Editorial: Former Chicago IG Joe Ferguson sounds the alarm on police reform. He’s right to do so.
The needless, tragic murder of Laquan McDonald, a Black teen, by a white Chicago police officer in 2014 put the city’s Police Department, and the need to reform it, in the national spotlight. McDonald’s death was a driving force behind the federally mandated consent decree that requires the Chicago Police Department to overhaul its training, supervision and accountability.
Since then, however, that national spotlight has faded. Unfortunately, also fading fast is the city’s drive to earnestly and expeditiously carry out the consent decree’s reforms, said Joe Ferguson, the city’s former inspector general.
The Tribune reports that in a June 5 letter appearing in a federal court filing, Ferguson painted a bleak portrait of the city’s commitment to bringing meaningful, lasting change to a department that has seen trust from the communities it serves ebb year after year.
“Consent Decree implementation and monitoring is a faltering undertaking both in substantive accomplishment and in transparency,” Ferguson wrote. “In the absence of a hard methodological and operational reset, I believe the Consent Decree is at high risk of failing to achieve its objectives.”
Ferguson was the city’s inspector general from 2009 to 2021. He’s a trusted voice when it comes to unvarnished assessments of what’s awry with how the city’s being run. He’s also a potential candidate for Cook County state’s attorney in 2024, and while he may be trying to ratchet up his own visibility with voters, we’re not bothered by that. His message needs to be heard.
Ferguson’s correct when he says progress with the consent decree has been unacceptably slow. Maggie Hickey, the independent monitor assigned by the federal court to evaluate the city’s progress with the consent decree, has consistently cited the city’s failure to meet implementation deadlines.
It took years for the department to put in place a permanent foot pursuit policy, even though the consent decree, enacted in early 2019, demanded it. CPD established the policy only after withering criticism about police shooting deaths during foot chases, most notably the tragic killing of 13-year-old Adam Toledo by a Chicago police officer in 2021.
Ferguson takes aim not just at City Hall and CPD, but also at Hickey, calling on her to be far more public in her assessments of consent decree progress. “Beyond voluminous technical reports, the (Independent Monitor Team) must be charged with conducting its work and exercising voice in a far more regular and public way than has been the case these last four plus years,” Ferguson wrote.
From our vantage point, Hickey has performed ably. She doesn’t pull punches, and her evaluations of CPD implementation of the consent decree are comprehensive and fair. Moreover, the consent decree essentially bars Hickey and her team from making public statements.
But we agree that visibility by the Independent Monitor Team is crucial to CPD’s mission to reform and to be seen to be doing so. It can be done without stepping outside the boundaries of the consent decree.
Hickey’s team has a website that posts periodic reports on CPD’s progress toward consent decree compliance. Those are helpful, but far more frequent updates on consent decree work — in reader-friendly form — would be even more useful for Chicagoans, who otherwise may be oblivious to Hickey’s work. Hickey’s team also has conducted community surveys on the Police Department and the consent decree. Again, that’s useful, but it seems there’s more room for stronger engagement between the Independent Monitoring Team and communities, perhaps via a series of public hearings or town halls.
But it’s CPD and City Hall — and not Hickey — that are tasked with consent decree implementation, and doing so at the proper pace.
We will watch closely how much of a commitment Mayor Brandon Johnson makes toward consent decree adherence. That effort starts with hiring a police superintendent who will embrace the consent decree as a genuine bridge toward community trust-building rather than just a bureaucratic box to check. And it starts with CPD ensuring that it has the needed personnel and resources to carry out reforms.
Recently, that’s been far from the case. The last person in charge of reform efforts, Tina Skahill, submitted her resignation earlier this month. Her predecessor, Robert Boik, was fired by former police Superintendent David Brown after he questioned Brown’s decision to divert to patrol duty several dozen members of his police reform office.
Ferguson said in his letter: “For meaningful reform to reach critical mass, the city must be prodded — repeatedly and publicly.”
Fine, we’ll be glad to prod.
City Hall’s motivation for implementing the consent decree shouldn’t just come from the fact that it’s court-mandated. Johnson and the rest of the city just experienced an election in which public safety was the No. 1 concern on the minds of voters. The challenge that violent crime poses to Chicago is existential. People will continue to leave in alarming numbers as long as they fear a stray bullet will hit their kids in the front yard, or on the school playground.
Other cities have experienced what happens when police departments trample on civil rights and rely on brutality to keep order. The Justice Department on Friday released a scathing report on the Minneapolis police force, laying out a longstanding pattern of discrimination and abuses that served as a precursor to the murder of George Floyd in 2021. It’s a damning account of years-long police misconduct in Minneapolis, one with which Chicagoans can certainly identify.
Police reform isn’t a cure-all, but it’s a critical component to the fix. When communities trust law enforcement, cooperation from Chicagoans improves — and crime goes down. But reforms can only take root if the city’s commitment to the consent decree is genuine and enduring.
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