Daywatch: When officers point their weapons
Good morning, Chicago.
Five years after pledging to firm up recordkeeping on incidents where police officers point their weapons at people while performing their duties, the Chicago Police Department and other city officials appear to have fallen short of goals outlined in a federal consent decree guiding reform, the Tribune has found.
That consent decree calls for CPD officers to notify the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications each time they point a weapon at someone. OEMC is then required to notify the officer’s supervisor, and those records ostensibly are available to the public through the Freedom of Information Act.
But in a response to a FOIA filed by the Tribune seeking those records during the five-year window since CPD agreed to the more stringent disclosure requirement, OEMC first provided records that indicated just 12 incidents where officers had made such a notification. Later, the office provided a spreadsheet with nearly 17,000 rows listing “firearm-pointing incident reports,” or FPIR notifications, made since early 2019.
Read the full story from the Tribune’s Sam Charles.
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