By Paul Vallas

April 24^th, 2026

Chicago’s media outlets are amplifying a dangerous narrative that paints the Chicago Police Department (CPD) as racist and unreformable, eroding public trust and hamstringing officers who protect our streets. This isn’t journalism—its activism disguised as reporting. Criminals are increasingly treated as victims and cops as villains by so called police reformers and advocates and criminal trial lawyers with media cheerleading the distortion. Facts be damned: the story line is that CPD is biased against Black residents, and allergic to change. It’s time to set the record straight.

# Police Shootings: Context WTTW Won’t Touch

Consider WTTW’s June 16 story, later updated, which emphasized that Chicago police shootings in 2024 — then at 16 — had already surpassed the 12 reported the previous year. What the story deliberately ignored is that even at 16, the total was far below averages from the previous decade. The 22 actual police shootings the city finished in 2025 was half to a third the annual number shootings experienced a decade ago.

Absent from WTTW’s reporting was any real attention to the surge in police officers being fired upon by criminal offenders. Superintendent of Police Larry Snelling reported that from 2020–2024, CPD officers were targeted by gunfire more than 330 times, resulting in 38 wounded and 7 killed — over four times the annual average of the previous decade. Dramatically fewer police shootings at a time of dramatically higher levels of armed assault against officers is not evidence of police abuse. It is evidence of restraint.

# Black Overrepresentation? Crime Rates Tell the Real Story

Chicago media’s obsession with tarnishing CPD is not limited to traffic stops or police shootings. The media’s coverage of fatal police shootings is also distorted and tends to frame disparity without context. Frequently, coverage of fatal CPD shootings claims that Black residents are overrepresented among police shooting victims but rarely acknowledges that the rate of violent crime arrests among Black residents is over 20 times higher than that of White residents.

South, Southeast, and West Side neighborhoods—overwhelmingly Black and Latino—saw murder rates 12-18 times the city average in 2023. More cops there means more encounters; it’s math, not malice. Yet media peddles raw ratios to stoke outrage, stripping context that high-crime zones demand heavy patrols. Police aren’t hunting Black residents or Latino residents-they’re responding to 95% of murders and 97% of felony gun arrests occurring in those communities. By ignoring this the media effectively green light’s the rhetoric of police critics.

# Excessive Force: Complaints Don’t Equal Guilt

The WTTW headline was damning: “Excessive Force Allegations Against CPD Officers Rose 46% Since 2022: Data.” How can it be that, after years of efforts to improve the city’s police department, there is still so much excessive force being deployed? WTTW’s report did not explore how many of those complaints were ultimately found to be valid. In fact, the outlet does not appear to have requested that data before filing its story.

An analysis by CWB Chicago concluded that the numbers look quite different once you filter for complaints that actually held up under scrutiny. The worst year for bona fide excessive force complaints in WTTW’s dataset was 2022, and even then, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability sustained just 15 percent of cases. CWB reported that last year COPA sustained only 4 percent of excessive force complaints, a total of 30 cases. In 2024, COPA has sustained 64 — 7 percent.

Ignored in the story is that the surge in complaints may be arising from the SAFE-T Act, which allows for anonymous complaints against police officers in the state. COPA has also dramatically expanded its presence at community events, spreading the word about what it does and how individuals can file anonymous complaints. Such community events ballooned from 110 in 2022 to 358 in 2024.

# Traffic Stops: Disparities Driven by Crime, Not Bias

WBEZ recently ran a headline suggesting that, despite a 45 percent reduction in Chicago traffic stops in 2024, “racial disparities” still exist, as Black and Latino drivers accounted for nearly 75 percent of all traffic stops. No significance is given to the fact that 57 percent of all non-moving violations involve Black and Latino drivers, which closely matches their 58 percent share of the city’s population. Non-moving violations are stops not tied to the act of driving, occurring when the vehicle is stationary or involves its condition.

Even more telling, there is no reference to Black and Latino residents accounting for nearly 95 percent of Chicago’s murder victims and 97 percent of felony gun possession arrests, suggesting a reason for the heavier police presence — and thus more stops — in Black and Latino communities. Traffic stops are among the most effective tools police have for intercepting illegal firearms in high-crime neighborhoods where shootings are concentrated.

