Chicago police department to get overhaul
Chicago officials are pledging to revamp the city Police Department following a scathing federal report.
The report released Friday in the final days of Attorney General Loretta Lynch's tenure found that police in the nation's second-largest department had violated the constitutional rights of residents for years.
Police did so by frequently using excessive force, shooting at people who did not pose imminent threats and using stun guns on others because they refused to follow commands.
The report was the culmination of a yearlong investigation, one of about two dozen civil rights probes of local law enforcement agencies undertaken by President Barack Obama's Justice Department.
The findings come just a week before Donald Trump is sworn in as president, marking a change from a Democratic White House that has strongly backed the review process to a Republican one that has expressed far less support for federally mandated overhauls of troubled police agencies.
The Justice Department began investigating the police force in December 2015 after the release of dashcam video showing a white officer shooting black teenager Laquan McDonald, who was hit 16 times as he held a small folded knife while walking away from police.
The video of the 2014 shooting, which the city fought to keep secret, inspired large protests and cost the city's police superintendent his job.
The report's conclusions were unsparing, blaming "systemic deficiencies" within the department and the city, including insufficient training and a failure to hold bad officers accountable for misconduct.
The federal government's recommendations follow an especially bloody year on Chicago streets.
The city logged 762 homicides in 2016, the highest tally in 20 years and more than the combined total of the two largest US cities - New York and Los Angeles.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel said the results of the investigation were "sobering" and pledged to make changes beyond those the city already has adopted, including de-escalation training and stricter use-of-force policies.
The Chicago department, with 12,000 officers, has long had a reputation for brutality, particularly in minority communities.
The most notorious example was Jon Burge, a commander of a detective unit on the South Side. Burge and his men beat, suffocated and used electric shock for decades starting in the 1970s to get black men to confess to crimes they did not commit.
Chicago has spent more than half a billion dollars to settle claims of police misconduct since 2004, but police did not conduct disciplinary investigations in half of those cases, the report says.
Of 409 police shootings that happened over a five-year period, police found only two were unjustified.
