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Report on Chicago’s Response to George Floyd Protests and Unrest

February 18, 2021

Summary

In June 2020, the City of Chicago Office of Inspector General and the Independent Monitoring Team overseeing the consent decree entered in Illinois v. Chicago launched a joint inquiry into the City of Chicago’s response to the demonstrations and unrest in late May and early June. This report is the summation of OIG’s findings from that inquiry.

Executive Summary

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis, Minnesota police. In the days that followed, protests and civil unrest engulfed cities across the country. The law enforcement response to those events, across the country and in Chicago, has been the subject of intense public and official scrutiny amidst sharp calls for police reform, transparency, and accountability. In June 2020, the City of Chicago Office of Inspector General (OIG) and the Independent Monitoring Team (IMT) overseeing the consent decree entered in Illinois v. Chicago launched a joint inquiry into the City of Chicago’s response to the demonstrations and unrest in late May and early June. This report is the summation of OIG’s findings from that inquiry. Consistent with the AP Stylebook, OIG uses the terms “protests” and “demonstrations” to describe marches, rallies, and other actions. OIG uses the term “unrest” to describe more violent or destructive criminal behavior such as looting and/or vandalism.

OIG’s report is an in-depth review of the period of May 29 through June 7, both chronologically and analytically. The report aims to present, to the extent possible based on the information and material available, a comprehensive account of the facts, including how involved parties–– members of the public, CPD’s rank-and-file, and CPD’s command staff, among others–– experienced the protests and unrest. A number of City departments beyond CPD, as well as partner law enforcement agencies, played critical roles in the City’s overall response. OIG sought out information and perspectives from representatives of these City departments and external partner agencies. OIG’s chronology, analysis, and findings are supported by an array of primary and secondary sources, including: interviews, video footage, radio traffic recordings, official reports and other documents, and quantitative analysis of CPD datasets.

In recognition of their different sources and scopes of authority and jurisdiction, and in the interest of avoiding the duplication of efforts, OIG and the IMT undertook fact gathering jointly but are issuing separate reports with different areas of focus. OIG’s report is issued pursuant to its City-spanning jurisdiction and mandate to, among other things, promote effectiveness and integrity in City operations, and the mandate of its Public Safety section to study policies, practices, programs, and training specific to CPD and Chicago’s police accountability agencies. OIG’s report focuses on matters implicating violations of existing City policies, variance between CPD’s then-existing policies and the conduct of its members, and the involvement of non-CPD City actors. The IMT’s report arises from its duties to monitor compliance with the terms of the consent decree, and therefore focuses on topics covered by the consent decree.

OIG and the IMT requested and reviewed thousands of documents and conducted more than 70 interviews with CPD officials, rank-and-file CPD members, officials at other City of Chicago departments, representatives of County and State entities, and members of the public.

Perspectives from members of the public were also gathered as part of the record in Illinois v. Chicago during two days of listening sessions held by the Court. OIG further reviewed and analyzed data on CPD’s arrests and reported uses of force during the days at issue, and reviewed over one hundred hours of body-worn camera (BWC) footage and recorded radio transmissions.

This report provides an in-depth public narrative of and accounting for CPD and the City of Chicago’s response to the protests and unrest in late May and early June of 2020. In doing so, this report presents findings on operational failures and shortcomings during the response, which have broad implications for CPD’s policies and practices going forward. This report does not offer specific recommendations. CPD has already undertaken numerous policy revisions in the months since these events, sometimes in consultation with the IMT, as required by the consent decree. OIG was not a party to these consultations and was not made privy to the method, manner, and means through which they were conducted. Other improvements are underway and may be matters of consent decree compliance within the monitoring province of the IMT. Once new policies are in place and operational, OIG, through the regular work of its Public Safety section, will monitor developments and assess whether there remain policy and operational issues that warrant future evaluative inquiry and reporting. For now, in light of the urgency of public concern and the rapidly shifting policy landscape, OIG publishes this narrative and accompanying findings without specific recommendations, but with the intention that it inform corrective actions and reforms to CPD’s policies and practices.

