Chicago Police Research Articles

Everyday police work during mental health encounters: A study of call resolutions in Chicago and their implications for diversion.

In recent decades, there has been sustained focus on police responses to persons experiencing mental health crises. The Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) model has been a seminal effort to improve safety, reduce arrests and enhance the use of emergency psychiatric assessment. With CIT well established, new discussions have emerged around how to further enhance the police-public health interface, including diversion from hospital emergency departments. In this context, this article takes stock of current police practices, utilizing descriptive data on 428 mental health-related calls addressed by Chicago Police over 3years triangulated with insights from 21 in-depth officer interviews. During these calls, hospital transports were conducted more often than arrests. Moreover, informal interventions - without any legal action or hospitalization - were used most often, speaking to the "gray zone" nature of mental health-related encounters. Taken together, the data reveal the need for non-crisis diversion options that address chronic vulnerabilities.

A Clear View from the Prairie: Harold Washington and the People of Illinois Respond to Federal Encroachment of Human Rights

The national debate over sanctuary cities demonstrates the deep divide between local community protection of its members and federal law that disrupts family and community bonds. This article discusses two Chicago efforts to prohibit city police from enforcing federal laws. Former Mayor Harold Washington issued his first 1985 Executive Order prohibiting city employees, including police, from cooperating with federal immigration officers unless required by law. Responding to misuse of city records and discriminatory tactics by federal officers, Mayor Washington recognized that civic harmony and health depended upon community trust that Chicago would not partner with federal immigration enforcement. Over a century earlier, the Chicago Common Council, after finding that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 undermined justice and dishonored humanity, prohibited Chicago police from assisting in the apprehension and removal of slaves. This article examines these two Chicago responses to federal law by: (1) examining the shifting relationship between local and federal enforcement of immigration law since the colonial days; (2) providing the context and rationale for Mayor Washington’s Executive Order 85-1; (3) exploring the context and rationale for the Chicago Common Council’s 1850 order; (4) addressing the proposed 2003 national legislation that sought to require municipal police to assist in enforcing federal immigration law; and (5) surveying the breadth of Mayor Washington’s vision for city government in protecting all community members. His vision to protect human rights, ban discrimination, and build a secure community demonstrated the distinct disadvantages of the proposed Clear Law Enforcement for Criminal Alien Removal Act of 2003 and the Homeland Security Enhancement Act of 2003. Although neither bill was enacted, Mayor Washington’s vision continues to provide a critique of efforts to involve municipal police in enforcement of immigration law.

How Can Violence Among Urban Youth Be Stopped?

How Can Violence Among Urban Youth Be Stopped?

The Role of Allegations in the Labeling of Wrongdoers: Misconduct in the Chicago Police Department

Research on misconduct has explored both what causes actors to commit certain behaviors as well as the consequences of those actions when they become public knowledge. However, less attention has b...

Racial accountabilities: the legal legibility of racial state violence in the Special State’s Attorney Report on Police Torture in Chicago

ABSTRACTPublic inquiries command significant political capital for liberal democratic states that premise their authority on being accountable to a generalized public sphere. By attending to the particular relations of visibility that are generated by these investigative state institutions, this article reveals the differentiated forms of legal and political accountability that structure the proceedings and case history of the 2006 Special State’s Attorney Report, which investigated the torture of African American suspects by Chicago police officers under the supervision of former Commander Jon Burge. More specifically, this article documents the racial relations of power that shape how state actors and institutions are made to answer for their conduct, explicating the ‘racial accountabilities’ that mediated this public inquiry as well as the practices of state violence it was tasked with investigating. On the one hand, these forms of accountability focused blame on the individualized actions of particular state actors, abstracting their conduct from the broader systemic conditions that have rendered African American populations vulnerable to racial state violence. On the other hand, this article explains how the forensic gaze deployed throughout the legal investigations into torture reconstituted its victims as objects of law with differential access to its forms of protection and technologies of redress. By detailing the force and dimensions of these racial accountabilities, this article illustrates how public inquiries and other institutions of law can reproduce and extend racial fields of violence while also regenerating public confidence in the efficacy and equality of the state.

