Police Under Attack

For at least the past 50 years, police have faced mounting criticism from multiple sources. Accusations range from involvement in criminal enterprises and excessive force to racial bias, lack of accountability, militarized policing, and—most recently and aggressively—harboring white supremacists within their ranks.

There is no doubt that some of these criticisms are justified. We can always find examples of each issue in some department somewhere. When I was an investigator for the state, there were departments in the Chicago area, and a few downstate, we couldn’t trust with some of our sensitive criminal intelligence because some officers, sometimes even the chief, had connections with known organized crime figures.