Feds release scathing report on Chicago police department claiming 'racially biased' officers regularly use excessive force 

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The Chicago Police Department is riddled with racial bias and has a tendency to use excessive force, according to a damning US Department of Justice report released today. 

The report, commissioned in the wake of the death of Laquan McDonald, found that institutional problems have led to serious civil rights violations for years.

It considers the pattern of excessive force to be 'largely attributable to systemic deficiencies within CPD and the City.'

And it cited insufficient training and a failure to hold bad officers accountable as further issues.

Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson is under fire amid a damning report on his department that found institutional problems leading to serious civil rights violations

Dash-cam video shows Laquan McDonald before he was fatally shot by CPD officer Jason Van Dyke sixteen times in Chicago. It is one of the incidents cited in the report

The Justice Department launched its investigation of the 12,000-officer force — one of the nation's largest — in December 2015 following the release of dashcam video showing a white police officer shoot a black teenager, Laquan McDonald.

McDonald was shot 16 times as he walked away holding a small, folded knife. 

The video of the 2014 shooting, which the city fought to keep from being released, inspired large protests and cost the city's police commissioner his job. 

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel will be expected to respond to the findings that cited systemic deficiencies in the CPD, insufficient training and a lack of accountability 

Under President Barack Obama, the Justice Department has conducted 25 civil rights investigations of police departments, including those of Cleveland, Baltimore and Seattle, among others.

The release of a report is one step in a long process that, in recent years, has typically led to bilateral talks between the Justice Department and a city, followed by an agreed upon police-reform plan that's enforceable by a federal judge.

Chicago's case is unique in that the report comes just days before a change from an administration that strongly backed the process to President-elect Donald Trump's, whose commitment to such federal scrutiny is unclear.

The perception that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel badly mishandled the Laquan McDonald shooting hurt the former Obama chief of staff politically and he may feel pressure to address all, or nearly all, of the Justice Department's findings to restore his political fortunes.

Chicago's police department has long had a reputation for brutality, particularly in minority communities. 

The most notorious example was Jon Burge, a commander of a detective unit on Chicago's South Side. Burge and his men beat, suffocated and used electric shock for decades starting in the 1970s to get black men to confess to crimes they didn't commit.

Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke, left, shot and killed Laquan McDonald, right. Van Dyke pleaded not guilty to six counts of first-degree murder and one count of official misconduct

The McDonald video, which showed Officer Jason Van Dyke continuing to shoot the teen even as he slumped to the ground, unmoving, provoked widespread outrage. 

It wasn't until the day the video was released, which was more than a year after the shooting, that Van Dyke was charged with murder. He has pleaded not guilty. 

Police reports of the shooting later suggested a possible cover-up by other officers who were at the scene.