The Nature of Animal Crime: Scope and Severity in Chicago

This study sought to contribute to our sociological understanding of animal crime. Using Chicago Police Department data that include primary and secondary charges of all animal crimes between 2009 and 2012, findings indicate that most animal crime offenders were male, African American or Hispanic, and under 35 years. When other crimes were committed with animal crime, they were likely drug or weapons offenses. Juveniles arrested for animal crimes tended to commit more severe animal crimes than adult offenders. Finally, regression results indicated that race was positively related to animal crime severity, while concurrent drug offenses were inversely related to animal crime severity. Implications for theory, research, and policy are discussed.

Networked Microgrids: Exploring the Possibilities of the IIT-Bronzeville Grid

Bronzeville is a community located in the city of Chicago that features a diverse historic district with essential city services, residential housing, and educational institutions. The Bronzeville neighborhood houses the headquarters of the Chicago Police and Fire Department, De La Salle Institute, Illinois College of Optometry, Boulevard Care Center, Chicago Public Library, Pilgrim Baptist Church, Bronzeville Nursing and Living Center, Chicago Military Academy, Pentecostal Church, Perspectives Math & Science Academy, and other institutions. The area provides an ideal location for the continued refinement and development of advanced electric power services, which can be demonstrated through the implementation of a community microgrid: the Bronzeville community microgrid (BCM). The BCM is the backbone of a planned community of the future, where residents and critical facilities enjoy a sustainable environment and utilize innovative smart grid products. The BCM can serve as a pilot project for demonstrating the merits of instituting Chicago as a smart city. Distribution automation devices capable of fault interruption and sectionalization will be strategically deployed so that a fault would only result in a local outage rather than an interruption to the entire area. The BCM operation will comprise several types of distributed energy resources (DER s). A battery energy storage system (BESS) located in close proximity to photovoltaic panels provides an effective means to mitigate the variability of renewable energy. The BESS is also effective in improving the power quality at customer sites.

“The Public Does Not Believe the Police Can Police Themselves”: The Mayoral Administration of Harold Washington and the Problem of Police Impunity

The article examines the tenure of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor, and his relationship to the Chicago Police Department (CPD). It suggests that while police accountability had been a long-standing goal of Washington and his allies, he failed to sufficiently address the impunity of the CPD once elected. From the outset, the Washington administration exemplified this contradiction by appointing the police department’s first black superintendent, but one who would leave in place a failed structure of a police accountability that made it possible to cover up an ongoing pattern of police torture and coerced confessions. These cases of police torture throw into relief the obstacles faced by this first generation of black mayors who attempted to uproot the institutional underpinnings of police impunity amid the emergence of mass incarceration.

Predictable Policing: Predictive Crime Mapping and Geographies of Policing and Race

This article draws on critical geographic engagements with policing and race and geographic information systems (GIS) to investigate the implications that predictive crime mapping has for racialized modes of urban policing. Focusing on the Chicago Police Department (CPD), it analyzes collaborations between geographic information scientists, crime experts, and police who have recently begun integrating temporal data into GIS-based maps to predict when and where future crimes will occur. The article builds the case that predictive crime mapping further entrenches and legitimizes racialized policing as it (1) rearticulates police data sets as scientifically valid and (2) correlates those data with other geocoded information to create new rationalizations for controlling racialized districts through differential policing practices. The article uses a mixed-methods approach that includes analysis of open-ended interviews with computer scientists involved with the CPD's Predictive Analytics Group and city technical documents to explain the recursive relation between GIS-based knowledge production and racialized policing. The article casts into relief the central role that the production of geographic information plays in current modes of racialized policing and how this contributes to the ongoing racial differentiation of urban geographies.

