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.
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Source: ProPublica
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