Dec. 12--The just-begun federal probe of the Chicago Police Department promises to be long and costly, and if a pattern of legal violations emerges, the city could be forced to pay even more to carry out reforms in areas such as police staffing, training, policies and oversight, experts say.
They added that it will likely be a year before the U.S. Justice Department completes the historic, exhaustive civil rights investigation focusing largely on use of force and the disciplinary process for wayward officers. Then, assuming a pattern of violations is found, city officials and the Justice Department will hammer out a lengthy legal agreement over how to reform the department. Finally, the most difficult task falls on the Police Department: implementing those changes.
Such a fundamental reform of a big-city police department and its entrenched culture will be a daunting undertaking that could take many years, say those who know the process firsthand from similar efforts by the Justice Department in other major cities. Police unions tend to resist the change, and the process can stall or falter without strong leadership from the mayor and police superintendent, they said.
Los Angeles, for example, went through three mayors and three police chiefs before the final vestiges of a consent decree mandating numerous reforms were lifted a dozen years later.
"All in all, this is a major transformation, or at least it is a step in the right direction," said Terry Gilbert, a 40-year civil rights and criminal defense attorney in Cleveland who was involved in that city's reform efforts. "And only time will tell whether it's going to make a big difference. I think it will, but I think it will take many, many years."
Vanita Gupta, who heads the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, which is conducting the probe, told the Tribune on Friday that though she could not predict the duration of the investigation, "We're going to be very thorough, fair and as expeditious as we can be."
The DOJ will bring in lawyers, paralegals, statisticians and consultants -- both current and former law enforcement officials -- to examine "hundreds of thousands" of documents, Gupta said.
Discussions with Chicago city leaders and lawyers have already begun. The aim is to explain the process and let people ask questions "so all the stakeholders will have a sense of what this will look like in the next months," Gupta said.
Stephen Rushin, a law professor at the University of Alabama, said the salient question for cities that have undergone reform is whether the improvements are sustainable.
"The No. 1 good thing about these federal interventions is they force local municipalities to face the issue of police misconduct head-on," said Rushin, author of a forthcoming book evaluating two decades of federal intervention into law enforcement. "I think there's a bunch of structural and organizational reasons, without federal interventions, that make it easy for cities to push those difficult decisions off their plate."
