Sheriff Tom Dart's Efforts to Flood Chicago's Jails With Sunlight

"Prisoners are brutalized by correctional officers with scandalous frequency. A recent abuse scandal in Los Angeles County ultimately sent former Sheriff  Lee Baca to jail. In Texas, “the state prison system’s inspector general has referred nearly 400 cases of staff sex crimes against inmates to prosecutors. An analysis by The Marshall Project found that prosecutors refused to pursue almost half of those cases.” In Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s list of misdeeds is too long to summarize in a sentence. In New York, the union for prison guards has helped dozens of abusive members to keep their jobs. Last year, human rights groups “called for a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into Florida state prisons, contending that ‘immediate intervention’ is necessary to stop the widespread abuse, neglect, torture and deaths of inmates in the Florida Department of Corrections.”

And in Cook County, Illinois? There is brutal inmate abuse there, too. But Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart is making efforts as aggressive as any I’ve seen to confront and improve on the status quo. In recent years, he installed 2,400 fixed-position video cameras and purchased handheld cameras and body cameras for guards.

Then, last week, he took a very unusual step: “He decided to release videos in cases where a civilian oversight board has sustained allegations of excessive force without waiting for Freedom of Information Act requests,” the Washington Post reports.

He declared, “The public has a right to know when officers abuse the public trust.” If you follow police reform efforts you’ve probably guessed who opposes his approach:

The local union called the videos' release “nothing but a political move.”

“Posting these videos on public websites is not only a violation of privacy of our officers, but it’s infringing on their right to a fair trial. The 'transparency' of these videos only goes one way,” Teamsters Local 700 said in a statement. “It’s not a true outlook of what happens at the jail on a daily basis, which are only small clips of the entire alleged incidents.”

There is a grain of truth to what the correctional officer’s union says. This is a political move. The sheriff wants to fire guards who abuse inmates. The union fights to save the jobs of guards who abuse inmates. And insofar as it can wage the fight behind closed doors, it can more easily prevail. But the political calculation changes if the public is permitted to see the behavior in question. Suddenly it’s a lot harder to keep guards on the job after particularly egregious brutality."

Sheriff Tom Dart's Efforts to Flood Chicago's Jails With Sunlight