AS a report by a panel commissioned by Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago found on Wednesday, racism in the city’s Police Department is rampant: Blacks are disproportionately subjected to traffic stops, Tasers and street stops that do not lead to arrest; they also account for an appalling 74 percent of the 404 people shot by the Chicago police between 2008 and 2015.

What the report does not say, though — and what many Chicagoans themselves may not know — is that the rottenness is not confined to the Police Department. Racist practices extend far into the criminal courts, indeed they are the very foundation of the cases that enter into the court system. The hands of many judges and prosecutors are just as dirty as the bigots in blue.

I know this firsthand. In 1997, I became a court clerk in the prosecutor’s office for Cook County, which encompasses Chicago. Many of my days started with my supervisors’ corralling police officers who were scheduled to testify.

The officers, in plain clothes, would walk into the office with a rolled-up newspaper under one arm, as if they were walking into a men’s bathroom rather than an office. Often, they would sit in the jury box, next to the judge (regardless of the appearance of impropriety) and would dutifully teach me how the justice system really worked, how black men really were “dogs,” and how judges and prosecutors who focused on due process “nonsense” were “liberals” who were throwing away “their” cases.