![\"Dudley4](\"http:\/\/www.jlpp.org\/old_blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/Dudley4-image-300x242.jpg\")
<\/a>The City of Chicago is no stranger to police misconduct lawsuits. The city spent <\/a>The City of Chicago is no stranger to police misconduct lawsuits. The city spent $45.5 million<\/a> in fewer than three years in cases involving beatings, taser attacks, unlawful detention, and the list goes on. A shortlist of officers was behind the payouts. Few made it to trial.\n\nOn November 13, 2012, The Chicago Police Department was found guilty<\/a> of covering up the beating of a female bartender by a city police officer, and was criticized for honoring a \u201ccode of silence\u201d in which officers cover up for one another\u2019s misdeeds. The case from 2007 resulted in an $850,000 federal jury verdict<\/a> on behalf of Karolina Obrycka. Officer Anthony Abbate was caught on tape brutally battering Obrycka, a 24-year-old bartender at Jesse\u2019s Shortstop Inn, after she refused to serve him any more drinks.\n\nObrycka\u2019s attorney presented evidence<\/a> of hundreds of phone calls between Abbate and other officers in the hours following the beating which convinced the jury that the cops were adhering to a \u201ccode of silence\u201d to cover up the attack. The city of Chicago has said they will appeal<\/a> the verdict.\n\nWhen Abbate attacked Obrycka, he wasn\u2019t on duty, he wasn’t doing police work, and he wasn\u2019t using police powers. He was a drunk jerk who beat up a woman, and he happened to also be cop. To borrow a phrase from the Rodney King trials<\/a> in California, it appears Abbate didn’t commit any of his crimes \u201cunder color of authority<\/a>.\u201d In some sense, Abbate\u2019s barroom brawling has nothing to do with Chicago police in general.\n\nBut if Abbate\u2019s buddies are trying to bribe and intimidate witnesses, we have a much bigger problem than one officer with a drinking problem and a propensity for violence. We are talking about a criminal conspiracy within the police department. There is also the question of why it took so long\u2014almost a month<\/a>\u2014for Abbate to be arrested for the beating. Perhaps officers who took the complaint from Obrycka were understandably reluctant to investigate and charge one of their own. Well, for Superintendent Phil Cline and the rest of the Chicago police brass, the incident at the Jesse\u2019s Shortstop Inn was not about an injured woman, rather, it was about an embarrassment to the department<\/a>.\n\nIt appears that they were waiting to see how embarrassing this would turn out to be. The more press coverage, the more severely Abbate would have to be punished to prove that the department is tough on bad cops. Given that there is video of the incident<\/a> all over the internet, it is clear that Abbate wasn\u2019t going to get out of this easily. Shortly after the Shortstop Inn video hit airwaves, the charges against Abbate were upgraded from a misdemeanor to a felony.\n\nHad the incident not been captured on video, Obrycka\u2019s lawyer Terry Elk predicts<\/a> that the case would never have made it through the courts. \u201cIf it became Karolina\u2019s word against Anthony Abbate,\u201d he told the Chicago Tribune<\/i>, \u201cthis case would have gone nowhere.\u201d\n\nSo what if more instances of police brutality were caught on tape?\n\nThere are huge movements on the internet today to use viral media to expose police misconduct worldwide, many of which were sparked by a viral video of a Stop and Frisk<\/a> in NYC. In their heyday, the Black Panthers would do this<\/a>. They had a police watch and would follow the police with a camera and record their actions. Now that so many people have cameras on their phones, it is a lot easier to hold the police accountable for their actions. The CATO Institute<\/a> even suggests that the police should be required to record their most intense interactions with citizens.\u201d Luckily for those of you who would like to participate in this movement to police the police, there are guidelines<\/a> available online that give advice on how to properly (and legally) record police misconduct.","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Michaela Dudley examines a potential solution for uncovering police brutality in light of the recent jury verdict against the City of Chicago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1142,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[82,298,327,418,1195],"class_list":["post-1141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-student-blogs","tag-abbate","tag-chicago","tag-code-of-silence","tag-criminal-justice","tag-police-brutality"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1141\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}