Sun-Times Op-Ed Really Misses Point About Policing With Data

By Stephen Gossett in News on Jun 21, 2016 9:08PM

In the wake of Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson’s panel appearance at the City Club of Chicago on Monday, the Chicago Sun-Times published an op-ed in which columnist Mary Mitchell expressed that familiar sense of empathy and fatigue about Chicago gun violence that we all feel—but unfortunately it leads her down a dangerous, slippery-slope path that advocates “an aggressive policing strategy” that even she herself envisions as resulting in civil liberties violations.

The crux of Mitchell’s argument rests upon an admittedly eye-catching statistic: 80 percent of the 66 people shot over Memorial Day weekend were on a list of possible targets generated by the police department's CompStat statistics; and all of the offenders appeared on the list.

“The reason why the shooters are still there, we identified them, but we can’t pluck them off the street until they actually do something that we can arrest them for,” Johnson said during the luncheon. It’s the logical, lawful position.

Mitchell’s response? “Fair, but not good enough.” She then cites the weekend’s most alarming violent crimes—the assault-rifle-powered shooting in front of church and the shooting of a 3-year-old—before the law-and-order outrage takes hold: “Not even one of the 1400 on the watch list should be able to take a breath of air without a police officer seeing it.”

But the police do take a pro-active approach toward the people on the list, knocking on doors and directing them toward local and federal services that might benefit. Mitchell’s own newspaper said as much while calling the question—why don’t we just arrest the people the algorithm identifies?—“obvious.”

Mitchell then draws a troubling parallel between the federal war on terror (and all the overreach therein) and the Chicago Police Department. “CPD should have as much intel on these individuals as FBI officials have on ISIS sympathizers…We shouldn’t let these domestic terrorists…force us to live in fear.”

Still, another line in her piece stands out for casual disregard: “Will some of these officers run afoul of civil liberties? Probably?”

From the fallout over the Laquan McDonald death, to the Independent Police Review Authority’s earned reputation for incompetence, to the seemingly regular release of videos that depict potential excessive force, this statement is particularly tone deaf. The gun violence is indeed tragic, out of control, indescribably costly in so many ways. But we should not let it cost innocent people their civil rights too.

(We’ve reached out to the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch and the Illinois Fraternal Order of Police for comment and will update this post accordingly.)