Chicago • A federal judge on Thursday approved a far-reaching plan for court-supervised reforms of the beleaguered Chicago Police Department, two years after a U.S. Justice Department report found a long history of racial bias and excessive use of force by officers in the nation’s third-largest city.
Judge Robert Dow’s approval of the consent decree — without ordering any notable changes the draft presented to him — is a culmination of a process that started with the release of video in 2015 showing white police officer Jason Van Dyke shooting black teenager Laquan McDonald 16 times.