Report: Chicago police have 'no regard' for minority lives

[Deepak]

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/aa30...chicago-police-must-acknowledge-troubled-past

Police in Chicago have "no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color" and have alienated blacks and Hispanics for decades by using excessive force and honoring a code of silence, a task force declared Wednesday in a report that seeks sweeping changes to the nation's third-largest police force.

...

In a summary of the report, the Task Force on Police Accountability recommended replacing the "badly broken" independent review authority that currently investigates misconduct with a "new and fully transparent and accountable Civilian Police Investigative Agency." It also suggested creating the post of deputy chief of diversity and inclusion.

Emanuel did not rule out doing away with the existing body known as the Independent Police Review Authority, or IPRA.

...

The task force also called out police unions, saying that the collective bargaining agreements between the city and the unions have "essentially turned the code of silence into official policy." The code refers to the reflex of some officers not to report colleagues for misconduct.

Officers, for example, can wait 24 hours before providing a statement after a shooting, given them enough time to get their stories straight with fellow officers. And not only are anonymous complaints prohibited, the task force found that accused officers must be given the names of people who filed complaints.

The head of the police sergeants' union insisted that union contracts "provide due process in disciplinary procedures, nothing more." Union President Sgt. Jim Ade said the idea that the contracts make it easy for officers to lie was "ridiculous."

Among other problems described in the report: Some officers in charge of training are teaching while they themselves are under investigation for a range of alleged offenses. And there is a disturbing lack of legal counsel for those in custody. Last year, for example, only 6 out of every 1,000 people arrested had an attorney at any point while in police custody.

"Stopped without justification, verbally and physically abused, and in some instances arrested, and then detained without counsel — that is what we heard about over and over again," the report said.

In other news water is wet. Let's see what this actually nets out to.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Looks like they don't know what they're talking about:

The group concluded that fear and lack of trust in law enforcement among minorities is justified, citing data that show 74 percent of the hundreds of people shot by officers in recent years were African-Americans, even though blacks account for 33 percent of the city's population.

The percent which is black isn't the right yardstick. Rather, look at arrests. I don't know about Chicago but when you look at nationwide stats the supposed anti-black bias vanishes when you use the proper yardstick.

The comments even show the problem:

....But 85% is committed by the 33%....Idiots!
....70% were in S. Chicago.
....95% in S. Chicago are Black.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Looks like they don't know what they're talking about:



The percent which is black isn't the right yardstick. Rather, look at arrests.

No, look at convictions. Because the percentage of arrests doesn't actually tell you what -- if anything -- those people were charged with or how often they were actually brought to trial with enough evidence TO convict. "Catch and release" has been known to be a form of police harassment since at least the 1980s; a teenager gets arrested for "loitering," detained overnight and then released without charge the next day. Rinse and repeat.

It's a well-known phenomenon: you'll find people on the south side who have been arrested a half a dozen times without ever being CHARGED with anything. The conviction rate for lesser crimes when they ARE charged with something is also close to 100% because almost everyone who DOES get charged simply pleads guilty to get probation instead of jailtime, usually on the advice of a drastically overworked public defender who doesn't have the time or the motivation to actually take his case to trial.

From the 2015 stats, 43% of all violent crimes in Chicago were performed by WHITE perpetrators, with 22.5% by blacks. So the disparity in arrest rates doesn't actually bear this out either.

 

[dismal]

If only they could get some Democrats in there to run things.

 

[KeepTalking]

Looks like they don't know what they're talking about:



The percent which is black isn't the right yardstick. Rather, look at arrests. I don't know about Chicago but when you look at nationwide stats the supposed anti-black bias vanishes when you use the proper yardstick.

The comments even show the problem:

....But 85% is committed by the 33%....Idiots!
....70% were in S. Chicago.
....95% in S. Chicago are Black.

Argument by Random Internet Commentor?

I seriously doubt that those statistics are any more well sourced than those from the ultra right wing fear mongering posts over in the Europe Submits Voluntarily thread.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Looks like they don't know what they're talking about:



The percent which is black isn't the right yardstick. Rather, look at arrests.

