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CPD has made little progress on vow to replace gang database criticized as error-filled and racially discriminatory, city watchdog says

Chicago Tribune - 3/31/2021

The city’s watchdog has found that the Chicago Police Department has “fallen critically short” on its vow to replace and improve its gang database, which reports have described as an error-laden tool of racial discrimination.

In a report released Wednesday, Inspector General Joseph Ferguson determined the department has made “minimal progress” toward a fairer and more accurate system promised in response to criticisms the watchdog made two years ago. The new report faults the police for failing to clearly establish who is in charge of the effort, lacking a timeline for completing it and giving the public potentially misleading information on the hot-button issue of who can be included in the new data collection.

Meanwhile, cops have sometimes continued to use the flawed system, Ferguson wrote.

Ferguson’s report indicates that Mayor Lori Lightfoot, nearly two years into her term, may yet be far from fulfilling the campaign promise she made to replace the gang database with a system strictly containing information that is “relevant and credible.”

Lightfoot’s office and the Police Department did not immediately offer comment.

Ferguson’s April 2019 report criticizing the so-called “gang database” — which is actually a set of data collections — reinforced the complaints of Chicago residents and reform advocates that cops have used flimsy evidence to tag people as gang members and gave them little recourse to challenge that label. Anything from tattoos to the word of informants to admissions by those arrested could lead to people being listed as gang members, and more than 134,000 names were included as of two years ago, Ferguson wrote.

Being in the database could increase the chances of receiving a more severe prison sentence or higher bond or losing out on a job, Ferguson wrote at the time.

His audit of one element of the database, gang arrest cards, found entries for some 90 supposed gang members with birth dates that would make them more than 117 years old. More than 15,000 people in the database had no specific gang tie listed.

Ferguson found that African Americans and Latinos made up 95 percent of those listed on gang arrest cards. He wrote that officers had written occupations on those cards including “scum bag,” “criminal,” “black,” “dork,” “looser,” and “turd.”

While city officials have promised a host of technical changes, activists have voiced skepticism that the department can be trusted to do better and called for the database’s abolition. Criticisms of the process of replacing the database align with complaints about the thus-far sluggish process of broadly reforming a Police Department with a long history of abuse and misconduct against minorities.

In response to Ferguson’s report two years ago, officials in the final days of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration vowed to change the system. Most substantively, the department promised a new database that would come with clear standards, training for officers, reviews to ensure accuracy, the purging of bad information and a process for people to appeal their entries into the system.

Wednesday’s report found little progress and no clear timeline for the project. Amid a shuffling of personnel, it was unclear for months who was responsible for managing the effort, Ferguson wrote. Only this month did city officials inform Ferguson’s staffers of which officers are managing the project and report that a vendor’s “build out” of the system was close to finished, the new report states.

Ferguson wrote that the department had not fully spelled out plans for training officers on using the new system, detailed the appeals process or explained how it will manage access by outside law enforcement.

Lightfoot and the City Council have, however, moved to prevent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from using gang database information.

The report also faults the department for leaving on its website for months an outdated version of the departmental directive on the new system, concealing a change likely to displease critics of the gang database concerned about people being included who aren’t accused of a crime. A new version of the directive that wasn’t shared online included a change that could allow more officers to designate people as gang members even when they weren’t arrested. Ferguson wrote that by failing to post the most current version, “CPD risks misleading the public with respect to its most recent policy position.”

Meanwhile, the department has continued to use its old system. For example, in 2020, the department objected to a state application for a concealed carry license and cited the database. The applicant, who was denied the license, allegedly self-identified as a gang member during a 2006 juvenile arrest, the report states.

“In sum, CPD accessed a gang identification for a juvenile, recorded in its database 15 years ago, and then shared that information with the State of Illinois, after the publication of OIG’s April 2019 report and CPD’s acceptance of most of the recommendations contained therein,” Ferguson wrote.

Underlying Ferguson’s specific criticisms is a philosophical one: “CPD has consistently maintained that its collection of gang information is critical to its crime fighting strategy but has not yet clearly articulated the specific strategic value of the data to be collected.”

Ferguson wrote that Chicago’s gang factions are now smaller and involved in fluid alliances and conflicts.

“A ‘gang database’ that does not remain up-to-date, that cannot effectively track the shifting alliances and conflicts across many small gang factions, or that cannot distinguish gang members at high risk of becoming victims or perpetrators of violence from those at low risk, might be of little or no value,” the report states.

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