Media Business as Usual

A reader of ours took a "reporter" to task over the WTTW report that said excessive force complaints were up 46%. The actual headline:

• Excessive Force Allegations Against CPD Officers Rose 46% Since 2022: Data

A pretty straightforward misrepresentation of the what the numbers actually revealed as it turned out. Our reader wrote to the "reporter" asking for a retraction:

• Your Feb 23rd article "Excessive Force Allegations Against CPD Officers Rose 46% Since 2022: Data" has been completely blown apart by CWBChicago.

  As YOU should have done, CWBChicago uncovered that a mere FOUR percent of these allegations were sustained last year. They even included a nice detailed chart to illustrate your own data set over the period 2022-2025. The chart shows on average just some 6-7% sustained allegations over 2022-2025.

  Criminals lie. Do "reporters" lie too?

  A retraction is in order.

The "reporter," of course, immediately admitted to misrepresenting the facts and issued a clarification:

• HAHAHAHAHA....April Fool!!!!

The "reporter" - who is a worthless police hater with a lib-tarded anti-police agenda written into her DNA - was very condescending to the letter writer:

• I appreciate your feedback! I'd like to direct your attention to this paragraph of the story: "In a statement to WTTW News, a CPD spokesperson said it would be 'inaccurate' to 'characterize an increase in excessive force complaints as a definitive increase in use of force' by police officers, since those allegations have not been probed for accuracy."

  The story does not assert that all of these complaints have been sustained; as you can see, it includes the information that they have not.

  For your reference, the number of complaints filed against officers was one of the reasons the Department of Justice investigated CPD in 2015 and 2016 and is a metric tracked by federal officials as part of the consent decree process.

  Best regards,

  [police hater with a lib tarded anti-police agenda written into her DNA]

The paragraph in question is seven or eight deep in the article, and as every third grader knows, people who read that far past the headline are few and far between, especially after the past few years of anti-police narratives being peddled in the media. "Editors" in charge of propaganda know this and they write their headlines accordingly, to catch the passing interest of the uneducated who then apply the headline to their internal biases.

And as any reader of the "consent decree" knows, there are no federal officials involved in the CPD "consent decree" aside from a retired federal judge who signed off on some document present to them. An actual Consent Decree involves tons of Federal money pouring into the Department to enact reforms....and that seems to be lacking around here.