A. BACKGROUND

On Monday, May 25, 2020, a member of the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) killed George Floyd while effecting Floyd’s arrest by placing his knee on Floyd’s neck while Floyd was restrained and lying on the ground, suffocating him. A civilian witness captured the MPD officer’s actions on video, and the video spread widely and rapidly through social media.2 This incident prompted the subsequent firing of four MPD officers and, eventually, the filing of criminal charges.

The days immediately following Floyd’s killing saw a rising and spreading swell of protests and unrest which included confrontations—sometimes violent—between the police and the public and widespread property damage, in cities across the United States. These events, which were covered extensively by the news media, are summarized in detail in OIG’s report. Despite these early harbingers, and even as indications appeared on social media signaling the planning of large-scale public protest gatherings in Chicago, CPD was underprepared and ill-equipped for the events that followed. As late as Friday, May 29, and Saturday, May 30, 2020, CPD and the City were in possession of and in communication about significant open-source information regarding planned protests in the City and the spread of increasingly volatile events nationwide, but did not believe that information to portend anything unusual or especially concerning.

In the late afternoon and early evening of Friday, May 29, large numbers of people converged on Chicago’s downtown. Late that evening and into the overnight hours, protest activity gave way to unrest, including episodic lawlessness. CPD’s response that night was marked by poor coordination, inconsistency, and confusion. Even so, senior members of CPD and the Mayor’s Office reported viewing Friday night’s response as something of a success, referred to by some as a “win.” Meanwhile, rank-and-file CPD members and front-line supervisors recalled wondering why the Department did not seem adequately concerned about what seemed to them obvious indications from news and social media that there was worse to come.

As the report describes in detail, the next several days found CPD outflanked, under-equipped, and unprepared to respond to the scale of the protests and unrest with which they were met in the downtown area and across Chicago’s neighborhoods.

The response to these events involved not only CPD, but also other City departments under the authority of the Mayor, as well as non-City entities solicited to assist and work coordinately with CPD—the Chicago Department of Transportation, the Office of Emergency Management and Communications, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, the Illinois State Police, the Illinois National Guard, the Illinois Emergency Management Agency, the Chicago Transit Authority, and the University of Chicago Police Department among them.

B. FINDINGS

In addition to offering a broad-reaching, in-depth public accounting of CPD and the City’s response to protests and unrest following the death of George Floyd, OIG has reached analytical findings with respect to breakdowns and failures in three specific areas: the mass arrest process, reporting on uses of force, and structural obstacles to discipline and accountability.

MASS ARREST PROCESS

Breakdowns in the mass arrest process resulted in CPD’s failure to arrest some offenders, the release of some arrestees without charges, and risks to officer and arrestee safety.

CPD’s policies do not precisely define the circumstances which should give rise to the declaration of a mass arrest situation; once such a declaration is made, however, CPD members who make arrests in the field turn their arrestees over to other members for mass transport and processing. Arresting members do not accompany arrestees to a detention facility and document and process the arrest, as they ordinarily would. Instead of completing an ordinary arrest report, members are to complete a truncated “mass arrest card,” or if that does not prove feasible, they are instructed to write their badge number and an abbreviation for the offense on the arm of an offender with a permanent marker before loading the arrestee into a transport vehicle.

Records—and recollections—of when, how, and by whom mass arrest declarations were made during the events of late May and early June are uneven and incomplete. In the absence of conclusive CPD records of who and how many were arrested for offenses related to the protests and unrest, OIG performed its own analysis of CPD’s arrest data, suggesting that CPD made more than 1,500 related arrests between May 29, and June 7, 2020, with approximately 1,000 of those occurring on May 30 and 31.

CPD was unprepared to deal with this volume of arrests over so short a time period and this led to breakdowns in the mass arrest process. As a result, arrestees were held without proper processing providing the substantiation for the reason for and duration of their detention, with some eventually released without being charged, and some being charged with something either less or more serious than their actual conduct may have warranted. Moreover, the safety of arrestees and officers was threatened by the lengthy delays in transportation and processing.

