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.

About 200 protesters gathered outside the Chicago Patrolmen’s Federal Credit Union on Saturday, their breath visible in the cold air as they chanted, their fists pounding with each cry.

They were determined to shut down Saturday morning’s business for the credit union, across the street from the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, Chicago’s police union. For nearly two hours, Black Youth Project 100 Chicago Chapter members, dressed in black T-shirts with the words “Fund Black Futures” written across them, linked their arms together to form a barricade around the bank’s front desk, stopping workers from conducting business.

“The FOP’s advocacy of CPD has helped perpetuate cycles of criminalization that especially plagues low-income black communities,” BYP 100 member Jennifer Pagán said. “These politicians, that these organizations and institutions, like the FOP, would rather police us, kill us, lock us up, than meet demands of better housing, mental health clinics, fully funded neighborhood public schools and jobs programs with fair wages for all of us.”

Protesters succeeded in closing the credit union for regular business, but they had done so because they believed they were “shutting down a privately owned bank that the FOP is housed in,” Pagan said during the protest. The union, however, is housed in a building across the street.

The protesters said they had an additional mission: To reconfirm the values of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Monday’s federal holiday honoring him comes at a tumultuous time for Chicago’s race relations, as city officials deal with the aftermath of the Laquan McDonald police shooting scandal and work to change a long-standing policy of keeping video evidence in police shootings under wraps.

The march on the Near West Side was intended to bring awareness about King’s belief that political equality can’t be achieved without social and economic equality. Protesters called for black workers’ rights, open housing for blacks, the revitalization of black communities and viable jobs.

Protester Gabe Frankel, of the Ravenswood neighborhood, said marching the day after the anniversary of King’s birthday was meaningful, particularly after this week’s release of surveillance video from the January 2013 police shooting of 17-year-old Cedrick Chatman.

“It’s time to step back and reflect to see if we’re meeting the pillars of (King’s) goals,” he said. “I think we’re failing miserably.”

In addition to protesting police brutality, dozens of activists joined the march to advocate for workers’ rights, asking for people of all education and experience to have access to parental leave, paid sick leave, the right to unionize without retaliation and protections against discrimination based on race, gender, past drug offenses or incarceration.

Kejioun Johnson, a McDonald’s employee living in the Roseland neighborhood, said black communities won’t be stabilized until black workers begin receiving fair and equal treatment.

“Low income, low-wage jobs and race (at Chicago’s fast-food restaurants) are one and the same,” he said. “Organizations like McDonald’s suck our community dry. Today, we’re here to reclaim history and continue fighting for our communities.”

Upon being hired for a job, Joseph Wilkerson, who is black, said he’s on the receiving of “hands-end judgment” from co-workers, who set their expectations for him based on his race.

“Black people are more likely to look at a pay cut,” he said. “If there’s a budget problem, you’re the first to be cut off.”

Wilkerson said he hoped that those skeptical about protests could understand that peaceful demonstrations, such as Saturday’s, are one of the few effective ways to get a message across.

“This is the only way we organize. Otherwise, we’re separated,” he said. “This shouldn’t be thought of as a waste of time.”

If the driver of a 1995 Chevy van had used a turn signal, he or she might still own the vehicle. Instead, Homewood police seized the van and turned it over to an auto auction, with money from the sale going to a special fund for the Homewood Police Department.

Police seized the van in July of 2014 following a traffic stop. The driver was charged with failure to signal when required, operation of an uninsured motor vehicle and driving on a revoked license, which is one of the qualifying charges under Article 36 of the Illinois Compiled Statutes, according to Deputy Police Chief Denise McGrath.

She declined to provide any other details about the incident, saying it would jeopardize other police investigations. However, Illinois code states police can seize a car if the license is suspended or revoked for a DUI, reckless homicide or leaving the scene of an accident involving injury or death.

“The court proceedings for property seized is completely separate from the criminal court proceedings and the outcome of each is independent of the other,” McGrath wrote in an email.

“Vehicles that are awarded to the police department, through the court proceedings, comply with regulations that they be used for law enforcement purposes.  I am unable to discuss specifics or provide pictures of the vehicles so as not to compromise officer safety and to protect investigative techniques.”

