In Illinois, a model police reform law falls short; Missouri backpedals

By Kallie Cox

After passing the SAFE-T  Act in 2021, Illinois was hailed as a model for police reform. However, despite the abolition of cash bail and sweeping police reforms, there remain barriers to accountability.

The next step, critics say, is enforcing the existing policy changes among Illinois’ enforcement agencies, strengthening the penalties for failing to fulfill public records requests, ending qualified immunity, and shoring up accountability measures relating to police surveillance technology.

When police killed George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020, a wave of reform bills swept the nation on a state, local, and federal level. Many of these measures failed — including the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act introduced in Congress.

Illinois, home of one of the nation’s most troubled police forces — the Chicago Police Department — managed to pass its ambitious reforms. Two police reform movements, started by the police killings of young Black and Brown men, created the political landscape that made the passage of this legislation possible. 

Brown killing results in few changes

Across the river in Missouri in 2014, the state and the nation were rocked by the police killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager. But Darren Wilson, the police shooter, was not indicted. There were few police reforms and the Missouri Legislature passed a Law Officers’ Bill of Rights that made it harder to hold officers accountable.

A different police killing months after Brown’s death would spark change in Illinois.

 In October of 2014, Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke shot 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times, killing him. 

Dash camera footage of the encounter wasn’t released until November of 2015. This footage contradicted Van Dyke’s claims that the shooting was in self-defense and led to protests demanding police accountability in the city.

McDonald’s murder was initially written off by the Chicago Police Department as a “justifiable homicide,” but the release of the video footage pressured officials to charge Van Dyke with first-degree murder. 

Van Dyke was found guilty on a reduced charge of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery. He was sentenced to 6.75 years in prison. Three other Chicago police officers were charged with conspiracy in 2017 for their role in covering up the murder, but they were later acquitted. Van Dyke was released from prison in 2022, after serving just three years.

Activists and the Black Caucus helped spur a civil rights investigation into McDonald’s death and the Chicago Police Department. The report from this investigation found a pattern of excessive and unconstitutional force, a record of discriminatory conduct, and found the department’s training of officers lacking.

Calls for reform led to the creation of the current Civilian Office of Police Accountability in Chicago — the investigative body in charge of civilian police oversight. And police dash and body camera footage has slowly become more available in the years after McDonald’s death.

Matt Topic, a partner at Lovey & Lovey, has helped clients navigate hundreds of cases involving the Freedom of Information Act across the country. In particular, he has handled several cases involving police misconduct in Chicago, including the release of the footage from Van Dyke when McDonald was killed.

After the release of the footage in McDonald’s case, the city of Chicago issued a policy calling for the release of body-worn camera and dash-camera footage in more cases.

“Now that the city knows it’s not allowed to withhold these indefinitely, it issued a policy requiring them to be released within 60 to 90 days,” Topic said. “But that [is] self-imposed. It’s not State law.”

On a statewide level, the SAFE-T Act requires all law enforcement agencies to use body-worn cameras by 2025. Additionally, it allows the release of body-worn camera footage in certain circumstances. This includes any footage flagged as a result of a complaint, the discharge of a firearm, the use of force, or an encounter that results in death or bodily harm.

The SAFE-T Act reforms and the new policies on body cameras have not prevented police killings in the state, but it has made it more difficult for officers to escape legal consequences when they kill on the job. 

New body camera footage in a recent police killing in Springfield, Illinois was released on July 22. This shows a white Sangamon County Sheriff’s Deputy, Sean Grayson, shooting and killing an unarmed Black woman, Sonya Massey, who called 911 to report a possible prowler.

The footage shows that as soon as Massey opened the door for deputies just after 1 a.m. on July 6, she said “Please don’t hurt me.” Shortly after entering, Grayson pointed out a pot on the stove and asked Massey to remove it. She immediately got up and did so and seemed to laugh with the officer. After the officer mentioned he was moving away from her because of the steaming water, Massey said “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.”

