Saturday, December 16, 2017

Chicago Police Win Big When Appealing Discipline


Analysis shows hundreds of misconduct findings overturned.
 
by Jennifer Smith Richards, Chicago Tribune, and Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica

A secretive appeals system has been knocking down the punishments of Chicago police officers no matter how serious their misconduct, undercutting the results of lengthy investigations and layers of review long after the public believes the cases were concluded.

In the first examination of its kind, the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica Illinois found that 85 percent of disciplinary cases handled through the Chicago Police Department’s grievance process since 2010 led to officers receiving shorter suspensions or, in many cases, having their punishments overturned entirely.

A suspension for punching a handcuffed arrestee, all caught on camera? Negotiable.

Discipline for making racially insensitive comments during a traffic stop? Tossed out and expunged from the record.

Punishments for making false statements, an offense for which the department says it has zero tolerance? Those, too, were wiped away as if they never happened.

The result: the weakening of a police accountability system that rarely finds fault with officers’ actions in the first place.

Click here for the full article. 

Source: ProPublica

No comments: