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 Supt. Eddie Johnson released the draft of a new use-of-force policy; and a detailed account of a top-level effort to stifle two Chicago cops’ investigation into an extortion ring within CPD was published.
At the annual police and fire awards ceremony Thursday, Supt. Eddie Johnson described the beating, in which a man attacked a female 17-year veteran of Chicago Police Department and pounded her head into the pavement as she tried to handcuff him after a traffic incident. Johnson said though the officer feared for her life, she chose not to shoot her attacker out of fear of being second-guessed.
“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 is, it may be that a good guys-bad guys narrative is 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 Instituterecounts the experience of two whistleblower cops, describing a “code of silence” that goes far beyond the common conception of individual cops covering for their partners.
Kalven traces a 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, aimed at discouraging the investigation, by their account.
Spalding and Echeverria won a $2 million settlement of their whistleblower’s lawsuit in May.
The series cites and posts affidavits by department officials accused in Shannon and Echeverria’s lawsuit who deny or cannot recall incidents and conversations thewhistleblowers allege. One retired officer, however, said in a deposition that her department head told administrative staff that Shannon and Echeverria were Internal Affairs “rats” and were not to be given backup.
The target of the investigation was Sgt. Ronald Watts, who allegedly headed a ring of cops which extorted protection money from drug dealers — and was reportedly suspected in two murders to protect that racket. Watts had been the target of a series of inconclusive investigations, stretching over a decade, by internal affairs, the FBI, and other agencies. He was sentenced in 2013 to 22 months and a $5,200 fine 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 moved to Las Vegas. A number of his former associates remain on the police force.
With the U.S. Department of Justice now investigating CPD, Kalven writes, it hasthe 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.”
Fallout from the scandal continues. In January charges were dropped against Ben Baker (who’d 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, charging he was framed by Watts, Kalven reports; there may well be others, advocates have said.
In April, carrying out a recommendation of 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: elimination of the 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 passage of his police accountability ordinance — creating aCivilian 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 theIndependent Police Review Authority under new leadership, and says COPA “is better equipped to do the job.” But 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 “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 eight aldermen voting 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’s waiting to see if the reforms are sufficient to address racial bias in the police department.
Meanwhile, the demand for community control of police achieved greater traction than ever before, according to the Chicago Reporter, and “it’s not going away.”
Use of force:
On Friday, Supt. Johnson released the draft of new departmental guidelines on use of force, and in an unprecedented move, invited public comment on the proposal. Thenew policy would emphasize “sanctity of life” and de-escalation of confrontations, limit when officers can shoot at fleeing suspects, restrict the number of times Tasers can be discharged, require use of lower levels of force whenever possible, and require officers to 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 Tribune; Geoffrey Alpert, criminologist at the University of South Carolina, called them “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.
Torture:
Jaime Huaud’s claim that he was falsely convicted of a double murder — for which he’s 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 Comdr. Jon Burge.
That’s changed since 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; so far 200 additional claims have been filed, the 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.”
