Report finds over 125,000 complaints against more than 25,000 Chicago police officers

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Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/10/13/report-finds-over-125000-comp.html

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RICO the entire force and the union.

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You get the funny feeling that all the ‘predictive policing’ and ‘compstat’ stuff that has become quite popular is being treated as ‘for external use only’.

I can’t imagine why…

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Finally finished The Intercept’s 4-part series on corruption in the drug side of CPD yesterday, and now get to read this. Oh joy and rapture.

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Someday Chicago will get a Democratic mayor, and this Republican racism will be stamped out.

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I see what you did there, but it is a straw man argument that Chicago is “Republican’s fault” or that there aren’t racists in the Democratic party. Chicago’s ills are more than just politics, though they have had notorious issues with that as well. Combine that with the fact that the Mayor is not a wizard. They can’t just reform the Police force, they have to deal with the existing entity as it is now, including a very strong Union, as well as what looks like a systemically corrupt system.

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True, there was a little snark in my comment. How’d you ever notice??

But seriously, when one political machine rules more or less permanently (the Democrats have controlled Chicago longer than the Bolsheviks controlled Russia) and never has to face any serious threat from an opposition, the need to reform any abuses of power drops pretty far down on the things-to-do queue.

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I’m not sure what a specific party machine has to do with it. As I’ve learned living in Seattle and Oakland, police forces are entities unto themselves and the local political machines generally never win going head to head with the police and their union.

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If your point is Democrats are as bad as Republicans, I agree with that.

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Really? Can we not do this hyperbole, please.

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Any political administration that doesn’t periodically get flushed from power and replaced, sooner or later begins to stink of corruption. There have certainly been Republican machines in our history every bit as vile as Chicago’s.

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