- [Narrator] Police abuse
is an intensely patterned phenomenon.
- [Crowd] 16 shots, 16 shots, 16 shots.
If an officer starts to enjoy roughing people up,
nothing happens, there's no intervention,
there's no rigorous investigation.
There's reason to fear that the next police shooting
will involve an officer who's been on that path.
- [Crowd] 16 shots and a cover-up.
16 shots and a cover-up.
- [Narrator] Every data point
in The Citizens Police Data Project is a story of abuse.
What we've found is it was almost
an infinitesimal percentage that resulted
in any kind of meaningful discipline.
- [Man] The right of the citizen,
in locking Jason Van Dyke up,
and let it be a message to every Chicago police officer.
- [Narrator] We had had a system in this police department
that really was in a sense dedicated to not knowing
things that were knowable.
Tremendous harms for societies flow from
that kind of official denial.
The antidote is transparency and it's really
that core principle that The Invisible Institute
is dedicated to.
(piano music)
This is a hyper-segregated city
and I began to try to understand the larger city
in which I lived.
And eventually found myself in this utterly fascinating
and compelling world of high-rise public housing.
(piano music)
That setting was where I was exposed to certain patterns
of unconstitutional, abusive, predatory policing.
So my reporting came to focus very intensely
on those conditions on the ground.
And after several years of that kind of reporting
several of the cases gave rise
to federal civil rights law suits.
One of which became in a landmark decision,
Kalven versus Chicago, in which I was the plaintiff.
And finally in 2014, the ruling in the case
of the Illinois Appellate Court was that
police misconduct files are public information.
They belong to the public.
(piano music)
What we learned was from 2000 to 2016
only 1.2% of civilian complaints resulted
in an officer being disciplined
in the form of suspension or termination.
Out of more than 8700 excessive force claims
from January 2007 to June 2016,
investigators sustained only 1.5% of the cases.
Some 61% of complaints come from black Chicagoans,
yet those complaints make up
only 25% of those eventually proven.
Some of the black officers
are disproportionately found guilty of an offense
and suffer higher punishments as a result.
We had this incredible trove of information
and so the question for us became how do we go about
making this information legible, useful
to citizens in general.
The outgrowth of that is something called
The Citizens Police Data Project.
A public facing database that houses,
in civil society, these documents and allows
all sorts of lines of inquiry and analysis.
I mean fully 82% of the force receive
between zero and four complaints
in the course of their careers.
Some officers, and some groups of officers,
have extraordinarily high numbers of complaints.
Now nobody would for a moment suggest
that pattern predicted what happened on October 20th, 2014.
- [Crowd] We know shots bang, the police are a gang.
- [Narrator] The Laquan McDonald case is really
probably the single most dramatic illustration
of why it's so important that public information be public.
- [News Woman] Three Chicago police officers
are charged with an alleged cover up
in connection with a deadly shooting of a black teenager.
- [Narrator] The initial official account of the shooting
was aggressive young man with a knife
lunges at police officer.
In self-defense and defense of his fellow officers,
the police officer shoots him in the chest,
he dies some time later in a nearby hospital.
A copy of the autopsy revealed that he was shot 16 times
front and back.
So whatever happened that night,
the police account of what happened could not be true.
And I published an article February 10th, 2015
in Slate reporting on this, which is what
sort of broke the story open.
For the next 13 months beyond the incident,
the city continued to double down on it's false narrative.
(crowd chanting)
Refused to release the video and other information
on the grounds that this was an open investigation.
And pressure just built and built and built and built,
and finally built to a point when a judge ruled
that the video should be released.
- [Wolf] I wanna just warn our viewers,
what you are about to see is disturbing video
of this police officer shooting and killing
this 17 year old teenager.
- [Narrator] The um,
officer in the shooting was named,
officer Jason Van Dyke.
And immediately everybody went to our database
to find out about officer Van Dyke's history.
(piano music)
And what people found when they went to the database
is that Van Dyke had 20 odd complaints against him,
10 of which were for excessive force
and a number of those coupled with racial verbal abuse.
That pattern that emerged from those 20 complaints
surely warranted a supervisor, an investigator
looking to see what was going on with this officer.
You know I don't want anybody to imagine
that we have a metric for saying
"X" number of complaints, bad officer.
That's really not the point of the data.
The point of the data is you have the means to identify
relatively early, before the worst thing happens,
occasions to intervene.
The police play an absolutely critical role in a democracy
and we vest them with extraordinary powers.
The power to stop and detain people.
The power to use force.
The power, under certain circumstances, to use deadly force.
These are extraordinary powers
and in a democracy, with power comes accountability.
(piano music)
- [Man in Hat] Thanks for watching.
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