At Issue: Calls for Contract Changes
BY CURTIS BLACK
The City Council Black Caucus introduced a resolution calling on Mayor Rahm Emanuel to “publicly endorse” a series of changes to collective bargaining agreements with police unions, citing recommendations from the U.S. Justice Department, the mayor’s Police Accountability Task Force, 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.
At the Chicago Sun-Times, Mark Brown notes that contract negotiations don’t 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 local president Dean Angelo told the Chicago Tribune. He said 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 give statements to civilian investigators.
The affidavit requirement is necessary to prevent the city from being “inundated with too many complaints to keep up,” he 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, but the most common involved time limits for filing complaints.
Until last year, the Independent Police Review Authority rarely took advantage of a contractual provision allowing the agency to seek to override the affidavit provision; only five overrides were sought from 2012 to 2015, according to reports from the agency. Last year chief administrator Sharon Fairley instituted a new policy requiring that all cases be reviewed for possible override. Affidavit overrides were sought and granted in 11 cases last year, while 63 cases were closed for 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.”
On the 24-hour waiting period, the PATF recommended revising the provision to ensure that officers remain separated until they all have given statements, and requiring officers under questioning to reveal any conversations they have had with law enforcement. The task force notes that the Justice Department’s consent decree with the Los Angeles Police Department contains such a provision.
“It is imperative that Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the City Council insist on a thorough rewriting” of contracts, the Sun-Times editorialized. “Unnecessary rules that protect bad cops finally must go.”
Commander with many complaints
Mayor Emanuel and Police Supt. Eddie Johnson defended Ogden District Cmdr. James Sanchez after WBEZ reported that Sanchez had accumulated 90 misconduct complaints – “more than almost any other Chicago police officer” — over a three-decade career.
Johnson named Sanchez to command the West Side district last August.
Most of the complaints were for excessive force or unlawful searches. Sanchez was named in 16 complaints along with Officer Jerome Finnigan, who pled guilty to robbery and murder for hire. Both officers belonged to the controversial Special Operations Section. Ten other SOS officers were convicted of corruption charges.
Sanchez was lead detective on a murder case in which the defendant was acquitted, sued for wrongful arrest, and won a $750,000 settlement.
Johnson argued that only a few of the complaints against Sanchez were sustained. He said Sanchez “has the support of the community” and “has done a phenomenal job.”
For many years very few complaints against Chicago police have been sustained.
Emanuel said he didn’t know about the complaints but Sanchez “is doing a very good job.” Emanuel also defended then-Supt. Garry McCarthy when he promoted Lt. Glenn Evans to commander despite 113 misconduct complaints. Evans was later charged and acquitted of assault.
Promotions criticized
Supt. Eddie Johnson came under criticism after the 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 FOP president Dean Angelo.
A department spokesman said the change was made to increase the number of patrol officers who were nominated, because most Merit Board members have backgrounds in the patrol division.
The DOJ report called on CPD to take steps to increase the fairness of promotions and the transparency of merit promotions. Shortly after it was issued, Johnson reinstated a policy of identifying the nominators of officers receiving merit promotions.
Merit promotions were instituted to increase minority promotions, but last year the Sun-Times reported that more white officers were receiving merit promotions than blacks or Latinos.
Kalven on police reform
In a wide-ranging conversation on Chicago Newsroom, the Jamie Kalven discussed his exposé of the code of silence and a criminal enterprise within the Chicago Police Department, his history working in South Side public housing and becoming involved in police issues, and the Invisible Institute and its Tracker project — as well as the state of the movement for police accountability and recent reforms in Chicago, and 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 released from prison after being exonerated in Illinois — about $220,000 for people imprisoned for 14 years or more, which tops out at $16,000 for each year — are low compared to other states, some of which pay $50,000 to $80,000 for each year in prison. On top of that, awards claims for exonorees 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 exonorees, and the payouts weren’t included in a budget that passed later. Senate President John Cullerton has included claims payments for 18 exonorees in a budget bill he introduced in January.
Education grants are required by law but unavailable due to the lack of a budget. The legislature also mandated that mental health services be made available by 2011, but the Department of Human Services says it is still 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 – and advocates of reform are not all on the same page. A new bill in the state legislature to abolish cash bail faces an uphill fight, since other counties rely on bond fees to fund their criminal justice system, and they don’t have the overcrowding problems Cook County does. In addition, abolishing cash bail requires counties to invest in pretrial services. Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart is also backing an alternative bill that would permit sheriffs to request bail modification for inmates who don’t belong in jail.
Sheriffs in Texas and California have supported lawsuits seeking to have the bail system ruled discriminatory, but Dart filed a motion to dismiss a similar lawsuit filed here in January, saying it “does nothing but complicate” reform efforts.
New mayoral advisor
Mayor Emanuel will appoint Walter Katz, who is currently independent police auditor for San Jose, as his lead policy advisor on public safety, the Daily Line reports. Katz is a former public defender with 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 delivered its report on CPD.
New hearings on juvenile life sentences
Some 80 Illinois inmates are serving sentences of life without parole for murders committed as juveniles, and following a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court decision finding such sentences unconstitutional, 13 of them have had new sentencing hearings that resulted in their sentences being reduced. The Chicago Tribune profiles two of them, including Steven Hawthorne, now 49, who was released after 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 events last year — nearly five times the number identified the year before, the Chicago Tribune reports. CIT officers responded to more than 16,000 events last year.
