"'a few bad apples’ do vast damage to individuals, communities and the institutions of city government."

Diane Bond was known as a cheerful, positive presence in Stateway Gardens, one of Chicago’s infamous high-rise public housing projects. A middle-aged single mother who  is a janitor for the Chicago Public Schools, she took pride in her work. “I love taking care of the kids and cleaning up after them,” she says.

With an inner toughness and courage belied by her affable demeanor, Bond had built a stable life after a difficult youth that included gang rape and incest.

But on April 13, 2003, her world was shattered by a group of Chicago police officers known locally as “the Skullcap Crew.”

According to a civil rights lawsuit later filed on her behalf, four officers approached her around 5 p.m. in the hallway of the building where she lived, and one of them put a gun against her head. Then, they allegedly took her keys from her hand, forced her inside the apartment, handcuffed her and proceeded to ransack her home and terrorize her. One officer allegedly brought her inside the bathroom and forced her to expose her genitals repeatedly as he “stared and smirked;” another officer allegedly threatened to plant drugs on her. The suit also maintains that the police officers forced her to watch as they beat her 19-year-old son, Willie, and then forced him to beat up a middle-aged man they had brought into the apartment, apparently for their own amusement. The officers finally left, according to the lawsuit, but the nightmare wasn’t over. They allegedly continued to harass Bond in incidents that took place over the next year.

The Chicago police department did not respond to interview requests for this story. A city law department spokesperson said the officers deny any contact with Bond.
   
But police critics say her case is indicative of an ongoing problem of police abuse and lack of city accountability in Chicago, which has gained national attention for several scandals involving drug-dealing cops and police torture.

The day after her first encounter with the Skullcap Crew, Bond told her story to Jamie Kalven, an independent journalist and author who also worked as advisor to the resident council at Stateway Gardens and ran a grassroots public works program that employed residents to clean out vacant apartments and do landscaping.

Four officers allegedly took her keys from her hand, forced her inside the apartment, handcuffed her and proceeded to ransack her home and terrorize her.

Kalven put Bond in touch with Craig Futterman, founder of a police accountability project at the University of Chicago’s Mandel Legal Aid Clinic. Futterman filed a civil rights lawsuit on Bond’s behalf, charging five individual officers, the police superintendent and the city of Chicago with violating her civil and constitutional rights, including through excessive force, unlawful search and discrimination based on race and gender.

“They engaged in a series of horrific acts that were just utterly sadistic, racist and sexist,” said Futterman. He obtained internal department personnel records showing that the department was doing little or nothing to track rogue officers with multiple complaints of abuse filed against them and that officers were extremely unlikely to ever be punished for misconduct. Between 2002 and 2004, Futterman reported, out of 10,500 serious abuse complaints, only 18 resulted in “meaningful discipline” of at least a seven-day unpaid suspension.

While the data could be viewed as supporting the “bad apples” theory often offered by police spokespeople—only a small number of errant officers give the department a bad name—Futterman’s analysis showed that the department has done little to weed out or change the behavior of these dangerous officers. The five men who allegedly terrorized Bond had a “pattern of similar abuse of a substantial number of African-American women in Chicago public housing for years,” according to Futterman.