The Shadow Behind the Real: Spike Lee Does Chicago

2016 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 30-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jade D. Petermon
Keyword(s):  
Police Department ◽  
Spike Lee ◽  
South Side ◽  
The Real ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Chicago Police ◽  
The City

When he began principal shooting in Chicago in summer 2015, Spike Lee assured audiences that Chi-Raq would engage the issue of violence on Chicago's South Side with intention and purpose. Chicagoans were skeptical because of Lee's use of the portmanteau phrase, which had been the subject of much debate in the city, as the film's title. Written almost entirely in verse, Chi-Raq is an adaptation of classical Greek playwright Aristophanes's comedy Lysistrata that marks an extension of Lee's use of satire. Despite Lee's promises, he flails outside of his native Brooklyn. The film primarily adopts a didactic and reductionist view, blaming black Chicagoans for their own “self-inflicted genocide” and encouraging them to put their trust in the notoriously corrupt Chicago Police Department.

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.

1877 and the Formation of a Law-and-Order Consensus

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Mitrani
Keyword(s):  
Police Department ◽  
Class Action ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
Business Elite ◽  
Ethnic Solidarity ◽  
Chicago Police ◽  
The City

This chapter examines the role of the Chicago Police Department in putting down the massive strikes that erupted in 1877 as well as the response of the city's business elite to the crisis. The strikes marked a turning point for the department and its response provides a vivid illustration of how the Chicago police reconciled democratic politics with the industrial capitalist order through violence. In these strikes, the most dramatic and disorderly they had yet to confront, the police seemed little more than hired thugs of the city's businessmen. In part, the police played this role because Chicago's businessmen organized themselves as never before. This chapter explores how the breakdown of ethnic solidarity and the beginnings of relatively coordinated working-class action pushed Chicago's businessmen to consolidate around a law-and-order program as never before by forming new powerful organizations, including the Citizens' Association of Chicago and the Commercial Club of the City of Chicago, that solidly supported law and order.

Drunken Immigrants, Businessmen’s Order, and the Founding of the Chicago Police Department

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Mitrani
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Daily Basis ◽  
City Government ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
German Immigrants ◽  
Lager Beer ◽  
Chicago Police ◽  
The City

This chapter examines the conflicts that gave rise to the Chicago Police Department. Over the first half of the 1850s, elite Chicagoans confronted two interrelated problems of order that prompted them to create a police force: the need to protect their property and the property of visiting businessmen, and the need to enforce order more generally among a largely immigrant class of wage workers who were not bound by earlier forms of social control. It was in this context that Levi Boone's Law and Order Party won control of the city government and embarked on an anti-immigrant temperance policy. This chapter considers the creation of the Chicago Police Department on April 30, 1855 and describes the Lager Beer Riot as a founding moment for the department. It also discusses what the new police department did on a daily basis during its first six months, such as arresting a large number of working-class Irish and German immigrants for drinking.

The Eight-Hour Strikes, the Haymarket Bombing, and the Consolidation of the Chicago Police Department

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Mitrani
Keyword(s):  
Police Officers ◽  
Police Department ◽  
City Government ◽  
Institutional Changes ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
Positive Image ◽  
The Press ◽  
Chicago Police ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

This chapter examines how the Eight-hour strikes of 1886 and the Haymarket bombing transformed the Chicago Police Department into a much stronger institution. It begins with a discussion of the Haymarket affair and how it led to massive strikes for the eight-hour workday that began on May 1, 1886. It then considers how the Haymarket bombing changed what it meant to be a member of the Chicago Police Department as well as the relationship between the police, the press, and the city government. It shows that the Haymarket and its aftermath consolidated a positive image of the Chicago Police Department in the eyes of the respectable citizens of the city. This shift facilitated some institutional changes that favored police officers, such as the allocation of funds for a pension, improvements in police buildings, and expansion of the force. But most of all, only citizens willing to risk being identified with the anarchists would criticize the institution itself.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Mitrani
Keyword(s):  
Police Department ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Business Elite ◽  
May Day ◽  
Lager Beer ◽  
Chicago Police ◽  
Economic Conflict ◽  
The City

This book examines the development of the Chicago Police Department from the 1850s through the 1880s amid class tensions and political and economic conflict in the city. During the late nineteenth century, Chicago was the most violent, turbulent city in the country. From the Lager Beer Riot of 1855, through the Civil War, the 1867 strikes for the eight-hour workday, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the 1877 strike and riot, the May Day strikes and the Haymarket bombing, and the Pullman Strike, Chicago was the scene of the crises accompanying industrialization and the development of a wage labor economy. This book explores how the various political and economic groups in Chicago, particularly the business elite, shaped the Chicago Police Department, as well as how the police shaped the relations between those groups. The book demonstrates the crucial role played by state institutions in the rise of capitalism and how businessmen influenced these state institutions to meet their needs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document