City Attends Hearing in Police Reform Lawsuit

17-year-old Laquan McDonald is shot 16 times by Chicago Police Ocer Jason Van Dyke on Oct. 20, 2014 and dies.
17-year-old Laquan McDonald is shot 16 times by Chicago Police Ocer Jason Van Dyke on Oct. 20, 2014 and dies.

City Attends Hearing in Police Reform Lawsuit

By Christopher Shuttlesworth

City attorneys recently filed a motion seeking more time to respond to a lawsuit filed by various community groups, including Black Lives Matter.

In an Invisible Institute document, Attorney Craig Futterman said it appears the city is hiring multiple outside law firms in preparation for opposing the lawsuit. The July 6th court hearing was scheduled for the city of Chicago to respond to specific deadlines for the lawsuit.

City lawyers said “they would need until Aug. 21 to file a motion to dismiss the lawsuit – and until Oct. 4 to file responses to the complaint,” the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

The coalition of community groups, including Black Lives Matter, recently filed the 100-page lawsuit against the City of Chicago seeking a federal court consent decree to oversee police reform.

The federal consent decree request comes after the Department of Justice (DOJ) revealed in an Investigative Report on Jan. 13, 2017, that the Chicago Police Department engaged in a pattern of excessive force, including deadly force, against African American and Latino men, which is a violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, according to the Department of Justice. During the same time that the U.S. Justice Department released its report, the city began negotiating a consent decree.

The dashcam video that displayed 17-year old Laquan McDonald being shot 16 times by Chicago Police officer Jason Van Dyke touched off a firestorm of controversy involving alleged police misconduct in Chicago and the need for police reform.

Van Dyke was charged with first degree murder on November 24, 2015. On December 16, 2015, Van Dyke was indicted on six counts of first degree murder and one count of official conduct as reported in the Chicago Tribune.

Three Chicago police officers were recently indicted on June 27, 2017, and charged with adhering to a “code of silence” following the 2014 shooting death of Laquan McDonald, according to the Invisible Institute. Special prosecutor Patricia Brown Holmes announced the indictment of Detective David March and Officers Thomas Gaffney and Joseph Walsh, and charged them with conspiracy, obstruction of justice and official misconduct. Their scheduled arraignment was on July 10.

Walsh was the partner of Officer Jason Van Dyke, now facing murder charges in the incident. Gaffney was one of the first officers to respond to a call about McDonald, and March conducted the initial investigation into the shooting. Walsh resigned and March retired after an investigation by the city inspector general recommended they be fired. Gaffney was placed on unpaid leave following the indictment.

Holmes charged the three coordinated efforts with Van Dyke and others to file false reports and failed to interview witnesses to the shooting.

“This indictment makes clear that it is unacceptable to obey an unofficial code of silence,” Holmes said in a press conference.

Alderman Anthony Beale of the ninth Ward said everyone knows that there is a lack of trust among Chicago citizens and the Chicago Police Department.

He explained that in order to bring back trust between the police and the African American community, the consent decree must be put into effect.

“It’s the right thing to do because our community has been affected the most by the injustice that has been going on with the police department,” Beale said. “We need the police department to be partners with us to fight crime in our area. But if people don’t trust the police, then they’re not going to give them the information to help fight crime in the area. So, we have to reverse this trend.”

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has proposed a 70-page Memorandum of Understanding with the U.S. Justice Department and recently defended his decision to retreat on a consent decree. The mayor's MOA only includes an independent monitor, but he says the city of Chicago is still “on the road to reform even without a consent decree,” as reported by the Invisible Institute.

Sheila Bedi, who is an attorney at the Roderick MacArthur Justice Center, said the problem with the Mayor’s memorandum agreement is that it lacks the efforts to address the pervasive balance of racism in the Chicago Police Department. Bedi continued to state that the MOA wouldn’t be enforceable, transparent and would lack federal judicial oversight.

“When you look at jurisdictions around the country that have turned around their police departments, almost every single one of them has had federal court oversight,” she said. “That is absolutely imperative if we really want to change the Chicago Police Department.”

Lori Lightfoot, who is the President of the Chicago Police Board and one of the leaders who has read the Mayor’s 70-page Memorandum agreement, has called it “fundamentally flawed.”

“It doesn't contain enough detail that sets out a roadmap for the kind of reform that the [Chicago Police] Department needs to make,” Lightfoot said. “Without the specifics, it means that the proposed [independent] monitor is going to have not enough of a roadmap to evaluate whether or not the police department is making progress towards the goals that have been set.”

She explained that the details for the agreement between the City of Chicago and the DOJ should be the kind of specific details that the public and the DOJ can identify with in order to understand the reform that the Chicago Police Department should be driving towards.

“It doesn't really matter what you call it, as long as you have specifics and resources to support the reform efforts,” Lightfoot said. “But it should absolutely have a function of auditing to make sure that the reforms that are agreed to are the ones that are actually getting accomplished.”

Before the Mayor’s proposed memorandum agreement can go into effect, it would have to be approved by President Donald Trump along with U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who as a U.S. Federal Prosecutor and Senator called a consent decree, "one of the most dangerous and rarely discussed exercises of raw power,” according to the Alabama Policy Institute.

Sessions also said in a memo on March 31, 2017, that “local control and local accountability are necessary for local policing. It is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies.”

In recent weeks, calls for negotiating a consent decree have come from Cook County President Toni Preckwinkle and Commissioner Jesus Garcia and from the editorial boards of the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times.

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