Embattled Chicago Mayor Plans to Implement New Police Watchdog

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel plans to scrap a police review board and replace it with a more independent and better-funded watchdog to investigate police shootings and other misconduct cases, Reuters reported on Saturday. 

The decision to abolish the Independent Police Review Authority comes a month after a task force released a scathing report recommending a new board to help mend strained relations between Chicago's police force and the city's minority communities.

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The task force report said IPRA was underfunded and staffed by former law enforcement officials whose findings were routinely reversed by the body's leaders.

"It is clear that a totally new agency is required to rebuild trust in investigations of officer-involved shootings and the most serious allegations of police misconduct," Emanuel wrote in an article posted late on Friday on the Chicago Sun-Times' website.

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Critics have long questioned the length of time the body takes to make rulings, and the frequency with which it finds justification for police actions in cases of alleged misconduct.

The Chicago Police Department has gained an infamous reputation for imposing lenient punishments on officers charged with police misconduct. 

Of the 28,567 allegations of misconduct that were filed against Chicago Police Department officers between March 2011 and September 2015 less than 2 per cent of those complaints resulted in any discipline, according to The Citizens Police Data Project. 

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Of those cases in which discipline is imposed, the vast majority result in a reprimand or a suspension of less than one week.

Black Chicagoans filed 61 percent of all complaints in the database, but make up only 25 percent of sustained complaints. While, White Chicagoans ––who filed 21 percent of total complaints –– account for 58 percent of sustained complaints, the The Citizens Police Data Project noted. 

Protests have erupted in a number of U.S. cities in the past two years over police-involved killings of African-Americans and other minorities.

Chicago was ranked by the website Mapping Violence as the city with the second highest number of police killings, reaching 20 people in 2014.