Few Chicago police officers who are accused of misconduct are found to be at fault, and when they are, most of them are cited for minor infractions that carry little if any punishment, a Tribune analysis of data found.
In fact, nearly three-fourths of the officers found to have committed some kind of wrongdoing weren’t docked any time off or received suspensions of five days or less, the analysis of Police Department records shows.
Department critics and some police accountability experts say people filing complaints against the police face obstacles and long odds in getting their allegations investigated and then substantiated. Nearly 60 percent of all the complaints were thrown out without being fully investigated because the alleged victims failed to sign required affidavits. What’s more, investigators won’t consider an officer’s complaint history as part of the investigation, and many of the cases come down to the word of the officer versus the accuser.
In the end, very few alleged victims prevail, the analysis found. Over four years ending in mid-December 2014, investigators “sustained” a little fewer than 800 of the approximately 17,700 complaints, just over 4 percent. The sustained rate rose to about 11 percent if the thousands of people who didn’t sign the affidavit are excluded from the tally.
In the relatively few cases in which officers are found at fault, about 45 percent were given a reprimand or what’s called a “violation noted,” neither of which results in any docked time for the officer. Another 37 percent of the officers were suspended, but three-fourths of them were docked only one to five days off work. Almost 15 percent resigned before punishment could be imposed, the analysis found. And only a dozen officers were dismissed over complaints filed during the four-year period, according to the department records.
Police officials objected to the Tribune’s analysis, saying there are complicated factors at play. Officers routinely stack up complaints by working in Chicago’s toughest neighborhoods. They said the affidavit law protects them from false complaints. And the Independent Police Review Authority, the city agency that investigates the most serious complaints, said it would be unfair to flag officers for past complaints for which they were cleared.
The Tribune analysis found that officers who piled up the most complaints routinely escaped discipline of any kind. Over the four years, the 11 officers with the most complaints amassed a combined 253, in some cases for serious allegations of misconduct such as excessive force or illegal searches. Yet just one officer was punished — and received only a five-day suspension for neglecting his duties, the analysis found.
A few of the officers with the most complaints over the last four years also ranked high on similar lists from the 2000s.
According to the analysis, most officers found at fault were disciplined for more minor or technical offenses. For instance, officers were most often cited for “neglect of duty/conduct unbecoming” — about 150 of the nearly 800 sustained complaints. Other common sustained complaints included failure to provide adequate service, misuse of department equipment and other personnel violations.
The Tribune conducted its analysis using internal department data provided through an open-records request.
Police accountability experts and critics of the department have long had concerns about how Chicago police officials investigate complaints from citizens, including allegations of excessive force and officer misconduct.
“This sends a very bad message that … (officers) don’t have to worry too seriously about discipline,” said Samuel Walker, a professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
“For discipline to matter, it’s got be meaningful,” said Locke Bowman, executive director of Northwestern University School of Law’s MacArthur Justice Center. “And I don’t think ‘violation noted’ and reprimand have any meaningful deterrent effect.”
Spokesmen for the Police Department and the Independent Police Review Authority both called the 4 percent sustained rate wrong, saying complaints that were tossed after accusers failed to sign required affidavits shouldn’t be counted. They also defended not considering an officer’s complaint history when investigating a new complaint, saying it would be unfair to take into account past accusations in which officers had been cleared of wrongdoing.
Scott Ando, a former Drug Enforcement Administration supervisor in Chicago who has headed IPRA for more than a year, said that the rate of sustained complaints shouldn’t be a measure of the agency’s success. To IPRA, a more significant benchmark would be what Ando calls its rate of “positive findings” — not just the complaints in which officers were found at fault but those in which the officers’ actions were found to be justified or the complaints were determined to be false. Last year IPRA resolved 46 percent of its cases in those ways, Ando said.
Experts said it is virtually impossible to compare Chicago’s sustained rate with those of other big-city police departments because no national standards exist, leaving each department to devise its own disciplinary system.
Still, Walker, the criminal justice professor, thinks Chicago’s sustained rate is comparatively meager.
“This whole thing is a swamp,” Walker said. “… Even if (the sustained rate) is as high as 20 percent, that’s still pretty low.”
But investigators of police complaints often have a tough time proving wrongdoing because independent witnesses and forensic evidence are infrequently found, he said.
“It’s often a he-said, she-said situation,” Walker said.
A few months after his appointment by Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2011, police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said he found the department’s disciplinary system confusing and promised an overhaul.
