Craig Futterman: Chicago's New Police Accountability Plan a 'Recipe for Disaster'
From the Chicago Sun-Times:
“To fix what needs to be fixed, it takes resources. You need a floor of at least 1.5 percent of the Police Department budget. That’s more than two times the current budget of IPRA,” Futterman said.
“You saw cases languish because there weren’t enough resources to do the investigations or train staff how to do high-quality investigations,” he said. “Now, we’re gonna give this agency far greater responsibility and not a penny more to do it? That’s a recipe for failure. Without a sufficient budget insulated from politics, we’re essentially changing the letters and keeping the organization.”
From the Chicago Tribune:
"The ordinance ensures that this agency will be wholly dependent on the mayor and City Hall for its efficacy, meaning that it cannot and will not be an agency independent from City Hall," Futterman said. "The mayor decides who's the chief, the mayor has the power to fire the chief, the mayor decides how much money, what kind of power, he or she will get."
From NPR:
"This ordinance would dramatically increase the caseload of this agency that investigates police misconduct and not provide it with a penny more than it already gets," Futterman says.
From The Chicago Reporter:
But under the law and the ordinance, documents created in the course of those audits and investigations by the office could remain hidden from the public.
That’s a problem, according to advocates for police accountability.
“It is difficult to assess the quality and the integrity of the work of the agency without being able to have a view into the basis for its conclusions,” said Craig Futterman, director of the University of Chicago Law School’s Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project, who has written a competing police oversight ordinance.