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<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title>Chicago Must Acknowledge Patterns of Police Misconduct - Gapers Block Mechanics | Chicago</title> <link rel="Shortcut Icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" /> <meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache" /> <meta name="robots" content="all" /> <link rel="image_src" href="http://gapersblock.com/gfx/default_thumb.jpg"/> <meta property="og:type" content="article" /> <meta property="og:site_name" content="Gapers Block"/> <meta property="og:url" content="http://gapersblock.com/mechanics/2015/12/07/chicago-must-acknowledge-patterns-of-police-misconduct/" /> <meta property="og:title" content="Chicago Must Acknowledge Patterns of Police Misconduct " /> <meta property="article:publisher" content="https://facebook.com/gapersblock" /> <meta property="og:locale" content="en_US" /> <meta name="og:description" content="By Susan Bandes Mayor Rahm Emanuel says he didn't watch the video of a Chicago police officer shooting a citizen in cold blood because he then couldn't be asked about it. Which is the perfect Chicago move. In fact, it..." /> <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://gapersblock.com/_styles/gb.css" type="text/css" media="screen" /> <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://gapersblock.com/_styles/sections.css" type="text/css" media="screen" /> <script src="http://gapersblock.com/_scripts/core.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="http://gapersblock.com/_scripts/jump.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body id="sections"> <div id="frame"> <script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script> <script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({ google_ad_client: "ca-pub-4819986644249075", enable_page_level_ads: true }); </script>  <div id="masthead"> <div id="announcement2" style="text-align: center;"> <h1><a href="http://gapersblock.com/goodbye/">Gapers Block has ceased publication.</a></h1> <p><strong>Gapers Block published from April 22, 2003 to Jan. 1, 2016. The site will remain up in archive form. 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Which is the perfect Chicago move. In fact, it crystallizes the city's longstanding attitude toward police abuses: if nobody has access to information, nobody can be expected to act.<br /> <br /> The body that's supposed to be keeping police accountable, the Independent Police Review Authority, does almost nothing to track patterns of police misconduct and brutality. When reviewing a complaint, it does not make inquiries into any previous complaints against the same officer. Although the agency says it now has an early warning system for repeat offenders, that system identified only six percent of the officers with 11 or more complaints.</p> <p>This is a critical failing as most brutality is committed by a small number of repeat offenders. Consider police officer Jerome Finnigan of the scandal-ridden Special Operations Section. He amassed 68 complaints, but was never disciplined. His career ended only when he was sentenced to 12 years in prison for robbing suspects and attempting to murder a fellow cop.<br /> <br /> And of course there's Jason Van Dyke, the officer who was charged with first-degree murder for Laquan McDonald's death. He had at least 19 misconduct complaints, including at least 10 for excessive force. He had never been disciplined either. <br /> <br /> There are many things the city could learn from existing data, if it chose to. For example, it could identify precincts that receive a high number of complaints. Remember Area Two, which housed Jon Burge and several other officers who were torturing suspects for over a dozen years? The Office of Professional Standards (the agency the IPRA replaced) never upheld a complaint against any of them. It treated each complaint as isolated and therefore unbelievable, instead of tracking the patterns.<br /> <br /> It may seem odd to turn away information that could help combat the scourge of police brutality. It certainly seems counterintuitive to pay out tens of millions of dollars a year to complainants, as Chicago does, instead of learning how to fix the problems that led to the complaints. But ignoring and erasing patterns is a time-honored strategy for deflecting blame.<br /> <br /> As the mayor revealingly said about the McDonald slaying, "One individual needs to be held accountable." Whose needs are being served by this story of the single rogue officer? It does no favors to all the good cops who act with courage and professionalism. They would be far better served by a system that actually identifies and disciplines the bad cops.<br /> <br /> The rotten-apple theory protects the mayor, the attorney general, and other powerful governmental actors by suggesting that they are not to blame -- that they couldn't have known in advance.