scholarly journals Complaining While Black: Racial Disparities in the Adjudication of Complaints against the Police

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 1028-1067 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob William Faber ◽  
Jessica Rose Kalbfeld
Keyword(s):  
Neighborhood Effects ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Neighborhood Context ◽  
Police Misconduct ◽  
Predominantly Black ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
Black Neighborhoods ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
High Crime ◽  
Chicago Police

Reports of citizen complaints of police misconduct often note that officers are rarely disciplined for alleged misconduct. The perception of little officer accountability contributes to widespread distrust of law enforcement in communities of color. This project investigates how race and segregation shape the outcomes of allegations made against the Chicago Police Department (CPD) between 2011 and 2014. We find that complaints by black and Latino citizens and against white officers are less likely to be sustained. We show neighborhood context interacts with complainant characteristics: Incidents alleged by white citizens in high–crime and predominantly black neighborhoods are more likely to be sustained. These findings provide context for understanding tensions between communities of color and the CPD. These results are consistent with theories that individual and institutional actors prioritize white victimhood and reflect the neighborhood effects literature stressing the interaction between individual and contextual factors in shaping outcomes.

Neighborhood Context and Homicide Clearance: Estimating the Effects of Collective Efficacy

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley M. Mancik ◽  
Karen F. Parker ◽  
Kirk R. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Collective Efficacy ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Neighborhood Context ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Community Characteristics ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
Combining Data ◽  
Homicide Clearance ◽  
Chicago Police ◽  
The Impact

Only a handful of macro-level studies of homicide clearance exist, and the impact of community characteristics is mixed. In addition, community members are critical to clearances, but the willingness of residents to unite for the collective goal of aiding in investigations (via collective efficacy) remains to be tested. Combining data from the Chicago Police Department, Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), and U.S. Census, we estimate the effect of collective efficacy on homicide clearances in Chicago neighborhoods, while taking into account neighborhood characteristics and case composition. Results indicate that economic disadvantage, residential stability, and victimization significantly decrease homicides clearances, while collective efficacy increases clearances.

scholarly journals Network Position and Police Who Shoot

2020 ◽  
Vol 687 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Zhao ◽  
Andrew V. Papachristos
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Statistical Models ◽  
Network Science ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Police Misconduct ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
Network Position ◽  
The Social ◽  
Chicago Police

This study applies the growing field of network science to explore whether police violence is associated with characteristics of an officer’s social networks and his or her placement within those networks. To do this, we re-create the network of police misconduct for the Chicago Police Department using more than 38,442 complaints filed against police officers between 2000 and 2003. Our statistical models reveal that officers who shoot at civilians are often “brokers” within the social networks of policing, occupying important positions between other actors in the network and often connecting otherwise disconnected parts of the social structure between other officers within larger networks of misconduct. This finding holds, even net measures of officer activity, career movement, and sociodemographic background. Our finding suggest that policies and interventions aimed at curbing police shootings should include not only individual assessments of risk but also an understanding of officers’ positions within larger social networks.

Occupied Territory

2019 ◽  
pp. 154-189
Author(s):  
Simon Balto
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Strong Law ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
The Public ◽  
Black Neighborhoods ◽  
Chicago Police

Chapter five focuses on the years from 1960 to 1967, aligning with the tenure of Chicago Police Department Superintendent Orlando Wilson. Hired in the wake of a massive scandal within the police department, Wilson came in as a departmental outsider, and with aims to reform and professionalize the department and ensure greater accountability to the public. For these efforts, Wilson is remembered as perhaps the most consequential leader of the CPD in the department’s history. He implemented the first Internal Investigations Division and labored to better the image of the police in the eyes of the public. However, he was also a strong law-and-order proponent who firmly believed in an expansive police power, leading to an evermore aggressive police presence in Black neighborhoods that would have longstanding consequences and a contentious relationship with Chicago’s civil rights movement (known as the Chicago Freedom Movement) when it sought to use civil disobedience in pursuit of racial justice. At the same time, Wilson’s reform efforts—especially those intended to bring more oversight and accountability to police behavior—were fought tooth and nail by many of his subordinates, led by groups like the Chicago Patrolman’s Association, the Fraternal Order of Police, and other police organizations that were direct ancestors of modern police unions. In the end, this meant that systems of accountability, while technically implemented during this period, were dysfunctional in actually halting police brutality and other abuses of power.

