At a recent court hearing, police reform advocates derided a strategic plan proposed by the Chicago Police Department (CPD).

The disapproval came during an April 8 federal court hearing about the status of CPD's compliance with a 2019 Consent Decree that imposes wide-ranging reforms.

In August of 2017, the state's attorney general and a coalition of community groups ("the Coalition") sued the city of Chicago in federal court to compel CPD to address findings by the U.S. Dept. of Justice that CPD had engaged in a longstanding, pervasive "pattern or practice" of civil rights abuses. That suit resulted in the 2019 Consent Decree, which mandates hundreds of reforms that CPD must implement—under supervision of a federal judge.

The April 8 hearing, held via videoconference, was presided over by Rebecca Pallmeyer, a judge of the U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois.

CPD Deputy Director Leslie Silletti.
Source: x.com

In the hearing, CPD's Leslie Silletti, Deputy Director of Constitutional Policing and Reform, outlined the department's proposed three-year strategic plan, which it calls "Strategy for Organizational Excellence."

In describing the plan to the court, Silletti called it CPD's "infrastructure to connect vision, mission, and core values to tactics."

"Nearly all initiatives in the plan align either fully or in part with Consent Decree requirements," Silletti said.

Of the Consent Decree's 500-plus original paragraphs, CPD has reached full compliance with just 16 percent of their mandates.

According to Silletti, CPD's strategic plan has four foundations: building, developing, and supporting CPD's workforce; community trust; neighborhood safety; and organizational infrastructure.

Under each foundation, Silletti said, DPS has three key strategies.

"Why key strategies?" she asked. "With so much experience, insight, and possibilities, the number of strategies could be infinite. These strategies are those determined to be the most effective at this time and looking forward to help us reach our goals. And going deeper into the infrastructure, the hierarchy, we see the 48 initiatives under the key strategies."

Pushing back on CPD's strategic plan was Jessica Gingold, an attorney with Coalition member Equip for Equality.

The plan "fails to identify a single concrete outcome measure," Gingold said in the hearing. "It fails to offer a single deadline for the lofty goals it espouses. If there are no outcome measures and no deadlines other than the three-year scope, then it isn't strategic and it isn't a meaningful plan."

Equip for Equality attorney Jessica
Gingold. Source: linkedin.com

Six years after the Consent Decree's launch, Gingold said, "we should be past the planning stage."

Instead, she said, CPD should be reporting on its "reductions in the use of force, successful diversion of people in crisis away from the criminal system, and the implementation of unbiased policing."

Gingold said that a court monitor's recent report showed "an erosion, not an increase, in trust. This is a crisis. It is a crisis that we are six years in—and people do not see, feel, and experience changes in policing in their day to day life."

Therefore, Gingold said, "these hearings should be about action and deadlines" and not "PowerPoint presentations with generalities . . . speaking past the [low Consent Decree] compliance rate and six years of consistent reports of ongoing harm to the people of Chicago."

Gingold called CPD's strategic plan "another piece of paper with a lot of good intentions—but the community is tired of intentions."

The community, Gingold said, "needs deadlines so that we can measure and encourage or meaningfully challenge CPD's actions."