Low point
During a recent traffic stop, the gang officer said, he pulled over a young woman for running stop signs. When he approached her car, she opened her driver's-side window and pointed her cellphone in his direction, close enough for him to see his own face on her screen.
"I'm recording this encounter," he recalled her telling him as he took her driver's license.
A rank-and-file officer who patrols the South Side worries even routine interactions with residents could blow up into controversies that draw unwanted attention.
"I feel like I can't talk to anybody because someone might accuse me of violating their civil rights," she told the Tribune.
The job has always been a thankless one, she said, but now it's worse. Before the McDonald video, cops knew that the department most likely had their backs, unless their actions were truly indefensible. But now every little thing is being challenged, she said.
It has gotten so bad, this officer doesn't want to be a cop anymore, but she can't leave. She's a single mother with a young child, she said.
The Police Department's crackdown on officers to make sure the dashboard cameras on their squad cars are working properly has also made some cops uneasy. The move by interim Superintendent John Escalante came after the squad cars that responded to the McDonald shooting picked up no discernible audio, raising concerns of a police cover-up.
With his police radio crackling in the background, one police supervisor who was contacted by the Tribune while he was on patrol in a squad car declined to talk then out of fear the conversation might be recorded on the audio equipment. While off-duty the next day, he told the reporter of his feelings of despair.
A cop with more than 10 years' experience, he called the past few months a "low point" in his career in spite of his recent promotion to sergeant.
His frustrations started after police took heat over the Ferguson police shooting even though the officer was ultimately cleared of wrongdoing by authorities there. The Justice Department, however, found officers routinely violated the civil rights of its citizens and has demanded change. Overall, the negativity has caused the Chicago sergeant to question his career in law enforcement and whether police brass in Chicago will back up frontline cops.
"I'm looking at retiring at 20 years," he said, noting at what point he'd qualify for a pension. "But before I thought I'd be doing this 30 years."
Caution and concern
Adding to the difficulties, officers say, has been the department's transition this year from using contact cards, which were brief records on every person officers stopped in a shift, to filling out a detailed questionnaire for every street stop that occurs.
Officers say the cumbersome process has not only slowed down their efforts by taking them off the street for longer stretches to handle the paperwork but also led to more caution on their part to lower the chances of getting into trouble.
So far this year, street stops are down drastically. Through January, police had filled out reports on 9,044 investigatory stops, a fraction of the 61,330 contact cards written in January last year, the most recent department data shows.
The department agreed to better document street stops last year after a study by the ACLU of Illinois found that Chicago police made more than a quarter-million stops from May through August 2014, four times more than New York cops did at the height of that city's controversial stop-and-frisk practices. The ACLU called those numbers "shocking."
But perhaps even more disturbing, the study exposed what the ACLU called troubling signs of racial profiling for a police department that flatly denied such a systemic problem. African-Americans were stopped at a disproportionately higher rate than Hispanics and whites, especially in predominantly white neighborhoods, the study found.
The two-page questionnaire takes far longer to fill out than the contact cards, tying up officers with paperwork for longer periods of their shift, officers say. It contains about 70 questions, including detailed background information on those stopped as well as an explanation for their "reasonable articulable suspicion" for the stop and pat-down. One officer said it takes about 20 minutes to fill out, compared with a few minutes for contact cards.
The officers said the forms can be filled out in the squad car on their portable data terminals, but those in-car computers often don't work properly, forcing them to go into the police stations to complete the paperwork. When that happens, officers can be taken off the street for lengthy periods of time while emergency calls over the police radio pile up, they said.
Last week the Police Department announced plans to simplify the forms effective Tuesday. It was unclear how much time that would save officers.
With the ACLU given access to drafts of the investigatory stop reports, officers expressed concern that any corrections they make to final reports might lead to accusations of a cover-up.
But Karen Sheley, an ACLU staff attorney who led the study released last year, said the ACLU isn't concerned about the conduct of individual officers as much as whether the department's overall practices are constitutional. With a federal judge reviewing the results, Sheley said, she hopes it results in fewer stops by police of innocent individuals and more positive officer interaction with the community.
