Chris Gasche
Associate Editor
Loyola University Chicago School of Law, JD 2027
Following the death of Laquan McDonald at the hands of Jason Van Dyke, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) underwent an investigation by the Department of Justice (DOJ), initiated by President Barack Obama. This investigation led to the determination that CPD engaged in a “pattern or practice” of unconstitutional policing. As a result, CPD agreed to federal enforcement of a consent decree in 2019. Since the implementation of the consent decree, CPD has been in compliance with only 23% of the consent decree’s mandates. Although this is an improvement from previous years, it has not been enough to foster community trust in CPD practices.
What is a consent decree and how is it implemented?
A consent decree is a court order initiated by the federal government that mandates reform. Consent decrees are detailed documents which provide police departments with aspirational reform goals and deadlines to achieve these goals. Once a consent decree has been published and agreed to by both parties, an independent monitor is typically appointed to ensure the department is progressing at an agreed upon pace. The Independent Monitoring Team (IMT) then reports their findings to a federal judge who oversees compliance. The IMT is responsible for overseeing the court order and ensuring compliance with its mandates. There are eleven total associate monitors who correspondingly oversee eleven topic areas set out in the consent decree. Additionally, there is a Community Engagement Team who works closely with the monitors in order to gauge community trust and its development over the course of the compliance process.
The IMT issues detailed reports of the department’s progress toward the decree’s goals. In the most recent report – Independent Monitoring Report 12 – the IMT recorded CPD efforts from the first half of 2025. Key goals included prioritizing the use of de-escalation, enhanced tracking of officer use of force, reforming oversight investigations, and prohibiting retaliation against officers who report misconduct. The IMT measures three levels of compliance with the consent decree – preliminary, secondary, and full. Preliminary compliance turns on whether there are sound, community-informed policies in place. Secondary compliance involves whether actual training has been provided for CPD officers to educate them about the new policies. For example, the consent decree mandates that de-escalation techniques be implemented in order to prevent uses of force. The techniques set out in the consent decree such as “using time as a tactic by slowing down the pace of an incident,” would need to be directly put in place throughout CPD training in order to achieve secondary compliance.
Full compliance is the final step and occurs when new policing practices have been developed because of the new policies and training. Full compliance is hard to measure because it involves the fostering of community trust and engagement with new police policies. Further, these new policies must cause a fundamental shift in the way policing is done. The only way to measure this is by gauging community support and trust, which has not increased in a meaningful way since the implementation of the consent decree.
In an article by the Manhattan Institute, author Charles Fain Lehman attempted to measure the impact of the consent decree by examining its effects on various different data points through 2023. Lehman found that after the decree was implemented, there was little to no change in the number of police killings across Chicago. Further, the amount of use of force claims stayed about the same. Similarly, Chicago citizen’s sense of trust and safety in the CPD has stayed relatively the same with occasional decreases in trust since the initiation of the consent decree.
According to a WTTW news article written in February of 2025, community confidence in CPD policies and the reform effort are incredibly low. The article draws from the Community Survey Report published by the IMT, which tracks community trust and confidence. In that survey, the team discovered that the overall positive ratings of the CPD with all Chicagoans was 47%. With young black men, that number was only 30%. Not surprisingly, Chicagoans in general, and young black men, reported low confidence in the lasting effect of CPD reforms.
What are the barriers to full compliance?
The CPD has until 2027 to accomplish its mandated goals. This provides both hope and concern for the City of Chicago. According to the IMT report, out of the 552 monitorable paragraphs of the consent decree, the City has achieved preliminary compliance with 518 paragraphs (94%), secondary compliance with 365 paragraphs (66%), and full compliance with 128 paragraphs (23%). Reaching the mountain of full compliance will be difficult because it requires the IMT to determine whether the new policies and training have resulted in new policing practices. This is much more abstract than preliminary and secondary compliance. With the first two forms of compliance, the results are readily apparent in that policies are observable, and training is reportable. However, full compliance requires years of progressive steps by a police department to achieve the kind of results that the consent decree intended. It is also almost entirely dependent on community trust and confidence which has been stagnant since the consent decree took effect.