A Thin-Slice of Institutionalised Police Brutality: a Tradition of Excessive Force in the Chicago Police Department
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Middlesex University Research Repository An open access repository of Middlesex University research http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk Bleakley, Paul ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2512-4072 (2019) A thin-slice of institutionalised police brutality: a tradition of excessive force in the Chicago Police Department. Criminal Law Forum . pp. 1-25. ISSN 1046-8374 [Article] (Published online first) (doi:10.1007/s10609-019-09378-6) Final accepted version (with author’s formatting) This version is available at: https://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/28081/ Copyright: Middlesex University Research Repository makes the University’s research available electronically. Copyright and moral rights to this work are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners unless otherwise stated. The work is supplied on the understanding that any use for commercial gain is strictly forbidden. A copy may be downloaded for personal, non-commercial, research or study without prior permission and without charge. 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See also repository copyright: re-use policy: http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/policies.html#copy THIN-SLICE OF INSTITUTIONALISED BRUTALITY A Thin-Slice of Institutionalised Police Brutality: A Tradition of Excessive Force in the Chicago Police Department Paul Bleakley Criminal Law Forum (2019) Abstract In the Chicago Police Department, a sustained tradition of tolerating violent conduct has contributed to the fostering of a police culture in which the use of force is celebrated. Evidence suggests that there has been a historical reluctance to take action to discipline officers accused of misconduct – many of whom are highly decorated veterans of the Chicago Police Department. It is the contention of this article that the long-standing endorsement of excessive force in Chicago policing has compromised officers’ ability to thin-slice, a psychological process in which people are able to draw on their experiences and socio-cultural context to make quick decisions under pressure. Instead, officers are instinctively drawn to engage in misconduct as a means to an end, with the confidence that their actions will not attract the sanction of their superiors. Key words: police, Chicago, priming, force, thin-slicing. 1 THIN-SLICE OF INSTITUTIONALISED BRUTALITY Introduction As the second-largest police department in the United States of America, the Chicago Police Department finds itself in the challenging position of having to enforce the law in a city in which intrinsic socio-economic and racial divisions typify the relationship between the community and law enforcement. Regularly listed as one of the most violent cities in the U.S. as a result of these societal conditions, police in Chicago are consistently faced with carrying out their job in a volatile environment that has often led them to adopt strategies that have often been criticised as excessive (Futterman et al., 2007). The formation of an intra-organisational culture is a common feature of most police departments and – with a lengthy history dating back to 1835 – the Chicago Police Department is no exception. A willingness to use extreme force to maintain order on the streets has developed into a central element of Chicago police culture, and has assumed an increasingly prominent position as the city’s ‘war on gangs’ took shape across the latter half of the 20th Century (Lemmer et al., 2008). A civil rights investigation in to the Chicago Police Department carried out by the U.S. Department of Justice from 2015 to 2017 verified that an organisational culture existed in which excessive force was widely considered a necessary element of policing in Chicago; it found that these ultra-violent tactics were primarily used by officers responsible for policing ethnic minority communities that were seen to be the focal areas for gang-related criminal activity (Serhan, 2017). It was also found that the culture of violence in Chicago policing was reinforced by an absence of professional oversight from senior officers who seldom investigated complaints of police misconduct and, on those occasions when they did, rarely sustained them (Berman & Zapotosky, 2017). 2 THIN-SLICE OF INSTITUTIONALISED BRUTALITY More than simply ignoring these aspects of the force’s organisational culture, the efficacy of such practices has led to a situation in which senior officers in the Chicago Police Department have shown a tacit approval for violence and other forms of procedural misconduct. A statistical analysis of the formal complaints made against Chicago police officers supports this assertion. A report compiled by the United States Department of Justice in 2017 found that use of excessive force in the Chicago Police Department was ‘not aberrational’ and ‘amount[ed] to a pattern or practice of unlawful conduct’ (United States Department of Justice, 2017). One particular group of five notorious South Side police officers known as ‘the Skullcap Crew’ attracted more than 128 official allegations of misconduct across their career — with more than a third of these allegations relating to accusations of excessive force made by African-American complainants (Flowers et al., 2016). Again, this statistic is – in the words of the Department of Justice – ‘not aberrational’. An analysis of open source data conducted by the Invisible Institute in 2018 found that while African-Americans make up 32 per cent of Chicago’s population, they made up 72 per cent of use of force victims between 2005 and 2015 (Fan, 2018). In many of these cases, the Department of Justice found that officers were not adequately investigated — in some cases, officers who used excessive force were even rewarded for achieving a positive outcome by ‘closing’ cases. In spite of their extensive reputation for misconduct, the Skullcap Crew received very little disciplinary action throughout their careers and, in fact, were also the collective recipients of more than 180 commendations during the exact same period (Flowers et al., 2016). It is this dissonance that is at the heart of the condition of anomie evident in Chicago police culture, wherein the norms adhered to by officers are at distinct odds with the expectations of the community; an anomic misalignment of values underpins the foundation of an intra-organisational police culture that is under significant pressure to achieve results, yet has determined through experience that it is not possibly to achieve order on the streets through 3 THIN-SLICE OF INSTITUTIONALISED BRUTALITY conventional means (Huisman & Vande Walle, 2010). Overarching organisational culture is one of the greatest influences on an officer’s ability to make the kind of snap decisions that are necessary in order to carry out their duty. In situations such as this, in which cultural influences exert pressure on officers to resort to strategies of violence or misconduct as a routine aspect of the job, it is virtually inevitable that an entire police department could be placed under a shadow of procedural corruption (Silver & Miller, 2004). Such a shadow of misconduct has implications for all police, not just those who participate in excessive force. As former US Attorney General Loretta Lynch said when releasing the 2017 report into the Chicago Police, such a pattern of behaviour results in ‘a deficit of trust and accountability’ that is bad for residents, and bad for ‘dedicated police officers trying to do their jobs safely and effectively’ (Madhani, 2017). To properly address this deficit, it is necessary to examine the core factors that drive police behaviour and determine how a lasting shift in the policing subculture of Chicago can be achieved. Literature Review The term anomie refers to a social condition wherein the intrinsic connection between the individual and community is severed due to a mismatch of values or morals. Often, anomie is described as a state of ‘normlessness’ in which ‘society provides little moral guidance to individuals’ (Gerber & Macionis, 2010, p. 7); this a reductive explanation of the concept, and is somewhat removed from the original definition of the term outlined by sociologist Emile Durkheim in the late 19th Century. Durkheim’s position on anomie was that it was less a state of normlessness than it was a misalignment between the normative values of the individual and those held by the collective to which the individual nominally belongs (Chamlin & Cochran, 2007). A state of anomic misalignment can have a significant impact on inter-communal relations: Atteslander describes anomie as ‘an anarchic state of crisis-prone uncertainty… 4 THIN-SLICE OF INSTITUTIONALISED BRUTALITY