Four days after Chicago closed the book on its most violent year in a quarter century, Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Chicago Police Supt. David Brown pinned their hopes on a novel crime-fighting approach.
Brown, Lightfoot’s handpicked choice to usher in sweeping court-ordered reforms outlined in a federal consent decree, set a goal for the year of logging at least 1.5 million “positive community interactions,” or PCIs, a three-fold increase from 2021. The effort to prioritize such exchanges — like helping change a tire or giving directions — was presented as a means to both build trust and crack cases.
The department has encouraged community outreach for years but has never enforced it at such levels. A Sun-Times investigation now raises serious questions about Brown’s plan — and even its legality.
While officers must record each interaction, they often leave out crucial information that makes it virtually impossible for the department to verify that an account is accurate, according to a review of internal records.
Many records are missing the officer’s name or their star number, and other records don’t give detailed information about the location where a PCI occurred. But perhaps most notably, not a single record contains information about who was helped or what made the interaction positive.
The state attorney general’s office found so many problems with the program that it urged city lawyers to “suspend or at least pause” the effort to notch 1.5 million interactions, calling it a “a quota system” that is “rife with significant downsides.”
“As you are likely aware,” states a Feb. 7 memo obtained by the Sun-Times through an open records request, “the use of quotas in law enforcement — whether described as goals, targets, performance standards or activity metrics — is deeply problematic.”
Setting such a high, ill-defined goal could even backfire, tempting officers to “coast” after reaching their targets, counter to the spirit of community policing, concluded the memo.
The attorney general’s office, which is overseeing the city’s compliance with the consent decree alongside a federal monitor, sent the memo in response to a policy proposal submitted by the police department that sought to more clearly define PCIs and offer guidance to the officers tasked with conducting them.
In a lengthy list of comments and recommendations, the attorney general’s office urged the police department to avoid using “crude performance measures” that exclude “the quality of interactions” and risk “having officers treat community members as statistics to be collected, and not as human beings with problems, concerns and needs.”
104 PCIs a day for a single cop
The department began conducting PCIs under former Supt. Garry McCarthy, and they have become part of a broader shift toward community policing, an approach increasingly embraced by law-enforcement agencies nationwide.
A department directive describes them as “brief, spontaneous, high-visibility” encounters that are “positive, informative, helpful or constructive in nature.”
PCIs reported by officers spiked in the weeks after Lightfoot and Brown announced the goal of 1.5 million, according to a Sun-Times analysis of data obtained through an open records request.
Through Jan. 20, the latest data provided, the department had logged almost three times as many PCIs per day in 2022 on average compared to 2021.
In total, in the first 20 days of this year, cops logged 78,560 PCIs, up from 3,341 in 2021, just before last year’s program started to ramp up.
But information about each interaction is sketchy, often missing key data that would be needed for any audit of how the program was performing.
For example, take Officer Sergio Pacheco from the Odgen District on the West Side. He logged 1,565 PCIs during the first 20 days of this year, more than double the officer who came in second.
They were reported over just 15 days, giving him an average of 104 PCIs each day.
The data doesn’t provide any information about who he or any other officer talked to, including their race, gender or age. It also doesn’t say how many people were involved in the interactions or say what was positive about the encounters.
Pacheco, who has been on the police force since 2018, declined comment.
He was named in a federal lawsuit filed by 21-year-old woman Alycia Moaton, an activist who accused Pacheco and other officers of wrongfully arresting her during a racial justice demonstration downtown in August 2020.
Moaton said she was sprayed with a chemical agent and groped by an officer during a search, then knocked down by police and called obscenities as Pacheco and other officers took her into custody.
The suit was dismissed earlier this month after a settlement was reached, a person familiar with the matter told the Sun-Times. Pacheco was removed as a defendant two days before the dismissal.
Increase in positive interaction calls in Chicago
The map below shows the increase in positive interaction calls by police district. Every district saw a soaring rate of calls between 2020 and 2021 with the 10th district seeing by far the largest increase.
‘Impossible to assess’
About 33,000 of the nearly 628,000 PCIs logged since 2020 — about 5.3% of the calls — don’t have an officer’s name listed. And about 3.8% don’t include an officer’s star number.
The location listed for the interaction is also inconsistent. Some interactions give the block address, while others merely list the name of a location, such as a restaurant or generic train station.
