The discussion around police misconduct and abuse tends to zero in on the cost to human life and dignity. But as certain segments of the civilian population struggle, seemingly, to empathize with the message of movements like Black Lives Matter, maybe a new approach is needed to argue for fundamental police reform.

Even if you are not a minority or have never even had an interaction with the police, you’re probably a taxpayer — and while you might never endure the hit of an officer’s baton, you will certainly feel the hit of police abuse in your wallet.

Police misconduct comes at a hefty cost in the most literal sense of the word. The non-profit journalistic investigation group Better Government Association recently took a look at the financial toll Chicago Police Department officers’ misconduct takes on the city’s taxpayers.

Their findings? In just 2014 and 2015, the city government had to spend $106 million for costs related to police misconduct (legal fees and lawsuit settlements, among other things). Almost $642 million was spent in the decade between 2004 and 2015. Based on the Chicago Police Department’s approximately 12,000 officers, that amounts to nearly $53,000 an officer.

According to Chicago Tribune, 124 Chicago officers were named in one-third of misconduct-related settlements since 2009. Though they represent a relatively small group of officers who repeatedly engage in misconduct — in absolute numbers, it’s still a large group that has been allowed to keep their uniform despite clear patterns of behavior. That’s a problem. Can you think of any other job where you can repeatedly cost your employer thousands, even millions of dollars, without being fired?

Where does the money come to cover all this misconduct, anyway? It comes from taxpayers, of course, who prop up law enforcement and municipal government budgets. As the Wall Street Journal reports, police departments all across the country have been seeing increasingly more of their budgets headed toward misconduct-related expenses. In 2014, the 10 largest police departments in the country paid $248.7 million in such costs.

With local governments in the United States so often finding themselves in dire fiscal straights, it seems ludicrous to permit police departments to hemorrhage such large sums of money, year to year. Why do these organizations keep around these so-called “bad apple” cops? The likely answer can be found in the fraternal, “good ‘ol boys’ club” nature of law enforcement; a highly costly and dysfunctional way to operate a group of gun-wielding public servants.

As cellphone-recorded footage of police abuse becomes commonplace alongside the adoption of officers’ dashboard and body-worn cameras, it seems practically inevitable that most police departments of any size will see misconduct allegations continue to rise.

That’s where the Department of Justice comes in. This week they have announced intentions to begin a collaborative review of the San Francisco Police Department following controversy around the death of Mario Woods. This follows on the heels of two “pattern of practice” probes being done of Chicago and Baltimore’s police forces.

It’s a good start, but only a start nonetheless. If Attorney General Loretta Lynch plans to set herself apart from her predecessor, then she needs have the Justice Department investigate dozens, if not hundreds, of police departments around the country. More importantly, however, Lynch must do so with a heavy hand and the understanding that in some cases drastic personnel restructuring may be necessary.

Two days after Bettie Jones was shot dead by Chicago police, it remains unclear why the 55-year-old grandmother of five walked to the front door of her West Side home, the spot where she became what authorities called an “accidental” casualty of a “domestic disturbance.”

But her daughter has a theory about the one-time crossing guard. She was “just being a good citizen,” Latarsha Jones told NBC News. “Trying to help out.”

Bettie Jones, along with 19-year-old Quintonio LeGrier, her upstairs neighbor, who was also killed by police on Saturday morning, have become the latest symbols in a city roiled by anger over alleged police abuse.

Latarsha Jones and two of her sisters told NBC News on Monday that the events were “shocking” and “terrifying.”

Latisha Jones said her mother was probably just opening the front door for the police Saturday morning.

“She was probably thinking, ‘I’m going to open the door, let them in,” she said. “‘They’re going to go upstairs and handle whatever’s going on. I’m going to come back, close my door and get back in my bed.'”

Instead, Latisha added, “My mom wound up getting shot.”

Chicago police have said they “confronted a combative individual” just after 4 a.m. on Saturday. Friends and neighbors told NBC affiliate WMAQ that LeGrier — a college student at Northern Illinois University who was home on break — had recently shown signs of mental illness and was threatening his father with a baseball bat. When police arrived, they shot him seven times, his mother said.

His father, Antonio LeGrier, filed a lawsuit against the city Monday alleging that LeGrier was unarmed and “never posed a danger of threat or harm.”

Their deaths came just more than a month after the release of dash-cam videothat showed Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke firing 16 shots at 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. Protests erupted over the city’s handling of the killing and whether the authorities — including Mayor Rahm Emanuel — tried to cover it up.

Chicago police released a statement Saturday saying Jones was “accidentally struck and tragically killed” and Mayor Rahm Emanuel ordered the city’s Independent Police Review Authority — or IPRA — to examine the case. “I have asked that they determine the deficiencies in the current training, and determine what steps can be taken immediately to address them,” Emanuel said. “We will continue to ask tough questions of the police department, of the investigative agencies, and of ourselves, to drive the reforms the people of Chicago deserve and expect.”

The Jones family’s lawyer, Sam Adam Jr., assailed the authorities’ version of the incident, telling NBC News on Monday that “many” shell casings were found “down the street” from Jones’ home.

“That sort of activity certainly doesn’t comport with necessary and justifiable shooting when the shell casings are 15 to 20 feet away,” he said.

A Chicago police spokesman referred calls on the case to IPRA. A phone call to the authority on Monday was not immediately returned.

This man circled around a reporter and photographer for the Guardian twice while waiting for a local politician to show up at the Chicago Police Department’s Homan Square ‘black site’ to be interviewed.

There are some events that starkly expose the reality of class relations and class rule in the United States. Such is the case with the brutal police murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald and the subsequent orchestrated cover-up involving the entire political establishment in Chicago, Illinois, backed by the Obama administration.

The Democratic Party in Chicago, led by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, is engaged in a desperate effort to contain the immense popular revulsion and anger that has followed the forced release—against Emanuel’s own determined efforts—ofdamning video evidence of the execution-style murder of McDonald by police on October 20, 2014.

On Tuesday, Emanuel fired police chief Garry McCarthy in a transparent act of damage control. Whatever the police chief’s role in the cover-up, it is clear to everyone that Emanuel threw him to the wolves to protect his own skin. Facing questions from the media, the normally arrogant Emanuel defensively said he had made “mistakes.” He said McCarthy had to go because he had lost the “trust and confidence” of the public but dodged suggestions that he should resign for the same reason.

Last week, after a long legal battle initiated by a local freelance journalist, the city released the video from a police dashboard camera, which exploded the lies of police who claimed that they fired in self-defense. The video shows Chicago policeman Jason Van Dyke firing two shots that strike the black teenager as he is moving away from the cops before he falls to the ground, followed by another 14 shots into McDonald’s crumpled body.

