Politics
Chicagoans Dissatisfied With CPD, Have No Confidence in Reform Push: Federal Court Monitor Survey
(WTTW News)
Chicagoans are dissatisfied with the Chicago Police Department and continue to be deeply skeptical that police reform will have a lasting and positive effect, according to the latest survey from the court-appointed monitoring team charged with keeping tabs on CPD’s efforts to change the way it trains, supervises and disciplines officers.
The third community survey from the monitoring team charged with enforcing the federal court order known as the consent decree found that Chicagoans’ confidence in CPD and the reform effort is exceedingly low, despite a reform push that is slated to cost Chicago taxpayers $208.8 million in 2025 alone.
The survey’s results are the latest indication that CPD has so far failed to address the decades of brutality and civil rights violations that led to the consent decree, even as that binding federal court order prepares to mark its sixth anniversary. (Read the full report.)
CPD has fully met just 9% of the court order’s requirements, according to the most recent report by the monitors. In all, the city set aside $667 million to implement the consent decree between 2020 and 2024, according to Chicago’s annual budget overviews.
Just 33% of Chicagoans said the police were doing a “good” or “very good” job protecting the city, unchanged from the first survey conducted by the monitors in 2020, according to the survey results. In addition, 47% of Chicagoans said CPD was doing a “good” or “very good” job protecting their neighborhood, down from 52% in 2020, a year after the consent decree took effect, according to the survey.
In addition, Chicagoans’ already low confidence in reform efforts fell even further, according to the survey, with just 27% saying they are “confident” or “very confident” the reform push will have a lasting and positive impact, according to the 2024 survey. In 2020, 31% said they were confident the reform push would bear fruit.
Just 21% of young Black Chicago men expressed any level of confidence that reform will lead to lasting and positive change, according to the 2024 survey, a drop of 2 percentage points as compared with the 2020 survey.
Read More: In Five Years, Chicago Has Barely Made Progress on Its Court-Ordered Police Reforms. Here’s Why.
Attorney Maggie Hickey, the head of the monitoring team, which has been paid at least $22.9 million by Chicago taxpayers through nine months of 2024, acknowledged during a Tuesday status hearing that the results showed a “need for improvement.”
In her remarks during a virtual hearing held by U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer, Hickey emphasized that the results of the 2024 survey showed a marked improvement as compared with the last survey by the monitors, which was conducted in 2022 amid the racial reckoning and demands for criminal justice reform sparked by the police murder of George Floyd.
“There is movement in the right direction,” Hickey said.
The most recent survey also found that Black Chicagoans, and young Black men, rated the CPD less critically in 2024 than they did in 2020, even though they continue to rate the CPD lower than White and Latino Chicagoans and had much higher rates of involuntary interactions, such as being stopped by CPD while driving or walking.
Latino Chicagoans and White Chicagoans rated the CPD significantly more unfavorably in 2024 than in 2020, according to the survey.
Craig Futterman, a professor of law at the University of Chicago who represented the coalition of groups that sued the city to force it to agree to judicial oversight during that hearing, said efforts to reform CPD are “at a critical inflection point.”
“People are not seeing or feeling positive change on the ground,” Fetterman said.
Regardless of race, all Chicagoans said CPD did a worse job in 2024 responding to emergencies promptly, supporting witnesses and victims of crime, using de-escalation strategies, and ensuring neighborhoods felt safe as compared with 2020, according to the survey.
Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone| (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]
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