A key Chicago Police Department unit that reviews cops’ use of force is woefully understaffed and has a backlog of unfinished reports, an assistant Illinois attorney general told a judge Thursday.
U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer oversees a 2019 consent decree that settled a lawsuit over widespread abuses of civil rights identified by a Justice Department probe.
The decree — which stems from the public outrage over a video of an officer’s fatal shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald — identified nearly 600 areas of reforms, which a former federal prosecutor is monitoring.
At a hearing on the consent decree, Assistant Attorney General Samuel Kennedy said Thursday that one unit, the Tactical Review and Evaluation Division, is “a critical component of the consent decree.”
The unit had a backlog of 2,702 cases in July, which has nearly doubled to 5,116, Kennedy said. In February, the unit had 54 police officers and now has 47. The department is adding four part-time employees to the unit, but that isn’t going to be enough to address the three-month backlog, Kennedy said.
Pallmeyer said she’s concerned that cops aren’t getting quick feedback from the reviews of their use-of-force incidents.
“I think it’s a lot more meaningful when you hear feedback immediately, rather than months down the road, when you maybe don’t even remember the episode all that well,” the judge said.
Cmdr. Sean Joyce, who runs the unit, said he’d like to see the unit complete its reports in 30 to 60 days. In addition to uses of force, the unit reviews incidents in which officers point their firearms and when officers get involved in foot chases.
The purpose of the unit, formed in 2017, is to recommend training for officers instead of investigating whether discipline is necessary as the city’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability does, Joyce said.