“You better (f****) not or I swear to God I’ll (f****) shoot you in your (f****) face,” he said, pulling his gun even though he was several feet away from Massey. “Ok, I’m sorry!” she told him, raising her hands in the air and ducking. Grayson then shot Massey, a mother of two, in the head. 

Grayson discouraged his partner from getting a medical kit to help Massey, but the other deputy intervened anyway — following another requirement of the SAFE-T act that requires law enforcement to render aid.

Shortly before the footage was released to the public, an Illinois Grand Jury indicted Grayson who is charged with first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a firearm, and official misconduct. 

Grayson’s killing of Massey has sparked peaceful protests in Springfield organized by the local Black Lives Matter chapter.

Progress in Illinois

Before the passage of the SAFE-T Act, Illinois largely failed to hold police accountable. 

A 2021 investigation by the Gateway Journalism Review in partnership with the Pulitzer Center found that from 2000-2020 81 Chicago police officers lost their badges, but only after being investigated for 1,706 previous offenses — an average of 21 accusations per officer.  One-third (28) of these officers were investigated for domestic altercations or sexual misconduct. Two murdered their wives. 

In Chicago, unjust convictions are not just isolated cases but are uncovered in the dozens from the work of corrupt police squads. Sgt. Ronald Watts’ tactical unit at Ida B. Wells

apartment has reached 115 exonerations and counting. CPD Detective Reynaldo Guevara

framed about 50 mostly young Latino men on the city’s Northwest Side. And Commander Jon Burge’s homicide squad tortured more than 120 mostly Black suspects from the 1970s-’90s before he was stopped.

Illinois has had 363 total exonerations since 1989, with 271 of them having grown out of

police misconduct. 177 of the exonerations were murder cases and 133 of those grew out of

police misconduct. Illinois courts have recently thrown out 115 unjust convictions based on the fabricated police work of a tactical team headed by disgraced Sgt. Ronald Watts.  

One of the Chicago officers who escaped consequences despite repeated complaints was Van Dyke, who was investigated for 25 complaints after 2000. Despite these instances of alleged misconduct — including a $350,000 jury verdict in a case where he used excessive force on another Black man, causing him to need surgery — Van Dyke still had his badge when he killed McDonald.

The SAFE-T Act, brought about by pressure from the Black Lives Matter movement, made it easier to decertify a police officer for misconduct. 

Under the law, a court conviction is no longer required for decertification and a broader array of misconduct is de-certifiable, including moral turpitude and more misdemeanors, GJR previously reported. Officers can also be suspended instead of decertification or pending an investigation. Background checks are required for new hires.

In addition to making it easier to remove bad police officers, the SAFE-T Act implemented reforms championed by advocates that most other states have failed to pass. This includes a ban on chokeholds, requiring body cameras and giving the attorney general broad authority to investigate civil rights violations by police officers. Attorney General Kwame Raoul has since used this authority to launch an investigation in 2021 into the Joliet Police Department.

Along with these reforms, Illinois became the first state in the country to abolish cash bail with its Pretrial Fairness Act. This was met with a targeted misinformation campaign by law enforcement advocates who attempted to tank the bill.

Christopher Williams — a Chicago native who has written about the impacts of the Pretrial Fairness Act as a Research Assistant Professor of Law and a Race, Place, & Equity Fellow at the University of Virginia School of Law — said the abolition of cash bail became a flashpoint for the state’s 2022 election.

Second coming of police reform after Floyd’s murder

Williams explained that Illinois was able to abolish cash bail because of the second coming of a movement that started with the death of Michael Brown and exploded after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

“The sort of rhetoric around crime and crime being out of control, and it being a pandemic of crime, was really sort of a facet of people trying to hold on to these outdated ideas about what jailing and policing mean, which obviously wasn’t going to have as much political cachet in the direct moments post Black Lives Matter,” Williams said. “This sort of fear-based strategy that happened across a lot of races in Illinois, it really failed.”