What followed was a systematic effort to conceal this crime. Police threatened motorists with arrest if they did not leave the scene and refused to take their statements. The cops later took the footage of a security camera at a nearby Burger King and deleted 86 minutes, according to a manager at the store.

For 13 months, including during the entire period in which Emanuel faced a tough reelection campaign, the mayor suppressed the video and protected the identity of the killer cop. He was joined in this conspiracy by the City Council, including its Black Caucus, which voted to pay $5 million to McDonald’s family on the condition that the video be kept from the public.

The explosive character of these developments was reflected in a lead editorial published in the New York Times on Wednesday, which acknowledged the “conspiracy of concealment” by a “historically corrupt law enforcement agency that is well versed in the art of hiding misconduct, brutality—and even torture.”

Notably absent in the Times editorial, however, was any reference to either the Democratic Party or the Obama administration. In fact, the Times itself is participating in a cover-up aimed at obscuring the real political significance of the conspiracy in Chicago.

Mayor Emanuel expresses the nexus of finance capital and political power that come together in the Democratic Party. After serving in the Clinton administration, he earned millions at the investment bank Wasserstein Perella & Co. A three-term Illinois congressman and chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, he then served as Obama’s chief of staff before resigning to run for mayor in 2011.

President Obama himself is the political offspring of the corrupt Democratic Party political machine that has run Chicago for the last eight decades. Obama has the closest ties to the city’s corporate and financial elite, which rely on the brute force of the police to contain the immense social and class tensions in Chicago.

There can be no doubt that Emanuel consulted with the Obama administration throughout the year-long cover-up of the police murder of McDonald. Indeed, Emanuel sought to justify blocking release of the video on the grounds that making it public would disrupt an ongoing investigation of the shooting by the FBI and Obama’s Justice Department.

The Justice Department has been conducting a so-called investigation for over a year while it had access to a video that demonstrates without a shadow of doubt that Van Dyke should be prosecuted for murder. Instead, the Obama administration joined the conspiracy to protect the Chicago cop, Mayor Emanuel and the Democratic political establishment in the city.

On a national scale the Obama administration has conducted no prosecutions of cops—who have killed 1,090 people this year and are on pace to surpass last year’s total of 1,108. Meanwhile, the administration has provided military hardware to police departments throughout the country, including for the suppression of protests against police killings in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland.

This is the reality of class rule in America: violence, criminality and cover-up. The efforts to prevent public exposure of the murder of Laquan McDonald go hand-in-hand with the Obama administration’s own campaign to shield torturers, defend and expand the illegal and unconstitutional spying on the American people and assert the right to assassinate citizens without due process.

The police are a critical component of an apparatus of repression and violence aimed at containing and suppressing the explosive class tensions in the United States.

In Chicago, Emanuel has overseen a brutal campaign of austerity, including the shutdown of 50 public schools, the layoff of 1,000 teachers and attacks on city worker pensions, on the one hand, while handing over corporate tax breaks and other incentives that have made the city a center of financial speculation, and the home of 29 billionaires, including the financier and real estate mogul Penny Pritzker chosen by Obama to be his commerce secretary.

Nationally, the corporate and financial aristocracy, with the assistance of its representatives among both Democrats and Republicans, has utilized the economic crisis that erupted in 2008 to transfer trillions of dollars to Wall Street while intensifying the assault on jobs, wage and social programs for the vast majority of the population.

With social tensions reaching a breaking point, the police increasingly function as an occupying force, given a license to kill in order to defend the wealth and power of the ruling class. Hardly a week passes without another revelation of brutal police violence, while many more atrocities never see the light of day.

Those factions of the Democratic Party, from Jesse Jackson to the pseudo-left International Socialist Organization and the ISO-run Chicago Teachers Union, who claim that the plague of police violence is fundamentally a question of racism are perpetuating a conscious political fraud. Their aim is to whitewash the role of the Democratic Party and the system of class oppression and social inequality that it upholds.

No amount of damage control, however, can conceal the fact that the killer cops are the armed forces of the ruling class, which confronts an ever more hostile population and a younger generation of workers, black, white and immigrant, who will not accept a future of poverty, dictatorship and war.

Jerry White

wsws.org

Earlier this week, a team of investigative journalists and legal experts unfurled an incredible new website aggregating the responses of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) to officer misconduct from roughly 2002 to 2008, and 2011 to 2015. Dubbed the Citizens Police Data Project (CPDP), the project documents 56,361 citizen allegations of misconduct and abuse, ranging from abuse of power to illegal arrest, racist insults to physical violence.

The data is, admittedly, limited. This is purposeful. As someone who has spent years researching a book on the CPD’s relationship to black Chicago, I can attest that the police department’s stultifying opacity on officer misconduct cases would be an almost impressive feat of obfuscation, were it not so maddening and socially harmful. In this case as in others, it’s not surprising that neither the city nor the police department was eager to disclose these records. A debt of thanks is owed to journalist Jamie Kalven and attorneys at the Invisible Institute, the legal arm behind the CPDP, who have spent two decades wrangling with Chicago and the CPD to drag this data out from under departmentally protected seal. Yet even that small degree of transparency is tenuous. From the beginning, the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), Chicago’s powerful police union for which accountability is a bit of a four-letter word, has fought tenaciously to block the records’ release, successfully filing an injunction preventing further releases.

FOP leaders have cause for concern, one supposes. Not only do the current records present a deeply unsavory portrait; they offer no glory for the past, either. The files that the current CPDP data comes from are said to comprise citizen complaint records that date back to 1967 – a time in which, among other things, the department was spying mercilessly on political dissidents, laboring to break the back of black radicalism, and housing within its ranks a sizeable cell of Ku Klux Klan members. The intervening years from then to now have done little to burnish the department’s reputation among many Chicagoans, particularly those that live in black and brown parts of the city. In 1966, a leading member of Chicago’s black elite described the city as having a racially split “dual system of law enforcement,” and there isn’t much in the forty-nine years since that’s brought the planes back together.