No, look at convictions. Because the percentage of arrests doesn't actually tell you what -- if anything -- those people were charged with or how often they were actually brought to trial with enough evidence TO convict. "Catch and release" has been known to be a form of police harassment since at least the 1980s; a teenager gets arrested for "loitering," detained overnight and then released without charge the next day. Rinse and repeat.

Arrests tell you the number of hostile interactions between the cops and the people and thus are the relevant yardstick. The police don't shoot people in courtrooms, they shoot them in encounters on the street.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

No, look at convictions. Because the percentage of arrests doesn't actually tell you what -- if anything -- those people were charged with or how often they were actually brought to trial with enough evidence TO convict. "Catch and release" has been known to be a form of police harassment since at least the 1980s; a teenager gets arrested for "loitering," detained overnight and then released without charge the next day. Rinse and repeat.

Arrests tell you the number of hostile interactions between the cops and the people and thus are the relevant yardstick.

Relevant to determine the amount of hostility between the cops and any particular group, yes. That the cops are more hostile to one group than another does not tell you anything about who initiates those hostilities; to determine that, you'd have to examine how many of those arrests resulted in legal action being taken.

The police don't shoot people in courtrooms, they shoot them in encounters on the street.

Which, again, doesn't tell you anything at all about the probability that the people killed in those encounters would have even have been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of one. That cannot be determined looking at statistics alone, only at an analysis of individual cases.

And yet the relevant statistic remains: in absolute terms, the majority of violent crimes in Chicago are committed by WHITE perpetrators. This being true, they SHOULD also make up the majority of arrests. On the other hand, a black person in a poor neighborhood is INDIVIDUALLY more likely to be involved in a violent crime.

On the balance, the disproportionate arrest rate directly indicates the police believe any particular black person they encounter is more likely to have criminal intent than any particular white person. Their interactions with black people reflect this assumption, and the police behave far more aggressively, suspiciously, and are quicker to resort to force.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Arrests tell you the number of hostile interactions between the cops and the people and thus are the relevant yardstick.

Relevant to determine the amount of hostility between the cops and any particular group, yes. That the cops are more hostile to one group than another does not tell you anything about who initiates those hostilities; to determine that, you'd have to examine how many of those arrests resulted in legal action being taken.

The police don't shoot people in courtrooms, they shoot them in encounters on the street.

Which, again, doesn't tell you anything at all about the probability that the people killed in those encounters would have even have been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of one. That cannot be determined looking at statistics alone, only at an analysis of individual cases.

And yet the relevant statistic remains: in absolute terms, the majority of violent crimes in Chicago are committed by WHITE perpetrators. This being true, they SHOULD also make up the majority of arrests. On the other hand, a black person in a poor neighborhood is INDIVIDUALLY more likely to be involved in a violent crime.

On the balance, the disproportionate arrest rate directly indicates the police believe any particular black person they encounter is more likely to have criminal intent than any particular white person. Their interactions with black people reflect this assumption, and the police behave far more aggressively, suspiciously, and are quicker to resort to force.

Where is this data showing the majority of violent crimes being done by whites?

 

[Derec]

Another shooting in Chicago, and one I think captures the problem quite well.
Teen fatally shot by cop as he was scaling fence, say police source, witness

Police said Pierre Loury was shot as he fled on foot from a car that officers had pulled over because it matched the description of a vehicle used in an earlier shooting.
An autopsy showed the teen suffered a gunshot wound to the chest.
Citing a preliminary investigation, First Deputy Superintendent John Escalante said the lone officer who chased the teen opened fire after the teen turned and pointed a gun at him. A semi-automatic weapon was recovered at the scene, Escalante said.
It marked the fifth police-involved shooting so far this year and the third fatal one.
A woman who said she witnessed the shooting told the Tribune the teen was shot as he was scaling a fence.
"They shot him in the air," she said. "His pants leg got caught on the fence and he hit the ground. If he hadn't gotten shot, he would have cleared the fence."

So a teenage thug flees the police, turns with a gun, is shot.

Gang tattoo and gun. Note that the mother doesn't believe he had a gun.

Part of the problem is certainly generational.

