Report on Race- and Ethnicity-Based Disparities in the Chicago Police Department’s Use of Force

Executive Summary

With a few exceptions delineated in policy, CPD members are required to document all takedowns, manual strikes, uses of less-lethal weapons, and uses of lethal force on a Tactical Response Report (TRR). The TRR collects a wide range of officer-reported information about use-of-force incidents, including: demographic information about the officer and the subject; the time and location of the incident; the “type of activity” that led to the incident, such as an investigatory stop, traffic stop, mental health related incident, or pursuit or arrest of a subject; information about the subject’s actions; and information about efforts the CPD member took to limit the need for use of force (“force mitigation efforts”), such as giving verbal direction, strategic positioning, and the use of “time as a tactic.”

OIG analyzed CPD’s TRR data and other, complementary CPD-generated data from October 17, 2017, through February 28, 2020. The objective of this evaluation was to assess whether there was any evidence of race- or ethnicity-based disparities in use-of-force encounters in this period. OIG construed this objective broadly and used the available data to evaluate evidence of disparities across several phases of use-of-force encounters: (1) disparity in the likelihood of being stopped; (2) disparity in the likelihood of facing a use of force after having been stopped; (3) disparity in the level of force deployed in use-of-force encounters; (4) disparity in the number of uses of force deployed in use-of-force encounters; and (5) disparity in the number of force mitigation efforts deployed in use-of-force encounters. The findings below report on each of these analyses separately, and the background to the report provides an overview of the data limitations associated with each analysis