Chicago’s top federal prosecutor – one of the 46 U.S. attorneys asked to resign last week – released a letter Tuesday urging the city and the Justice Department to quickly move forward to reform the Chicago Police Department as a way to address soaring violence.
In a five-page letter, Zachary Fardon, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois until last week, said Chicago’s violence cannot be stopped without a “top-flight police department” that has the resources and training needed to combat “entrenched” street gangs.
“For decades, [the Chicago Police Department] has been run on the cheap,” wrote Fardon, who became a U.S. attorney in 2013. “Officers don’t have the training, the supervision, the equipment or culture they need and deserve. . . . If you leave correcting those deficiencies to the vagaries of city politics, then you lose the long term fight.”
Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city, has seen a dramatic increase in violence and shootings recently. In 2016, the city had 762 homicides, its deadliest single year in two decades, eclipsing the combined tolls in New York and Los Angeles. There were also more than 4,000 shooting victims.
This bloodshed has regularly been invoked by President Donald Trump, who during the campaign and since taking office has repeatedly singled out Chicago as an example of how the entire country has been besieged by dangerous crime. While a number of cities have experienced a recent increase in homicides, levels of violent crime nationwide remain far below what they were a quarter-century ago.
Shortly before President Barack Obama left office, the Justice Department released a scathing report accusing the Chicago Police Department of using excessive and unreasonable force. The report concluded that the pattern was “largely attributable to systemic deficiencies” in the city and the police force, which it said had inadequate training and routinely violated the constitutional rights of minority residents. Federal investigators also said they found that officers felt unsupported and lacking in morale.
The 13-month investigation of the police department was launched amid a firestorm prompted by video footage of a white officer fatally shooting Laquan McDonald, a black 17-year-old. That video, released in November 2015, sparked intense protests in the city and led to the ouster of Chicago’s police superintendent.
The departure of Fardon, 50, comes at a time when Trump’s Justice Department appears less likely to impose change on local police departments – and it is unclear what will happen to the police reform agreement between the Justice Department and Chicago city officials.
The same day the Justice report was released, city officials said they would negotiate with the federal government on a court-enforceable order to reform the police department. A week later, Trump took the oath of office, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions has not addressed the future of the Chicago accord under his Justice Department.
Sessions has generally been critical of consent decrees that force reforms on police departments. During his confirmation hearing, he said that consent decrees “undermine the respect for police officers.”
Under Obama, the Justice Department investigated a number of local police departments and forced significant reforms through consent decrees. In a speech two weeks ago, Sessions tied the recent increase in violent crime to a lack of respect for police officers and promised that his Justice Department would be more supportive of local law enforcement.
Last week, Sessions told federal prosecutors that a top priority is to “use every tool we have” to investigate and prosecute violent criminals. But Fardon wrote in his letter that the Chicago U.S. Attorney’s Office is woefully understaffed and needs to be immediately assigned 15 to 20 additional federal prosecutors for more violent-crime prosecutions.
“It’s a travesty that the office remains understaffed,” Fardon wrote. “. . . If you want more federal gang and gun prosecutions, we need more full-time, permanent federal prosecutors in Chicago. That’s simple math.”
Trump has suggested sending “the feds” to Chicago to help, although he has not elaborated on what that would mean. Federal agents are already on the ground in Chicago, coordinating with local police. But Fardon said federal law enforcement and local police need to greatly increase their presence in crime-ravaged neighborhoods.
“We need to flood those neighborhoods,” Fardon wrote. “. . . Not just to arrest the bad guys but also to be standing on that corner where shots otherwise might get fired, to be breaking up those corner loiterers, and to be meeting and learning and knowing the kids, the people, and the truth of who are the good guys, who are the bad guys, and who isn’t yet formed and can be swayed.”
(c) 2017, The Washington Post ยท Sari Horwitz, Mark Berman
