How the Chicago police might get more people to like them

One would think that this summer, when very large numbers of people are less than chummy with law enforcement, that there would be special effort expended by the Chicago Police Department and City Hall to create better relationships.

And there is! 

One of the newest initiatives of Chicago’s newest police superintendent, David Brown, is the creation of the helpful-sounding “Community Safety Team,” which sounds more like something the fire department might come up with.

It’s not charged with checking smoke detectors or door locks. It’s a roving group of officers who are assigned to trouble spots in the city to tamp down criminal activity.

These sort of groups, usually with more exciting names such as “Targeted Response Unit” and “Mobile Strike Force,” have  been created -- and then uncreated -- several times in recent years, even though they have been relatively effective in their avowed purpose.

They have often been suddenly disbanded at least partly because they have also been effective in scaring the living shit out of men, young and old, mostly black and brown, who dared to hang around outdoors.

There have been occasions in my day when such squads have rousted an entire census tract of suspected miscreants simply by climbing out of their cars with billy clubs drawn.

This is where an alternative meaning of the phrase “home run” originated. That’s what witnesses say it sounds like when a baton hits somebody flush on the head. 

It is a bit ironic for such an outfit to be created now, considering that it has become relatively well-known in some circles that a number of Chicago’s rank-and-file police officers have called occasional slowdowns on their responsibilities of serving and protecting people other than themselves.

This phenomenon should not be entirely unexpected, because police officers have been insulted and degraded here by people with megaphones at the ready. The invective has even been voiced by Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who cannot seem to make up her mind whether she likes or dislikes the police department she and Brown command.

Another fine effort at better police-public relations is the recent election of John Catanzara as Chicago Police union president. This is a fellow who has an exemplary record as a patrol officer, with a mere 50 complaints against him, 10 sustained. An inspiration to us all.

He is currently actually stripped of his police powers, an action allegedly taken as discipline after he filed a report against former Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson in 2018, long before Johnson was fired for lying about getting drunk and falling asleep behind the wheel of his car.

The complaint maintained it was illegal for Johnson to let thousands of marchers onto the Dan Ryan Expressway to protest the lack of jobs, mental health support and affordable housing in black neighborhoods.

That makes Catanzara an interesting cat to lead a cop union, considering Johnson’s action may have been the high point of a decade of the CPD-public relationship. Chicago police officers were the recipients of a lot of love from concerned citizens after Johnson took their side and joined them walking down The Dan. 

This was a pretty extraordinary event at the time, considering that former CPD Officer Jason Van Dyke was about to go on trial for backshooting Laquan McDonald enough to kill him three or four times over. Yet there it was, throngs of black people thanking Chicago police officers.

Catanzara has also been upfront about his dislike for people like Colin Kaepernick taking a knee to protest police brutality. He doubled down on his feelings of police put-uponness after George Floyd died at the hands -- or knees, as it were -- of Minneapolis police in late May.

In early June, Catanzara threatened to throw any kneeling CPD officers out of the union. Not for kneeling on suspects. For kneeling with protesters.

The city and the feds signed a consent decree last year in the wake of the McDonald case. It requires, among other things, that CPD officers file a report every time they point their weapon at a human being.

This is perfect. That’s what citizens want to make them confident they won’t get shot. The promise of a written police report about it.

Those are always accurate.

If only there was a higher-tech way, in this digital age, for us to get a better idea of whether police shootings are justified.

But wait! There is.

CPD owns thousands of body cameras.

But CPD officers seem to not necessarily be required to turn on body cams or even to wear them, despite that being tucked into the consent decree, too.

So we may never know what happened at 57th and Racine Sunday. Was it an unjustified shooting of Latrell Allen that precipitated rioting and looting? Or not? Allen appears to have made a pretty bad rep for himself in only 20 years on the planet, so there’s room for doubt.

But even if the body cameras had been present and accounted for, they may not have told the tale. Officers, when they’re being shot at, or even think they’re being shot at, do what everyone else does when they feel threatened with great bodily harm. They move very fast away from the threat, and it can be pretty tough for a body cam to record all that drama.

That’s what happened to a Vernon, Texas cop named T.J. Session. In April, 2019, he was trying to arrest a fellow sitting in a car when the gentleman apparently pulled a sawed-off shotgun on him. With all the hysterics that immediately followed, his body cam managed to not record even a glimpse of the man’s firearm.

But Session had another camera, tucked under the barrel of his duty weapon. It automatically turns on as soon as the weapon is unholstered, whether he likes it or not.

At first, the gun-mounted video doesn’t seem to show the shotgun, either. But run it frame by frame, and there it is:

The suspect, who somehow survived being shot five times or so by the Vernon officer, was convicted this spring, largely on the strength of that evidence.

“There was no obstruction that you usually get from a body cam” with Corporal Session’s gun barrel camera, Vernon Police Chief Randy Agan told me last September. “It takes the doubt away. It sees what the officer sees.

“I think this system needs to be on every gun in law enforcement.”

It is not, however, on guns in Chicago law enforcement. 

CPD spokesman Luis R. Agostini told me in an email last fall, “While each of CPD’s 22 districts have been equipped with and trained on body-worn cameras which would capture firearm pointing incidents, there aren’t any plans on investing in weapons-mounted camera technology.”

That’s quite an investment. At $750 per gun, it costs more than the pistol itself. It would come to $9 million for the department’s 12,000 sworn officers.

The investment does not seem as formidable, however, when you consider that the annual Chicago Police budget comes to about $1.8 billion. Yes, that’s with a “b.”

And that police misconduct lawsuits cost the city, 2004 through 2016, $662 million.

You may be startled by the size of the Chicago Police Department budget and of its armed contingent. This is one of the reasons why people keep talking about police funding and defunding. The CPD has more people under arms than the entire military of Ireland, with Haiti and The Bahamas thrown in.

If the CPD had weapon-mounted cameras, people might have confidence that every time a cop shoots, there’s a good chance they’d know why. 

It’s hard to think of any other way they could reasonably get that kind of confidence. It certainly won’t come from double-spaced police reports.

But why buy digital technology that shows what happens every time a police officer grabs his gun, when you can have a Community-Targeted Mobile Safety Strike Force ready to spring into action, staffed by no-nonsense union cops with no time to waste on crazy stuff like civil rights?