University of Chicago law professor Craig Futterman, who has studied Chicago police misconduct for 15 years, said one must look beyond the numbers — particularly when it comes to Rule 14 allegations, administrative findings made against police officers by law enforcement officers — to fully understand how pervasive the code of silence is within the department.

After reviewing more than 1,000 police misconduct cases, Futterman said that neither the Police Department's Internal Affairs Department nor IPRA charged an officer with violating Rule 14 every time an officer was accused of filing a false report in cases that involved alleged dishonesty.

"A charge of making a false report could be submitted in any police misconduct investigation. It's present in every single complaint in which an officer doesn't admit, 'I did it.' Those are allegedly false reports," Futterman said. "And we're not seeing those charges added or investigated in any systematic matter by Internal Affairs or IPRA.”

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But prosecutors do not routinely check officer personnel files for Rule 14 violations. To do so would have a "crippling effect on the criminal justice system in Cook County" due to the sheer volume of felony cases prosecuted each year, said Dan Kirk, State's Attorney Anita Alvarez's chief of staff.

All those things amount to the "ramifications for society" that St. Eve referenced when upholding the jury's determination that a code of silence exists within the Police Department, Futterman said.

"The police code of silence, I think, does as much if not more to destroy community trust as anything," said Futterman, whose research findings suggest Chicago's method of investigating officers is broken. "And it's the very kind of community trust that police need to solve crime."

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