All the reforms the Justice Department wants to implement here - the question is, are those reforms sufficient to change a racist culture in a police department? A culture that is doing what historically and politically it's assigned to do - to occupy and protect the property of the capitalist class, to be very Marxist about it all.

Civil rights attorney Flint Taylor explains what a recent Department of Justice report on Chicago's police crimes reveals (and misses) about corruption and violence within the city, and outlines the choice between continuing ineffective liberal reforms, and a radical re-imagining of the relationships between policing, money and political power in minority neighborhoods.

Flint's latest writing is Chicago's Brutal Example for Jacobin.