To be sure, this racially bifurcated system is and long has been a systematic problem – one deeply entangled in the policies of the CPD and the politics of city powerbrokers. But the matter of individualized misconduct and abuse ought to be of profound concern, as well. And the city and the department have consistently dodged the issue. Both have a long record of avoiding public disclosure of officer wrongdoing, and have demonstrated a consistent record of throwing out (or literally throwing away) citizen cases prior to investigating them. Such evasions of transparency scar the entire lifespan of institutional mechanisms that are supposedly devoted to ensuring police accountability. Ushered in during the spring of 1960 under the modernizing impulse of Superintendent Orlando Wilson, who hoped to make the department “as clean as the driven snow,” from the moment that internal investigations have been formalized they’ve also proven to be extraordinarily dirty. Assessing the Internal Investigations Division a few years after its founding, a former member of that division accused it of practicing “purposeful and deliberate malfeasance,” and devoting “75% of the effort and time to window dressing which protects the police image in the eyes of the public.” Be that as it may, for the ancestors of the FOP, accountability measures that floundered didn’t flounder enough. Quite like how the current FOP seeks to keep the records of misconduct sealed, its most important predecessor in Chicago, the Chicago Patrolmen’s Association (CPA), tried to keep them from being opened in the first place. When Orlando Wilson began reforming the CPD and suggested more accountability as a prerequisite for better police-community relations, the CPA went mad. The organization’s president, Frank Carey, excoriated his Superintendent to such a strong degree that he was finally suspended from the force. (Carey’s response was to publicly call for Wilson’s resignation.)

Invisible Institute: a journalistic production company “working to expand and operationalize transparency, and make visible perspectives too often excluded from public discourse.”

Then as now, these failures of accountability wreak tremendous damage to the public trust. Indeed, while the data made available to (and thus through) the Citizens Police Data Projectis purposefully and relentlessly proscribed, it nevertheless ought to be stunning to those who don’t live with these issues every day or study them for a living.

This is true at the levels of both macro-statistics and individual cases. In the matter of the first, consider that in a particular four-year portion of the CPDP data set, roughly 17,000 out of 27,000 total complaints leveled against CPD officers were thrown out for bureaucratic reasons, as Chicago radio station WBEZ recently reported. In other words, nearly two-thirdsof such complaints were never even properly ushered through the system. For the entirety of the CPDP data, of those that did go through accountability review, more than 96 percent of those cases were deemed to be unsustained; in the cases of those that were sustained, officers faced disciplinary action only 77 percent of the time. (Even then: seldom a serious punishment. As WBEZ notes, the average penalty for illegally arresting someone is only a 2.3 day suspension.) Parsing all of this, maybe the statistic most important to know is that a citizen who files a complaint of officer misconduct has a 1 in 35 chance of departmental review both finding in their favor and seeing fit to discipline the offending officer.

It should shock no one that the odds are even longer if you’re not white, and awful if you’re black. While black Chicagoans lodged 61 percent of the complaints that comprise the CPDP data and white Chicagoans only about 20 percent, investigatory review managed to virtually invert those complaint statistics when it determined whether or not charges against officers were sustainable. (Twenty-five percent of the charges deemed sustainable were leveled by black people; 58 percent were brought by whites.) Thus, while white Chicagoans initiated only one-fifth of the charges of officer misconduct, they represent three-fifths of what the CPD would consider legitimate victims of police abuse.

But statistics cloud the human face of who exactly is doing this. Once you begin digging through the records of individual officers, patterns of abuse on the part of certain men and women begin to emerge that should stun even the most determined denier of racism and police conduct. Officer Raymond Piwnicki, for instance, who works on the Southwest Side, has had sixty-eight different complaints lodged against him since the early 2000s. In one of only three instances in which institutional review found the charges to be sustained, an off-duty Piwnicki, who is white, was found to have instigated an altercation with a black man and his wife as all of them tried to board an elevator. Piwnicki swung at the man, pushed the woman in the chest, and told the man to “Shut up, you fucking coon, you fucking cluck, I do whatever the fuck I want to a fuckin’ nigger coon.” The following year, sustaining a second charge against Piwnicki for abusing a young man and calling him a nigger, a reporting investigator noted that “P[olice] O[fficer] Piwnicki has clearly exhibited a pattern of using profane and derogatory language in his contact with citizens.”

Over and over again, Piwnicki and other high-volume offenders have been brought before investigators because of citizen complaints of abuse. A year ago, an investigation into CPD “impunity” by Truthout found Piwnicki the highest offender in the department, with fifty-five misconduct complaints in just five years. Yet he received precisely zero disciplinary penalties for that misconduct. (Indeed, the Truthout investigators reported, Piwnicki was “awarded the Superintendent’s Award of Valor in 2013, for a shooting in which he is now a defendant in a civil suit that cites his ‘deliberate indifference’ to a fellow officer’s deadly force.”) Together, repeat offenders like Piwnicki comprise about 10 percent of the CPD’s personnel, but are responsible for roughly 30 percent of misconduct complaints. What this demonstrates more than anything is that citizen complaints – particularly those of black citizens – have no systematic value in the eyes of the police department. Piwnicki has no negative total body of work as far as the CPD is concerned. The department, which builds commendations upon sustained record of accomplishment, for disciplinary purposes appears to treat the receipt of an average of eleven citizen complaints per year as a series of isolated cases that will hopefully (and likely) be swept under the rug.

This sort of unaccountability is a proven recipe for terror and tragedy for community members. Over the past year, Guardian journalist Spencer Ackerman has documented the most stunning systemic manifestations of this, uncovering the secrets of the CPD’s Homan Square facility, at which the department “disappeared” thousands of people for extended periods without access to attorneys or the outside world. Unsurprisingly, more than 80 percent of the people so detained (and often abused) at this site – one that many compare to a CIA “black” site – are African American. The same unaccountability is what failed Rekia Boyd, too. It’s what promotes a climate in which there will be more victims like her. It’s what causes the city of Chicago to “quickly” pay a $5 million settlement to the family of a 17-year-old black boy whom a white police officer riddled with sixteen bullets – “the bullets making the body [on the ground] jump again and again.” Whether fifty years ago or today, it’s what causes people to conjure the idioms of terrorism and occupation when they talk about the police.

***

The failure to bring accountability to police departments like the CPD conjures other things, as well. It creates breathing space for lies to get their lungs. In and beyond Chicago, there’s a growing backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement and ideologically affiliated groups – a backlash that insists that police misconduct and abuse is infrequent, unsystematic, or nonexistent altogether. For an extreme case of the latter, see recentcomments by Sheriff David Clarke that “there is no police brutality in America. We ended that back in the ’60s.” (Clarke is the Sheriff of Milwaukee County, ninety miles to Chicago’s north; a FOX News darling when it comes to talking tough about race, crime, and law enforcement; and real-life embodiment of Dave Chappelle’s “black white supremacist” character, Clayton Bigsby.) More commonplace: a few days ago, I was privy to an uncomfortable conversation in which a white man insisted that while he believed that police violence against black people “happened” (note the passive construction), it didn’t “happen” “as much as people say” – as if the denial of basic rights of citizenship to black people was acceptable so long as it was “occasional.” Consider, too, the case of Internet commenterstrolling a cell phone video for evidence that a young women sitting in a chair at her high school “deserved” to be flung about the room by an officer with a record of excessive force. (See, again, the problem of accountability.)

