Chicago police have shot 262 people in 6 years; about 80% were black men, newspaper reports
Chicago police have been involved 435 shootings over the last six years, killing 92 and wounding an additional 170. And four out of five people shot by Chicago police officers have been African-American males.
Those were the main findings from a study conducted by the Chicago Tribune which was published Friday. The Tribune found that there had been a police shooting, on average, once every five days since 2010. In that time, police had discharged a total of 2,623 bullets.
Among the main findings of the Tribune’s study was the widespread racial disparity of the shooting victims. About 80.2 percent of those shot by the Chicago Police Department were African-American; 13.4 percent were Hispanics and 5.3 percent were whites. Earlier this year, the mayor’s police accountability task force called on the police superintendent to acknowledge the department’s history of racial discrimination.
The officers were, on average, highly experienced with a decade or more of service time at the force. There were 520 officers who fired their guns; more than 60 of those officers were involved in more than one shooting. Of the 520 officers who fired their weapon in the line of duty, 324 officers fired shots which struck a person. Approximately 46 percent of the police officers who fired shots which struck people were either African-American or Hispanic, although the Tribune was unable to find demographic information for 24 of those officers.
The study also found that shootings by police (hits and misses) have actually declined over the last several years, going from 100 in 2011 to 44 in 2015. Despite that, Chicago still leads other major cities—including Los Angeles, New York, Houston and Philadelphia—in police shootings during that same time span.
“As a police officer, you don’t wait for the shot to come in your direction,” said Dean Angelo Sr., president of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, to the Tribune about the findings. “You might not get a chance to return fire.”
Angelo also argued that many of these shootings could have been avoided had the victims complied with police instructions. “If you comply, it’s over,” Angelo told the Tribune. “But what happens is, if you reach for your waistband or don’t drop the knife, if you don’t stop going for the gun or if you point the gun at me, then my response is going to be weapon engagement. And sometimes it happens in seconds. Not even.”
According to the Tribune, the newspaper engaged in a protracted seven-month battle with the Chicago Police Department to obtain the records of police shootings via the Freedom of Information Act. The study includes high-profile killings, like the 2014 death of Laquan McDonald, as well as other, less-publicized incidents that were not caught on video. The vast majority of these police shootings have been cleared by the Independent Police Review Authority as justified.
