Chicago’s new police chief reinvents a notorious concept. Can it work?
One of the worst ideas in modern Chicago policing may make a comeback under new Superintendent David Brown. Credit Brown for at least knowing the history, and giving the notorious strategy an enlightened twist.
The bad idea — a specialized, citywide anti-crime task force — sounds effective in theory because it appeals to the desperate desire of residents for safer streets. It goes like this: Gun violence is out of control. Gangs run amok. Beat cops have their hands full. So why not create a permanent task force to go after the most dangerous criminals? Give it a cryptic, military-style name like Special Operations Section or Mobile Strike Force to increase the intimidation factor. Let this unit roam the city from one hot spot to the next, gathering intelligence, making arrests and confiscating weapons.
Those units, designed to match the aggression of gangs that brutalize neighborhoods, were credited at times with helping to reduce Chicago’s homicide toll. But they were bad news — shut down because the concept was inherently flawed. Their role was to get into the city’s dangerous crevices, operating aggressively with a long leash, which is not how a big-city police force should operate. Without proper supervision, they frightened the public and, in the case of SOS, spawned one of the worst police scandals in memory.
In 2007, the Chicago Police Department closed down the Special Operations Section after some unit members turned into criminals themselves, committing robberies and home invasions. They were accused of targeting people — most of them suspected drug dealers — to steal drugs and money. One of the officers, Jerome Finnigan, pleaded guilty to plotting to hire a hit man to kill a fellow police officer whom he suspected of cooperating with investigators and was sentenced in 2011 to 12 years in prison.
As that scandal began to unfold, CPD tried to create a similar mission with the Mobile Strike Force, but in 2011 the department disbanded that operation and another unit because their military-style tactics alienated residents and diverted resources from beat policing.
The problem is these operations represent an outdated, commando-like approach to crime-fighting when Chicago needs to focus on community policing efforts to regain the trust of alienated residents. The long ugly track record of police misuse of force against minority Chicagoans feeds directly into suspicions that specialized squads are laxly supervised and prone to going rogue. As one-time police Superintendent Garry McCarthy told Chicago Magazine in 2012: “With specialization, those guys have zero connection to the community. They offend a lot of people because not everybody is a perp.” CPD under McCarthy gave up on the Mobile Strike Force and Targeted Response Unit, only to return to the idea of roving saturation teams when gun violence worsened.
This is how policing in Chicago has whipsawed — from a weaponized approach to an emphasis on beat patrols and community relations. One tactic leads to safer streets but potentially turns residents against the police, while the other tries to repair the damage.
Brown, former chief of the Dallas police, believes he may be able to achieve a balance between crime-fighting and community relations. “I do understand the history of the difficulties with these units both with misconduct and effectiveness,” he told the Tribune’s Jeremy Gorner in a recent interview. “If I were to pursue that, I’d want to do it in a way that would be much different from what we’ve done in the past.”
His approach, should he pursue it, would be to require permanent task force members to participate in community service as well as fight crime and confront flare-ups of violence. “They could deliver meals one day a week to the seniors in the city. They could do some work with young people in the schools. And what I like about a community service day once in a week for groups like this, it keeps that group sensitive to the needs of the community, rather than every day, all day, every day, they come to work, that’s all they do is enforcement.”
Given the Chicago Police Department’s deplorable record of committing and condoning abuses by officers, it would be facile to presume that community engagement activities would guarantee the difference between a task force that protects citizens and one that preys on them. Any police unit that operates with autonomy would require extraordinary training, extra layers of supervision, bodycams and zero tolerance for misconduct.
CPD now operates under a federal consent decree intended to lock in reforms to police management and accountability. A judge’s oversight should give those reforms teeth and strengthen Brown’s authority. But it will still be on the chief to convince the public and police officers that two ideas that have failed time and again in Chicago — aggressive tactical squads and community relations — will somehow strengthen each other.
This is Memorial Day weekend, the annual start to Chicago’s tragic killing season, in which the number of shootings traditionally rises as people spend time outdoors. CPD still uses saturation squads during the summer to combat outbreaks of violence. They haven’t solved the problem. Nothing has. Through mid-May, Chicago recorded 175 homicides, a 12% increase from the year-prior period.
Brown’s two biggest missions — the ones most likely to define his tenure as superintendent — overlap in this potential experiment. First, there’s the gun violence epidemic. Second, there’s the lack of community trust in police, which exacerbates the public safety crisis because residents don’t want to help the police solve crimes.
Brown’s got our attention. Creative approaches to policing in a troubled city are welcome.
If the superintendent can find a way to resolve the tension between crime-fighting and trust-building in neighborhoods, he will make Chicago safer.
Given the Chicago Police Department’s deplorable record of committing and condoning abuses by officers, it would be facile to presume that community engagement activities would guarantee the difference between a task force that protects citizens and one that preys on them.