“I’m a firm believer in justice delayed is justice denied,” McCarthy told the Tribune Editorial Board. “We’ve got officers who have been stripped (of police powers) for like four years. That’s absurd, that’s absolutely absurd.”
McCarthy, whose office declined an interview, has recently talked publicly about how he has added investigators to the department’s internal affairs bureau. In a speech to the City Club of Chicago last month, he highlighted the department’s required “procedural justice” training that aims to teach officers how to treat citizens fairly, saying police leaders from across the country have come to Chicago to observe it. And he touted a 20 percent drop in the number of complaints against officers over the last two years — though the department has not released data to support his statement.
“It’s incredibly important to have internal legitimacy,” he told the crowd. “And that has a lot to do with our discipline system.”
Discipline for Chicago police officers is a complicated process with three separate city agencies — IPRA; the Police Department, including its Bureau of Internal Affairs; and the Chicago Police Board — deciding punishment for misconduct.
Last year an independent study of the department’s disciplinary system found that officers had multiple opportunities to appeal disciplinary actions, often delaying decisions for months if not years. The city’s collective bargaining agreements with its police unions, particularly the Fraternal Order of Police, which represents rank-and-file officers, have limited the ways in which misconduct can be investigated and disciplined, further complicating the process, according to the report by A.T. Kearney, a management consulting firm, and the law firm of Schiff Hardin. The most recent FOP contract, however, has lessened those roadblocks somewhat, they said.
IPRA said major strides have also been made in recent years by mediating more complaints, significantly lessening investigators’ caseloads and cutting down on the time investigations take. Officers typically get a break in their punishment for taking responsibility.
The Tribune analysis found that a majority of people who filed complaints against police did not follow through by signing the affidavit — a requirement of a state law amended in 2004 with backing by the FOP.As a result, fully 58 percent of the 17,700 complaints were tagged “no affidavit” and were never fully investigated by IPRA or Chicago police.
But some police accountability experts criticized the state law as counterproductive, saying the requirement likely discourages many people from complaining in the first place.
“Requiring to sign an affidavit acts as a deterrent for filing a complaint,” said Merrick Bobb, whose California-based Police Executive Resource Center is overseeing federal court-ordered reforms within the Seattle Police Department.”Complainants are going to think twice.”
“I think the more open the complaint process can be the better,” said Brian Buchner, president of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement, who noted that filing a complaint against a police officer can be intimidating enough for people who think they were victims of misconduct.
Several veteran Chicago lawyers said there’s good reason not to sign the affidavits. Many of those who file complaints face criminal charges in connection with the same incident, the lawyers said, and it is an unwise strategy to let defendants give statements to police that could be used against them in the criminal case.
“It’s a tool for them to blow people off,” Torreya Hamilton, a lawyer who has filed numerous misconduct lawsuits against Chicago police, said of the affidavit requirement.
Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago law professor who has talked to hundreds of residents in neighborhoods with a deeply rooted distrust of police while studying misconduct by officers for years, said he believes even greater numbers of people don’t bother with the initial step of filing a complaint because they have little faith that meaningful discipline will be imposed.
“I don’t know what the complainant gets out of it at the end of the day,” Futterman said. “… The complainant isn’t going to get, ‘Here’s a medal for what you did for exposing this corruption’ or anything like that. It’s a hassle. … It’s a kind of second thought, like, ‘Whoa, do I really want to sign an affidavit? Do I really want to go and follow up after this when there’s little chance that anything’s ever going to come of this?'”
A national survey by the U.S. Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2008 found that nearly 84 percent of those who were the targets of force or the threat of force by police thought the officers’ actions were unreasonable, yet only 14 percent ended up filing complaints.
Still, Ronald Safer, the managing partner of Schiff Hardin who co-wrote the report on Chicago police discipline, backed the affidavit requirement as the fairer approach.
“It may deter some people from pursuing a complaint … but you’ve got to structure a system that’s fair to everybody,” said Safer, a former federal prosecutor. “No one would want their job to be placed in jeopardy simply by somebody making a statement that they were not willing to stand behind, and that’s what we’re dealing with here.”
“They were able to just blindly say things against police,” Dean Angelo, FOP president, said of those filing complaints anonymously. “That had to stop.”
Police accountability experts faulted IPRA for failing to consider an officer’s history of complaints — including those not sustained — whenever a new complaint is investigated. That way IPRA fails to spot troublesome trends, they said.
“If you look at one complaint in an island within itself, you’re going to miss stuff,” Futterman said. “… That’s just bad Investigations 101. That’s not how you investigate cases.”