The family had been mentioned in a 2000 Tribune story about the high rate of truancy at Rezin Orr High School. His mother, then an 18-year-old junior at the West Side high school, said she missed school for a number of days to care for her then-infant son.
"It's not like I'm just out hanging in the streets," she told members of Orr's truancy crew who had stopped by her home at the time. "My baby needs me at home. That's where I'm going to be, school or not."

I guess the mother didn't learn anything from getting knocked up at 17. Also, the "aspiring rapper" is something of a cliche with these shootings.

His family said Loury was the oldest of five children, an aspiring rapper who attended Community Christian Alternative Academy in the West Side's Lawndale neighborhood.

This kind of sums up the tragedy of the matter. Loury was not unusual at all.

"He's a typical Chicago teen male, no different than any other young man living in this city, facing some of the same challenges and trials and tribulations," Winters said in the vestibule of the two-flat.

And the usual "dindu nuffin" stuff could not go amiss..

Winters said she found reports of her nephew carrying a gun hard to believe and described his past brushes with the law as "small, minor incidents."

And of course, #BLM creeps are already on the case, blocking highways and shit.

Tuesday night, more than 100 people gathered at the scene where Loury was killed for a vigil sponsored by groups including Black Lives Matter Chicago and the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. As the time of the vigil approached, a woman tied metallic red and blue balloons to a black iron fence near the intersection of Central Park Avenue and Grenshaw Street.
The crowd chanted, "Justice for Pierre," while gathering near the middle of the street. Some people held up a fabric poster that had faces of young black people who have been killed by police.
Shortly after 8 p.m., protesters spilled onto the Eisenhower Expressway. Police sirens went off immediately and officers jumped out to try to stop them, but some were already too far ahead. Police vehicles stopped traffic on the expressway, causing a pileup on lanes headed toward downtown.

Even some protesters think the #BLM is taking it too far.

ther protesters walked away from the entrance to the highway, some shaking their heads furiously and questioning the leadership of the group.
"I don't condone what they did out here," said Tatiana Balogun, 18, who lives on the 3400 block of Grenshaw Street and was marching with the protesters but ran the other direction when the group went onto the expressway.
"I don't condone what they did to the rest of the black people out here, but I'm not getting killed for nobody," she said. "You don't take innocent kids on the expressway. You're an adult. You don't take kids on that expressway. That's wrong."

I think it's not so much that police do not have regard for "minority lives" but that too many "minorities" have little to no regard for their own lives.

 

[laughing dog]

The BLM movement and the reactions of these protesters did not arise out of some vacuum - the Chicago Police have earned this distrust via their actions over the years.

 

[Derec]

The BLM movement and the reactions of these protesters did not arise out of some vacuum - the Chicago Police have earned this distrust via their actions over the years.

The problem is that the "atmosphere" in that these protesters arose is a deceptive one. The distrust was developed mostly due to justified shootings like this one. And besides, if #BLM really thought that "black lives matter", they'd care more about black on black murders, which are a lot more common that police shootings, and the victims are much more likely to be innocent.
Also, if #BLM was about black lives mattering, they'd note that their latest Dindu said he wanted to "kill niggas".

Charming fella.

So I wonder who really has "no regard for minority lives"? Police or #BLM?

 

[laughing dog]

[
The problem is that the "atmosphere" in that these protesters arose is a deceptive one. The distrust was developed mostly due to justified shootings like this one.

You are confusing the end product with the process. You really have no clue. I don't pretend to have much of a clue. Having lived in bigger cities and listened to professional black men describe their hassles with police over the years, I believe I can appreciated why there is segment of the black community that distrusts the police.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

No, look at convictions. Because the percentage of arrests doesn't actually tell you what -- if anything -- those people were charged with or how often they were actually brought to trial with enough evidence TO convict. "Catch and release" has been known to be a form of police harassment since at least the 1980s; a teenager gets arrested for "loitering," detained overnight and then released without charge the next day. Rinse and repeat.

Arrests tell you the number of hostile interactions between the cops and the people and thus are the relevant yardstick. The police don't shoot people in courtrooms, they shoot them in encounters on the street.

Sounds like we need to look at arrests with respect to convictions then.

