In August 2013, an African-American couple stood outside their home on Chicago’s South Side when officers from the Chicago Police Department (CPD) arrived and began towing their car. The couple asked the police if they could remove personal items from the car before it was towed. One of the officers hit the female member of the couple, who happened to be pregnant and suffered a miscarriage.
The incident, which ended in a settlement with the city, is one of 19 cases charging abuse by the CPD that Chicago settled in the past two years and among a series of wrongs cited by a coalition of black and Latino residents who filed a lawsuit on Wednesday accusing the CPD of using excessive force in violation of their civil rights.
The class action aims to build on a civil rights investigation by the Obama administration, which found a pattern of misconduct and unconstitutional force by the CPD. However since then both Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have backed away from the idea of court oversight.
“We’re asking the federal court to oversee the police department and to appoint a monitoring team that’s going to oversee enforce a process to bring about the changes that are necessary to redress years of unchecked police abuse and a code of silence,” Craig Futterman, attorney for the plaintiffs and a professor of law the University of Chicago, told reporters. “It’s a sad and scary day when we have our federal government abdicating its responsibility to enforce our nation’s most fundamental laws.”
The class action asks the court to appoint monitors to oversee efforts by the city to change its policing and end a culture that allows police to conceal wrongdoing by their colleagues.
A history of abuses
In support of their accusations, the coalition, which also includes community groups and nonprofits such as Black Lives Matter, documents a history of abuse by police against Chicago’s black and Latino residents.
Over a period of five years that ended in June 2015, black people accounted for 80 percent of the 282 people shot by the CPD despite black people making up just a third of the city’s population, the plaintiffs said in court papers. In the last three of those years, three-fourths of people shocked by police with a Taser gun were black, according to the plaintiffs, who also document a series of abuses that range from use by police of racially charged language to punching people, clubbing them with batons, and slamming them to the ground.
The city says it agrees that reforms are needed but blames the Trump administration for failing to pursue a consent decree. “The substance of the reforms that we are all trying to achieve is not really in question,” Edward Siskel, Chicago’s top lawyer, told the Times. “It is matters of process that we are discussing.”
If the city wants to negotiate a consent decree, “we can do it tomorrow,” Futterman responded.
Besides failing to train police properly, agencies charged with overseeing the CPD frequently fail to determine whether officers’ accounts of encounters with residents match evidence, the plaintiffs contend. Such failures lead police to conclude they can operate with impunity, according to the plaintiffs, who assert that the CPD has proved to be incapable of policing itself.