Of course, such backlashes and equivocations and denials live in fictions. They crumble before the data that the CPDP data shows, the grief that Rekia Boyd’s family knows, the horror that the families of other victims killed by police under questionable circumstances choke upon with terrible and terrifying force.

It’s a favorite (and very tired) trope of the deniers of Black Lives Matter – proud denizens of a whitewashed unreality – that black folks wouldn’t die by police guns if they’d stop being criminals. There are dozens of pieces of writing by better authors than I that expose this notion as racist, intellectually vacant, and statistically unsound, and I won’t rehash those points here. But what’s worth noting is that what those deniers are advocating is moreaccountability – that people need to be accountable for their actions, and that society needs to hold them so accountable if they don’t do so themselves.

Against that, what the actual evidence tells us is that it isn’t black protestors who are undermining the legitimacy of police departments like the CPD. Departments, rather, undermine themselves through their own failures of accountability – or perhaps more accurately, their refusal to be accountable. Through evasions and dedicated opaqueness, police departments continue to ensure not just the legitimacy, but the necessity, of organizations like Black Lives Matter and its affiliates. The sort of staunch unwillingness by police departments to address their own failures, so clearly in evidence in the CPDP data, only guarantees further anguish from the community, and therefore greater struggle from within it. Will better investigatory and accountability practices solve everything wrong with the police’s relationship with the community? No. But there is no doubt that better accountability would at the very least alleviate some of the deep and penetrating grief of those communities worst hit by police violence – most obviously by driving the most violent, reckless, and overtly racist officers off of police department payrolls.

Finally, without greater accountability – without paying attention to what the CPDP data and other studies show – the CPD and other departments are not likely, anytime soon, to get out of their own muddy and often ugly histories. In the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson last year, MSNBC commentator Melissa Harris-Perry recited the names of young black people killed by the police, and paired them with a reading from the infamous 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision. This was the decision that effectively ruled against the possibility of black citizenship, with Chief Justice Roger Taney infamously quipping that a black man had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” When I heard her do this, I couldn’t help but think about Chicago’s long tradition of what black activists of today and times past alike have called police “terrorism.” The catalog of offenses shaping that idiom is too voluminous to list here. But more than anything, I flashed to 1958, when the Chicago-based black newspaper Crusader, beating Harris-Perry to the point by some fifty-six years, wrote that, “In the eyes of the police, no Negro has any rights that a policeman is bound to respect.” History is inescapable, even if it bears a badge.

Earlier this year, a protracted struggle in Chicago to get the city to pay reparations to victims of police torture succeeded, thanks to the extraordinary work of community activists, attorneys, and victims, as well as to the sheer ubiquity and sadism of police officer-executed torture that included simulated drownings, beatings, and cattle-prod electrocution. (Like basically everything else that informs these matters, these tortures have a history in Chicago that dates back a century – a genealogy that winds serpentine through the midcentury decades and that culminates in the person of former CPD Commander Jon Burge, orchestrator of the torture of more than a hundred police suspects, mostly black.) The reparations plan that activists achieved includes $5.5 million paid directly to victims, free counseling services, and tuition at city colleges. Importantly, it also includes an educational component. Starting in the near future, students in Chicago Public Schools will be taught about Chicago’s history of police torture, abuse, and impunity.

In other words, Chicago’s schoolchildren will soon have some understanding of the consequences that follow from acute institutional unaccountability. Maybe CPD administrators and some representatives from the mayor’s office should consider heading back to school on the days those lessons are taught.

Simon Balto is an Assistant Professor of History at Ball State University. He is currently working on a book about policing and race in Chicago from the 1910s through the 1970s.

Lorenzo Davis, a former Supervising Investigator who was fired from his position at the Independent Police Review Authority poses for a portrait at his home in Chicago, Illinois July 21, 2015. Davis was terminated from his job after his employer said he refused to change his findings in Chicago police officers involved in cases on excessive force and officer involved shootings. (Joshua Lott for The Daily Beast)

CHICAGO — Three people killed by police in Chicago should be alive today, according to a retired cop who says he was fired for reaching that conclusion after investigating their deaths for the city.

If the allegations made by Lorenzo Davis are true, then the authority charged with investigating the Chicago Police Department for police shootings and claims of misconduct since 2007 can no longer be trusted.

Davis, a former supervisor at the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) who previously had a 23-year career with the Chicago Police Department, tells The Daily Beast that he was fired after refusing to obey orders to reverse his findings that police were not justified in shooting suspects six times in the past eight years. In three of those incidents, the suspects died.

“Bad shootings,” Davis says in police parlance for unjustified officer-involved shootings.

IPRA boss Scott Ando was responsible for the orders to reverse the findings, Davis said, adding that when Davis refused to whitewash the incidents, Ando fired him. Davis, despite his decades in law enforcement, was accused by Ando of having an “anti-police bias,” he said.

“He made it clear that supervisors there serve at his pleasure,” Davis said. “Our jobs are completely at-will. He doesn’t have to have a reason to fire us.”

IPRA spokesman Larry Meritt declined to comment directly on Davis’s allegations.

“This is a personnel matter, and it would be inappropriate to address it through the media,” Meritt said in a statement. “IPRA is committed to conducting fair, unbiased, objective, thorough and timely investigations of allegations of police misconduct and officer-involved shootings.”

Davis first went public to WBEZ radio in Chicago this week. While he wouldn’t mention which cases he had called into question because the investigations are ongoing, there are plenty to choose from, including several that have resulted in multimillion-dollar settlements with families of those killed by police.

“As many as 5 percent of police shootings [that IPRA investigates] are problematic,” Davis said.

Yet out of almost 400 police shootings investigated since 2007, IPRA has only found wrongdoing on the part of one officer. That’s not surprising to Davis, who said other investigators and supervisors in IPRA were overruled by Ando, the police department, or the police board when they concluded officers used lethal force without justification.

When IPRA finds that an officer is guilty of excessive force or unjustified in a shooting, it recommends disciplinary action—suspension, desk duty or firing, among other punishments. But that decision first must go through Ando before being considered by Superintendent Garry McCarthy and the police board, who can reject the recommendation.

A city agency, IPRA was created in 2007 after claims of corruption and distrust crippled its predecessor, the Office of Professional Standards. At its outset, hope was high that IPRA would help to change a police culture that some view as being abusive and torturous, Davis said. The agency’s former director, Ilana Rosenzweig, a California lawyer, fostered that sense of enthusiasm. But all that changed when an interim director that followed Rosenzweig was replaced by Scott Ando in 2014. Ando spent nearly 30 years with the Drug Enforcement Administration in Chicago before taking over IPRA.