ETA: Of course, there is also the issue of an arrest isn't the best metric here as shootings may be more likely under certain scenarios and those scenarios would need to be compared in order to get a better idea as to potential race related discrepancies in shootings.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Arrests tell you the number of hostile interactions between the cops and the people and thus are the relevant yardstick. The police don't shoot people in courtrooms, they shoot them in encounters on the street.

Sounds like we need to look at arrests with respect to convictions then.

ETA: Of course, there is also the issue of an arrest isn't the best metric here as shootings may be more likely under certain scenarios and those scenarios would need to be compared in order to get a better idea as to potential race related discrepancies in shootings.

Better would be to look at arrests for violent offenses.

 

[Derec]

You are confusing the end product with the process. You really have no clue. I don't pretend to have much of a clue. Having lived in bigger cities and listened to professional black men describe their hassles with police over the years, I believe I can appreciated why there is segment of the black community that distrusts the police.

That would be more believable if a "segment of the black community" wasn't jumping on justified shootings like the one of this Pierre.

 

[laughing dog]

You are confusing the end product with the process. You really have no clue. I don't pretend to have much of a clue. Having lived in bigger cities and listened to professional black men describe their hassles with police over the years, I believe I can appreciated why there is segment of the black community that distrusts the police.

That would be more believable if a "segment of the black community" wasn't jumping on justified shootings like the one of this Pierre.

You are confusing cause and effect. Because of the level of distrust of the police, the police get jumped on. Until the police earn the trust, this will continue.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

That would be more believable if a "segment of the black community" wasn't jumping on justified shootings like the one of this Pierre.

You are confusing cause and effect. Because of the level of distrust of the police, the police get jumped on. Until the police earn the trust, this will continue.

Except the distrust is being driven by agitators, not by reality. The reality is that in proportion to arrests for violent crime blacks are slightly less likely to be shot. There is no racial problem in shootings.

 

[Underseer]

Looks like they don't know what they're talking about:



The percent which is black isn't the right yardstick. Rather, look at arrests. I don't know about Chicago but when you look at nationwide stats the supposed anti-black bias vanishes when you use the proper yardstick.

The comments even show the problem:

....But 85% is committed by the 33%....Idiots!
....70% were in S. Chicago.
....95% in S. Chicago are Black.

Let's apply that same "yardstick" to something else.

Whites are just as likely as blacks to use illegal drugs, but blacks are much more likely to be arrested or go to jail for illegal drugs.

So you assume that the same thing is not happening with other kinds of crimes? Really?

 

[laughing dog]

You are confusing cause and effect. Because of the level of distrust of the police, the police get jumped on. Until the police earn the trust, this will continue.

Except the distrust is being driven by agitators, not by reality. The reality is that in proportion to arrests for violent crime blacks are slightly less likely to be shot. There is no racial problem in shootings.

The "agitators" are hitting a chord with the community. That would not happen if the distrust was not more widespread. The "reality" does not matter once distrust sets in.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Relevant to determine the amount of hostility between the cops and any particular group, yes. That the cops are more hostile to one group than another does not tell you anything about who initiates those hostilities; to determine that, you'd have to examine how many of those arrests resulted in legal action being taken.

The police don't shoot people in courtrooms, they shoot them in encounters on the street.

Which, again, doesn't tell you anything at all about the probability that the people killed in those encounters would have even have been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of one. That cannot be determined looking at statistics alone, only at an analysis of individual cases.

And yet the relevant statistic remains: in absolute terms, the majority of violent crimes in Chicago are committed by WHITE perpetrators. This being true, they SHOULD also make up the majority of arrests. On the other hand, a black person in a poor neighborhood is INDIVIDUALLY more likely to be involved in a violent crime.

On the balance, the disproportionate arrest rate directly indicates the police believe any particular black person they encounter is more likely to have criminal intent than any particular white person. Their interactions with black people reflect this assumption, and the police behave far more aggressively, suspiciously, and are quicker to resort to force.

Where is this data showing the majority of violent crimes being done by whites?

Right next to the data showing the majority of violent crimes are being done by blacks. You show me yours, I'll show you mine.