A federal judge overseeing the Chicago Police Department (CPD) Consent Decree has heard arguments over whether a court should dictate CPD practices concerning traffic stops.

Screen capture of June 11 Consent Decree hearing.
Source: U.S. District Court, Northern District of Ill.

The hearing, held via videoconference on June 11 2024, was presided over by Rebecca Pallmeyer, chief judge of the U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois.

At issue: whether the city's Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability (CCPSA) should control CPD policy regulating traffic stops. CCPSA would lose such control, according to its Web site, if Pallmeyer's court folds it into the Consent Decree. At the hearing, adjudicates and members of the public argued for and against expanding the decree's scope.

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:
IMT: Independent Monitoring Team
ISR: investigatory stop report
OAG: Office of Attorney General of Illinois

Participating in the hearing were:
Craig Futterman, Clinical Professor, University of Chicago Law School*
Michelle Garcia, Deputy Legal Director, ACLU of Illinois*
Mary Grieb, OAG Deputy Bureau Chief
Maggie Hickey, IMT Independent Monitor, ArentFox Schiff law firm
Kerr Putney, IMT Associate Monitor
Larry Snelling, CPD Superintendent

* 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 Associate Monitor Putney.

Length 2 hours, 13.5 minutes minutes standard.

Standard audio: