Good morning, Chicago.
The latest assessment by the independent monitor has found the Chicago Police Department continues to make incremental progress in its consent decree obligations, but those efforts are under threat because of proposed cutbacks to personnel in the department’s reform office.
CPD’s overall compliance with the consent decree — a set of reforms spurred by the 2014 killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by a former CPD officer — again ticked up in the first six months of 2024, according to the latest assessment report released Tuesday by the independent monitoring team, led by former federal prosecutor Maggie Hickey.
CPD was found to be at some level of compliance with 504 of the 552 “monitorable” paragraphs in the consent decree, Hickey and company found. The department now is at full compliance with 9% of its requirements, up from 7% in the previous monitoring period. Secondary compliance was reached in 37% of monitorable paragraphs in the first half of this year, up from 35% in the last period.
Preliminary compliance, though, fell from 46% in the last monitoring period of 2023 to 45% in the first period of 2024, the monitoring team found.
The measured progress comes as Mayor Brandon Johnson’s spending plan calls for the CPD reform management group responsible for tracking reform efforts consistent with the consent decree to shrink from 19 to 17 staff members.
Read the full story from the Tribune’s Sam Charles.
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