A few bad apples or a rotten barrel?

Chicago Police Department statistics released during Bond v. Utreras, a civil rights lawsuit settled in December 2006, reveal that the system for investigating police abuse is especially ineffective in protecting low-come, black residents from abusive officers.

From 2002-2004, citizens filed 10,149 complaints alleging police abuse. Only 124 of those complaints were investigated, according to CPD statistics- that's less than 2 percent.

The national rate for investigating allegations of excessive force was 8 percent in 2002, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. By contrast, Chicago's rate for investigating allegations of excessive force was less than half of 1 percent during 2004.

These statistics seemed to startle many attendees at the conference "The View From The Ground," which explored perspectives on the eight square blocks that once comprised Stateway Gardens, held recently at the University of Chicago Law School.

Diane Bond, a resident of Stateway Gardens housing development, alleged that from April 2003 to March 2004 she was subjected to physical violence, threats of sexual abuse. She also claimed that her teenage son was beaten and that her apartment was repeatedly trashed by five tactical CPD officers who were infamous in the Stateway area for brutality against black residents.

Jamie Kalven, local writer and activist who documented the alleged police misconduct, was the keynote speaker at the conference.

"What are the underlying conditions that allowed this group of rogue police officers to operate with impunity in this eight-block area?" asked Craig B. Futterman, a clinical professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School, who has pursued five civil rights suits on behalf of Stateway residents, like Bond.

According to Dr. Steven Whitman, the director at Sinai Urban Health Institute and conference panelist who helped analyze the CPD data, the five cops accused of beating Bond had 104 official complaints among them.

Take into consideration the trend that only 1 in 10 cases of police abuse are actually reported.

"Police administrations are clueless as to what's going on in the streets," said Norm Stamper, a former San Diego police officer and Seattle police chief. "They generally believe their reforms are paying off.

"When I became a part of the police culture, I said and did things I'd never done in my life.

"Goading someone to take a swing at me so I could choke them out, I did this up to one hundred times my rookie year," said Stamper, explaining his abusive tactics as part of the need to belong to the police family.

Stamper explained that a police officer's partner has much more power than a supervisor or police chief on what happens on the ground. The disconnection between the officers on the street and the officials at headquarters is much of the problem, he said. But he said that on a whole, police administrations have good intentions.

Other experts disagreed with Stamper's assessment of the problem.

Joseph Margulies, a lead counsel in a Supreme Court case involving Guantanamo Bay detainees, characterized the need for an investigative system that would penetrate beyond the abuse statistics. He compared the panic for intelligence in a post 9-11 world to the police department's panic to curb urban crime.

"We've institutionalized an interest in not uncovering an environment that gives rise to abuse," said Margulies, a Northwestern law professor. "9-11 is about getting intelligence, getting it is vastly more important than what happened to the person from whom you get it."

A statistic that several panelists returned to was the decline in police brutality investigations in Chicago from 1999-2004. During that time, the investigations for excessive force decreased from 4.84 percent to .48 percent -- a decline of 90 percent, according to the police department. .

Tracey Meares, a Yale professor of law, offered an explanation that Mayor Richard M. Daley's mandate to lower the homicide rates led to a much more aggressive style of policing. In 1991, Chicago had the highest murder total in the nation.

"There is the relationship between the institution Special Operations Section and the drop in rates of investigation of complaints," Meares said.

One of the themes that kept emerging during the conference was a need for transparency in the police review board, and a community-based independent inquiry into abuse cases.

Gerald Frazier of Citizen's Alert, who attended the conference and has more than 20 years' experience lobbying for change in the Chicago Police Department, said, "[The conference] reinforced what we as an organization have been hearing for years.

"Not only is the police Office of Professional Standards ineffective, it reinforces the public fear that the OPS is an agent to cover up and protect bad officers.

"The most shocking statistics were the police officers that have over 50 complaints. That really shows gross negligence in protecting civilians.

"An independent review board is common sense and good government," Frazier said.

A spokesman for the Chicago Police Department did not return a call for comment.