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In a Community Survey Report conducted by the court-appointed
monitoring team convened in 2019 to oversee the department’s
efforts to change the way it trains, supervises and disciplines
officers, researchers said all the angst persists despite a
reform campaign that has seen city taxpayers pump more than $208
million into reform efforts in 2025 alone.
Alarmed as he might be, Chicago Ald. Chris Taliaferro insists
he’s not surprised.
“You got to understand that our public is still seeing that
young Black men are still being unjustly pulled over at an
alarming rate, which has led to some young Black men being shot
and killed,” Taliaferro, a former CPD detective, told The Center
Square. “The public's going to be skeptical when that's front
page every now and then. Our police department is not going to
have the public’s trust until they see progress being made in
those areas.”
With the department having satisfied only 9% of the court order
requirements laid out for it over the past six years, data also
shows just 33% of residents now think CPD is doing a “good” or
“very good” job protecting the city and just 47% of individuals
thought as much when it came to the question of if the
department was excelling at protecting their neighborhood. Both
figures are down at least two points from 2020 tabulations, or a
year after the federal consent decree first went into effect.
At the same time, Taliaferro stressed just over one in five
young Black men expressed any level of confidence that ongoing
reform efforts will lead to real change, down two points from
2020 findings as Blacks continue to face much higher rates of
involuntary interactions with police than either whites or
Latinos.
“I think our department has done very well in reducing violence
and bringing crime down,” Taliaferro said. “Our homicides and
violent offenses are down tremendously, but that's not the areas
that I believe help build public trust in our department. Across
the city, they're going to continue to reduce those because
they're making great efforts in those areas, but it's those
other areas that the public is very concerned about.”
Race aside, most Chicagoans agree CPD did a poorer job in 2024
compared to four years earlier in areas ranging from responding
to emergencies promptly, supporting witnesses and victims of
crime and ensuring neighborhoods felt safe. |
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