Homewood Police Chief Denise McGrath can be contacted at (708) 206-3420

The van was one of four vehicles that officials approved for sale at the Nov. 24 Village Board meeting. Others include a 1997 BMW, a 2002 GMC Envoy, and a 2003 Nissan.

Police seized the BMW in March 2014 under the Drug Asset Forfeiture Procedure Act following a traffic stop where the defendant was charged with possession of cannabis between 30 and 500 grams, disobeying a traffic sign and driving without a license on his or her person.

Police seized the GMC Envoy in June 2013 under the Drug Asset Forfeiture Procedure Act following a traffic stop where the defendant was charged with possession of cannabis with intent to deliver and expired registration.

The Nissan was seized in April of 2014 under the Money Laundering Act where the defendant was charged with possession of an altered credit card.

While police departments often use seized vehicles for undercover work before selling them, McGrath declined to say whether Homewood police had done so with any of the cars.

Funds from the sale of these vehicles will support further police work, said Assistant Village Manager Michael Marzal. “We typically use Dyer Auto Auction. Since it is an auction, (the sale price) depends on the vehicle, condition and who is bidding,” he wrote in an email.

“Proceeds go to a police fund that has specific terms on what the monies can be used on.”

Homewood police have seized and auctioned off eight vehicles in recent years, generating $6,174 in revenue.

In 2012, the village received $381 for a 1995 Dodge Intrepid and $337 for a 1994 Olds Cutlass.

In 2014, Homewood received $1,144 for a 2001 Pontiac Bonneville, $880 for a 1995 Lexus LS400, and $484 for a 1997 Chevy Blazer.

In 2015, the village received $1,496 for a 2003 Volkswagen, $1,100 for a Chevrolet Monte Carlo, and $352 for a 1990 Lincoln Town Car.

Homewood Police Department can be contacted at (708) 206-3420.

In this June 8, 2010 file photo, former Chicago Police Lt. Jon Burge arrives at the federal building in Chicago. The city of Chicago has paid $5.5 million in reparations to dozens of people whose claims that they were tortured by a police unit commanded by Burge decades ago were found to be credible.

The city of Chicago has paid out $5.5 million in compensation to dozens of people who claimed to have been victims of police brutality decades ago.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported that all but “five or six” of the 57 people whose claims of being abused were deemed credible received $100,000. The others had received previous settlements and saw those amounts deducted from their share.

The checks have been mailed 44 years after the “first known instance” of torture by a police unit led by former commander Jon Burge and known as the “midnight crew.”

More than 100 men, most of them African-American, have accused Burge and officers under his command of shocking, suffocating and beating them into giving false confessions, some of which landed them on death row. Burge has never been criminally charged with torture, but he served a 4 ½-year sentence for lying about the torture in a civil case and was released from a halfway house last year.

“Reparations is not a necessity,” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told the Sun-Times. “But it is a moral compunction and a moral reckoning to right a wrong. There is no statute of limitations on that

The Sun-Times reports that the latest award to victims is a fraction of the estimated $100 million that has beenpaid in court-ordered judgments, settlements of lawsuits and legal fees — most of it spent by the financially strapped city of Chicago and some by Cook County — over the years related to the torture scandal. The $100,000 payment most victims received Monday is a fraction of some previous settlements.

The payments mark the latest black eye for the police department in the nation’s third-largest city, which has come under withering criticism since the release in November of a video showing white police officer Jason Van Dyke shooting black 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times in 2014.

A months-long claims process for the payments included vetting by an arbitrator and by a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Kent School of Law.

The reparations were part of an ordinance the City Council passed last year that also mandated a formal apology, the construction of a memorial to the victims and the addition of the police torture to the city’s school history curriculum. It also provides psychological counseling and free tuition at some community colleges. Some of the benefits are available to victims’ children and grandchildren.

One torture victim, Darrell Cannon, said Monday that the payments were only the first step toward healing the city.

“We still have a long way to go,” he said.

Cannon was freed after 24 years in prison when a review board determined that evidence against him was tainted. The Sun-Times reported that Cannon has claimed that Burge’s officers played a game of Russian Roulette with him and shocked his genitals with a cattle prod.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel, known for keeping vise-like control over Chicago and his own political image, finds himself in the weakest position of his long public career as he struggles to respond to a police scandal, claims of cover-ups at City Hall and calls for his resignation.