Stops are CPD’s top gun-interdiction tool: 25 percent of 2023 firearm recoveries came from them. In high-crime zones, that’s lifesaving work. The irony? Whites at 32 percent of the population are stopped at rates far exceeding their 3-5 percent share of violent crime arrests.  In this context, the real disparity may be in the number of White residents being stopped than their share of serious criminal involvement would warrant.

# The Consent Decree: A Boondoggle Masquerading as Reform

The 2019 consent decree—236 pages, 503 mandates—was political theater after Laquan McDonald’s 2014 shooting. Mayor Rahm Emanuel needed a diversion from his coverup of the Laquan McDonald shooting, birthing the expensive police monitoring empire. Today, compliance consultants outnumber the full-time police officers assigned to the CTA. The Consent Decree has cost the city over $200 million since 2019, with no end in sight.

It’s reform theater: enriching outsiders while CPD chases paperwork instead of criminals. Police shootings have dropped by 70% since before the Consent Decree despite the dramatic increase in attacks on police coincidently since the decree went into effect. Media routinely promotes the decrees importance by sighting CPD’s low compliance the decree’s plethora of mandates every time there’s a police controversy or a city financial settlement for alleged police misconduct, as if that is the reason.

# Ignoring The Wrongful Convictions Racket

In nearly every major settlement for wrongful conviction or police misconduct, failure to implement the Consent Decree is cited as justification for multimillion-dollar payouts. Rarely do reporter’s question whether individuals receiving these settlements were actually innocent or why the settlements are so large. Since 2000, Chicago has paid out over $700 million in police misconduct lawsuits, not because claimants were proven innocent but due to alleged police misconduct.

The media ignored Kim Foxx’s brokering of deals with a secretive “Lawyers Committee” composed of private attorneys specializing in lawsuits against the police. These lawyers, sometimes hired as “Special Assistant State’s Attorneys,” worked to overturn murder convictions, often not because of new exculpatory evidence but due to allegations of police misconduct. Foxx’s “Conviction Integrity Unit” issued “Certificates of Innocence” even when there was no evidence to support actual innocence, paving the way for successful lawsuits against the city.

After eight years of Foxx having her thumb on the scales of justice, Chicago has seen half the nation’s overturned convictions and wrongful conviction lawsuits filed. By the time she left office in December 2024, Foxx left as many as 275 wrongful conviction cases for which lawsuits have been or will be filed, seeking millions more in damages. These new suits could cost the city $ 1 billion. No one in the media ever seems to question whether these individuals were innocent of the crimes.

# Clearance Rates: Reform’s Cruel Irony

For all the media’s negative or contorted coverage of CPD, here lies the great irony: In one breath, media reports accuse CPD of disproportionately targeting Black residents; in the next, they criticize CPD’s lower clearance rates in solving murders in Black neighborhoods — as if both claims can be true simultaneously. The reality is that years of criminal justice “reforms” have undermined police capacity to deliver justice.

Staffing shortages mean half of 911 priority calls go unanswered, the elimination of ShotSpotter has slowed response times to shootings, and restrictions on vehicular and foot chases allow violent criminals to escape. Even before the SAFE-T Act, pretrial release policies returned over 70 percent of violent offenders to the streets pending trial. With insufficient detectives and witnesses unwilling to testify under threat of retaliation, it is hardly surprising that clearance rates are low.

# Who profits from anti-police narratives

The real beneficiaries of this endless cycle are not Chicago’s neighborhoods but the growing “criminal industrial complex” of lawyers, consultants, and monitors who profit from lawsuits, reform studies, and consent decree contracts. Their influence depends on perpetuating the narrative that police cannot be trusted, regardless of crime rates or police actions.

Meanwhile, as this chain of events unfolds, vital city resources are drained from programs that could address violence, and police officers remain hamstrung by rules and scrutiny that make it harder to keep streets safe. The ultimate victims of this dynamic are overwhelmingly Black and Latino residents of Chicago’s poorest communities, who suffer under the daily weight of shootings, homicides and the fear of the return of violent criminals under pretrial release.

Chicago cannot afford a biased media landscape that turns its back on facts in pursuit of narratives. The city needs stronger, fairer journalism — and a justice system that prioritizes public safety over politics and profit.  Demand facts and objectivity from the media who in turn should demand accountability from a justice system in which protecting and advocating for criminals has become an extremely profitable enterprise.

-30-

Paul Vallas formerly ran the public school systems in Chicago, Philadelphia and the Louisiana Recovery School District. He was a candidate for Mayor of Chicago.