Dark days

“TODAY we stand together as a city to try and right those wrongs, and to bring this dark chapter of Chicago’s history to a close,” said Rahm Emanuel, Chicago’s mayor, on April 14th as he announced a $5.5m reparations package for (mostly black) suspects who were tortured by police in the 1970s and 1980s.

The next day the city council revealed that it is paying the family of Laquan McDonald, a black teenager fatally shot by a cop last autumn, as much as $5m to dissuade them from suing. The police refuse to release a video of the shooting, saying the investigation is still going on. Many Chicagoans are unimpressed.

On April 20th an outcry ensued after a judge cleared Dante Servin, a cop who shot Rekia Boyd, a black woman, in the head. Mr Servin’s lawyers said that he mistook a mobile phone held by of one of Ms Boyd’s companions for a gun, and opened fire because he feared for his life.

Chicago’s cops shoot about 50 suspects dead each year—more than 75% of them black. The police are largely white and Hispanic and, consciously or otherwise, tend to associate blacks with criminality, says Craig Futterman of the University of Chicago’s Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project. About 70% of murders in Chicago are committed by African-Americans, who are 33% of the population.

In March the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) published a study of a four-month period last year in which black Chicagoans were subjected to 72% of all stop-and-frisk searches. The police stopped 93.6 per 1,000 residents, according to the ACLU, far more than the 22.9 per 1,000 stopped in New York when stop-and-frisk was at its peak in 2011. (New York stops fewer people now, partly because the present mayor thinks the police overdid it in the past.)

Black Chicagoans distrust the police, so the cops are least effective in the poorest neighbourhoods, says Mr Futterman. Without transparency, trust cannot be rebuilt, he argues. Chicago paid a whopping $500m in claims related to police misdeeds between 2004 and 2014, according to the Better Government Association, a watchdog (see chart). Ms Boyd’s family, for example, was awarded $4.5m in 2013. For a city in dire financial straits, which has closed mental-health clinics and public schools, all this adds up.