EVANSTON, Ill. (CBS) -- Police misconduct can be difficult to expose, in part because of the so-called blue code of silence among officers.
But what if a computer model could detect misconduct without a whistleblower ever coming forward? A research team led by Northwestern University says they have accomplished just that.
As CBS 2 Investigator Megan Hickey reported Thursday, researchers say their initiative is not about identifying a few bad apples, but instead looking at police misconduct as a group activity. They have offered to share their findings with CPD.
For years, the CBS 2 Investigators have been tracking the misconduct allegations connected to Chicago police Sgt. Ronald Watts and a group of more than 10 officers.
More recently, CBS 2 Investigator Brad Edwards exposed the years of alleged misconduct by Officer James Hunt, who bragged on camera about killing someone – specifically saying, "I kill m****rf****rs."
"In a lot of the cases that we know, there's usually one or two kind of ringleaders that people kind of rally around," said Andrew Papachristos, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University.
Papachristos says individual officers might make the headlines, but focusing on them is not sufficient.
"You can't just look at one cop," he said. "You have to look at the groups around them, because the chances are it's not just them. It's a unit or a group or a crew that we sort of found."
His team, in coordination with the Invisible Institute, analyzed...
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