I suspect that there may be less to these numbers than meets the eye.
Specifically, I suspect that a lot of whether a given cop has complaints and settlements has more to do with what type of work he’s involved in and which part of the city than it does to with his approach to policing.
Meaning there could be many good cops with a lot of complaints against them and many bad cops with few or none.
Here’s some more numbers for you, also from Chicago. Chicago, like a lot of places is expanding their use of dashcams and bodycams. The Chicago PD is actively sabotaging those cameras.
Chicago Police Have Been Sabotaging Their Dash Cams
The Chicago DP interim superintendant John Escalante has implemented spot checks and fines for officers who don’t have functional cameras. Two dozen cops have been disciplined so far -
Nearly 2 dozen Chicago cops disciplined for faulty dashboard cameras
So, it’s nice that they’re starting to take steps, but you know, it wasn’t just a handful of bad apples running around disabling everybody else’s dashcams.
Hopefully, cop culture can change. If not, I guess we all need to start wearing our own livestreaming bodycams.
IANAPoliceman, but here’s how I’ve heard it: Even cops who aren’t bullies and wife-abusers find themselves in a situation where someone they know needs to be taken off the street, but it ain’t gonna happen without cutting a few corners. They don’t get gold stars in Heaven from letting a known (to him, not the courts) menace skate on a technicality. A cop’s role isn’t to serve and protect and keep his hands clean, it’s to let the city keep running and let businesses do their business.
That what they do in Russia; motorists use dash cams as protection against corrupt police (& insurance scams). I’d like to think our police are better than theirs, but the jury’s still out.
Without reliable numbers we can’t know the answer to the OP.
How many senior officers have been disciplined for the failures of their staff?
I don’t know. I’m not sure that’s relevant to the question of whether there’s an epidemic. I would agree that inconveniencing the senior officers would be a help in effecting change.
To be fair, I can totally see how bodycams could be interpreted as unwanted and unneeded surveillance- as a sort of nanny measure implemented by jittery politicians to monitor grown men who are well trained, experienced professionals.
I’d fucking rebel too, if my workplace was literally recording everything I did on my computer over the course of the workday, and requiring me to upload it every day, based on what some other assholes did at some other company in some other state.
That said, there is definitely a CYA component to them for good cops, but even at that, I can totally see how they would be viewed as a massive breach of trust and faith, and an implicit discounting / disbelief in one’s professionalism as a law enforcement officer.
Finally, is IS Chicago, a city with a government not known for being a shining example of integrity, honesty and above-board dealings, so I’m not really sure in the case of Chicago.
To be fair, if you were caught destroying your employer’s equipment, your opinions on the nanny state would not stop them from firing your ass and handing you a bill for the damage. You certainly would not be allowed to go on damaging it, repeatedly, for months on end.
To be fair, Police Departments need to get more aggressive about firing rebel officers.
It takes a healthy does of hypocrisy for the organizations that are responsible for undercover surveillance, license plate readers (and aggregating that data so they can keep tabs on your and my whereabouts), collecting texts, GPS, and other information from your cell phone via fake cell towers (Stingray devices), petitioning the government to ban encryption technologies or leave backdoors for law enforcement in their code, etc to be upset about their privacy being trampled via dash cams.
You do realize that NYPD has been recruiting nationally for years due to an inability to attract qualified applicants, don’t you?
This thread has some relevant links.
In the recent case of the Sammy Yatim shooting in Toronto, one thing that was noted was that the police officer, Joseph Forcillo, had pulled his gun on a surprising number of suspects over the previous few years.
I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but what was immediately striking was that the stats on Toronto police pulling their guns were extremely skewed; it wasn’t a bell curve. The majority of police officers draw their weapons basically never, or once in a blue moon, and then a small percentage draw them once or twice a year, and then a tiny number are pulling the guns out far more than anyone else.
That’s only one thing, of course, but then we see that a very small number of Chicago cops are messing with the dash cams, and I’m sure we could find other examples. While these anecdotes prove little, they are rather suspiciously similar to what common sense and almost everyone’s personal experience should dictate. In every single job I have ever been in, the bad apples are few, in any area of behaviour.
The problem is not that all cops are bad, it’s that the good ones protect them.
I wouldn’t call it an “epidemic.” People need to keep in mind that there are hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officials, interacting with millions of civilians, suspects, and criminals every day. Even in a near perfect system, there would still be daily instances of abuse, corruption, misconduct, etc.