Chicago considers deadly force rules
Panel that investigates police shootings recommends further restrictions on when officers can fire guns.
CHICAGO — As battles over police reform in Chicago continue, the agency that investigates shootings by police is recommending that the Police Department tighten its rules on deadly force to further limit the circumstances in which officers can shoot.
A quarterly report from the Independent Police Review Authority in part aims to prevent shootings that could be considered legally justifiable — but also unnecessary.
One recommendation calls for the department to revise its “fleeing felon” rule, which allows officers to shoot fleeing suspects who have committed violent crimes.
The department’s current policy mirrors the Illinois state statute on justifiable uses of deadly force by police, but the authority recommended that the policy be revised to be more restrictive, barring officers from shooting fleeing felons except when officers reasonably believe those people pose an immediate threat to police or others.
The authority also called for policy revisions to mandate that officers give warnings before shooting when possible, and avoid drawing their weapons unless they are likely to have to shoot.
Tightening the rules could give police disciplinary authorities greater leeway to suspend or fire officers after shootings, which the city has almost never done. Of more than 400 police shootings of people since 2007, only three have been ruled to violate the city’s use-of-force policies, records show.
The authority’s recommendations come amid a wave of changes to policing in Chicago triggered by protests that followed the release of a video last year that showed white police Officer Jason Van Dyke shooting black 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel has announced plans to scrap and replace the authority — which has been slow and prone to superficial investigations that rarely lead to discipline for police — but the oversight agency has sought to reform itself even as it faces elimination.
Changing policies related to force has the potential to spur political rancor; as Emanuel tries to cope with public anger over police abuse, he’s also facing a surge in violent crime, believed by many to be a result of police avoiding confrontations with civilians that could land officers in trouble.
The authority has commissioned an outside review of shooting cases, which is ongoing.
The authority’s report notes McDonald’s 2014 shooting death. Van Dyke is charged with murder, though the city has yet to rule on whether the officer — or those whose reports were at odds with video of the shooting — violated policy.
“Based on our review of officer-involved shooting investigations, we are greatly concerned about the number of instances in which the use of deadly force may have been justified, but the scope of the force appears excessive based on the totality of the circumstances,” the report reads.
“In particular, there have been investigations where the evidence suggests that the officers have continued to fire their weapons without making any assessment of whether the additional shots fired were really necessary. As [an example], we point to the 16 shots fired at Laquan McDonald.”
On Thursday the authority ruled two shootings unjustified because police fired into vehicles though the officers were in no serious danger.
With the decisions, the authority has ruled more shootings by officers unjustified over the last several weeks than it had in the previous nine years.
In one case, a Chicago police officer shot Ryan Rogers to death in 2013 while the officer was on a special assignment investigating robberies of Radio Shack stores, records show.
The officer told authority investigators that he fired four times because Rogers drove an SUV at him, but the agency’s ruling said the evidence showed that at least one shot was fired after the officer was no longer in peril.
In the other case, two officers shot and wounded a man who drove off in his SUV as the police tried to stop him after an alleged drug transaction in 2015. The agency ruled that both officers were out of the vehicle’s path when they fired.