But the former White House chief of staff has said repeatedly that he will not step down. The nation’s third-largest city has no process for a mayor to be recalled. And most of the cries for Emanuel to resign have come from grassroots activists and residents, not from the city’s political powerbrokers. The next election — should he seek another term — isn’t until 2019.

On Wednesday, the mayor used a special meeting of the Chicago City Council to try to calm the firestorm, apologizing for the fatal shooting of a black teen by a white officer and promising “complete and total” reform.

“I take responsibility for what happened because it happened on my watch. And if we’re going to fix it, I want you to understand it’s my responsibility with you,” Emanuel said during a sometimes-emotional speech that lasted nearly 45 minutes. “But if we’re also going to begin the healing process, the first step in that journey is my step.

“And I’m sorry.”

The remarks were Emanuel’s lengthiest and seemingly most heartfelt since the public got its first look last month at the squad car video that showed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald veering away from officer Jason Van Dyke before he began shooting, hitting McDonald 16 times. Van Dyke is charged with first-degree murder.

Critics have repeatedly accused him of keeping the footage under wraps until after he won a tougher-than-expected spring election for a second term. The mayor has denied the claim and acknowledged Wednesday that he should have pressed for prosecutors to wrap up their investigation sooner so the video could be made public.

But his contrition did little to ease the anger in the streets. Hours after the speech, protesters overflowed an intersection in front of City Hall, then marched through the financial district and blocked a major intersection for a short time as police directed traffic around them. Officers guarded the doors to the Chicago Board of Trade as demonstrators approached.

Outside City Hall, retired schoolteacher Audrey Davis carried a sign reading, “Mayor Emanuel is morally corrupt!”

Calling the speech “politically expedient,” Davis said, “I don’t want to hear anything from him except, ‘I tender my resignation.'”

Davis, who is black, said she fears for her 25-year-old grandson when he comes home from college.

“Each time he comes home, my heart is in my throat in case he meets up with a racist cop,” Davis said. “We shouldn’t have to live like this.”

Since the video emerged, Emanuel has scrambled to contain the crisis. He fired his police superintendent after days of insisting the chief had his support. He also reversed course on whether the Justice Department should launch a civil-rights investigation, saying he would welcome it only after presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and other top Democrats endorsed the idea.

In news conferences, he has appeared worn down, fumbling answers to reporters’ questions or avoiding them entirely by walking away, with cameras rolling.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen him grapple with anything quite like this,” said longtime ally and adviser David Axelrod, who also served with Emanuel in the Obama White House.

Axelrod said Emanuel worked on the speech all weekend, with input from him and others. But he said the speech alone isn’t what matters.

“You don’t earn trust back with one speech,” Axelrod said. “You earn trust back with actions.”

The most likely effect of the crisis will come in the form of pushback from aldermen, who have long been considered a rubber stamp for the mayor’s initiatives, said political consultant Delmarie Cobb. She said the black community “has been awakened,” and Emanuel can expect a tougher re-election if he tries again.

“He definitely won’t run unopposed, and it will be a viable candidate,” said Cobb, who is black.

The mayor won re-election in April by a healthy margin, but only after suffering the embarrassment of not getting a majority in a five-candidate February election, forcing the first mayoral runoff in decades.

At the time, he pledged to listen more and to “bridge the gaps between the things that divide us.”

In the months that followed, his public schools CEO, who oversaw closings of about 50 schools that angered many residents, was indicted on corruption charges. Emanuel also pushed through the largest tax increase in city history to deal with a budget crisis.

His administration has warned of massive mid-year layoffs in the public schools and is in the midst of rocky contract negotiations with the Chicago Teachers Union. This week, union members are voting on whether to authorize a strike. They could hit the picket lines as early as March.

After the video was made public, other flashpoints kept coming. Footage was released of another police shooting — this one deemed justified by prosecutors — and of another man who died in police custody. A review by the city’s quasi-independent police watchdog agency showed that of 409 shootings involving police since 2007, the agency found only two with credible allegations against an officer.

Police reports from the McDonald shooting included officer accounts that differed dramatically from the video.

In his speech, Emanuel noted the problems are ones that have plagued Chicago for decades, and that there are no simple solutions.

