A whopping one out of every twenty cops (or 662 of 13,200) in Chicago has had at least ten official written complaints filed against them in the last five years. This information comes by way of a lawsuit against the police department. Naturally, Chicago PD has been fighting tooth and nail to prevent the list from going public. Note, the list doesn’t point out which of the officers had more than ten complaints. Nor does it include officers who’ve had one or five or nine complaints over the same period. The city had to be forced by a court to finally release the list, and even then, it redacted the names of the officers.

You know, regular citizens accused of wrongdoing often get their names published in the newspaper. Why not police officers? And why in particular not police officers who’ve garnered ten complaints over five years?

This, remember, is the same department where this happened. And this. And this. And this.

I’m sympathetic to the “it’s just a few bad apples” line about bad cops (though the good apples have a troubling tendency to cover for the bad ones). But in Chicago at least, 662 is a heck of a lot more than a “few.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 22nd, 2007 at 9:22 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Police Professionalism, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.