Craig Futterman: Chicago Has "A Long Way To Go" in Adhering to Police Department Consent Decree
Attorney And Professor Craig Futterman Says CPD Is Dragging Feet On Consent Decree, Talks About What Defunding Police Might Accomplish
“What we’ve seen is a pattern of foot-dragging and delaying on behalf of the city. Sadly even with the change in administration, we haven’t seen a fundamental change in orientation toward the decree. It’s still more about kicking and screaming as opposed to, ‘How do we embrace the decree to do better?’ Indeed, they haven’t just missed 50 percent, but they missed more than about three quarters of the deadlines,” Futterman said.
He said the issue goes beyond the deadlines for putting in place the specific policies outlined in the consent decree – and also pertains to current events such as how police handled protests and protesters.
Part of what we’ve been seeing; what we’ve been monitoring as recently as last weekend was we’ve heard reports of nearly 300 instances – just in the last weekend alone – of egregious abuse and people protesting – and protesting peacefully – between broken bones, physical abuse, including holding people – and actually as a standard practice over the weekend – holding people who were protesting incommunicado in police stations without access to anyone – basically disappearing folks for a while,” Futterman said.
He said the city has “a long way to go,” and contrary to what Mayor Lightfoot has claimed, adherence to the consent decree is not moving fast enough. Whether that changes is completely within the control of the mayor and the Police Department, he said.
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