More Numbers Trouble
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.
