Earlier this week, the US Department of Justice published its report on its its investigation into the Baltimore Police Department (BPD). This long report — more than 160 pages — concluded that the BDP “engages in a pattern or practices that violates the Constitution or federal law,” makes “unconstitutional stops, searches and arrests,” and that there were “unjustifiable disparities in rates of stop, search and arrests of African Americans.”
It’s a damning report but nothing that police departments have not had to face and deal with before. Five years ago the Seattle Police Department was also subject of a DOJ report, which found that the SPD also breached the Constitution and that they “engaged in a pattern or practice of using unnecessary or excessive force.” A report in yesterday’s New York Times, headlined “Here’s How Racial Bias Plays Out in Policing,” lists other examples.
Police use of force, stop-and-frisk and disparities in stops and arrest of whites and blacks, has been discussed for decades. Focusing on the police is an easy measure and certainly far easier than looking at the broader issues of society and government as a whole.
It could be argued that the police are being used as scapegoats for much bigger problems that have failed to be addressed by those in power. The police are, after all, just dealing with what they are presented with.
The police are not and should never be unaccountable to the public, but policing is a grey area — nothing is really ever black and white (no pun intended). What happens when police practices are interfered with? There may well be some positives, but there is often a counter to that positivity.
We may want the positives but we must be prepared for the negatives.
Last Monday, the city of Chicago had its deadliest day for 13 years. Nineteen people were shot. Nine were killed. Even in a city that regularly sees high numbers of shootings, this is still a startling statistic.
So far this year more than 2,500 people have been shot in Chicago. Think about that number for a moment. 2,500 people shot. In one city. In a little over eight months. And there have been well over 400 homicides.
In the first three months of 2016, Chicago had the same number of homicides as New York City and Los Angeles combined: 141. Compare that to 83 homicides for the first three months the previous year and you can see that Chicago is heading toward a record year of murder.
Gun crime has been climbing throughout 2016, and many cities see a summer spike in shootings when the weather gets hotter and the days longer.
But why has 2016 been such a vintage year — and I mean that in the terrible sense — for killings in Chicago?
Photo: Michael Matthews
When I had first started to see the reports on the increase in gun crime and homicides in Chicago my immediate reaction was that this was a response from the cops to what had been happening in places such as Ferguson and Baltimore. For the past year the police in America have come in for unprecedented criticism and the world’s headlines have been dominated by news about black men being killed by police.
The result of these police shootings and deaths at the hands of police — “justifiable homicides,” in the eyes of the law, it should be pointed out — has been the emergence of groups such as Black Lives Matter and has led to the mass killing of police officers in places such as Dallas, where the US saw its single greatest killing of police officers since 9/11. There had also been a number of videos that had emerged from Chicago itself, showing police involved shootings that had also been open to criticism.
So I wondered if this criticism and this new “war on cops” had been a reason for the police officers of the Chicago Police Department to simply slip back from the more challenging neighborhoods and allow the gangs and the gunmen to have an open season on each other.
I had been watching social media closely for people’s reactions to Black Lives Matter and police involved shootings and had seen comments from many saying that the police should simply remove themselves from these neighborhoods and allow people — whom, these commenters felt, seemed ungrateful and unsupportive of the police — to kill each other.
Although there are some who really do want the police to leave their neighborhoods, there are of course many others who don’t. I asked a Chicago cop friend of mine if this was the case. He assured me that it wasn’t and explained to me that he believed it was down to something far more mundane: paperwork.
New forms were required to be filled out when officers carried out a stop-and-frisk, he told me, and quite simply, officers couldn’t be bothered to fill in forms every time they stopped someone, when they already had so much else to do. New state law require officers to fill in a two-page Investigatory Stop Report rather than the relatively simply Contact Card from before. As a result stop-and-frisk by officers in Chicago has reportedly dropped by as much as 80%.
Photo: Michael Matthews
When the cops stop searching people, word gets around pretty quick and the carrying of weapons increases. More weapons mean more assaults and that means more deaths.
Stop-and-frisk is an issue of contention that has gone back and forth between the police and politicians for decades. Communities cite stop-and-frisk as the reason for bad relationships between the youth and the police, even going so far as to blame its use for full-blown riots.
But surely what happened in Chicago proves two things: firstly that the police use of this tactic does have a positive — that is, downward — effect on the carrying of deadly weapons by criminals, and secondly that by using this tactic, the police are also protecting the communities that these criminals operate in.
Among the 19 people shot on Monday in Chicago, one was an innocent, ten-year- old boy. There needs to be balance, of course, when the police use this technique but the police need to be allowed to measure this balance themselves, without politicians and various groups using stop-and-frisk as a political tool to push their own agendas.
When they do that, as we have seen in Chicago this week, people die.
Michael Matthews is the author of We Are The Cops: The Real Lives of America’s Police, published by Silvertail Books.