<br /> <br /> The philosopher Karl Popper defined ignorance not as the absence of knowledge but as the refusal to acquire knowledge. And that is what Chicago is dealing with: a longstanding, concerted effort to turn away knowledge that would help combat police brutality.<br /> <br /> Let's skip the usual delaying tactic of a "task force" and begin making good use of the information we have. We need an effective database for police complaints, independent from police control, and available for public scrutiny. Police abuse flourishes in Chicago not because we lack information but because our representatives ensure they never see the data that shows systematic dysfunction and rot.</p> <p align="center">~*~</p> <p><em>Susan Bandes is the Centennial Distinguished Professor of Law at DePaul University and a 2015 Public Voices Fellow of <a href="http://theopedproject.org/" target="_blank">The Oped Project</a>.</em></p> <div style="padding-bottom: 10px;"><table border="0" padding="0"> <tr> <td valign="top">  <div class="addthis_toolbox addthis_default_style addthis_32x32_style"> <a class="addthis_button_preferred_1"></a> <a class="addthis_button_preferred_2"></a> <a class="addthis_button_preferred_3"></a> <a class="addthis_button_preferred_4"></a> <a class="addthis_button_compact"></a> <a class="addthis_counter addthis_bubble_style"></a> </div> <script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=gapersblock"></script>   <div class="centup"></div> </td> </tr> </table></div>  <div class="display-ad"> <div class="border white"> <a href="http://gapersblock.com/store/"><img src="http://gapersblock.com/ads/gfx/gbstore_468x60v2.jpg" width="468" height="60" alt="GB store" /></a> </div> </div> </div> <a id="comments"></a> <div class="comment-entry"> <h4><span class="icon-comment"><a title="http://www.chicagocarless.com" href="http://gapersblock.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-comments.cgi?__mode=red;id=1418852">Michael Benami Doyle</a></span> / <a href="#comment-1418852">December 7, 2015 11:23 AM</a></h4> <p>Some of us believe Rahm is simply lying about not having seen the video in the first place. Which would be a much more typical Chicago move. </p> </div> </div>  <div class="col-right">   <div class="display-ad"> <div class="border white"> <a href="http://gapersblock.com/store/"><img src="http://gapersblock.com/ads/gfx/2014_gbstore.jpg" width="300" height="250" alt="GB store" /></a> </div> </div>  <div style="padding: 10px 10px 10px 10px;"> <h3>Feature</h3> <h2><a href="http://gapersblock.com/mechanics/2015/11/10/parents-still-steaming-but-about-more-than-just-boilers/">Parents Still Steaming, but About More Than Just Boilers</a></h2> <p>By Phil Huckelberry / <a href="http://gapersblock.com/mechanics/2015/11/10/parents-still-steaming-but-about-more-than-just-boilers/#comments">2 Comments</a></p> It's now been 11 days since the carbon monoxide leak which sent over 80 Prussing Elementary School students and staff to the hospital. While officials from Chicago Public Schools have partially answered some questions, and CPS CEO Forrest Claypool has informed that he will be visiting the school to field more questions on Nov. 16, many parents remain irate at the CPS response to date. <a href="http://gapersblock.com/mechanics/2015/11/10/parents-still-steaming-but-about-more-than-just-boilers/"><em>More...</em></a> </div> <div class="dotted"></div> <div style="padding: 10px 10px 10px 10px;"> <a href="http://gapersblock.com/mechanics/civics/"><img src="http://gapersblock.com/mechanics/civics_100.jpg" width="100" align="right" /></a><h3>Civics</h3> <h2><a href="http://gapersblock.com/mechanics/2015/03/16/substance-not-style-the-source-of-rahms-woes/">Substance, Not Style, the Source of Rahm's Woes</a></h2> <p>By Ramsin Canon / <a href="http://gapersblock.com/mechanics/2015/03/16/substance-not-style-the-source-of-rahms-woes/#comments">2 Comments</a></p> It's not surprising that some of Mayor Emanuel's sympathizers and supporters are confusing people's substantive disputes with the mayor as the effect of poor marketing on his part. 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value="http://gapersblock.com/mechanics/race/">Race</option> <option value="http://gapersblock.com/mechanics/rahm-emanuel/">Rahm Emanuel</option> <option value="http://gapersblock.com/mechanics/republicans/">Republicans</option> <option value="http://gapersblock.com/mechanics/rta/">RTA</option> <option value="http://gapersblock.com/mechanics/segregation/">segregation</option> <option value="http://gapersblock.com/mechanics/social-issues/">Social Issues</option> <option value="http://gapersblock.com/mechanics/social-services/">Social Services</option> <option value="http://gapersblock.com/mechanics/special-election-il05/">Special Election IL05</option> <option value="http://gapersblock.com/mechanics/springfield/">Springfield</option> <option value="http://gapersblock.com/mechanics/state-budget/">State Budget</option> <option value="http://gapersblock.com/mechanics/state-politics/">State Politics</option> <option value="http://gapersblock.com/mechanics/stump-connolly/">Stump 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