“Police Brutality Exposed”

This article explores the conditions for changing news media coverage of police brutality, focusing on the Chicago Tribune. Police have historically dominated news about policing, resulting in very limited coverage of wrongdoing. Following the murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by Chicago Police officers, a racially and politically heterogenous coalition exposed the connection between police brutality and knowledge production. Activists developed a radical critique of police brutality’s role in sustaining an unequal social order and opened new possibilities for political solidarity. When longtime Chicago machine alderman Ralph Metcalfe challenged Mayor Richard J. Daley on the issue, “regular” Black Democrats came to join liberals and radicals in demanding change. The conflict generated by Metcalfe’s revolt provided both a justification and a set of questions for the Tribune’s investigative task force to engage. In a pathbreaking series of investigative reports on police brutality in 1973, the task force convincingly demonstrated the existence of widespread police brutality but also tamed its political significance with bureaucratic reform. The dilemmas of coalition politics that shaped this investigative reporting and the response to it continue to structure the choices faced by political movements seeking meaningful transformation today.

Accountability and transparency as levers to promote public trust and police legitimacy: findings from a natural experiment

PurposeThis paper examines the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing's recommendation that police promote trust and legitimacy by creating a culture of transparency and accountability.Design/methodology/approachThe study is based on a panel survey of 841 Chicago residents that was interrupted between the waves by a momentous local policing event that proved to be known to virtually every participant. The reinterview period encompassed this event, its political repercussions and subsequent efforts to hold Chicago Police accountable and increase transparency. The authors examine whether these events and reform efforts improved African Americans' assessments of police legitimacy and trust relative to other respondents.FindingsTrust in Chicago Police improved by 21%, and trust in neighborhood police increased 30% among Black residents. In contrast, views of Whites became more negative, declining by 62% in their assessments about Chicago Police and by 39% regarding neighborhood police.Originality/valueEvents occurring between the waves of a panel survey created an opportunity to examine the impact of events on residents of a large and diverse city. The authors discuss why reforms promoting transparency and police accountability can alter levels of trust in the police but in different and politically consequential ways.

RACIST TORTURE AND THE CODE OF SILENCE

We join Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s structural theory of the racialized U.S. social system with a situational methodology developed by Arthur L. Stinchcombe and Irving Goffman to analyze how law works as a mechanism that connects formal legal equality with legal cynicism. The data for this analysis come from the trial of a Chicago police detective, Jon Burge, who as leader of an infamous torture squad escaped criminal charges for more than thirty years. Burge was finally charged with perjury and obstruction of justice, charges that obscured and perpetuated the larger structural reality of a code of silence that enabled racist torture of more than a hundred Black men. This case study demonstrates how the non-transparency of courtroom sidebars plays an important role in perpetuating systemic features of American criminal injustice: a code of silence, racist discrimination, and legal cynicism.

More and better video evidence for police investigations of shootings: Chicago's area technology centers

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to describe the creation, implementation, activities and rationale for the Area Technology Centers (ATCs), an innovation adopted by the Chicago Police Department’s (CPD’s) Bureau of Detectives (BoD) in 2019 for the purpose of supporting investigations of crimes of serious violence by deploying specialized teams of officers to gather and process video and digital evidence.Design/methodology/approachThis case study utilizes historical information and descriptive data generated by a record-keeping system adopted by the ATCs.FindingsThe ATCs were developed as a collaboration between the CPD and the University of Chicago Crime Lab (a research center). The start-up was funded by a gift from the Griffin Foundation. Detectives have made extensive use of the services provided by the ATCs from the beginning, with the result that homicide and shooting investigations now have access to more video and digital evidence that has been processed by state-of-the-art equipment. The CPD has assumed budget responsibility for the ATCs, which is an indication of their success. The ATC teams have been assembled by voluntary transfers by sworn officers, together with an embedded analyst from the University of Chicago.Practical implicationsThe ATC model could be adopted by other large police departments. The study finds that ATCs can be effectively staffed by redeploying and training existing staff and that their operation does not require a budget increase.Social implicationsBy arguably making police investigations of shooting cases more efficient, the ATCs have the potential to increase the clearance rate and thereby prevent future gun violence.Originality/valueThe ATCs are a novel response to the challenges of securing and making good use of video and digital evidence in police investigations.

