A federal judge overseeing the Chicago Police Department (CPD) Consent Decree has heard about the status of CPD compliance with the decree, and about CPD's performance during the recent Democratic National Convention (DNC).
Screen capture of Sept. 10 Consent Decree hearing.
Source: U.S. District Court, Northern District of Ill.
The hearing, held via videoconference on September 10 2024, was presided over by Rebecca Pallmeyer, a judge of the U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois.
In August of 2017, the state's attorney general and a coalition of community groups ("the Coalition") sued the city 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.
Some of the acronyms used during the hearing:
COPA: Civilian Office of Police Accountability
IMR: independent monitoring report
IMT: Independent Monitoring Team
OAG: Office of Attorney General of Illinois
Participating in the hearing were:
Jennifer Bagby, Deputy Corporation Counsel, Chicago Dept. of Law
Alexandra Block, Senior Supervising Attorney, ACLU of Illinois*
Michael Dirden, IMT Associate Monitor
Karyn Bass Ehler, OAG Assistant Chief Deputy Attorney General
Paul Evans, IMT Associate Monitor
Mary Grieb, OAG Deputy Bureau Chief
Maggie Hickey, IMT Independent Monitor, ArentFox Schiff law firm
Angel Novalez, CPD Chief of Constitutional Policing and Reform
Larry Snelling, CPD Superintendent
* Coalition member
At issue during the hearing: how CPD officers handled protests at the August DNC in Chicago. While members of the monitoring team gave CPD high marks, their narrative was contradicted by a Coalition member.
Though the court did not make a video or audio recording of the hearing publicly available, Inside Chicago Government has provided the audio below. The audio begins with Judge Pallmeyer.
Length 1 hour, 33.8 minutes.
Standard audio:
