An analysis of five decades of police records by The Chicago Tribune found that a small group of Chicago police officers have racked up over 100 complaints each over the course of their respective careers, “including notoriously corrupt cops who wound up in prison but also others whose allegations of repeated wrongdoing were never before made public.”
In the rare cases where Chicago police found wrongdoing or rule-breaking by cops, firing the offending officers happened in only one-half of 1 percent of all cases.
“Most Chicago police officers don’t get more than five (complaints) in an entire career,” attorney Jon Loevy told the Tribune. “If the Police Department is truly interested in identifying the problem officers, then the clusters of complaints seem to be the obvious place to look.”
Timothy McDermott (R) and Jerome Finnigan (L) of the Chicago Police Dept., with a man identified as a drug suspect circa 1999-2003.
One famously corrupt cop amassed more than 150 complaints in two decades. Evidence against him included this trophy photo, in which he and a partner posed with a black man wearing antlers, as if he were a trophy deer they’d shot.
Snip from the report findings:
The Tribune’s analysis of thousands of pages of internal police records — handed over by Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration Wednesday after a two-year court fight — offers an unprecedented look at complaints against Chicago police dating to 1967, making it possible for the first time to identify officers with a long history of complaints.
The data include complaints filed between 1967 and 2014 against some 25,000 different Chicago police officers, including current and former members of the force. Seven officers in that time period racked up more than 100 complaints each, while an additional 62 officers amassed at least 70 complaints, the Tribune found.
[Photo: Police officers in Chicago. REUTERS]