As a result, many of the complaints come down to the credibility of the officer and the alleged victim. Without any independent witnesses or video to back up the accuser’s account, that typically means IPRA and the department’s internal affairs side with the officer.
The Tribune found a number of cases in which officers were cleared of wrongdoing by IPRA but the alleged victims pursued lawsuits and won sizable damages at trial or in settlements.
On the West Side in the summer of 2011, two officers stopped a woman on a bike riding down an alley where neighbors had been complaining about drug activity. A lawsuit filed on behalf of Olympia McGill — who has autism and is said to have the mental capacity of about a 10-year-old — alleged that one of the officers threw her from the bike and pressed a knee to the back of her neck, blocking her airway.
According to the lawsuit, she was handcuffed so tightly that the metal punctured her skin, and then she was dragged across a vacant lot and thrown into a squad car. After spending several hours at the Harrison District station, she was released without charges.
The lawsuit alleged that McGill suffered a fractured neck — a contention that IPRA denied in its findings.
Numerous witnesses at the scene complained to the officers about their treatment of McGill and warned them that she had autism, but IPRA made a “not sustained” finding, saying there was insufficient evidence to either support or refute the allegations of excessive force because of what it called the many conflicting accounts of what happened, records show.
To resolve the lawsuit, the city agreed in 2012 to pay $70,000 to McGill’s grandmother, according to records.
More recently, a Cook County jury awarded Trevor Mitchell, an insurance salesman, $1.16 million in damages after he was knocked to the floor by a police sergeant during a 2011 drug raid of a West Side carwash, injuring his hip so badly that he later needed surgery.
Mitchell, now 66, declined to be interviewed for this story, but at the April trial over his lawsuit, he testified that he was watching a Western movie on a TV in the lounge while waiting for his car to be washed when he heard a sudden commotion. Fearing a robbery could be taking place at the Old School Carwash, he tried to make a quick exit but was knocked over from behind. He said he looked up to find a female officer, Dany Helwink Masters, standing over him.
In excruciating pain, he was unable to get up off the floor on his own power, he said. Two other officers helped him to his feet, and he was handcuffed, Mitchell testified. The officers demanded that he tell them where the drugs were hidden.
Mitchell said he protested his innocence, noting that he was only a customer, but without his permission, officers searched him three times, according to court records. They eventually left the carwash without finding anything illegal.
The jury found Helwink Masters responsible for Mitchell’s hip injury about two years after IPRA had cleared her of wrongdoing. Its “not sustained” finding meant investigators could not prove or disprove Mitchell’s claims. Helwink Masters has since been promoted to lieutenant. Reached Friday by phone, she had no comment.
At his trial, Mitchell testified that he was still embarrassed by the whole experience more than four years later and has had a hard time even convincing himself that he could be treated so harshly by police and not be in the wrong somehow.
“… Emotionally, that’s something I have to overcome,” he testified.
The Fraternal Order of Police contends that most of the complaints are baseless and made by criminals seeking revenge for their arrests. The officers who amass numerous complaints are likely making the most arrests, according to the union.
The FOP has fought the release of misconduct records since an Illinois Appellate Court ruling in March 2014 that all allegations against police officers and the related investigative files should be made public. In December the union sued to block the imminent release of the department’s entire misconduct data going back decades, arguing that its collective bargaining agreement required the city to destroy any disciplinary records more than four years old. That court fight continues, but in the meantime, the judge presiding over the lawsuit allowed the city to release the records for the last four years.
In an emailed response to questions from the Tribune, IPRA chief Ando stressed that his agency investigates more serious complaints that he said are more difficult to prove because of the involvement of many more witnesses, often reluctant ones.
As for officers with the most complaints, Ando cautioned that they often work in the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods and have more frequent interaction with gang members and other criminals. He said IPRA has no authority to “flag” officers for intervention but that he occasionally refers officers to the department for nondisciplinary intervention programs “whenever we identify a real pattern of behavior that causes us concern.”
But he rejected taking into account an officer’s complaint history — including those not sustained — in deciding discipline.
“Say, for example, an officer has five complaints for excessive force, but all five were found to be exonerated or unfounded,” he said. “Would it be fair to use this complaint history against the officer? Of course not.”
Chicago Tribune’s Jason Meisner and Dan Hinkel contributed.
Gorner is a Tribune reporter; Hing is a Tribune news applications developer.
Twitter @JeremyGorner
Twitter @geoffhing
