(The Center Square) – A new survey finds that Chicago residents are dissatisfied with the Chicago Police Department and have grown more skeptical about any reform efforts.
In a Community Survey Report conducted by the court-appointed monitoring team convened in 2019 to oversee the department’s efforts to change the way it trains, supervises and disciplines officers, researchers said all the angst persists despite a reform campaign that has seen city taxpayers pump more than $208 million into reform efforts in 2025 alone.
Alarmed as he might be, Chicago Ald. Chris Taliaferro insists he’s not surprised.
“You got to understand that our public is still seeing that young Black men are still being unjustly pulled over at an alarming rate, which has led to some young Black men being shot and killed,” Taliaferro, a former CPD detective, told The Center Square. “The public’s going to be skeptical when that’s front page every now and then. Our police department is not going to have the public’s trust until they see progress being made in those areas.”
With the department having satisfied only 9% of the court order requirements laid out for it over the past six years, data also shows just 33% of residents now think CPD is doing a “good” or “very good” job protecting the city and just 47% of individuals thought as much when it came to the question of if the department was excelling at protecting their neighborhood. Both figures are down at least two points from 2020 tabulations, or a year after the federal consent decree first went into effect.
At the same time, Taliaferro stressed just over one in five young Black men expressed any level of confidence that ongoing reform efforts will lead to real change, down two points from 2020 findings as Blacks continue to face much higher rates of involuntary interactions with police than either whites or Latinos.
“I think our department has done very well in reducing violence and bringing crime down,” Taliaferro said. “Our homicides and violent offenses are down tremendously, but that’s not the areas that I believe help build public trust in our department. Across the city, they’re going to continue to reduce those because they’re making great efforts in those areas, but it’s those other areas that the public is very concerned about.”
Race aside, most Chicagoans agree CPD did a poorer job in 2024 compared to four years earlier in areas ranging from responding to emergencies promptly, supporting witnesses and victims of crime and ensuring neighborhoods felt safe.
