Vol. 2, Issue 34: Chicago's Criminal Justice Playbook
At Issue: Calls for Contract Changes
The City Council Black Caucus has introduced a resolution calling on Mayor Rahm Emanuel to “publicly endorse” a series of changes to collective bargaining agreements with police unions. The resolution cites recommendations from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the mayor’s Police Accountability Task Force (PATF), and the Coalition for Accountability in Police Contracts.
Existing contracts “[make] it easy for officers to lie, and difficult for misconduct to be identified or investigated,” according to the resolution.
In The Chicago Sun-Times, Mark Brown notes that contract negotiations do not take place in public, but “this resolution has as much to do with making the mayor accountable for that process as it does the police.”
“This is the same rhetoric we’ve been listening to ever since the anti-police movement began,” Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) local president Dean Angelo told The Chicago Tribune. He stated that the union intends to push to maintain contract provisions requiring sworn affidavits from civilian complainants and a 24-hour grace period before officers involved in shootings provide statements to civilian investigators.
The affidavit requirement is necessary to prevent the city from being “inundated with too many complaints to keep up,” Angelo said, as paraphrased by The Tribune.
A recent review of 85 big-city police contracts by Reuters found that very few require affidavits from civilian complainants. Affidavit requirements were counted among contract provisions “disqualifying complaints from being investigated” in 27 contracts, though the most common disqualifications involved time limits for filing complaints.
Until last year, the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) rarely exercised a contractual provision allowing the agency to seek to override the affidavit requirement. According to IPRA reports, only five overrides were sought between 2012 and 2015. Last year, Chief Administrator Sharon Fairley implemented a policy requiring that all cases be reviewed for possible affidavit overrides. In 2016, overrides were sought and granted in 11 cases, while 63 cases were closed due to the lack of an affidavit, according to IPRA’s annual report.
The DOJ report noted that “for most of the lawsuits in which police misconduct victims received significant settlements or verdicts, IPRA’s parallel misconduct investigation was closed for lack of an affidavit. In other words, the city routinely pays large sums to police misconduct victims...in civil litigation describing the misconduct in question but fails to investigate these same officers for disciplinary purposes because their administrative complaints are not verified.”
Regarding the 24-hour waiting period, the PATF recommended revising the provision to ensure that officers remain separated until they have all given statements. It also recommended requiring officers under questioning to disclose any conversations they have had with law enforcement. The task force notes that the DOJ’s consent decree with the Los Angeles Police Department includes such a provision.
“It is imperative that Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the City Council insist on a thorough rewriting” of police union contracts, The Sun-Times editorialized. “Unnecessary rules that protect bad cops finally must go.”
COMMANDER WITH MANY COMPLAINTS
Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson defended Ogden District Commander James Sanchez after WBEZ reported that Sanchez had accumulated 90 misconduct complaints—“more than almost any other Chicago police officer”—over his three-decade career.
Johnson appointed Sanchez to command the West Side district last August.
Most of the complaints against Sanchez involved allegations of excessive force or unlawful searches. He was named in 16 complaints alongside Officer Jerome Finnigan, who later pled guilty to robbery and murder-for-hire. Both officers were members of the controversial Special Operations Section (SOS), a unit in which ten other officers were convicted on corruption charges.
Sanchez also served as the lead detective in a murder case where the defendant was acquitted, sued for wrongful arrest, and won a $750,000 settlement.
Johnson argued that only a small number of the complaints against Sanchez had been sustained. He stated that Sanchez “has the support of the community” and “has done a phenomenal job.”
For many years, very few complaints against Chicago police officers have been sustained.
Emanuel said he was unaware of the complaints but maintained that Sanchez “is doing a very good job.” He also previously defended then-Superintendent Garry McCarthy when he promoted Lt. Glenn Evans to commander despite Evans having 113 misconduct complaints. Evans was later charged and acquitted of assault.
PROMOTIONS CRITICIZED
Superintendent Eddie Johnson came under criticism after The Chicago Sun-Times reported that he had issued a “verbal order” allowing Merit Board members to recommend candidates for merit promotions.
“CPD should not be operating from nonofficial, nonpublic orders,” said Inspector General Joe Ferguson, who monitors police merit promotions.