With deep ties to law enforcement, Davis and others claim that Ando is nothing more than a puppet for McCarthy and Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Before Davis’s firing this month, Ando announced a new directive that stipulates how investigations of police shootings are assigned. According to Davis, officer-involved shooting investigations had previously been assigned randomly to one of 12 supervisors. (Those supervisors are in charge of IPRA’s 60 investigators, who, like detectives, dig into the minutiae of each incident.)

Now, Ando has hand-picked a single supervisor to oversee investigations of all police shootings, according to Davis. This is problematic, Davis said, because some supervisors fail to conduct thorough investigations and have never found wrongdoing on the part of officers despite tenures spanning the length of IPRA’s existence.

“That’s statistically improbable,” Davis said.

According to Davis, Ando wanted all IPRA employees to sign a nondisclosure agreement  that requires them not to talk about what police allegedly did, even if they left the agency.

IPRA investigators, protected by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) union, did not sign Ando’s agreement. Supervisors (who are not unionized) were also asked, and Davis refused.

“To me, his policies and the way he runs IPRA, should be public,” Davis said of Ando.

There is no shortage of questionable police shootings for IPRA and the public to examine.

The most egregious appears to be the case of Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old who was shot 16 times last year by at least one officer after the teen was found with a knife near a junkyard. Police said the officers were in fear for their lives, but an attorney for the McDonald family claims footage shows the teen walking away from police when they began firing. The video was apparently enough to prompt the city into a $5 million settlement with the family, on the condition that attorneys would not release the footage. McDonald’s family has seen the video and expressed their wishes that it be withheld from the public, fearing its release would cause Chicago to riot.

“Laquan McDonald is a very ugly shooting,” Davis said. “But they knew that if they had come out right away and released information on that shooting, you would have had demonstrations in Chicago.

“[McCarthy] should just admit that a bad shooting is a bad shooting,” Davis added. “If he doesn’t, then people will believe that it’s a cover-up.”

Police have tried to keep a lid on the McDonald case from the start. Not only did they confiscate surveillance footage from a nearby restaurant without a warrant, but audio is missing from the dashcam video showing McDonald’s death, attorneys announced last week.

In 2010, the city paid a similar $4.6 million settlement to the family of William Hope Jr., who was shot after police blocked him into a parking space and tried to take his keys from the ignition when the 25-year-old said he felt he was being unlawfully detained. One officer fired several rounds, killing Hope, who died behind the wheel of his car.

In 2012, the city settled with the family of Jamaal Moore, an unarmed 23-year-old who was first hit by a police cruiser, then gunned down. The car in which Moore was riding was mistaken for a vehicle used in an armed robbery. Moore was struck after the driver of the vehicle crashed. After being hit by the squad car, Moore tried to run. An officer fired twice, killing Moore.

The settlements mean the details of police killings, including the identities of the officers involved, won’t be exposed to the public in court trials.

Neither of the cases above were assigned to Davis, he said. But with six “bad” police shootings under his charge as a supervisor, the deaths of Moore, Hope, and McDonald just add to the tally of killings that probably shouldn’t have happened, Davis said.

For 23 years Davis patrolled some of the city’s toughest neighborhoods, first as a beat cop, then as a tactical officer working to get dangerous gang members and other criminals off the streets. He knows what it takes—physically, mentally, and emotionally—to shoot someone. Davis said he can’t count the number of times his service weapon left its holster.

He knows what it’s like to be on the receiving end of gunshots, too.

On January 17, 1984, Davis and several other officers were executing a search warrant in the 6th District, which includes the Gresham neighborhood where Davis served as a tactical officer for half a decade. With him that day was Officer Fred Eckles, a 10-year veteran of the force who died from multiple gunshot wounds after a drug dealer fired on the 41-year-old.

Davis returned fire, killing the offender.

Now, the 65-year-old police veteran has risked alienating himself among current cops who face similar dangers each day.

“Do you decide that an officer’s belief that he was in fear for his life was reasonable just because he says so? Or does the evidence and the witness statements lead you to believe that this was an excuse?” Davis said of his time leading IPRA investigations.

“If we don’t stand back and have some skepticism, than any time some police officer says ‘I was in danger,’ that’s the end of your investigation.

“That’s not the way it should be.”

Davis contends that’s the way it is in Chicago.

If the politics affecting police shooting investigations weren’t bad enough, Davis said, a culture of bravado within the police department may be making cops’ decision to pull the trigger more acceptable.

“I know people coming out of the training academy telling me that it’s a badge of honor to shoot somebody, particularly a gangbanger,” Davis said.

Last week, during a particularly chaotic night in Chicago, officers fired on a shooting suspect but missed. When asked for the condition of a nearby shooting victim, a cop on the scene became confused, thinking the dispatcher had referred to the target of police gunfire.

“If they’re shot by police, they’re not victims; they’re offenders.”

While that mentality may make sense in the heat of the night, investigative minds are supposed to be cooler. Davis brought that approach to IPRA, until Ando decided that the veteran cop had to go.

“He should have known that I might go out and talk to people.”

By Justin Glawe for The Daily Beast

George Roberts, a Chicago employee in charge of investigating police misconduct, was pulled over by Chicago police for minor traffic violations and allegedly beaten so badly that he lost control of his bowels. Police also mocked Roberts, a black man, with Eric Garner’s dying words, saying, “What are you going to tell me next? You can’t breathe?”

Roberts, who is a supervisor at the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA), says that after he was stopped for the minor traffic violation, police approached his vehicle with guns drawn and at least one weapon pointed directly at him, with one officer threatening, “Don’t make me fucking shoot you!”

“This was wholly unnecessary and unreasonable, as [he] was not threatening, resisting, or otherwise failing to comply with the Defendants’ orders at this point or at any point during the stop,” stated Roberts’ court complaint.

Roberts says that moments after police saw his IPRA identification badge, officer Brandon Ellison “ran back to his vehicle” and killed the dash cam recording the incident. Police only admitted the existence of the dash cam video after Roberts’ attorney discovered it. According to Roberts’ court complaint, “Up to that point, the video recording device had been properly functioning with date and time stamps clearly visible.”

Roberts was subsequently taken to jail where he allegedly remained in his soiled clothes overnight and was laughed at by a cop “wearing a white Chicago Police uniform shirt”, the complaint states.

Police claimed that Roberts had been pulled over for driving under the influence, a charge for which he was later acquitted.

In July, another member of Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority was fired after refusing to exonerate police for civilian shootings.