Do #AllLivesMatter? An Evaluation of Race and Excessive Use of Force by Police

There is anecdotal evidence showing that African-Americans are more likely to be subjected to excessive use of force by police than are people of other races. The counterargument is that these issues are not related to race and there are other factors at work. There have been several high-profile cases, such as those in Ferguson, Cleveland, and Baton Rouge. In this study, we estimate the effect of race on excessive use of force incidents using a new dataset comprising citizen complaints against the Chicago Police Department. Our findings show that not only does race play a role in excessive use of force complaints, but also that race plays a role in which complaints are sustained. Our study also highlights the importance of having data on which to perform rigorous empirical analysis in order to inform policymakers.

Building Community, Breaking Barriers: Little Free Libraries and Local Action in the United States

Building Community, Breaking Barriers: Little Free Libraries and Local Action in the United States

Digitize and punish: Computerized crime mapping and racialized carceral power in Chicago

While critical attention has recently turned to racialized police violence in US cities, another quiet development in urban policing is taking place. Hundreds of police departments have begun to wed database software with geographic information systems to represent crime cartographically. Focusing on the Chicago police’s digital mapping application, CLEARmap, the article interprets this development from the standpoint of racialized carceral power. It puts critical geographic information systems theory into discussion with critical ethnic studies and builds the case that CLEARmap does not passively “read” urban space, but provides ostensibly scientific ways of reading and policing negatively racialized fractions of surplus labor in ways that reproduces, and in some instances extends the tentacles of carceral power. CLEARmap’s data structure ensures that negatively racialized fractions of surplus labor, the places they inhabit, and the social problems that afflict them are only representable to state authorities and the public as objects of policing and punishment. CLEARmap is also used at police–community meetings and via the Internet to adapt public perceptions of crime to that of the policing apparatus, and mobilize the public as appendages of police surveillance. By tracing these phenomena, the article casts a heretofore untheorized dimension of the carceral power into sharp relief.

The Men Who Lived Underground: The Chicago Police Torture Cases and the Problem of Measuring Police Violence, 1970-2016

Historical data on the use of force by police officers in the United States are unreliable or nonexistent. Available data, moreover, focus primarily on the behavior of patrolmen on the streets while neglecting violence by detectives during criminal investigations. Through an examination of a police torture scandal in Chicago from the early 1970s through the late 1990s, this article explains why violence during custodial interrogation often goes undocumented. In Chicago, the primary method of discovering, correcting, or preventing custodial abuse—pretrial motions to suppress statements—proved inadequate. By including the work of detectives, this article argues that a true measurement of police violence, impossible in practice, would likely be much higher than official data suggest.