Campaigns against the SAFE-T Act and the Pretrial Fairness Act focused on the idea that crime would be rampant and cops would flee the state as a result. These misinformation campaigns were sponsored by external money from political groups flowing into the state, Williams said, and can especially be observed in a phony newspaper that was created for this purpose — The Chicago City Wire. 

The Chicago City Wire has been described as worse than a tabloid and primarily contains misleading, right-wing propaganda but is designed to look like a traditional newspaper. Block-Club Chicago reported on the “deceptive,” paper and found that it is funded by “Local Government Information Services, a Lake Forest-based LLC run by prominent conservative Brian Timpone and associated with conservative radio voice and Republican political strategist Dan Proft.” Copies of the wire were sent to thousands of Chicago residents to disparage the SAFE-T Act. (GJR published a 2017 investigation of Dan Proft’s propaganda-filled news outlets in 2017.)

Despite critics of the bail reform law, data show the approach has been successful in Cook County, Williams says. In an essay for the Triibe, he wrote: 

“Data emerging from the Circuit Court of Cook County shows that the law is working. Since implementation, about 88% of people have returned to their scheduled court dates while on pretrial release, regardless of what crime they have been accused of — and 88% of people have not committed a new crime since they have been on pretrial release. All the while, crime has actually gone down in Chicago this year compared to 2023. For all the fear-mongering about what was to come, it appears that advocates and organizers supporting the Pretrial Fairness Act were right.”

Now that Illinois has shown success with a cashless bail system, Williams is hopeful that other states will follow suit.

Accountability failures

In addition to the legislative reforms and policy changes, a civil rights suit by the Justice Department resulted in a consent decree requiring changes in the Chicago Police Department.   

In 2015,  then-Attorney General Lisa Madigan asked the Department of Justice to investigate the Chicago Police Department in the wake of McDonald’s death in 2014 and the 2015 release of Van Dyke’s dash camera footage to determine whether or not this incident was symptomatic of a larger issue. In 2017 — just before Barack Obama’s Presidential term ended —  the DOJ released the final results of its investigation into the department. 

The DOJ found CPD “engaged in a pattern or practice of unconstitutional policing, particularly in its use of force, which the DOJ characterized as unnecessarily dangerous and racially discriminatory,” according to research by the Manhattan Institute. The DOJ recommended a formal consent decree supervised by an independent monitoring team to ensure CPD committed to its reforms.

When President Donald Trump took office, it became clear that the DOJ under his administration would not pursue the federal lawsuit against CPD that would be required for a consent decree to be put into place. Instead, Madigan filed the lawsuit. Nearly a year later, they had negotiated a proposed consent decree. The Trump administration opposed this, but the final agreement was approved by a federal judge and was effected in March 2019.

This consent decree mandated department-wide reforms for CPD and requires, among other measures, additional training, the implementation of de-escalation tactics, mandated reports whenever an officer points their weapon at someone and additional transparency measures. 

More specifically, the consent decree requires annual training, regular crisis intervention training, the tracking and review of use of force data, tracking and analysis of foot pursuits, and ongoing assessment of the department’s enforcement practices. 

The final consent decree was more than 236 pages long and involved hundreds of policy changes and reforms, according to research by the Manhattan Institute. An independent monitoring team found that as of June 2022, the department was only in compliance with 80% of these reforms.

The institute found that since the decree was put into place, the number of police killings has remained the same. Additionally, the number of complaints regarding police rose in 2022.

The Manhattan Institute remains pessimistic about the consent decree’s effectiveness at reform. In its 2023 analysis, it wrote:

“Most relevant indicators have seen little meaningful movement since the consent decree’s implementation. It is, of course, possible that CPD will demonstrate some marked improvement — it has another five years to do so — but it is equally possible that things will remain where they are. In either case, it is hard to attribute the positive change to the consent decree as such, rather than to the pressures that came before or after it.”

Ed Yohnka with the ACLU of Illinois seems to be similarly concerned about the practical implementation of the reforms.