Read the rest of the complaint in its entirety below:

Ken Klippenstein is a freelance journalist based in Madison, WI who can be reached on twitter@kenklippenstein or via email: [email protected]

Paul Gottinger is a staff reporter at Reader Supported News who can be reached on twitter @paulgottinger or via email: [email protected]

A new YouTube video surfaced where a Chicago cop clearly is attempting to intimidate and show completely disregard for the civil rights of American citizens recording his actions:

“If you think the camera is gonna make a difference to you as to what the fuck I say, you’re incorrect.”

He continues saying,

“It’s all black people that live here, so I got no choice but to fucking pull over black people, if you don’t like it, then move-” the officer proclaims.

“I ain’t gotta go nowhere,” an unidentified man responds.

“Then sit around and bitch, I don’t give a fuck,” the cop responds.

The video was published by a YouTube user named The Lyrical Elitist. The harsh honesty of this officer, while shocking to an outsider, is a common notion among the residents of Chicago’s inner-city neighborhoods.

As Tamar Manasseh, the mom behind the creation of MASK (Mothers Against Senseless Killings) explains, the police are the largest obstacle their town faces when it comes to their mission of reducing violence in the community.

“I thought the kids and the violence would be the hardest part but it turns out that the police are,” she continues, “Once, we were singing happy birthday to a kid and an officer drove by and flipped us off.”

Watch the video below and decide for yourself is the relationship between Chicago PD and the community is what it should be.

More victims have come forward to detail recent abuse inside Homan Square, a secret compound used by Chicago police for incommunicado interrogations and detentions which some have described as the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site overseas. Exclusive video obtained by The Guardian shows a Chicago man named Angel Perez being taken inside a “prisoner entrance.”

Perez says police handcuffed his right wrist to a metal bar and then sexually assaulted him with a metal object, believed to be a handgun barrel. Perez says the officers also threatened to “go after” his family members, including his father who is battling cancer. Perez is now the 13th person to describe his detainment at the secret police site to The Guardian.

Like many detainees, he apparently was never formally arrested — neither booked, nor permitted access to an attorney, nor charged. Now, Perez and four others have filed a lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department. We are joined by the reporter who broke the Homan Square story, Spencer Ackerman, national security editor at The Guardian.

Transcript

AMY GOODMAN: More details have come to light about a secret compound used by Chicago police for incommunicado interrogations and detentions. The Guardian first reported on the Homan Square facility earlier this year. Some have described it as the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site overseas.

Now The Guardian has obtained exclusive video from inside the site. The footage shows a Chicago man named Angel Perez being taken inside a, quote, “prisoner entrance.” In 2012, Chicago police sought to compel the 33-year-old Perez to cooperate with a drug sting. After agreeing to meet with police officers, Perez was handcuffed and taken to Homan Square. What happened next may be disturbing to many in our audience.

Angel Perez says police handcuffed his right wrist to a metal bar behind a bench in an interrogation room. Two officers stood behind him and reportedly threatened to send him to the infamously violent Cook County Jail if he didn’t cooperate. Then, Perez says, one of the officers proceeded to sexually assault him with a metal object, believed to be a handgun barrel.

ANGEL PEREZ: He’s saying that, you know, when you’re in jail and you get penetrated by an African American, that it feels just like a gun going up your rear end. While he’s doing all this, he ends up pulling down my pants, and he gets near my rear end, I guess you can say, and that’s when I just felt something cold and hard just, I guess, penetrate me. And that’s when I just jerked, and I freaked out, and I just went into full panic attack. I couldn’t even talk.

AMY GOODMAN: Angel Perez went on to describe what happened.

ANGEL PEREZ: They shackled my my legs, and they handcuffed me to the bar and the bench that was there. When this happened, I was already pretty shaken up. My eyes were watering. He kind of pushed me over the metal pile and pushed his hands into my eyes while he was sitting on me. And he was like, “You know, you better learn to [bleep] cooperate.” They were playing tug of war with me, too. And they were kind of throwing fake punches at me so I would hit myself, like, you know, when I flinched, I would hit the back of my head.

AMY GOODMAN: Angel Perez says the officers also threatened to also “go after” his family members, including his father who’s battling cancer. Angel Perez is now the 13th person to describe his detainment at the secret police site in Chicago to The Guardian. Like many prisoners, he apparently was never formally arrested, so he was neither booked, nor permitted access to an attorney, nor charged. Now Angel Perez and four others have filed a lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department seeking justice from the city.

For more on Homan Square, we’re joined now by Spencer Ackerman, national security editor at The Guardian, where he has published a new article on police abuse in Chicago called “Homan Square Detainee: I was Sexually Abused by Police at Chicago ‘Black Site'” We’ll link to that at democracynow.org.

Spencer Ackerman, welcome to Democracy Now! So tell us more about Angel Perez.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: So, this all happened, allegedly—and let’s say “allegedly” upfront; these are allegations from Angel Perez—so we’re not, you know, consistently using that word throughout and interrupting what the story is.

On October 21st, 2012, police, who had already contacted Perez the day before, sought to have him help them buy drugs in a controlled operation for a dealer that they believed Perez knew, who they had been monitoring. He went under his own free will to an agreed-upon meeting place, thinking that they would just basically have a quick conversation. They had asked him to get there to make sure, in their words, according to Perez, that his car wasn’t impounded. When he goes there, as surveillance camera footage from outside that lot that we’ve obtained and published shows, he extends his hand to the officers. He tries to go for a handshake. They turn him around on the car, they handcuff him, and they take him to Homan Square.

The video footage that we’ve published is, if not the first, extremely rare, footage from inside the facility that appear to show a more routinized detention operations apparatus than the Chicago police have said publicly in response to our reporting.

From there, when Perez demonstrates his reluctance to cooperate—he’s afraid, he doesn’t really want to be wrapped up in all of this, he’s worried about retaliation—the police start escalating things. According to Perez, they’re talking a lot about retaliation not just against him, but against his family, ways that they’ll plant evidence, not just on him, but on his family. They start getting, according to Perez, violent. One officer sits on his chest, starts pressing his palms into Perez’s eyes. He describes himself as experiencing this kind of aggression for the first time in his life. He’s freaked out. He’s panicking. They bend him over what he describes as metal detritus in the room near where he’s handcuffed, and they pull down his pants. They use a metal object. He says he feels the coldness and metallic aspect of it as they start tracing it down his back and saying some really vulgar and very racist things, in his telling, about what’s going to happen to him when African-American inmates in a jail in Cook County get a hold of him. They start saying that—if you’ll excuse the language—that he’s going to feel really like a “sexy bitch.” So they’re really using a lot of sexualized and homophobic insults at him as they’re doing this, again, according to Perez, at which point one of the officers allegedly uses this metal object to rectally penetrate him. He says it happens very quickly.