Pedagogical Subversion: The "Un-American" Graphics of Kevin Pyle

Pedagogical Subversion:The "Un-American" Graphics of Kevin Pyle1 Allan Antliff (bio) In her study Anarchism and Education, Judith Suissa argues that anarchist learning entails a constant interplay of tensions arising from emergent desires to transform society and the challenges society poises for realizing them. This is inescapable because a critical attitude is integral to an anarchist process of learning, infusing it with creative license premised on the conviction that we need not accept things as they are, that learning is not only a space for understanding, but also enactment (Suissa 150). My purpose is to explore this dynamic in the work of graphic artist Kevin Pyle, an American-born artist with a substantive body of illustrated books and comics addressing a myriad of issues. I am interested in how Pyle undermines and subverts narratives of "Americanness" which figure in the political imaginary of the United States. More specifically, I will explore how Pyle unravels one of the most powerful ideological weapons in the political lexicon of United States nationalism—the label "un-American." Perhaps the most appropriate way to unpack the etymology of "un-American," in keeping with Pyle's politics and his subversive agenda, is to review its historical application to anarchists. The term was liberally bandied about in the mass media after an anarchist-attributed attack on Chicago police in 1886 (the so-called "Haymarket riot"),2 but government-designated un-American status dates to the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 by an American-born anarchist of Polish descent. This inspired Congress to pass the Immigration Act (also known as the "Anarchist Exclusion Act"), which President Roosevelt signed into law on March 3, 1903. The Act decreed: no person who disbelieves in or who is opposed to organized government, or who is a member of or affiliated with any organization entertaining and teaching such disbelief in or opposition to all organized government, or who advocates or teaches the duty, necessity, or propriety of the unlawful assaulting or killing of any officer or officers, either of specific individuals or of officers generally, of the Government of the United States or of any other organized government, because of his or their official character, or who has violated any of the provisions of this Act, shall be naturalized or be made a citizen of the United States. (United States Fifty-Seventh) [End Page 95] Anarchists who gained entry to the United States under false pretenses were to be deported and anyone who abetted an anarchist's attempt to enter the United States and gain residency was liable to be fined up to $5,000 or imprisoned for up to ten years, or suffer both penalties (United States Fifty-Seventh). Thereafter the pale of "un-Americanism" haunted anarchists, their publications, and their activities: politicians, the law courts, newspaper reporters and other public figures made frequent recourse to this nationalist slur.3 Despite the condemnation, anarchists continued fomenting dissent that crossed into "un-American" territory. For example, in August 1914, Emma Goldman's Mother Earth journal, which was anarchism's most widely-read English-language publication in the United States, responded to the advent of World War I with an illustration by Man Ray depicting a monstrous beast with two heads—"capitalism" and "government"—ripping "humanity" apart in its jaws (Ray). War, the journal declared, was "permanently fostered by the present social system," which could not exist without it ("International"). Capitalism was founded on exploitation and it could only be maintained through state-sanctioned violence or the threat of violence in times of peace, as well as war ("International").4 This critique was not only directed at Europe's nation-states; it was countering a conservative-orchestrated "preparedness" campaign focused on militarizing the United States so it could join the conflict (Goldman).5 In keeping with this analysis, anarchists called for social revolution, not only in Europe, but in the United States as well.6 Government response was swift and brutal. Once President Wilson declared war on Germany and its allies in April 1917, the United States Congress passed the Espionage Act, which criminalized anyone promoting insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny or avoidance of the draft (United States Sixty-Fifth). Anarchists...

Neighborhood Girls by Jessie Ann Foley

Reviewed by: Neighborhood Girls by Jessie Ann Foley Karen Coats Foley, Jessie Ann Neighborhood Girls. HarperTeen/HarperCollins, 2017 368p Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-06-257185-4 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-06-257190-8 $9.99 R Gr. 7-10 When Wendy Boychuck’s father was arrested for brutally abusing his power as a Chicago police officer, Boychuck became a household name shellacked with shame. At first, high school junior Wendy depended on Alexis, her quiet, studious best friend, to help her through the public humiliation, but when Wendy was savagely beaten by a classmate, she dumped Alexis for Kenzie, the meanest girl in school, and the protection she offered. Now Wendy overlooks Kenzie’s faults and relies on being friends with the girl nobody challenges—but when Alexis unexpectedly fights back against Kenzie’s bullying, what will Wendy do? Foley creates narrative intimacy through a textured mix of high school drama, family dynamics, ripped-from-the-headlines scenarios, a richly drawn setting, hints of the supernatural, and heartfelt grief. Wendy’s ambivalence toward the dehumanizing effects of the life she has chosen is held up to scrutiny by her reflections on the icons of her faith (she finds sanctuary in her Catholic school) as well as on other girls from her neighborhood who had lost their lives over the years and yet live on in superstitious lore. If the nuns at her school are occasionally objects of teen ridicule, they are also multifaceted and admirable; in fact, with the exception of Kenzie and her crew, the young and old women in this book represent levels of strength, conviction, and faith that create an ethos of forgiveness and hope for Wendy. This compelling portrait of real life, with all of its messes, mistakes, and compromises, will inspire girls to see their ordinary neighborhoods in a new light. Copyright © 2017 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Shadow Behind the Real: Spike Lee Does Chicago

When he began principal shooting in Chicago in summer 2015, Spike Lee assured audiences that Chi-Raq would engage the issue of violence on Chicago's South Side with intention and purpose. Chicagoans were skeptical because of Lee's use of the portmanteau phrase, which had been the subject of much debate in the city, as the film's title. Written almost entirely in verse, Chi-Raq is an adaptation of classical Greek playwright Aristophanes's comedy Lysistrata that marks an extension of Lee's use of satire. Despite Lee's promises, he flails outside of his native Brooklyn. The film primarily adopts a didactic and reductionist view, blaming black Chicagoans for their own “self-inflicted genocide” and encouraging them to put their trust in the notoriously corrupt Chicago Police Department.