“When you look at Chicago and you look at the policies and practices that are trying to be addressed through the consent decree process these are good efforts, these are important steps,” he said. “I think it’s also true to say […] we’re in a little bit of a checkbox policy where the department is creating policies, but are they really training to those policies? And are they really enforcing them out on the streets?”

There are hundreds of police departments in Illinois and ensuring that each community can truly enforce changes to the law is difficult, Yohnka said. 

“We’ve seen the requirements on officers to report if they see another officer using excessive force. We’ve seen bans on things like chokeholds and things like that. So I think all […] of that is good,” Yohnka said. “But they’re beginning steps, and it’s going to be a lot further process to change a system that has become as entrenched as the current policing system that we have.”

While complaints of police misconduct can be difficult to sustain because of the strength of the state’s police union, they cost Illinois taxpayers millions every year. 

From 2019-2021 in the city of Chicago alone, the misconduct of just 116 officers cost taxpayers $91.3 million in lawsuits, according to an investigation by WTTW News.

In addition to facing difficulties implementing reform, Illinois has also failed to pass barriers to qualified immunity. Qualified immunity has been used for years to shield corrupt officers who engage in misconduct in the course of their duty.

Qualified immunity is a get-out-of-jail-free card. An officer cannot be punished for an abusive practice unless it violated “clearly established law” and “every reasonable” police officer would know was illegal the moment it occurred. An example was that the governor of Ohio, James Rhodes, and top National Guard commanders received qualified immunity for their role in the killing of four students at Kent State during the Vietnam War. 

In 2022, the ACLU of Illinois was advocating for a bill (IL HB1727) that would remove qualified immunity as a defense for officers accused of misconduct, but it failed to pass.

Transparency

The SAFE-T law required the Illinois Law Enforcement and Training Standards Board to maintain a statewide database of police misconduct, but the same law then closed this to the public. Anyone wishing to obtain these records would have to file a FOIA request with the state’s nearly 900 law enforcement agencies. 

In the three years since the law restricted access to this database, this legal loophole has not been addressed.

Still, Illinois is one of just 19 states where police misconduct records are available, or mostly available, to the public, the Gateway Journalism Review analysis found. 

And, ILETSB makes available an annual report naming the officers who were decertified and showing broad data on where misconduct was reported. It does not name the officers who were accused of, or found guilty of misconduct they were not decertified for.

In 2022 the board reported the decertification of 33 police officers and 175 citizen and agency complaints of alleged misconduct since July when the new statute for allowing citizens to report took effect. In 2023, 21 officers were decertified and the board received 496 complaints.

The board did not release the names of the decertified officers in 2023. When asked why the names were not included in the “transparency report,”  a spokesperson for ILETSB responded:

“Contrary to your assertion, the Board hasn’t stopped releasing names, but the process was extended to insure [sic] due process. The differences you noticed in the 2023 Annual Report are reflective of changes brought about by recent case law. Officers who have committed criminal offenses are now presented to the Board for decertification approval after notice and an opportunity to respond has been provided to the officer. Once the Board gives final approval of decertification, the names of the officers will be available.”

This spokesperson did not respond to additional requests for comment, would not specify what case law he was referring to, and would not explain why the “process was extended to insure [sic] due process.”

Despite these changes and a requirement that law enforcement agencies must check the Officer Professional Conduct Database and contact each person’s former departments before appointing a law enforcement officer, unsuitable candidates have managed to slip through the cracks.

Grayson, the deputy who killed Massey, was hired by six law enforcement departments within a four-year period after being discharged from the Army for serious misconduct, an investigation by the Invisible Institute and the Investigative Reporting Workshop found. Five of these departments hired Grayson after the SAFE-T Act was passed. 

While Illinois is better than most states when it comes to making officer misconduct records available, it has its flaws, Topic said. 

“Forever and continuing until today, the Chicago Police Department in particular just has a very bad track record in complying with the law, they very often just ignore requests until you sue them to get records released,” Topic said. “They make very broad claims that whenever there’s an open investigation, they can just withhold, like, all the records, even though that is not what the law says, and they lose that issue over and over again.”

