Seda, a Legal Aid attorney representing adolescents charged as adults in Queens, thought the allegations against her client were dubious and was looking for a way to get him out on bail. That’s when she decided to look into the officers named in the complaint against him. What she discovered stunned her.
The arresting officer, she learned, had been sued several times, and in the 1990s, he had been part of a group of officers working a narcotics operation that was accused of planting drugs on people and stealing drugs from suspects. Some of the officers went to trial and were convicted on felony charges, but most settled, costing the city some $1.2 million in damages to their victims. The officer she was researching was acquitted in court, but he had been named in connection with at least nine separate misconduct cases and had settled at least two, she told The Intercept. [...]
Most police misconduct goes unreported, particularly in less extreme cases and in more disenfranchised communities, but complaints filed with police departments and civilian review boards, as well as lawsuits, can point to significant histories of abuse tied to specific officers and precincts. In most cases, however, a citizen who becomes the victim of police abuse has next to no way of knowing if that officer is a repeat offender or has a history of targeting certain people, say, or sexual harassment. [...]
Eventually, it emerged that Van Dyke had been accused of misconduct at least 17 times before he killed McDonald, including several allegations of brutality. Yet none of those complaints — one of which cost the city a $500,000 civil settlement — had resulted in any disciplinary action. Between 2012 and 2015, the city of Chicago paid $210 million in police misconduct settlements — with just 124 of the city’s roughly 12,000 police officers accounting for $34 million in payouts. The Chicago Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.
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