"The recent incidents involving officer misconduct have been disheartening and demoralizing, especially to the officers who serve this department honorably every single day," said interim Police Superintendent Dana Starks.

Seven members of the Special Operations Section have been charged with belonging to a rogue band of officers who used their badges to shake down residents and intimidate people. All have pleaded not guilty.

One of those officers, Jerome Finnigan, was charged two weeks ago with plotting to hire someone to murder another member of the unit to keep him from talking to the government.

Starks said the SOS will be reorganized and all specialized units including SWAT teams, the helicopter unit and mounted patrol will be organized under one unit and closely supervised.

"We cannot monitor every single police officer's behavior," Starks said. "But we can enforce accountability measures combined with a disciplinary process to demand that members at supervisory levels are held accountable. I am confident that this is a positive step forward."

Starks said more officers will be assigned to an internal affairs division to monitor citizens complaints more closely and to make unannounced audits at districts.

Also last month, three members of the unit were stripped of their badges and assigned to desk work after surveillance camera video at a bar contradicted officers' version of a search and arrests there.

Officers said in a police report that they searched Reymundo Martinez outside the bar in March 2004 because he was drinking on a public street, and arrested him when they found a plastic bag of cocaine sticking out of his sleeve.

But video from inside and outside the bar, obtained by the Chicago Tribune, showed more than two dozen SOS members raiding the bar and searching everyone, and showed them arresting Martinez inside.

Since July 2006, when special prosecutors released a study that determined police beat, kicked and shocked black suspects in the 1970s and 1980s to get confessions, there have been a series of embarrassing incidents involving officers.

In March, department veteran Anthony Abbate was charged with beating a female bartender after a surveillance camera video of the incident was shown around the world.

Allegations soon followed that another group of off-duty officers beat up four businessmen in a bar an incident that led to charges against three of them. Abbate and the other officers have all pleaded not guilty.

Amid the controversy, Police Superintendent Phil Cline announced his retirement. Just days ago, the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. said he would spend a night in a South Side public housing complex after hearing complaints about police harassment.

University of Chicago law professor Craig Futterman said the police department's announcement was not a surprise and was an attempt to fix public perception of the police department, which has faced numerous scandals in the past year.

But he worries that "bad apple" officers will still exist.

"A Band-Aid isn't going to cure a broken system," he said. "You're just putting the same officers in other units ... transfer them and make them somebody else's problem."

The Rev. Ira Acree, pastor of the Greater St. John Bible Church and a local activist, applauded the announcement as a long overdue "step in the right direction."

"This is a big deal for our community," he said. "We feel there is hope in restoring police and community relations."