Why Does the Chicago Police Department Tolerate Abusive Racists in Its Ranks?

The report notes elsewhere that the sort of racist mindset reflected in the Finnigan hunting trophy photograph “has desensitized many officers from the humanity of the people of color they serve, setting the stage for the use of excessive force.”

Whatever the merits of monitoring officers’ political affiliations and social media activity — both of which raise possible First Amendment issues — the department has failed to make use of the most powerful tool at its disposal for the purpose of identifying white supremacists on the force: pattern analysis of citizen complaints.

The collective bargaining agreement between the police union and the city in force at the time effectively barred the agency from employing even the most rudimentary pattern analysis — e.g., reviewing a past history of complaints alleging similar misconduct — as an investigatory tool.

Notwithstanding the long odds of achieving redress, the complainants, all of them Black or brown — and presumably unacquainted with each other — independently filed strikingly similar complaints against Piwnicki alleging excessive force coupled with racist and sexist verbal abuse.

Over time, the quality of COPA’s investigations of misconduct complaints has significantly improved, but it remains constrained by the police union contract from doing the sort of pattern analysis necessary to effectively curb the immense damage to public trust caused by officers such as Piwnicki.

Unless and until it does, the career of Piwnicki will stand as the cautionary tale: An officer who, for over a quarter century, has been allowed to openly act out his racial hostilities by an oversight system that has only seen fit to discipline him when his abusive behavior spills over onto others in law enforcement.

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