Post-Discharge Needs of Victims of Gun Violence in Chicago: A Qualitative Study.

The purpose of this study was to understand the post-discharge needs of violently injured patients and their families to improve health outcomes and reduce the impact of gun violence. We recruited 10 patients from the trauma registry of a Midwestern university hospital with a Level 1 Trauma Center (L1TC). After obtaining the informed consent, semi-structured, face-to-face, in-depth interviews were conducted. Discussions focused on post-discharge needs and resources to facilitate the recovery and rehabilitation process, and aid in community reintegration. Interviews were audiotaped and transcribed verbatim. Transcripts were analyzed thematically in stages of open, axial, and selective coding methods. Seven main themes were identified at the hospital and community level. These included the following: (a) feeling stigmatized by hospital personnel, (b) patient-provider communication, (c) feeling discharged too soon, (d) issues in obtaining medicines, (e) challenges with Chicago Police Department, (f) transportation to trauma center for follow-up care, and (g) concerns with returning back to the community. Patients reported the need for mental health counseling for themselves and their family, more follow-up, and help with financial paperwork among others. For the victims of gun violence, there exists a chasm between injury and care, and an even wider one between care and rehabilitation. The findings can inform health care, social workers, and rehabilitation professionals in their efforts to better address the myriad of unmet needs pre- and post-discharge. For trauma centers, the identified needs provide a template for developing an individualized- and community-centered resource pathway to improve outcomes and reduce suffering for this particularly vulnerable subset of patients.

Predictions put into practice: a quasi-experimental evaluation of Chicago’s predictive policing pilot

Objectives In 2013, the Chicago Police Department conducted a pilot of a predictive policing program designed to reduce gun violence. The program included development of a Strategic Subjects List (SSL) of people estimated to be at highest risk of gun violence who were then referred to local police commanders for a preventive intervention. The purpose of this study is to identify the impact of the pilot on individual- and city-level gun violence, and to test possible drivers of results.

Neighborhood Violent Crime and Academic Growth in Chicago: Lasting Effects of Early Exposure.

A large body of research documents the importance of early experiences for later academic, social, and economic success. Exposure to an unsafe neighborhood is no exception. Living in a violent neighborhood can influence the stress levels, protective behaviors, and community interactions of both parents and children in ways that generate cumulative educational disadvantage. Using nine years (2002-2011) of detailed crime data from the Chicago Police Department and longitudinal administrative data from the Chicago Public Schools, I estimate the influence of early exposure to neighborhood violence on growth in standardized test scores over time. Student fixed-effects are included to remove any bias due to constant differences between students. The results show that children from more violent neighborhoods fall farther behind their peers from safer neighborhoods as they progress through school. These effects are comparable in size to the independent association with socioeconomic disadvantage and an annual measure of more recent neighborhood violence exposure.

The Sociology of Animal Crime: An Examination of Incidents and Arrests in Chicago

ABSTRACTThis study seeks to sociologically examine the patterns of animal crime in one large American city. Using Chicago Police Department animal crimes data, this research analyzes the types of crimes perpetrated, characteristics related to animal crime, and patterns of arrest. Findings indicate that a majority of animal crime was classified as abuse/neglect. High animal crime areas had higher rates of crime, more socioeconomic hardship, and more African-American residents. Compared to abuse/neglect, animal fighting was more likely to occur in community areas with more socioeconomic hardship, and animal crimes were more likely to result in arrest when they occurred in areas with more hardship.