
The Sins of the Chicago Police Laid Bare - teslacar
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/15/opinion/the-sins-of-the-chicago-police-laid-bare.html?_
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jboynyc
Note that this op-ed is from last year and the report it discusses came out
almost a full year ago, in April 2016.

The link to the 190-page report on the NYT site is broken; it can be found
here: [https://chicagopatf.org/wp-
content/uploads/2016/04/PATF_Fina...](https://chicagopatf.org/wp-
content/uploads/2016/04/PATF_Final_Report_4_13_16-1.pdf)

What's incredible is that a report of this length on the abuses of the CPD
does not even mention Homan Square, the CPD's "black site" where over 7,000
people were detailed without access to a lawyer over the course of a decade
and many were tortured into making a confession.

 _The Guardian_ reported on Homan Square in 2015:
[https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/19/homan-
square...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/19/homan-square-
chicago-police-disappeared-thousands)

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chillacy
The video mentioned is here (might be graphic):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix2N6_jLAgA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix2N6_jLAgA)

The police report said he lunged at the officer, the video shows that wasn't
the case. I hope we see increased body cam usage and availability of data as
time goes forward, because the culture of covering up police crimes is a
perversion of the point of civic duty. I hate that it has to be Police vs the
People.

~~~
ccvannorman
It's only "police" vs the people when you include officers who break the law,
and other officers who defend them. What we need is not a "war" that people
can "win", but rather, a shift of mindset of the departments themselves --
they need to be on board with everything being above board. _That_ is where
the battle is.

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SomeStupidPoint
I wonder how closely the racial breakdown of who gets shot by police matches
the racial breakdown of who commits murder.

I also think it's silly to act indignant about a disproportionate amount of
police misconduct happening to a group that commits a disproportionate amount
of crime.

In fact, if the volume of misconduct matches volume of crime (eg, same number
of mishandled incidents for number of calls), that's evidence they _arent_
racist, because you'd expect racists to have misconduct at a higher-than-usual
rate for the amount of crime they're responding to.

~~~
tinus_hn
Unfortunately it is impossible to know volumes of crime because you can't know
about all crime and you can't rely on the reports of people who report the
crime you do know about. Both of these are tainted by biases.

And even if you would know, and it turns out that blue men commit more murders
than green men, would that make it not racist to shoot a blue man just because
he is blue and therefore more statiscally likely to be a killer? He may also
not be a killer.

~~~
tynpeddler
True, but if blue people commit a higher number of crimes, then it's
reasonable there will be a great number of witness reports describing blue
suspects, and therefore you can expect a higher number of encounters between
police and blue people. You can examine the link between suspect descriptions
and the number of encounters and see if an ethnic group generates more or less
encounters per description to check for racism in who police decide to
encounter.

You can then look at the rate at which police encounters become violent, and
if that rate is different than the rate for green people, that would also be
clear evidence of racism on the police force.