Negro Distrust of the Police Increased

2019 ◽  
pp. 26-55
Author(s):  
Simon Balto
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Police Corruption ◽  
Race Riot ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
Black Neighborhoods ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Chicago Police ◽  
White Violence

The first chapter opens with scenes from Chicago’s Red Summer race riot in July of 1919. It explores the cascade of white violence that characterized the riot, as well as the armed self-defense that Blacks deployed in response. It also tracks the ways in which both police brutality and police neglect were features of how Black Chicagoans experienced the Chicago Police Department during those awful summer days in which thirty-eight Chicagoans in total were killed. From there, it shifts in the 1920s, when segregation in Chicago became more rigid, and explores how police corruption and political corruption worked hand in hand to shape the city’s Prohibition decade. It documents how politicians especially used the police department to their advantage, in particular by variously allowing vice operators to set up shop in less politically influential Black neighborhoods, and subsequently cracking down on low-level vice offenses by Black people. It also explores the long reach of police torture of civilians in 1920s Chicago.

scholarly journals Revised findings for "Procedural justice training reduces police use of force and complaints against officers"

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Wood ◽  
Tom Tyler ◽  
Andrew V Papachristos ◽  
Jonathan Roth ◽  
Pedro H. C. Sant'Anna
Keyword(s):  
Procedural Justice ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Original Study ◽  
Statistical Problem ◽  
Police Use Of Force ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
Point Estimates ◽  
Chicago Police

Wood et al. (2020) studied the rollout of a procedural justice training program in the Chicago Police Department and found large and statistically significant impacts on complaints and sustained complaints against police officers and police use of force. This document describes a subtle statistical problem that led the magnitude of those estimates to be inflated. We then re-analyze the data using a methodology that corrects for this problem. The re-analysis provides less strong conclusions about the effectiveness of the training than the original study: although the point estimates for most outcomes and specifications are negative and of a meaningful magnitude, the confidence intervals typically include zero or very small effects. On the whole, we interpret the data as providing suggestive evidence that procedural justice training reduced the use of force, but no statistically significant evidence for a reduction in complaints or sustained complaints.

The Sunset of 1974: Lenny Patrick’s Changing World

2019 ◽  
pp. 37-48
Author(s):  
Joe Kraus
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Organized Crime ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Hard Evidence ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Chicago Police ◽  
Legal Sense ◽  
Changing World

This chapter documents Lenny Patrick’s growing paranoia by 1974. This was a pivotal year—the twenty-fifth since the death of Benjamin Zuckerman and Patrick’s own rise to power. Everyone knew that and, for practical purposes, such knowledge mattered. It meant people made way for him; that they understood he had influence to help in shady business; and that they acceded to his suggestions, requests, or threats. In a legal sense, though, the difference between knowledge and proof was everything. Until law enforcement had hard evidence against him, he was a free man. And by 1974 the FBI and Chicago Police Department had been trying to collect such evidence for at least fifteen years through sustained campaigns of surveillance, wiretapping, and harassment. Wherever Patrick went, someone was trying to track him. He had had a long run as boss of Chicago Jewish organized crime, but the net was tightening around him.

The Introduction of Tasers and Police Use of Firearms: Evidence from the Chicago Police Department

2019 ◽  
Vol 109 ◽  
pp. 157-160
Author(s):  
Bocar Ba ◽  
Jeffrey Grogger
Keyword(s):  
Event Study ◽  
Policy Change ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Patrol Officers ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
Field Training ◽  
Chicago Police

Many police jurisdictions have recently expanded their Taser arsenals with a goal of reducing officer-involved shootings. We analyze substitution between Tasers and firearms by means of an event study made possible by a policy change at the Chicago Police Department. Before March 2010, only sergeants and field training officers had access to Tasers; after that date, they were made available to patrol officers. We find that the change in Taser policy led to a large increase in Taser use, but not to a decrease in the use of firearms.

Chicago’s Anarchists Shape the Police Department

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Mitrani
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
Strong Force ◽  
Real Mass ◽  
Socialist Movement ◽  
Chicago Police ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines how the Chicago Police Department was transformed by its struggle with the city's anarchist and socialist movement during the 1870s and 1880s. Compared with the department's interaction with the wider labor movement and the working class generally, the relationship between the police and the militant workers' organizations varied solely in degree. The police and the anarchists consistently faced each other with unmistakable hostility. The first real mass confrontation between the anarchists and the police took place during the 1877 upheaval, when the police broke up their meetings with violence. But in the 1880s, the anarchist organizations grew rapidly in size and increasingly set themselves against the police. This chapter shows that the conflict between the police and the anarchists shaped the development of the Chicago Police Department, in part due to the threat of mass strikes, riots, and revolution that pushed the city's elite to seek a strong force that could be relied on to respond to the workers' movement.

The Native-Born Protestant Elite’s Bid for Control in the 1870s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Mitrani
Keyword(s):  
Fear Of Crime ◽  
Municipal Government ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
City Government ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
Business Elite ◽  
Chicago Police ◽  
The City

This chapter examines how the Chicago Police Department figured in the native-born Protestant elite's attempt to control urban life in the city during the 1870s. In the 1870s, it became increasingly clear that the promise of “free labor” would not be met. Native-born Protestant urban elites across the country felt as if the cities were slipping into the grasp of immigrant workers and unemployed vagrants. This chapter describes the efforts of Chicago's traditional native-born, Protestant urban elite to enforce stricter temperance laws, regulate economic life, especially construction, and gain tighter control over the municipal government itself. It begins with a discussion of the responses of Chicago's business elite and politicians, the city government, and the police to the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 as well as to the fear of crime that gripped Chicago in the summer of 1872. It then considers the Committee of Seventy's attempts to control the police and their divided stance over temperance and concludes with an assessment of the power struggle in the Chicago Police Department that would continue through 1873.

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