THE OFFICERS ARE RUN BY THE CITY

a Public Policy Studies BA thesis

How do you get involved in one?

There isn't a short path from taking a ride to jail to taking a cop to court. What kinds of people file complaints with the Chicago Police Department and leave it there? How many people go home and forget about the whole thing? Hopefully there's a lawyer or two who can shed some light on that for me.

Do they accomplish anything?

I go into this work with a strong belief that the court system is biased in favor of police officers, as opposed to the people they charge with crimes. Why go to court at all? Even if individual people win their cases, does this do anything to mend a deeply distrusted criminal justice system?

Disclaimer:

I am deeply aware that I'm trying to bail out a ship with a teacup here, but this paper's due in April. If this work is of use to a single person, I'll have done something of value.

What This Is All About

This is a study of Chicago, my home of the last three years, its police, of whom I have maintained a healthy fear of for the last three years, and professional misconduct involving them, which I have not been party to for the last three years. I hope to learn about the second from studying the third, and picking up a lot of other things along the way.

There's a lot I could learn about these lawsuits, but I want to try and focus on these:

Where do police misconduct lawsuits come from?

I'm working on this with Phil. The legal history of these kinds of court cases promises to be some pretty dense stuff, but I won't know for sure without a few billion more trips to the National Archives.

Updates

May 4, 2020
5 min

Bibliography.

This is an incomplete list of the things, people, and groups of people who influenced my work on this project, aside from the many interview

Apr 26, 2020
4 min

Decentralizing the CPD.

Each form of response to police misconduct represented a potential solution to the problem of police misconduct on the South Side of...

Apr 26, 2020
2 min

CPAC.

Some community organizations were part of a multiyear political campaign to put City Hall’s policing powers into a Civilian Police...

Svoboda Funds

$904.78 spent

$95.22 left

Me

I'm a fourth-year student at the University of Chicago, living in the Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. I'm a double major in public policy and computer science. My friend Philip was writing his thesis on the history of lawsuits against Chicago police officers, and I guess I got pulled in.

Anything to Say?

We'll see if I get any interesting comments out of this site at all, but if I do happen to catch anything, I'll post about anything that it wouldn't be unethical or inappropriate to feed back to this tiny audience.

Talk to me at:

aalilonu@uchicago.edu