Reform of the Chicago Police

Yesterday, April 15th, I was invited to give a presentation at this forum organized by the University of Illinois Chicago Criminal Justice Society.  Three other presenters were significant.

Rob Warren, Ex. Dir. of Northwestern University Center for Wrongful Convictions talked about his experiences that have resulted in 35 persons being exonerated and freed from prison.  His suggestions to combat this type of wrongful conviction based on false confessions is fourfold:  (1) record all interrogations, (2) limit the length of the interrogations, (3) prohibit investigators from lying to suspects during interrogations, and (4) allow expert testimony on false confessions at trial.  I found one of this points interesting.  He said that confessions that were not false averaged a little over 2 hours of interrogation, while those found to be false confessions lasted for over 6 hours and in one case 16 hours.

Ignacio Cano, a professor from the State University of Rio de Janeiro, came to us via Skype.  It seems that our TSA had shut down its vista computer link for 24 hours so he couldn't get on the plane in Brazil.  His presentation concerned police reforms in South and Central American countries. His experience wasn't good.  The bottom line was that outside efforts to change the culture of the police wasn't effective or lasting.  He believes that it must be a joint effort between outside influences and the officers inside the agencies.  He also said that officers involved in misconduct fell into two types.  The first were those who were lining their own pockets with money from drug operations or extortion. The second group were those who did misconduct designed to reduce crime even through murder of suspected criminals.  My good friend Steve Rothlein talks of this being coined 'Noble Cause.'  Professor Cano noted that all of the agencies refused to accept or acknowledge any responsibility in the actions of these officers. Just 'bad apples.'

The most interesting presentation, I believe, was the intimate explanation of Chicago Police corruption by Craig Futterman a professor from University of Chicago Law School. He and his students have been deeply involved in this area of police misconduct for nearly 20 years.  His law students rode with special enforcement units during one his research projects of police misconduct in public housing projects. These students came away with the perspective that the Constitution wasn't the same in these minority communities.  Terry stops were done without any hint of reasonable suspicion or any degree of articulation.

The other area of his historical work concerned the systemic and cyclic reform movement.  Every few years following a public outcry or high profile incident, the politicians would call for reform, have some sort of study, find a couple of scapegoats and then slip back into the way it always was when the hue and cry ended.  He has amassed a wealth of statistics on the officers involved in many of these most significant incidents of police misconduct.  In all of these the officers involved amassed huge numbers of citizen complaints, but the OPS or IPRA process and even that of IA did not identify these officers.  There was never any intervention.  These officers were not judged to have committed misconduct and were never disciplined.  Statistics seemed to overcome any intervention.  Of course, all of these units worked in minority areas of Chicago.