And afterwards, he immediately agreed to do whatever the police wanted him to do—in this case, make a controlled buy of $170 worth of heroin. That is one of the most shocking aspects, I think, of this case, that all of this happened not just for a man who police were not looking at, who never charged—who they never charged, who wasn’t implicated in the crime itself—and that would be no excuse, of course, even if he was, but nevertheless as a peripheral figure here, in order to compel him to make a $170 controlled purchase of heroin.

AMY GOODMAN: And the officer, he said, said to him, as he did that, “I almost blew your brains out.”

SPENCER ACKERMAN: That’s right, leading—leading Angel Perez to think that the object used to penetrate him was the barrel of a service revolver, of a gun.

AMY GOODMAN: So what is Angel Perez doing right now? He actually had filed a suit and now has refiled?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: So, in 2013, Perez filed his lawsuit initially, making the claim of the sexual abuse. What he didn’t know at that point, and would only come out later, was that all of this happened at Homan Square, the warehouse on Chicago’s West Side, home to Chicago narcotics units and some tactical units, that—

AMY GOODMAN: He didn’t know, because he just didn’t know its name?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: He didn’t know, because he was, in his telling, jostled in the car. Where he was going, he couldn’t really see. The cops were doing a kind of—a kind of wild ride. It sounded, in some cases, because he wasn’t shackled in, although it wasn’t a van, somewhat similar to the rough rides we’ve now heard about with Freddie Gray in Baltimore and other places. He wasn’t hurt during that ride nevertheless. He had also been taken to an actual police station nearby Homan Square at Harrison and Kedzie. So, initially, he just assumed he was back there. But they take him to this warehouse. They go through a kind of warren of different rooms, until he’s taken to the second floor at Homan and this happened to him.

AMY GOODMAN: And again, for people who are just hearing about this for the first time—

SPENCER ACKERMAN: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: —it has become a big issue since The Guardian started exposing it, even before the re-election of Rahm Emanuel—Homan Square is?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Homan Square is a warehouse complex on Chicago’s West Side. It’s a secretive, but, as the Chicago police will like to point out ad nauseam, not secret, complex, where a lot of plainclothes operations happen. The vice squad is out of there. The narcotics unit is out of there. And it’s a place where we now have accounts from 17 people, 13 of whom I have personally interviewed, who, between 2005 and 2015, have been taken there, held incommunicado, meaning there’s no contemporaneously available to the public record of their whereabouts—no one knows where they are, in other words—hours shackled with no access to legal counsel, often while police try and pressure them in order to either become informants, provide them with drugs and, increasingly, from the stories that we’ve accumulated, provide them with guns.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to two other men who are now suing the city of Chicago after being detained at Homan Square. This is Jose Garcia.

JOSE GARCIA: Took us in the building. And when you hear them say, “Dead man walking,” and you hear doors closing, I mean, your hairs just stand up. You know, I mean, what are you going to do? You know, you’re thinking you’re going to get beat up. You know, so we were just scared.

AMY GOODMAN: Another plaintiff, John Vergara, describes the conditions of his confinement at Homan Square.

JOHN VERGARA: It kind of looks like a cage for a dog. It’s just a bench, with a bar on the wall, no toilet, no sink, no nothing.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk more about this, Spencer Ackerman.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: So, John and [Jose] have described, in their case, being at a sandwich shop in Chicago a couple years ago, when masked police busted in and arrested both customers there, arrested kitchen staff there, took them to Homan Square, tried to, again, shake them down as they’re all shackled, some of them shackled to each other and then shackled to a bar in this sort of cage-like holding area, in order to see about a narcotics arrest.

In the case of John Vergara and Jose Garcia, John Vergara starts saying to the officers that he knows a civil rights attorney, and he’s going to contact that attorney and let people know what’s happening inside Homan Square. The cops made a deal with him. They say, “We will let you out”—this is after several hours of being detained and not being able to access, you know, phone—being denied phone calls, not being able to call their families, not being able to call their lawyers, anyone. And then, ultimately, the cops make a deal with him, and they say, “If you don’t tell this lawyer or anyone else, we’ll let you go right now.” And that’s ultimately what happened.

AMY GOODMAN: And as one of them says, “Dead man walking,” they say?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: “Dead man walking.” A lot of intimidation moves by police to make people feel like they’re entirely under the control of their police captors.

AMY GOODMAN: And lest anyone think we’re talking about decades ago, though that is extremely significant today, can you tell us a story of Calvin Coffey that happened a couple months ago?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: So just in February, basically, less than three weeks before we published our first story from inside Homan Square, according to the lawsuit that he joined, which Angel Perez recently refiled, he was picked up for narcotics or for some sort of—it’s unclear—drugs delivery issue. But he’s just picked up off the street. He’s taken to Homan Square. He’s confined for a long period of time without a bathroom break. He ultimately, while he’s held there for a long period of time, has to answer a call of nature, defecates on the floor of where he’s shackled. Police allegedly make him clean up his own feces with his skull cap.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to Victoria Suter, who traveled to Chicago on May 12, 2012, to attend the big anti-NATO protest. On May 16, she and 11 others were taken to Homan Square in Chicago after police raided the apartment where they were staying. Suter spent 18 hours in solitary confinement before being allowed to speak to a lawyer. Earlier this year, she described her experience on Democracy Now!

VICTORIA SUTER: When we arrived there, it was dark. I couldn’t see the outside of the building. But we went in through a garage. There were really large, like military vehicles. They were black, just absolutely massive. There was—one of the other people arrested in that raid with me, they took him in first and left me outside with another officer, and then they took me inside. I was taken to a room, not particularly big, no windows. They put ankle shackles on me at that point and cuffed my right arm to a bar that ran behind the bench, where I stayed for 18 hours prior to being able to see an attorney.

AMY GOODMAN: Victoria Suter also said an officer told her, quote, “We’re going to give you a tour of hell on Homan.” You can see the whole interview at democracynow.org. Finally, Spencer?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: With Angel Perez, there’s a legacy here of not just police abuse, but sexualized police abuse in Chicago. Darrell Cannon, a man who in 1983 was coerced into falsely confessing for a murder that would have landed him on—that landed him on death row and would have had him be executed, if Illinois’s governor, George Ryan, hadn’t cleared out death row, had a gun, a shotgun barrel shoved in his mouth. It was empty, but police pulled the trigger three times. That got him to falsely confess to a murder. It sounded very reminiscent to me of what Angel Perez went through, again, allegedly, in 2012. So, over—basically, three decades later, this continued.

