CHICAGO — The former Chicago Police Officer who fatally shot Laquan McDonald in 2014 is set to be released from prison on Thursday. Ahead of the former officer's release, Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Monday defended the Chicago Police Department’s reform efforts.
Her comments came after the Tribune published a front-page story Monday reflecting on changes the police department has made since the release of the dash-camera video that showed Jason Van Dyke fatally shooting McDonald 16 times. Criminal justice experts said the Chicago Police Department has been slow moving in its reforms and attempts at cultural change.
Lightfoot said the city isn’t “where we want to be” but has made “remarkable progress in a difficult time.
“Change is hard. We’re all experiencing that over these last two years of this pandemic entering year three. It’s hard for us to give up our old ways, our status quo, even when we know it is failing us,” Lightfoot said. “It’s still hard for us to pivot and embrace that new mindset. We are on the right path. We are moving forward in the right way. We’ve got the right leader in the Chicago Police Department to keep pushing these initiatives forward but we can’t just wallow in the critics and the criticism because we are doing great things in our city.”
Lightfoot also reflected on the department’s progress since Van Dyke killed McDonald, saying she was “very concerned” about how the city would react after viewing the video of Van Dyke shooting the teenager.
“That was a very difficult and fraught time in our city and I think that many people carry the trauma of that moment and others like it with them to this very day,” Lightfoot said. “What I will also say is, looking back on that time right before Thanksgiving of 2015 when the video was first released, there were some things that I think helped our city move forward that came out … not the least of which I think is the level of activism across our city, many young people, many people of different generations, let their voices be heard and demanded change and there has been some change. Not enough. Not enough by any stretch of the imagination but I think some significant things have happened and continue to happen that we need to take stock of in light of this moment.”
Lightfoot noted the work she did leading the Police Accountability Task Force after the shooting, as well as a Department of Justice investigation of the department’s practices and the City Council’s passage last summer of a new civilian oversight body for police.
Asked about Van Dyke’s imminent release from prison, Lightfoot said she wasn’t happy with the sentence he received but said that while many were not happy with Van Dyke’s sentencing length, “Jason Van Dyke was the first police officer in 50 years who was convicted of committing a crime while on duty so let’s not lose sight of that fact.”
“I think frankly Pastor Marvin Hunter, who’s been the spokesperson and really I think the conscience for not only the family but for the city on this issue, has spoken eloquently about it, and talks and continues to talk about healing, about redemption, about accountability,” Lightfoot said. “I think those are the words we need to take with us in our heart when we think about this moment that we are in.”
Robert Boik, CPD’s executive director of constitutional policing and reform, said in a phone interview with the Tribune that he wanted to push back on what Chad Williams, the former civilian commanding officer of the department’s audit division, said in his resignation letter to Lightfoot in August.
Williams wrote in his letter that department leaders were unable “to even feign interest in pursuing reform in a meaningful manner has made it impossible for me to remain involved.”
“Despite my efforts, both the office of the superintendent and the office of constitutional policing & reform continue to insist upon employing a ‘check the boxes’ strategy that focuses on getting credit for ‘preliminary compliance’ based primarily on policy edits that lack operational considerations,” Williams said. “Over time, the optimism I brought to this role withered in an incessant stream of discussions with the singular intent of identifying ways to ‘move the needle’ by ‘getting the percentages up’ to improve portrayals in local media coverage.”
Boik said that is how the consent decree is set up. It contains almost 800 paragraphs, and the independent monitor assesses progress on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis. So the department has to look at and count the paragraphs as it moves forward.
The police department’s compliance over the last year has “jumped significantly” from 48 paragraphs with some level of compliance in the second monitor’s report to 266 in the most recent report, Boik said. He said they are expecting the next report, which is set to come out within the next month, to show the same trajectory.
“But compliance is not just numbers, there’s a ton of work behind all of that compliance and all of those paragraphs,” Boik said.
The amount of service training hours for officers increased from zero to 40 hours as of last year, which will continue to be an annual occurrence, Boik said. The additional training will serve to change the department’s cultural as it’s an opportunity to reinstruct officers on an annual basis about use-of-force, community policing and impartial policing.
“I would put our policies now up against any department in the country,” Boik said. “I believe we have the best practice policy, and officers have been trained on that policy, and they’re operating under that policy out in the field.”
Boik said that the Chicago Police Department is a “dramatically different department” since the release of the McDonald shooting video, but it isn’t the end game for the department. This is because, he said, the department has made changes to how it approaches community policing and has better training on crisis intervention.
Boik added that if anyone in the department in 2015 had said that a consent decree would be a good thing for the department, then they would have been ostracized. Now it is considered a standard practice for the department and is talked about often.
“When you compare the department today to where we were back in 2015, it is night and day different,” he said.
The department also now has a unit that looks over every use of force incident for tactical and training issues, Boik said. If any misconduct is observed, that misconduct has to be investigated. The department has also made it “as transparent as possible” to show the public how they can file a complaint against an officer.
“We do not sweep those issues under the rug. In fact, we now have an internal mechanism to bring those issues to the forefront, to ensure that they’re being addressed as promptly as possible,” he said.
If it had not been for the shooting of McDonald and the reforms that came after, Boik said that he is not sure if the department would be at the forefront of best practice on use of force policy now.
“Or maybe we’d still be going through it, just at a slower rate, and maybe it would have caught up with us eventually,” he said. “I don’t know. But I can tell you, we’re happy with the path that we’re on. We’re going to stay on the path to reform until we achieve full and effective compliance.”
When asked what the release of Van Dyke means to the department, Boik said he’s focused on the Independent Monitoring Report five coming out and the work ahead of him for Independent Monitoring Report six.
“I think the officers on the street are focused on whatever is on their plate today,” he said.
Tribune reporter Madeline Buckley contributed to this story
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