Ethics

Balko on the Chicago PD

By Ed Brayton

Balko has an article at Reason about the rampant corruption in the Chicago Police Department and the fact that they're actually working to become even less accountable than they already are - which scarcely seems possible. He recounts some of the recent scandals there:

You can certainly understand why someone would want to get a planned interaction with Chicago police on tape. In the last few years, the department has been hit with scandals of egregious police misconduct that, had they not been captured on tape, likely would either never have been investigated, or the investigation wouldn't have been based on what actually happened.

The most famous incident was footage of an off-duty cop viciously beating a female bartender who refused to continue serving him in 2007. He wasn't even charged until three months later, after the surveillance video surfaced on the Internet, generating worldwide outrage. There are other examples: six cops beating two men in a bar brawl; a video of a fatal police shooting in a subway station where officer accounts of the incident don't match the video footage. The department also recently disciplined two officers after a video showed up on the Internet showing a Chicago PD unit posing for a trophy photo with a protester they had apprehended earlier this year at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on December 20, 2009 (boomark / email).