“We have to be honest with ourselves about this issue. Each time when we confronted it in the past, Chicago only went far enough to clear our consciences so we could move on,” he said. “This time will and must be different.”

The main Chicago police union is standing behind the white officer who was charged this week with first-degree murder for gunning down a black teenager. It is facing a backlash from leaders of the city’s black community as a result.

On its website, the Chicago lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), has posted a bail fund appeal for the officer, Jason Van Dyke, who is accused of shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times just six seconds after emerging from his patrol car on a street in Chicago on Oct. 20, 2014. An earlier link on the FOP’s front page to a GoFundMe campaign was removed after the fundraising site said it violated a policy against its use by criminal defendants.

The FOP also is paying the lawyer representing Van Dyke, Daniel Herbert, himself a former FOP member the union pays to represent Chicago cops in misconduct cases. Funding such a defense is a common practice among U.S. police unions.

The FOP’s support for Van Dyke appears to have support within the union, according to email and phone interviews Reuters conducted with a number of white and black active-duty and retired cops, as well as union and black police association officials.

They stopped short of defending Van Dyke’s actions – which were caught in a graphic video made public this week – but did say it was important to place them in the context of a racially divided city beset by violence.

Some of the officers say they are concerned the city’s police force has become a political football and is not getting enough support from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and police chief Garry McCarthy. These officers also say the decision by Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez to charge Van Dyke with first-degree murder, rather than the lesser charge of second-degree murder, was a politically motivated effort to head off outrage about the video.

“First degree is a high bar to set, and of course it’s political,” said one active duty police officer who asked not to be named, and who responded to written questions from Reuters by email.

A second police officer said most people would not understand the pressures on Van Dyke and other cops when they are dealing with someone holding a weapon, in this case a knife, and have to make split-second decisions.

“A police officer sees that video and has a different mindset than the rest of the people out there. It could be one of us,” the officer said.

UNION CONTRACT

Dion Trotter, president of the Cook County chapter of the National Black Police Association, said a 13-month delay in releasing the video of Van Dyke shooting McDonald frayed relations with the community.  “Those kinds of things begin to break down the trust between police and community,” Trotter said.

But Trotter backs the FOP’s decision to stand behind Van Dyke. “It’s the FOP’s job to support him,” he said.

The turmoil over the case – protesters blocked streets this week and disrupted Black Friday shopping on Chicago’s “Magnificent Mile” — has shone a spotlight on a police department unable to stanch violence in the city’s poor, black neighborhoods.

A group of African American aldermen last week called for the ouster of McCarthy, a key member of Emanuel’s administration. One also stated the police union contract, which expires in 2017, will now be scrutinized.

“Our caucus has vowed to work with other caucuses and other of our colleagues to review the FOP contract to make sure there are tougher policies and sanctions against police officers who do egregious or illegal acts,” said Alderman Pat Dowell.

McCarthy put Van Dyke on administrative duty soon after the shooting, but under terms of the FOP contract the cop still drew a police paycheck until he was charged with murder on Tuesday.

The police chief and the mayor have defended the delays in charging Van Dyke and releasing the video. They said their hands were tied, in part by the city’s agreement with the union.

Dean Angelo, president of the local lodge of the FOP, dismissed criticism from lawmakers who he noted had unanimously approved the FOP contract. “Now, because it’s advantageous to their political career,  the FOP contract needs to go.”

He also defended the FOP’s decision to post the appeal for a bail bond on its website, saying that no members have complained.

One concern among black city council members is the frequent use of lethal force by Chicago cops. In the seven years between 2008-2014, 74 percent of people shot by police in Chicago were black. Chicago police shot an average of 50 people a year in that period, against 31 a year for Los Angeles, 27 in New York City, and 14 in Houston. To be sure, though, Chicago’s murder rate – at 17 per 100,000 people – is significantly higher than the other cities over the same period.

In almost all cases, investigations of the Chicago Police Department’s officer-involved shootings find that lethal force is justified. However, the city spent $358 million from 2008-2014 to settle lawsuits against the city, the vast majority having to do with police misconduct. In the McDonald case, city lawyers preempted a lawsuit by agreeing to a $5 million settlement of all McDonald family claims arising from the case.

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