Topic said that in his experience, once a case makes it to court, judges are “pretty good” about requiring the department to release the records but the penalties need to be strengthened for departments that ignore requests.

“There isn’t really much I would change with the statute, other than I would increase the penalties for violating the statute, because as good as the statute is, as I mentioned, very often, the police department doesn’t follow it,” Topic said. “It takes a lawsuit in order to get them to comply with what the statute said.”

The department is inclined to withhold these records because of a longstanding culture of secrecy, he says.

“In part, it’s the result of [an] oppressive amount of bureaucracy that they’re imposing on themselves before records will be released, which adds significantly to the amount of time it takes to process them,” Topic said. “The knee-jerk reaction is to [not] release anything you don’t have to because there’s not enough disincentive on that. So they err on the side of withholding things, especially if it’s an open investigation.”

In the years since Ferguson, some attempts have been made to increase accountability within the Chicago police force, including the creation of the Civilian Office of Police Accountability after McDonald’s death which replaced the Independent Police Review Authority. 

But misconduct investigations still aren’t transparent and COPA limits what information can be made public, an investigation by ProPublica found.

“Instead of making its reports public as soon as investigations are completed, as its predecessor did, COPA withholds the ones in which it found an officer at fault until the findings have been vetted by police officials and officers have been notified,” ProPublica noted.

This leads to lengthy delays in releasing any information to the public.

“Under the new ordinance, COPA is barred from posting its investigative reports — and any disagreement or pushback from the Police Department — until the review process has been completed and the officer is notified of the discipline,” according to ProPublica. “There is no deadline for that last step.”

Topic acknowledged running into some issues with COPA’s records as well.

“They’re a little bit better than the police department, but they still can be difficult to deal with when there’s an ongoing investigation,” he said. “They have the same knee-jerk reaction that as long as their investigation is open, that they really don’t want to release anything.”

Because Illinois is so progressive when it comes to what records are available to the public, the fight for access has shifted. Now rather than pushing for additional public records access, it’s about enforcing current law and preventing backsliding in the legislature.

 “It’s more about pushing against efforts by police interests to try to take away transparency rights,” Topic said.

The Chicago Police Department announced in May of this year that it will make its misconduct records available to the public, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

Future of police accountability

In St. Louis Missouri, a short drive from the Illinois border, city officials have passed an oversight bill that would give the public more transparency and oversight regarding what surveillance technology is used in the city.

Board Bill 185, championed by the ACLU and also known as CCOPS (Community Control Over Police Surveillance) passed the Board of Aldermen earlier this year despite facing some pushback from the SLMPD and Mayor Tishaura Jones — whose campaign promised police reform. The bill regulates the use of police surveillance technology in the city, requires the technology to be approved by the Board of Aldermen, and mandates that the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department publish an annual report with extensive detail on the use of these surveillance tools.

Passing this oversight puts the city of St. Louis a step ahead of Illinois, which has yet to pass a similar measure.

“It’s something we’d really like to do, I’m a little bit envious of our colleagues in St Louis getting to do that in a way that we haven’t been able to yet,” Yohnka said. He said addressing this gap in regulation is the next logical step for advocates in the state.

Additionally, the ACLU of Illinois plans to continue advocating for legislation ending qualified immunity, it said in a release last year after the legislation failed.

Yohnka is hopeful that additional reforms can pass without another tragedy spurring action in the state legislature.

“I think this is part of a little bit of an arc of a journey that we’re on. And, hopefully, we’ll be able to make the next steps without the need for a tragedy, but just simply because it’s the right thing to do,” he said.

Already this year, 12 civilians have been killed by police in Illinois. This included an unarmed 4-year-old boy who was Black, according to the Washington Post’s police shooting database. In April, plainclothes Chicago Police officers shot a 26-year-old Black man — Dexter Reed — 96 times in 41 seconds during a traffic stop, killing him.

Kallie Cox is a freelance journalist who previously worked for the Riverfront Times. They can be reached at Kecoxmedia@gmail.com. This article previously appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of the GJR magazine,