In 14% of all PCIs reviewed by the Sun-Times, the data doesn’t include the police district where an interaction took place. Instead, it includes a designation for a citywide police radio channel.
Only 9% included information about a police beat, making it even harder to determine where exactly the PCIs occurred.
The poor recordkeeping was noted in the attorney general’s office’s memo, which said that has plagued similar programs across the country, “making it impossible to assess and learn how these departments can continue to improve.”
In setting the goal for the new year, Brown said PCIs were tools for “engaging the community [and] building trust.” Lightfoot lauded the effort, saying community trust is the “secret sauce” to solving crimes.
But the attorney general’s office warned in its memo that setting a goal or quota for PCIs actually “risks exacerbating known disparities in trust levels between certain communities and CPD.”
Without a carefully crafted program and training, the memo warned officers will prioritize interactions with residents who are “easier” to engage, rather than those distrustful of police.
Officers would also be driven to “misconduct, fraud and corruption,” making up or wrongly describing their actions to meet the requirements, the memo stated. Supervisors focused on meeting the goals may “wrongly encourage or tolerate misreporting, fraud and other misconduct,” it added.
In fact, just before the Jan. 4 news conference, Brown and Lightfoot had threatened to demote supervisors who couldn’t deliver more PCIs and arrests, the Sun-Times has reported.
The attorney general’s office strongly urged the department to develop a system to audit PCIs in order to eliminate the potential “fraud or abuse.”
Difference in positive interaction calls between 2020 and 2021
All police distrcits saw a sharp increase in calls between 2020 and 2021, but minority neighborhoods saw some of the largest jumps.
Minority Police Districts
Majority White Police Districts
Source: A Sun-Times analysis of OEMC data
Graphic by Jesse Howe
‘First point of contact’
Police representatives didn’t respond to a list of questions from the Sun-Times. Instead, the department issued a statement repeating many of Brown’s talking points from the Jan. 4 news conference where he announced the PCI goal.
“The department’s focus on getting officers out of their cars, out from behind their desks, and out into the community is not about a quota; it’s about changing our culture and making a difference,” the CPD statement said. “In many situations, officers are the first point of contact for residents and wear many hats. They are first responders, liaisons and ambassadors, and community members themselves.”
Annie Thompson, a spokeswoman for the attorney general, declined to answer questions about the memo, saying only that her office “continues to work collaboratively with CPD and the city to resolve the comments we submitted during the consent decree’s review process.”
The office’s memo was signed by Senior Assistant Attorney General Aaron Wenzloff and was also sent to Maggie Hickey, a former federal prosecutor appointed by the court as an independent monitor overseeing the implementation of the consent decree.
Hickey declined comment but remarked last month that CPD’s “great data challenges” make it hard for the department to come up with best practices. She said the department’s community engagement was “still not sufficient” and called CPD a “very cumbersome organization when it comes to data.”
The goal-driven system of PCIs could ultimately impact the department’s compliance with the consent decree, which explicitly prohibits the use of numeric quotas and stems from a 2017 lawsuit the attorney general’s office filed against the city over the police killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. Last month, Hickey said the department has reached full or partial compliance with just over half the points in the federal court order.
Shareese Pryor, who negotiated the consent decree and oversaw its enforcement while previously working at the state’s attorney’s office, also raised alarms about the quality and nature of the PCIs. She warned they’re not the best tool for engendering trust in minority communities with “a history of over policing and negative police encounters.”
The three police districts that recorded the most PCIs last year were all located in predominantly minority areas on the West Side that have high levels of violent crime and drug activity.
Violence in Chicago Police Districts
These maps show the number of homicides and shootings (both fatal and non-fatal) in all of Chicago's police districts between 2020 and 2021.
Sources: City of Chicago, a Sun-Times analysis of 2020 census data
Graphics by Jesse Howe
Both Pryor and Michelle Garcia, the deputy legal director for the ACLU of Illinois, warned that PCIs could be used as a pretext for stopping and searching city residents.
“It’s up to the cops to decide what’s positive,” said Garcia, a former U.S. Justice Department official. “They’re the ones doing the reporting. There’s no auditing. ... If anything, it allows and encourages more unconstitutional stops.”
Jesse Howe contributed to this report.