AMY GOODMAN: And in just a minute, we’re going to have Darrell Cannon join us live from Chicago. Finally, the Chicago police continuing to insist they do not use violence with interrogations, though they have admitted Homan Square exists?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: They’ve admitted Homan Square exists. They continue their nonspecific denials. And now, at this point, they don’t even respond to my questions when I ask them. They don’t even acknowledge receipt of my emails. But in a supposed fact sheet that they put out on March 1st to attempt to refute some of my reporting, they took great umbrage at the suggestion that anyone would be physically abused. They acted as if that has never happened in Chicago, that there’s no history there, there’s no legacy there.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to talk about a multimillion-dollar fund that the mayor and others have set up to deal with police torture in Chicago. Spencer Ackerman, thanks so much for being with us, national security editor at The Guardian, where he’s published a new article on police abuse in Chicago called “Homan Square Detainee: I was Sexually Abused by Police at Chicago ‘Black Site'” We’ll link to that at democracynow.org. We’ll be back in Chicago in a moment.

Published on DemocracyNow.org

The last election day in Chicago was 24 February, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel was expected to stave off a re-election challenge. But that morning, the high-profile mayoral race took an unexpected turn: allegations of abuse and detention inside a secretive Chicago police facility known as Homan Square reverberated from a Guardian report across the world, and Emanuel was forced into a runoff to save his political career.

Nearly six weeks later, as voters head to the polls once more, advocates seeking new reforms to years of Chicago police violence remain frustrated that Homan Square never became more of a direct campaign issue. In a city where boss-style politics and police brutality rarely evolve, they say, a culture of top-down silence has drowned out a potentially historic flashpoint.

Despite multiple protests, international outrage, a federal civil-rights lawsuit as well as local and national activists calling for the facility to be investigated by the mayor, organizers now worry that if Emanuel succeeds after looking the other way, what they consider to be abusive police business will only continue as usual.

“He is cowering in the tradition of silence that he inherited,” said Jason Tompkins, an organizer with Black Lives Matter of Chicago. “Why do you think the mayor has denied Homan Square and not allowed for an investigation?”

Homan Square did not come up in three mayoral debates or in candidate speeches, even as the Guardian continued to report stories of off-the-books interrogation by the city’s police force. Emanuel – abetted by near-silence over the reports from his challenger, Jesús “Chuy” Garcia – has managed to skirt public confrontations with the issue, save for a short reply in a local public television interview that “we follow all the rules”, echoing continued police denials.

But Emanuel’s involvement in Homan Square runs deeper than his public silence indicates. An official in the Chicago police department’s office of legal affairs, Victor Castillo, has told the Guardian’s attorney that he needed the mayor’s office to sign off on the disclosure of at least one Homan Square-related document.

Emanuel’s office has declined multiple requests for comment about Homan Square, citing only a police statement, which has served as one of two department responses to allegations from at least 11 people who say they were held incommunicado at the site. A police “factsheet” attempting to refute the Guardian’s reporting did little to quiet critics who charge Emanuel has allowed unconstitutional brutality to continue on his watch.

“In many ways, for the past 60 years, the torch has been passed from Richard J Daley to Richard M Daley and on to Rahm Emanuel,” said longtime Chicago civil-rights attorney Flint Taylor, referring to Emanuel’s predecessors and the long history of Chicago police abuse. “The assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was carried out by Richard J’s police; the Chicago police torture scandal was Richard M’s; and Homan Square is now Rahm’s.”

No matter who wins Tuesday’s runoff, activists say voters will have been robbed of any real option for a mayoral candidate actively pursuing police reform: even Garcia, the progressive challenger, has said next to nothing.

In a single local independent newspaper interview, Garcia briefly called the Homan Square allegations “troubling”. At multiple campaign appearances, he has instead called out Emanuel’s unfulfilled promise to hire 1,000 police officers in a move that would make one of the largest US police forces even larger. Garcia has also connected the lack of an expanded police force to the more than 10,000 shootings in Chicago since Emanuel was elected in November 2011.

“What we have here are two candidates who are basically fighting over who is more pro-police,” said Mariame Kaba, executive director of Project NIA, an advocacy group focused on criminal-justice reform. “We don’t have a choice in this election between people who are pro-police accountability.”

Another Black Lives Matter of Chicago organizer, Aislinn Sol, said neither Emanuel nor Garcia “offer an answer to police brutality and thus no answer to the people of Chicago”.

‘Not much happens’

On the morning of 16 March, the parents of Dakota Bright, Roshad Mcintosh, Ronnie Johnson and Desean Pittman made their way to Chicago city hall for a meeting with the mayor about the deaths of their sons at the hands of Chicago police.

After waiting for some time, the families were notified that Emanuel could not attend.

Local activists say the mayor’s office has been similarly unresponsive – during his entire tenure and especially the campaign home stretch – on other issues, from stop-and-frisk searches to a years-long push for reparations for a torturous regime led by the notorious Chicago police commander Jon Burge, beginning in the 1970s.

“Not much happens in Chicago without making the mayor move,” organizer Kelly Hayes said at her event in early March, dubbed ‘Reparations Not Black Sites: Rally for the Run Off’.

Also in March, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a report detailing that Chicago police had more stops per resident than their counterparts in New York City, who came under heavy pressure for a practice that has been ruled unlawful for singling out minority citizens.

“These stops are of great concern to us,” said ACLU legal director Harry Grossman. “But they are particularly of concern to us because we don’t believe they are properly recorded or monitored by the Chicago police department.”

Black Lives Matter organized a protest outside the mayor’s office, demanding reforms to what they considered “excessive” searches on primarily black and brown Chicagoans. They have not received a response, even though Emanuel met on Saturday with a coalition of religious leaders calling for a “complete” overhaul of Chicago police oversight, including stop-and-frisk data.

Meanwhile, Cook County commissioner Richard Boykin and US congressman Danny Davis were expecting a reply by the end of this week from the US department of justice to their hand-delivered call for a Homan Square investigation – but not before a second election day which Emanuel, with a double-digit lead in the polls, was expected to survive.

A week after the runoff election, the Chicago city council will hold a hearing on an ordinance, filed in October 2013, seeking $20m in reparations for victims of the torture tactics orchestrated by Burge 30 years ago. Even with backing from 27 local aldermen who called the tactics “torturous” when the ordinance was discussed, the payout legislation has been stalled.

But next Tuesday, along with dozens of activists who said they would confront Chicago’s politicians once more, there will be a new face: Mayor Emanuel, who must approve any such reparations, is scheduled to attend.

“I look forward to seeing a mayor who speaks up and out – to talk about the legacies that continue as a result of these kinds of horrific abuse of people,” said Kaba, of Project NIA. The reparations ordinance, she said, “is a great example of what is possible when people fight together, collectively, for a long period of time to try.”