With a new mayoral administration, no permanent police superintendent and a new federal judge overseeing the case, the Chicago Police Department’s consent decree is in grave danger of failing, according to the city’s former chief watchdog.
“Consent Decree implementation and monitoring is a faltering undertaking both in substantive accomplishment and in transparency. In the absence of a hard methodological and operational reset, I believe the Consent Decree is at high risk of failing to achieve its objectives,” Joe Ferguson, the city’s former Inspector General, wrote in a June 5 letter made public Wednesday in a federal court filing.
“For meaningful reform to reach critical mass, the City must be prodded — repeatedly and publicly,” Ferguson added.
The consent decree — a sweeping set of reform mandates that were born out of the 2014 murder of Laquan McDonald by a Chicago police officer — was approved in early 2019. Former U.S. District Judge Robert M. Dow selected a team led by former federal prosecutor Maggie Hickey to grade the CPD’s adherence to the reforms.
In addition to its semi-annual reports, the monitoring team has held several public forums to solicit feedback on consent decree efforts, and the monitoring team has pursued offshoot investigations into the CPD’s response to the civil unrest of 2020. But Ferguson said there’s more to be done.
“Beyond voluminous technical reports, the IMT must be charged with conducting its work and exercising voice in a far more regular and public way than has been the case these last four plus years,” Ferguson wrote.
A spokesperson for the independent monitoring team noted that the consent decree effectively prohibits the team from making any public statements without the court’s blessing.
Ferguson, who’s said he’s considering a campaign to become the next Cook County State’s Attorney in 2024, added that the independent monitoring team has so far billed the city $14 million for its work, but the team has not submitted a publicly available budget since it was selected to oversee the consent decree.
“Based on the history of the last major federal monitorship of the City — the Shakman Decree — this lack of transparency and accountability is poised to turn into questions of whether the Monitorship has become a bureaucratic organ that exists primarily as a profit center at taxpayer expense,” Ferguson said.
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Dow, the former judge who initially oversaw the consent decree, left the federal bench late last year to serve as chief of staff to John Roberts, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. The consent decree case was transferred to Rebecca Pallmeyer, the chief judge of the Northern District of Illinois.
Ferguson urged Pallmeyer and the independent monitoring team to include the OIG in further evaluations of the department’s consent decree compliance.
“Going forward, I urge the Court’s (and the IMT’s) consideration of a practice that makes a new norm of full and fully partnered engagement with the Inspector General, who I know to be equally if not more steeped in technical and experiential history and knowledge of CPD and the City and has at the ready the capacities of an extraordinarily skilled and knowledgeable staff of dedicated professionals behind her,” Ferguson wrote of his successor, Deborah Witzburg.
Reached Wednesday, Witzburg pointed out that “the opportunities for cooperation between the monitoring team and the Office of Inspector General are built into the consent decree itself,” adding that the OIG is in full compliance with all of its consent decree obligations.
“We are in full compliance and we are, as we speak, coming to the end of our sustainment period. And so as soon as that is behind us, then we are really well-positioned to have a different structural relationship with the monitor, and one that recognizes [that] while the consent decree and the monitoring effort are temporary structures, the Office of Inspector General is the permanent oversight structure,” Witzburg said.
In the years since the consent decree was entered, the CPD has struggled to meet its obligations, and the monitoring team’s most recent report was heavily critical of the firing of the former director of the CPD’s reform office. The next semi-annual report is expected to be released in the coming weeks, and it will detail the CPD’s consent decree adherence between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2022.
The CPD’s Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform has seen several changes in leadership in the last year. The former director, Robert Boik, was fired by former Supt. David Brown last year after he protested Brown’s plan to take several dozen officers out of the reform office and reassign them to the Patrol Bureau. Boik’s successor, Tina Skahill, a longtime CPD supervisor, tendered her resignation last month, citing “retaliation.”
