Politics
Inspector General Launches New Dashboard to Identify ‘Hot Spots’ of Police Misconduct
Inspector General Deborah Witzburg appears on “Chicago Tonight” on July 21, 2025. (WTTW News)
Elected officials and Chicagoans concerned about misconduct by members of the Chicago Police Department now have a new way of keeping track of officers who have been repeatedly accused of wrongdoing, the city’s watchdog announced Wednesday.
Chicago taxpayers paid $295 million between 2019 and 2024 to resolve lawsuits naming CPD officers whose alleged misconduct led more than once to payouts, according to an analysis of city data by WTTW News.
“Any student of CPD’s modern history can recognize that there have been these groups of officers that have contributed more than their fair share of harm and misconduct,” Inspector General Deborah Witzburg told WTTW News Wednesday.
The database, which includes only closed complaints, was designed to allow both police brass and Chicagoans to map the ties between officers accused of misconduct by creating a “social network analysis” to identify “hot spots” of misconduct, Witzburg said.
The database shows “spider webs of misconduct complaints,” Witzburg said.
That will give officials a chance to identify groups of officers that have drawn more than their fair share of complaints, and reassign them, before issues metastasize, Witzburg said.
Had a similar tool been in place decades ago, officials could have prevented groups of officers who worked with disgraced former officers like Commander Jon Burge, Detective Reynaldo Guevara and Ronald Watts from harming hundreds of Chicagoans and forcing taxpayers to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to resolve lawsuits prompted by that misconduct, Witzburg said.
Witzburg said she hopes that CPD officials use the data even as they struggle to create a system designed to alert supervisors about which officers have been the subject of repeated police misconduct allegations.
CPD must implement that system under the terms of the consent decree, the federal court order designed to compel the department to change the way it trains, supervises and disciplines officers.
As part of the city’s 2026 spending plan, CPD leaders are required to submit monthly reports to the Chicago City Council on efforts to create that early-warning system.
The two officers identified by the database as having the most complaints that name other officers are Officers Joseph Vecchio and Richard Rodriquez, Jr., who were both assigned to an Town Hall (18th) District tactical team that the Civilian Office of Police Accountability warned had engaged in a troubling pattern of undocumented and unprofessional stops of Black people in the downtown police district.
Two other officers from the same 18th District tactical team — Officers Nicu Tohatan and Michael Donnelly — are also among the officers with the most complaints, according to the new database.
Vecchio, Tohatan and Donnelly have been stripped of their police powers, while Rodriquez remains on active duty in the 18th District, according to a CPD spokesperson.
WTTW News coverage of policing and police reform is supported by The Joyce Foundation.
Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone | (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]
