they won’t get backup, that they’ll be ostracized and blackballed by fellow officers,” Futterman said. “And that’s been the experience of the few officers who have spoken out in the past and have they’ve seen their careers go down — it’s a message to others.” Futterman said one of his students while interviewing Stateway Gardens residents witnessed Special Operations Section police officers run an African American man on a bicyle off the road, stop the car and beat the man in front of approximately 100 residents and other police officers.

“I came there in the aftermath and actually saw a couple of African-American officers get into a shoving match with the white officers who beat this man and struck this man with their car,” Futterman said. “I overheard, we have to work in this neighborhood, what are you doing, you’re making it hard for all of us — it was really heated.” Futterman said he talked to the officers afterwards who expressed that they could not come forward with what had transpired without risking their careers and their lives.

Futterman and his students’ three years of research has resulted in a suit against five SOS officers and a suit against the city of Chicago for “failing to adequately supervise, monitor, discipline and otherwise control its police officers.”