In case poetry and gender isn’t your thing, here’s some­thing from today’s NYT:

Chicago police offi­cers are the sub­ject of more bru­tal­ity com­plaints per offi­cer than the national aver­age, and the Police Depart­ment is far less likely to pursue abuse cases seri­ously than the national norm, a legal team at the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago reported Wednesday….

The national aver­age among large police depart­ments for excessive-​force com­plaints is 9.5 per 100 full-​time offi­cers. For a depart­ment of Chicago’s size (13,500, second only to New York), that would cor­re­spond to 1,283 com­plaints a year. From 1999 to 2004, how­ever, cit­i­zens filed about 1,774 bru­tal­ity com­plaints a year against Chicago offi­cers [i.e. 13.1 out of 100 officers].

The report from the U. of C. Police Account­abil­ity Project also says:

Less than five per­cent of the Depart­ment account for nearly half of all abuse com­plaints against the CPD. Indeed, 662 Chicago police offi­cers, a little less than 5% of the CPD’s 13,500 member force, amassed 11 or more offi­cial mis­con­duct com­plaints between 2001 and 2006. Because the vast major­ity of offi­cers get only a few com­plaints in their entire careers, it is easy to iden­tify those who may be engaged in a pat­tern of abu­sive behav­ior. They lit­er­ally jump off the page….Yet, the CPD refuses to look or allow others to look at its “repeater” data. It chooses not to know—avoiding crit­i­cal self-​examination and fight­ing public and judi­cial scrutiny of its practices….

As the num­bers detailed above illus­trate plainly, “not know­ing” about police abuse in Chicago requires a great deal of active effort. It requires a deep com­mit­ment to the machin­ery of denial, includ­ing deny­ing inci­dents of bru­tal­ity, turn­ing a blind eye to pat­terns of abuse, refus­ing to look at data that is just a key stroke or two away, and pas­sively encour­ag­ing a cul­ture of silence in the face of abuse per­pe­trated by fellow officers.