The Chicago Consent Decree and the Fallacy of Police Reform

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In this Article, I discuss the state of police reform in Chicago, starting with the findings of two recent official investigations into the Chicago Police Department: the 2017 Department of Justice report and the 2016 Police Accountability Task Force report. I discuss the empirical data unveiled by these investigations, and the reports’ conclusions that the Chicago Police Department continues to consistently violate the Constitutional rights of primarily Black and Brown Chicagoans. Next, I detail the reforms that these reports proposed, and discuss the investigations’ role in the city of Chicago’s decision to enter into a consent decree with the Office of the Illinois Attorney General. I then discuss the Chicago Police Department’s failure to implement the majority of the consent decree’s requirements in the first year that the agreement has been in effect, according to reports from the court-appointed Independent Monitoring Team, and the Inspector General. In the final part of the paper, I detail the historical context, and the fact that the consent decree is the latest in a long line of failed efforts at reforming the Chicago Police Department. I discuss the arguments of the Movement for Black Lives, which rejects liberal police reform in favor of the transformational change of the abolitionist vision. I ultimately agree with this conclusion, and I argue that policing cannot be reformed, even with the federal consent decree, which has been the most powerful reform implemented thus far. I argue that the only way to end racist police killings and the oppressive role of policing in society is to abolish policing and the entire Prison Industrial Complex.