Crime Prediction Using Machine Learning Algorithms

The most serious security challenges we face in these turbulent times are terrorist attacks and the transmission of disease. length and breadth are measured in hundredths of a centimetre. On a daily basis, we see the most minor offences committed by ordinary citizens. Details of breaches and recurring cases of items should be applied to files to ensure that they are up to date. When it is known that a crime has been committed, people believe that disciplinary action will be taken, even if there is no means of knowing which one. The study of criminology helps to broaden our understanding of who is likely to become a suspect. In the midst of his attempts to identify and deter alleged criminals from reoffending the legal system, he is incorporating both computer science and deep learning. Anyone interested in learning more about the workings of the Chicago Police Force should visit "The Chicago Police Department Site." The Crime Timeline will keep track of all criminal activity as well as the time and date of any incident that occurs. The data collection and modelling have been completed; all that remains is on-line modelling and compilation. To address this question, we must first determine if the case history of K-grooming and other related methods will help with criminal prediction. The invention is typically used as a testing tool, but it can also be used in conjunction with other technologies. Based on internal or external metrics, an algorithm can estimate how easily law enforcement authorities may be able to track, anticipate, and cope with, or preempt, risks, such as the ratio of those sentenced to those arrested, with a life sentence to those awaiting the risk of life imprisonment.

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

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 Memorial Day Massacre and American Labor

On the afternoon of May 30, 1937, the Chicago Police killed or mortally wounded ten men who were among a large group of unionists attempting to picket a mill operated by the Republic Steel Corporation. Scores of demonstrators were injured, some critically, in this shocking episode. The “Memorial Day Massacre” occurred during the Little Steel Strike, a sprawling and protracted conflict that arose out of the Committee for Industrial Organization’s (CIO) attempt to overcome the strident resistance of a coalition of power companies and to organize the basic steel industry. The strike evolved into a contest to decide how much the Second New Deal and its legislative centerpiece, the Wagner Act, would alter the landscape of American labor relations. This was evident in Chicago, where the unionists’ efforts to engage in mass picketing at Republic’s plant were an attempt to wrest from the Wagner Act’s ambiguous terms an effective right to strike, and where the violence of the police, who were doing Republic’s bidding, was intended to prevent this. Ultimately, the use of violence against the unionists not only defeated this bid to engage in mass picketing but served, along with similar clashes elsewhere during the strike, to justify government intervention that ended the walkout and secured the companies’ victory. Later, the strike and the massacre were invoked to justify political and legal changes that further limited the right to strike and that endorsed much of what the police, the steel companies, and their allies had done during the conflict. While the CIO did eventually organize steel, this success was primarily the result of the war and not the strike or the labor law. And although the National Labor Relations Board prosecuted the steel companies for violating the Wagner Act, this litigation took years and ended with Republic facing only modest penalties.

Capitalizing on Crisis: Chicago Police Responses to Homicide Waves 1920-2020

This article investigates Chicago city government policy responses to the four largest homicide waves in its history: 1920-1925, 1966-1970, 1987-1992, and 2016. Through a combination of spatial and historical methods, we discovered that homicide was more than a social problem, it was a tool for advancing a diverse set of policy agendas. Specifically, city policy responses were the outcome of struggles between government and non-government actors over the definition of homicide and its causes. The struggles produced a repetitive cycle of city responses that included efforts to 1) delegitimize Black social movements, 2) expand policing, 3) frame homicide as an individual rather than systemic problem, and 4) exclusively credit police for homicide decreases. These findings suggest that efforts to improve violence prevention policy in Chicago require not only a science of prevention and community flourishing, but also efforts to democratize how the city defines its social problems.