Allowing the board to nominate candidates “seems to be borderline unethical,” said Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) President Dean Angelo.
A department spokesperson stated that the change was made to increase the number of patrol officers nominated, as most Merit Board members have backgrounds in the patrol division.
The DOJ report called on CPD to take steps to improve the fairness and transparency of promotions, including merit-based advancements. Shortly after the report’s release, Johnson reinstated a policy requiring that the nominators of officers receiving merit promotions be publicly identified.
Merit promotions were originally instituted to increase minority representation in leadership roles. However, last year, The Sun-Times reported that more white officers than Black or Latino officers were receiving merit promotions.
KALVEN ON POLICE REFORM
In a wide-ranging conversation on Chicago Newsroom, Jamie Kalven discussed his exposé on the code of silence and a criminal enterprise within the Chicago Police Department. He also reflected on his history working in South Side public housing, his involvement in police reform efforts, the work of the Invisible Institute and its Tracker project, the state of the movement for police accountability, recent reforms in Chicago, and the implications of the new administration taking power in Washington.
“What we’re now hearing loud and clear from Washington is that police accountability measures are an impediment to effective law enforcement. And what the argument is in essence is that the only effective policing in communities of color is unconstitutional policing. That’s what the argument is, and that’s a critically important argument to win. And to demonstrate that police accountability in the various forms it takes is a necessary condition for effective law enforcement,” Kalven told host Ken Davis.
STATE FUMBLES ASSISTANCE FOR WRONGFULLY CONVICTED
State compensation for individuals exonerated and released from prison in Illinois is comparatively low—approximately $220,000 for those imprisoned for 14 years or more, which equates to a maximum of $16,000 per year. By contrast, some states provide compensation ranging from $50,000 to $80,000 per year. Additionally, compensation awards for exonerees have not been paid for the past two years due to the state’s budget impasse, Injustice Watch reports.
Last year, Gov. Bruce Rauner vetoed a stopgap budget that included payouts for 14 exonerees, and the payments were not included in a subsequent budget that was passed. Senate President John Cullerton included claims payments for 18 exonerees in a budget bill he introduced in January.
Education grants for exonerees are mandated by law but remain unavailable due to the lack of a state budget. Additionally, while the legislature required that mental health services be made available by 2011, the Department of Human Services has stated that it is still in the process of developing rules for the program.
BAIL REFORM
“Cook County is one of the battlegrounds in a nationwide movement to reform the [bail] system,” according to Injustice Watch—but advocates of reform are not entirely unified in their approach.
A new bill in the state legislature aiming to abolish cash bail faces significant challenges. Many counties outside Cook County rely on bond fees to fund their criminal justice systems and do not experience the same overcrowding issues. Additionally, eliminating cash bail would require counties to invest in pretrial services, creating further obstacles to statewide reform.
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart is backing an alternative bill that would allow sheriffs to request bail modifications for inmates who do not belong in jail.
While sheriffs in Texas and California have supported lawsuits seeking to have the bail system ruled discriminatory, Dart filed a motion to dismiss a similar lawsuit filed in Cook County in January, arguing that it “does nothing but complicate” reform efforts.
NEW MAYORAL ADVISOR
Mayor Rahm Emanuel will appoint Walter Katz, currently the independent police auditor for San Jose, as his lead policy advisor on public safety, The Daily Line reports. Katz, a former public defender, has a “national reputation for his work on police oversight.”
He will replace Deputy Chief of Staff Janey Rountree, who resigned in January on the same day the Justice Department released its report on the Chicago Police Department (CPD).
NEW HEARINGS ON JUVENILE LIFE SENTENCES
Approximately 80 Illinois inmates are serving life sentences without parole for murders committed as juveniles. Following a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court decision that found such sentences unconstitutional, 13 of these individuals have had new sentencing hearings, resulting in reduced sentences.
The Chicago Tribune profiles two of them, including Steven Hawthorne, now 49, who was released after serving 33 years in prison.
CRISIS INTERVENTION DISPATCHES INCREASE
Following training in mental health awareness, the city’s 911 operators identified over 25,000 Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) events last year—nearly five times the number identified the previous year, The Chicago Tribune reports. CIT officers responded to more than 16,000 of these events.