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On Monday morning, a Chicago courtroom was the scene of injustice. Four floors higher, a second audience hall was where the city was overseeing the course of justice.
On the first floor, Kim Foxx, Cook County Attorney, went to court to formally apologize and shake hands with 18 men whose convictions had been handed down in cases related to a former sergeant and police officer. his corrupted tactical unit. This result is considered the largest mass exemption ever achieved in Cook County.
While the men were celebrating their release, a high-level trial continued in the third week, involving another Chicago police officer, Jason Van Dyke, who was murdered in 2014 by a black teenager.
While the two cases are of a different nature, they crystallize together how the country's second largest police department has been systematically and historically rife with corruption and excessive force charges, say experts and activists.
According to Craig Futterman, director of the police, these scandals feature agents who "committed and collected complaints – repeated complaints after complaint that were ignored, whitewashed and, most importantly, denied by the ministry and the city. examine these complaints. A law professor from the University of Chicago who criticized the Chicago Police Department.
"To date, the underlying conditions still need to be addressed and taken into account," he added.
Monday's exemptions were particularly striking, Futterman said, as were cases involving ex-Sgt. Ronald Watts has now led 42 people whose convictions have been canceled since 2016.
"We continue to hear that many of these arrests have been purely conjoined," said Mark Rotert, the head of the lawyer's integrity unit, according to NBC Chicago. "They basically arrested people and framed them or said they were involved in drug-related offenses that did not happen or did not happen in the same way as these police officers."
At a press conference, Joshua Tepfer, a lawyer at the University of Chicago Law School's Exoneration Project, met with several of the men whose convictions had been dismissed, including one on four occasions.
He noted the absence of anyone from the city or the police department "who really needs to apologize to these men and so many others for letting this happen and covering it for so long" .
Last fall, Cook County prosecutors accused 15 men of being accused by Watts, who was sentenced in 2013 for extortion of protective payments by drug traffickers as part of a accommodation in South Side. The ex-defendants filed federal prosecutions this summer alleging that Watts and other agents were engaged in a mutually-protective "code of silence" while extorting bribes and allowing corruption to take place. 'flourish.
The lawsuits also blame the city for doing nothing to control these agents, paving the way for false accusations.
Fourteen men were wrongly convicted of drug charges and one on firearms charges, according to their lawyers.
Watts' actions were revealed after two Chicago police officers, Shannon Spalding and Danny Echeverria, worked undercover with the FBI for two years.
But instead of congratulating Spalding and Echeverria, they claimed that they had been retaliated by their supervisors and other officers. They filed a federal whistleblower suit, which they settled in 2016 for $ 2 million instead of going to trial. The city agreed to admit a code of silence within the department if it meant that Mayor Rahm Emanuel would not have to testify, reported the Chicago Tribune.
Watts and another officer, Kallatt Mohammed, who was named in several trials, were found after shaking a drug dealer who was working as an FBI informant.
Watts was then sentenced to nearly two years in prison and released in 2015.
"Even when good police officers are trying to come forward, the strength of the Chicago code of silence has prevented them from challenging criminal behavior and abuse, preventing innocent people from being imprisoned, and police from committing perjury." said Futterman.
Concealment was also a "standard operating procedure" in the case involving Van Dyke, he added.
Three other police officers are being tried for lying to exaggerate the threat that 17-year-old Laquan McDonald posed before Van Dyke shot him 16 times after failing to obey orders to drop his knife. The shooting was captured on the police dashcam and provoked waves of protests and police reform claims, especially in the black community.
Van Dyke's lawyers say the officer feared for his life.
The police union refused to comment on the trial and Van Dyke was suspended from the department without pay.
Futterman said the Van Dyke lawsuit and false arrests under Watts also show that black Chicago residents remain the most vulnerable to police abuse.
Reverend Ira Acree, an anti-violence activist from the city's west end, said he hoped that a draft court-ordered consent decree, which is still waiting for the approval of 39, a judge, will bring lasting responsibility to the police service.
While he fears that a verdict of not guilty "brings justice back to 100 years in Chicago," he is considering the next city administration to end the code of silence that the police have adopted. Emanuel announced earlier this month that he would not seek a third term next year.
"We need a fresh start," said Mr. Acree, "and we really need to be serious about this."
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