On December 7, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced a federal investigation of the Chicago police department. Recent history shows that the Obama Department of Justice cannot be counted on to perform a competent investigation, but at least this particular inquiry is not without cause. The city has earned the nickname “Chiraq,” because by international standards, certain Chicago neighborhoods have some of the highest murder rates anywhere in the world. Even as the city has become an abattoir, police have been routinely abusive—a series of troubling investigations suggests the police were operating a “black site” out of an off-the-books warehouse where cops were holding and interrogating suspects without due process. Such extraordinary tactics are intolerable in principle, and the fact that they generated no notable decline in crime suggests they were also bad in practice.
It appears, however, that a very ordinary aspect of American policing might be one of the biggest contributors to Chicago’s bloody difficulty in maintaining order. A finger must inescapably be pointed at the city’s police union for keeping bad cops on the beat.
The latest incident that has people marching in the streets of Chicago is the shooting of Laquan McDonald in October 2014. The 17-year-old had PCP in his system, was walking down the middle of the street carrying a knife, and otherwise acting in a manner that would draw police attention. Even so, dashcam video that only recently surfaced shows officer Jason Van Dyke shot McDonald from a distance when he was moving away. Without the emergence of new and extenuating evidence, it seems impossible to watch the footage and conclude McDonald posed an immediate threat to Van Dyke, warranting deadly force. The shooting is even more outrageous when you consider that events described in the original police report diverge wildly from what was caught on tape and that Mayor Rahm Emanuel may have been involved in a cover-up to protect his reelection prospects.
Van Dyke is being charged with murder and will get his day in court. Until then, the presumption of innocence applies. But Van Dyke’s record as a police officer suggests that egregious behavior is not unusual for him. The Citizens Police Data Project maintains a database of misconduct complaints against Chicago police officers. While not comprehensive, the database shows Van Dyke had 20 complaints filed against him in his 14-year career, many of them accusations of excessive force. Van Dyke has been cleared of most of the charges, but in one instance a Chicago jury awarded $350,000 to a man on whom Van Dyke used excessive force during a traffic stop. This past spring, while Van Dyke was still on the job, the city paid $5 million to McDonald’s mother even though she had yet to file a lawsuit.
To put Van Dyke’s record in perspective, of the 12,000 police officers in Chicago, only 402 have had 20 or more complaints filed against them, according to the Citizens Police Data Project database. One Chicago cop against whom 68 complaints have been filed is still on the job. There is little doubt that the resources and clout of Chicago’s police union are keeping dangerous and incompetent cops on the streets.
Now, it is certainly true that cops are often wrongly accused of brutality and other misconduct, and working in such difficult circumstances would make one grateful for a union eager to provide legal support and other assistance. But the magnitude of Chicago’s police problems suggests that the union’s fanatical approach to defending officer misconduct makes no concessions for officers who are a demonstrable threat to public safety. This is particularly counterproductive at a time when police are, rightly or wrongly, enduring a great deal of public criticism. America’s police officers, the vast majority of whom are dedicated and sensible, deserve better than to have their image destroyed by highly publicized incidents involving bad cops who should have had to surrender their badge and gun a long time ago.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to imagine the Justice Department or any of the relevant authorities in Illinois taking this union problem seriously. Chicago’s entire city government is based on patronage and union payoffs to politicians. The result is a city where the debt service and annual pension costs for public employees are closing in on claiming half the city’s annual revenue. That’s money that otherwise could be spent finding ways to reduce crime by preventing it before it starts, such as bolstering social services, putting more and better cops on the streets, and improving the city’s terrible schools. (Alas, teachers’ unions present a pretty dramatic problem unto themselves.)
Again, we don’t expect the Justice Department or the deeply and deservedly unpopular Mayor Emanuel to make this connection. But it wouldn’t kill Democratic politicians to take a more critical look at the consequences of their co-dependent relationship with public-sector unions. The failure to do so may have played a role in the killing of Laquan McDonald.
