The Patriot Post® · Task Force Report Puts Chicago Cops in the Crosshairs

The task force Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel assembled in response to the Laquan McDonald video released its findings Wednesday — surprise! — accusing the Chicago Police Department of racist policing policies. After crunching CPD data, the task force wrote it “gives validity to the widely held belief the police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color.” In the 404 CPD officer-involved shootings from 2008 to 2015, the report found 74% of the incidents involved a black suspect. Maybe that’s because blacks disproportionately commit violent crimes, including attacking police.

This report is both informed by and will only exacerbate the race-bait rhetoric about cops perpetuated by Emanuel’s old boss, Barack Obama. The Left will use this report to pile more regulations on law enforcement, handcuffing them from keeping the peace. Granted, police are not immune from the need to reform. While police officers in the Windy City stopped and searched black and Hispanic drivers in 2013 four times as often as white drivers, police were two times as likely to discover contraband on white motorists. But this report will only make things worse in Chicago.

Ever since the McDonald video was released, Chicago police have been reluctant to engage in proactive policing and arrests have dropped. As a result, the homicide rate in the city spiked, with the city on track to exceed 500 homicides by year-end. It fits the Left’s agenda to say the Chicago PD is engaging in some kind of protest in response to the criticism by the mayor’s office, but this isn’t entirely the case. Instead, according to FiveThirtyEight, police officers who have to fill out more paperwork thanks to Emanuel’s “reforms” have less time to investigate crime. That said, cops no doubt think twice before stepping into an incident that might end up on YouTube. Welcome to “The Ferguson Effect,” where policing decreases over fears that criticism will ruin the officer’s career, or worse, that an officer will be killed for the “crime” of being white. The relationship between Chicago police and the people they serve is broken, and the Left’s rhetoric is only making it worse.