Vol. 2, Issue 18: Operation Smoke and Mirrors
At Issue: Invisible Institute in The Intercept, Code of Silence and COPA
In a remarkable week, a Chicago police officer was brutally beaten last Wednesday—the same day the City Council passed Mayor Emanuel’s police accountability ordinance; Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson released the draft of a new use-of-force policy; and a detailed account was published of a top-level effort to stifle two Chicago officers' investigation into an extortion ring within CPD.
At the annual police and fire awards ceremony on Thursday, Superintendent Eddie Johnson described the beating, in which a man attacked a female 17-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department and pounded her head into the pavement as she attempted to handcuff him after a traffic incident. Johnson said that although the officer feared for her life, she chose not to shoot her attacker out of fear of being second-guessed.
Supt. Eddie Johnson (Sun-Times file photo)
“We have to change this national narrative that the cops are the bad guys,” Johnson said. “The cops are actually the good guys trying to do a difficult job.”
However difficult a police officer’s job may be, a good guys-versus-bad guys narrative may be insufficient to fully comprehend the scope and complexity of the problem.
CODE OF SILENCE: In a four-part series in The Intercept, Jamie Kalven of the Invisible Institute recounts the experiences of two whistleblower police officers, describing a “code of silence” that extends far beyond the common conception of individual officers covering for their partners.
Kalven traces the long, frustrating, and sometimes treacherous investigation into an extortion ring operating within a CPD narcotics unit by Officers Shannon Spalding and Daniel Echeverria. The two officers encountered resistance, intimidation, and retaliation from high-ranking department officials, including their supervisors and department heads, who, according to their account, sought to discourage the investigation.
Spalding and Echeverria won a $2 million settlement in May for their whistleblower lawsuit.
The series cites and posts affidavits from department officials accused in Spalding and Echeverria’s lawsuit, some of whom deny or claim they cannot recall the incidents and conversations the whistleblowers allege. However, one retired officer stated in a deposition that her department head told administrative staff that Spalding and Echeverria were Internal Affairs “rats” and were not to be given backup.
The target of the investigation was Sgt. Ronald Watts, who allegedly led a ring of officers extorting protection money from drug dealers. He was also reportedly suspected in two murders related to the scheme. Watts had been the subject of a series of inconclusive investigations over a decade by Internal Affairs, the FBI, and other agencies. In 2013, he was sentenced to 22 months in prison and fined $5,200 for taking money from an FBI informant. One of his unit members, Kollatt Mohammed, was sentenced to 18 months.
Watts has since been released and relocated to Las Vegas, while several of his former associates remain on the police force.
With the U.S. Department of Justice now investigating CPD, Kalven writes, it has the means to determine whether Watts’ prosecution was “the capstone of a massive cover-up, designed not to secure information about Watts’ crimes and co-conspirators but to buy his silence.”
Click on the photo to read the full story. (The Intercept)
Fallout from the scandal continues. In January, charges were dropped against Ben Baker, who had served ten years of a fourteen-year sentence, after prosecutors concluded he was falsely arrested and wrongfully convicted. Baker maintained that Watts had planted drugs on him because he refused to pay a bribe. Another prisoner, Lionel White, is now seeking to have his conviction vacated, alleging that he was framed by Watts, The Intercept’s Jamie Kalven reports. Advocates have suggested that there may well be others.
In April, following a recommendation from his Police Accountability Task Force, Mayor Emanuel established a hotline for police officers to anonymously report misconduct.
More could be done. One small but significant step urged by the mayor’s task force is the elimination of a provision in the contract with the Fraternal Order of Police that bars the department from rewarding officers who act as whistleblowers. That provision “arguably encourages noncompliance with the central public duty” of reporting misconduct, according to the task force.
COPA PASSES: Mayor Emanuel described the passage of his police accountability ordinance—creating a Civilian Office of Police Accountability and a Deputy Inspector General for Public Safety—as “the beginning of a journey, not the end.”
A Chicago Tribune editorial notes improvements in the performance of the Independent Police Review Authority under new leadership and states that COPA “is better equipped to do the job.” However, it adds, “Count us among those who have reservations about COPA’s independence. It’s still tethered to a City Hall that until recently was in denial about the scope of police-on-citizen abuse and the code of silence that enabled it.”
Still unanswered is the question of “who will control” COPA, WBEZ reports. Establishing a community oversight board, promised by the end of winter, is part of the answer. “What is not clear is whether this community board will have real power, starting with authority to select COPA’s chief, as recommended by [the mayor’s task force].”
Five of the eight aldermen who voted against the ordinance represent outlying wards with large police populations. The Fraternal Order of Police opposes civilian review of police misconduct. “If we continue to blanket this profession with multiple layers of civilian involvement—[people] that don’t know how this job is supposed to be performed—that’s very dangerous for the law-abiding populations of our inner cities,” Chicago FOP president Dean Angelo told WBEZ.
Ald. Rod Sawyer told WBEZ he is waiting to see whether the reforms are sufficient to address racial bias in the police department.
Meanwhile, the demand for community control of police has gained greater traction than ever before, according to the Chicago Reporter, and “it’s not going away.”
USE OF FORCE: On Friday, Superintendent Johnson released the draft of new departmental guidelines on the use of force and, in an unprecedented move, invited public comment on the proposal. The new policy emphasizes the “sanctity of life” and de-escalation of confrontations, limits when officers can shoot at fleeing suspects, restricts the number of times Tasers can be discharged, requires the use of lower levels of force whenever possible, and mandates that officers intervene when another officer uses force inappropriately.
Chuck Wexler of the Police Executive Research Forum called the new guidelines “impressive and state of the art,” according to the Chicago Tribune, while Geoffrey Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina, described them as “a day late and millions of dollars short.”
The new policy on Taser use does not appear to reflect recommendations from PERF, which call for recognizing the weapon’s potential lethality and restricting its use to situations where an individual is actively aggressive or resisting in a manner likely to cause injury.
(Max Herman/Chicago Reporter)
TORTURE: Jaime Huaud’s claim that he was falsely convicted of a double murder—for which he has spent nearly 20 years in prison—after Chicago police officers threatened to cut off his toes is bolstered by a lineup photo showing his sneakers with the tips sliced off.
The Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission twice found that a preponderance of evidence supported his claim but was unable to act on it because a court ruling limited its jurisdiction to cases associated with disgraced Commander Jon Burge.
That changed when a law authorizing the commission to investigate all Cook County police torture cases went into effect in July. Now, 129 existing non-Burge claims can be considered, and so far, 200 additional claims have been filed, the Chicago Tribune reports.
Noting the recent exoneration of Mark Maxson and the history of obstacles created for the commission, a Chicago Sun-Times editorial urged, “Don’t put up any more unnecessary hurdles until the commission’s work is finished.”