A court-ordered study quietly finished in March 2025 has concluded that the Chicago Police Department used force on Black and Latino residents at disproportionately high rates, even after controlling for who officers suspected or arrested. The researchers dug through more than 16,000 Tactical Response Reports from 2020 through 2023 and found that Black people were the subject of roughly 73 percent of all documented use-of-force incidents. The report was prepared for CPD, but it only surfaced publicly this week after reform groups handed it to reporters.
Who wrote the study and what they examined
According to WTTW, the analysis was conducted by Michael R. Smith and Rob Tillyer of the University of Texas at San Antonio and John MacDonald of the University of Pennsylvania. The team reviewed 16,196 Tactical Response Reports, which they grouped into about 8,595 distinct use-of-force incidents between Jan. 1, 2020, and Dec. 31, 2023. To test whether factors like geography or call type could explain racial gaps, the authors relied on disproportionality ratios, regression models, and beat-level analysis that looked at where and how officers were deployed.
Key findings on racial disparities
As reported by WTTW News, less than 7 percent of CPD’s reported use-of-force incidents involved a White person, while about 16 percent involved a Latino person and roughly 73 percent involved a Black person. When the researchers compared these force incidents with benchmarks for people suspected of crimes and those arrested, they found Black suspects faced a 52 percent higher risk of having force used against them than White suspects, and Black arrestees faced a 39 percent higher relative risk than White arrestees. Hispanic suspects and arrestees also experienced elevated risks. The study said no single police beat or small set of officers could explain the gap, pointing instead to broader systemic factors inside the department.
Monitors say CPD is not using its own data
The court-appointed Independent Monitoring Team notes that CPD has updated policies and training on paper, yet has not shown that it is using the study’s findings to spot and address patterns that should trigger changes in policy, training, or tactics. According to the monitors, the department has reached full compliance with roughly 22 to 23 percent of the consent decree requirements, leaving many reforms unfinished. Reform advocates argue that this split, rules written in manuals but different realities on the street, is exactly why federal oversight is still needed.
Use-of-force trends through mid-2025
WTTW’s review of CPD data shows officers used force 1,645 times in the first six months of 2025, nearly a 10 percent jump over the same period in 2024, and that officers used the highest level of force 84 times in 2024. The midyear numbers also show officers pointed their firearms more than 2,200 times in the first half of 2025, and in more than two-thirds of those encounters, the person on the other end did not have a gun. CPD says it has increased training and that a Tactical Review and Evaluation Division now examines use-of-force incidents, but the study and the monitors say that work has not yet produced clear reductions in racial disparities.
Community reaction and what comes next…