CHICAGO — The Justice Department on Friday exposed years of civil rights violations by Chicago police, blasting the nation’s third-largest department for using excessive force that included shooting at people who did not pose a threat and using stun guns on others only because they refused to follow commands.
The report was issued after a yearlong investigation sparked by the 2014 death of a black teenager who was shot 16 times by a white officer. The federal investigation looked broadly at law enforcement practices, concluding that officers were not sufficiently trained or supported and that many of those who were accused of misconduct were rarely investigated or disciplined.
Chicago officers endangered civilians, caused avoidable injuries and deaths and eroded community trust that is “the cornerstone of public safety,” said Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
The federal government’s recommendations follow an especially bloody year on Chicago streets. The city had 762 homicides in 2016, the highest tally in 20 years and more than the combined total of the two largest U.S. cities — New York and Los Angeles.
The Justice Department began the Chicago investigation in December 2015 after the release of dashcam video showing the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Laquan McDonald, who was walking away from police holding a small folded knife. The video of the shooting, which the city fought to keep secret, inspired large protests and cost the city’s police commissioner his job.
The report “confirms what civil rights lawyers have been saying for decades,” said attorney Matt Topic, who helped lead the legal fight for the release of the McDonald video. “It is momentous and pretty rewarding to see that finally confirmed by the U.S. government.”
Chicago has spent more than half a billion dollars to settle claims of police misconduct since 2004. But in half of those cases, police did not conduct disciplinary investigations, according to the federal report. Of 409 police shootings that happened over a five-year period, police found only two were unjustified.
The Justice Department criticized the city for failing to investigate anonymous complaints or those submitted without a supporting affidavit and for having a “pervasive cover-up culture.”
It said that witnesses and accused officers were frequently never interviewed at all, that evidence went uncollected and that witnesses were routinely coached by union lawyers — “a dynamic neither we nor our law enforcement experts had seen to nearly such an extent in other agencies.”
Investigations into misconduct are “glacially slow,” with discipline often “unpredictable and ineffective,” said Gupta, who described how police used stun guns on people for no other reason than they did not obey officers’ verbal commands. She also said officers do not get enough support to help them deal with the trauma of their jobs.
The findings also challenge the argument that making officers more accountable will somehow make it tougher to fight crime. The report said solving crimes becomes more difficult “if police don’t have legitimacy in the community,” Topic said. “The lack of trust makes it tougher … because the community is less willing to help them because they don’t trust them.”
The head of Chicago’s police union said the Justice Department hurried the investigation to release its findings before Trump takes office.
In a statement sent minutes before the report was posted online, Fraternal Order of Police President Dean Angelo questioned whether the investigation was compromised because of its timing.
The Chicago department, with 12,000 officers, has long had a reputation for brutality, particularly in minority communities. The most notorious example was Jon Burge, a commander of a detective unit on the South Side. Burge and his men beat, suffocated and used electric shock for decades starting in the 1970s to get black men to confess to crimes they did not commit.
The McDonald video, which showed officer Jason Van Dyke continuing to shoot the teen even after he slumped to the ground, provoked widespread outrage. It was not until the video was released, which was more than a year after the shooting, that Van Dyke was charged with murder. He has pleaded not guilty. Police reports of the shooting later suggested a possible cover-up by other officers who were at the scene.