USE OF FORCE REPORTING

During the events at issue, CPD did not fulfill its force reporting obligations and did not provide clear and consistent guidance to officers on reporting obligations.

As a general matter, as remains the case, CPD members during the period at issue who used force were required to complete a Tactical Response Report (TRR). Among the several different relevant policies in effect at the time, however, were special provisions for use of force reporting in mass arrest situations. Some of those policies were new and, during the protests and unrest, there was significant confusion among CPD’s highest ranks—and, as a natural result, among its rank-and-file members—about whether and when members were required to complete TRRs under mass arrest protocols.

Ultimately, CPD deployed specialized force options for crowd control and failed to appropriately document those uses of force. CPD underreported uses of baton strikes and manual strikes, further resulting in an inadequate record of severe and potentially out-of-policy uses of force, and as written and effected at the time, CPD’s policies on use of force reporting left important ambiguities about mass arrest situations.

OBSTACLES TO ACCOUNTABILITY

CPD’s operational response to the protests and unrest and gaps in its relevant policies crippled accountability processes from the start.

The way in which CPD responded to the protests and unrest posed critical challenges to the appropriate management of allegations of police misconduct. First, breakdowns in mass arrest processing and documentation undermined any efforts to systematically identify relevant reports and BWC footage, and CPD failed to retain any copies of a significant volume of mass arrest records. Second, CPD’s emergency deployment of all available members compromised the members responsible for reviewing uses of force and conducting internal investigations by risking the involvement of those members in the very events they would be responsible for examining. Meanwhile, deficits in training and policy clarity meant that some of those events were never processed for examination in the first place. Third, there was widespread noncompliance with CPD’s policy requiring the use of BWCs; during much of the time at issue, CPD members who were working outside of their regular schedules deployed to the field directly from Guaranteed Rate Field, rather than from their stations, and BWCs were not available to them. As a result, countless interactions between CPD members and members of the public were not captured on BWCs. Finally, there were widespread complaints—and evidence—of CPD members obscuring their badge numbers and nameplates while deployed during the protests and unrest. These actions, coupled with CPD’s failure to keep comprehensive records to show who was deployed where and when, profoundly compromised the investigation of allegations of misconduct—beginning with the identification of accused members.

C. CONCLUSIONS

There have been important developments since the end of the period of protests and unrest in early June, including further clashes between police and protesters in Chicago later in the summer and policy changes from CPD. The fact remains, though, that CPD was under-prepared and ill-equipped, and thus critically disserved both its own front-line members and members of the public. While the challenges were daunting, and in some respects unprecedented in recent memory, the efforts of CPD and the City to stem unrest were marked, almost without exception, by confusion and lack of coordination in the field emanating from failures of intelligence assessment, major event planning, field communication and operation, administrative systems and, most significantly, leadership from CPD’s senior ranks. In the aggregate, CPD’s senior leadership failed the public they are charged with serving and protecting and they failed the Department’s rank-and-file members and front-line supervisors, who were at times left to highstakes improvisation without adequate support or guidance.

Even as new challenges arise, CPD and the City will be dealing with the negative repercussions of these shortcomings for some time. Missing reports and videos may limit or preclude prosecution of some arrestees as well as accountability for individual officers and may compromise CPD and the City’s position in investigations or litigation. OIG’s interviews with rank-and-file CPD members laid bare that, at least in some quarters, chaos and confusion in the command staff ranks struck a serious blow to the morale of front-line members who plainly felt failed by the Department. And to the extent that public video and public reporting captured out-of-policy, dangerous, and disrespectful actions by CPD members, the events of May and June 2020 may have set CPD and the City back significantly in their long-running, deeply challenged effort to foster trust with members of the community.

Report on Chicago’s Response to George Floyd Protests and Unrest - publication cover