Vol. 2, Issue 3: Rogue Commander
From The Archive:
"Assuming the veracity of Jennie’s account, it would be comforting to believe this outcome was produced by a malfunction of an otherwise workable system. Experience at Stateway and elsewhere, however, suggests the more disturbing possibility that what happened to Jennie is a common rather than exceptional outcome." —View From the Ground, August 2011
IPRA investigations fall short
New disciplinary recommendations came too late in two prominent cases involving police officers with multiple excessive force complaints, as the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) works through a large backlog of cases and reexamines previous determinations.
Last week, IPRA reported that its recommendation to fire Lt. Glenn Evans came weeks after a five-year statute of limitations had expired. The agency also determined that Officer Gildardo Sierra was unjustified in the 2011 fatal shooting of Flint Farmer, but the decision came 10 months after Sierra resigned.
Also last week, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced that an ordinance replacing IPRA with a new accountability structure would be delayed to allow for public discussion.
Rogue commander
On May 6, the agency recommended firing Evans for an incident in which he pushed a female arrestee's face, breaking her nose. This revised a recommendation issued in February 2015— four years after the complaint was filed—that he be suspended for 15 days for the incident.
Evans is among the CPD officers with the highest number of civilian complaints—114 since he joined the police force in 1986, half of them for excessive force, according to WBEZ. Since 2002, the city has paid over $280,000 in settlements and legal fees in six lawsuits related to misconduct allegations against him. In December, he was acquitted of charges of assault and misconduct in another case.
The case cast a shadow over the new police superintendent, Eddie Johnson, who recommended a 30-day suspension for the incident. As lieutenant and commander, Evans reported directly to Johnson from 2008 to 2014—a period in which he accumulated 11 complaints, according to City Bureau and DNAinfo.
A CPD spokesperson told WBEZ that Johnson had no role in Evans’ promotion to commander in 2012. However, in a deposition in the lawsuit filed by Rita King—the woman involved in the 2011 incident at the Gresham station house—former Superintendent Garry McCarthy stated that it was Johnson who recommended Evans for promotion.
In April, Injustice Watch reported that 15 lawsuits alleging excessive force and illegal searches and arrests had been filed against officers under Johnson’s command when he led the Gresham District beginning in 2008. The city paid well over $5 million in judgments and settlements in 12 of those cases.
One officer, Armando Ugarte, was named in 10 lawsuits, another was named in seven, and nine officers were named in two or more lawsuits.
Evans is now on desk duty at CPD headquarters. Several IPRA investigations and lawsuits remain pending.
16 shots
The fatal 2011 shooting of Flint Farmer echoes Laquan McDonald’s killing in striking ways: Farmer was unarmed, he was shot 16 times, and part of the shooting was captured on a dashcam video.
In 2013, State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez declined to charge Officer Gildardo Sierra in the killing, stating that Sierra had reason to believe Farmer was armed. Sierra said he thought Farmer’s cell phone was a gun.
This was despite video evidence showing Sierra circling Farmer’s body as he lay prone on the ground and firing three final rounds into his back. A medical examiner determined that the final shots were what killed Farmer.
The city settled a wrongful death lawsuit with Farmer’s family in 2013 for $4.1 million.
Last week, the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) ruled that the shooting was unjustified. However, Sierra cannot be disciplined because he resigned from the force last August.
Farmer’s death was one of three shooting incidents involving Sierra that year. In a strange coincidence, last week, IPRA received dashcam video from another case. The video contradicted key elements of the version of that incident given by Sierra and his partner regarding the January 2011 shooting death of Darius Pinex, according to WBEZ.
In the same case, Senior Corporation Counsel Jordan Marsh resigned in January after a federal judge ruled that he intentionally concealed dispatch tapes, which also contradicted Sierra’s account of Pinex’s fatal traffic stop.
Preemptive mediation
Seriously understaffed and facing a growing backlog of cases, the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) turned to mediation in 2011 to expedite resolution. A Chicago Tribune investigation found that of 678 cases resolved by IPRA since 2008, 300 were resolved through mediation, described as “an opaque process akin to plea-bargaining.” Often, serious complaints of misconduct were resolved when officers admitted to paperwork errors and received reprimands, which were removed from their records after one year.
In its April report, Mayor Emanuel’s Police Accountability Task Force stated that mediation “preempt[s] full inquiry into potentially serious misconduct and abuse charges.” The task force recommended implementing a “true mediation” program based on restorative justice, as other cities have done, in which citizen complainants and the officers who are the subjects of their complaints meet face-to-face before a neutral facilitator “to promote dialogue and understanding.”
Legal culture
While clerking in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve stated that she observed “an entire legal culture that often acted in criminal ways,” including a widespread acceptance by prosecutors of “police perjury.”
Now an assistant professor of criminal justice at Temple University, Gonzalez Van Cleve is the author of Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court.