By John Byrne and Bill Ruthhart
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — With U.S. Department of Justice officials set to meet Wednesday with Chicago Police Department command staff as part of a federal civil rights investigation into officers’ use of force, aldermen had a marathon hearing Tuesday focused on the high-profile Laquan McDonald shooting that prompted the probe.
Political symbolism and campaign angling ahead of the March primary election were among the themes at a joint hearing of the City Council’s Human Relations and Public Safety committees. Aldermen don’t have the power to force changes at the state’s attorney’s office, which has been vilified for waiting 13 months to charge the officer who shot the teen. And while aldermen asked for information on Police Department policies, they are not calling for specific changes in the way police misconduct cases are investigated.
While Mayor Rahm Emanuel has come under intense criticism for keeping video of the shooting under wraps, the aldermen did not request that the mayor or even top aides appear at the hearing. And the first witness, the mayor’s head of the agency that reviews police shootings, offered generic answers as aldermen pressed for specifics, saying she’s new to the job.
The agenda did feature a symbolic resolution asking for a special prosecutor to replace Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez in the prosecution of police Officer Jason Van Dyke for murder in the McDonald case. But with Alvarez facing a difficult re-election bid, some aldermen even balked at calling that resolution for a vote.
The hearing stretched into a 12th hour before concluding late Tuesday, but it’s the presence of federal investigators that provides the opportunity for wholesale changes in the city’s long-beleaguered department. Chicago police interim Superintendent John Escalante acknowledged there is a certain amount of unknown as he and his command staff prepare for their first meeting with federal investigators Wednesday.
“We have not been through anything like this before. We can only look at some other major cities and what they’ve gone through for a little bit of reference. I think we’re all going into it tomorrow with open minds,” Escalante said. “We understand the reason for it, and we’ll take it day by day as we work with the Department of Justice. We fully intend to cooperate with them, and as we’ve said before and truly mean it, we know this is going to be a lengthy process, but when all is said and done, we should be and expect to be a better department and more professional department.”
Escalante said he and the Emanuel administration plan to identify a liaison within the Police Department to work with Justice Department officials.
“It’s my understanding that we will provide them with a senior command person, but we haven’t identified that person yet,” Escalante said. “We’ll have a better idea of who to put in that position after we meet with them tomorrow.”
The just-begun federal probe promises to be long and costly, and if a pattern of legal violations emerges, the city could be forced to pay even more to carry out reforms in areas such as police staffing, training, policies and oversight, experts have said.
It could take a year to complete the historic, exhaustive civil rights investigation focusing largely on use of force and the disciplinary process for wayward officers. Then, assuming a pattern of violations is found, city officials and the Justice Department will hammer out a lengthy legal agreement over how to reform the department. Finally, the most difficult task falls on the Police Department: implementing those changes.
Prior to Tuesday’s City Council hearing, Latino Caucus Chairman Ald. George Cardenas, 12th, said he wasn’t sure removing Alvarez makes sense.
“The (Justice Department) is coming, there’s a lot of folks coming down here to investigate the Laquan case and many other cases,” Cardenas said. “I think they will speak to that if it’s needed. At this point I think we have a lot of people here with eyes on this stuff. If we bring somebody else in here, who’s going to be in charge? I think it makes it more difficult for us to do our job, and more processes for justice to take place.”
Timothy Evans, chief judge of Cook County Circuit Court, wrote an opinion piece published on the Chicago Tribune website Tuesday afternoon saying “several people,” whom he does not name, have asked him to appoint a special prosecutor in the Van Dyke case but that he does not have the power to do so under the law. “Only the judge to whom the case is assigned can decide whether to appoint a special prosecutor,” Evans wrote.
While protesters and some aldermen also have called for Alvarez to resign because of her handling of the case, some members of the Latino Caucus have been more circumspect about the best course of action. Alvarez is facing two challengers in the March 15 Democratic primary, Kim Foxx, who is backed by many African-American leaders including County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, and Donna More, who has put $250,000 of her own money into the campaign.
“Calling for resignations, to me, we have elections,” Cardenas said at a news conference Tuesday with other members of the caucus when asked what they want from Alvarez. “You can certainly call for resignations, but reforming the system is a priority, I think not just for the caucus, the council and the city at large.”
At the committee hearing, Sharon Fairley, whom Emanuel named last week to take over the Independent Police Review Authority that investigates police misconduct, faced pointed questions from aldermen about how that agency investigates officer-involved shootings. Having just taken over at the agency, Fairley mostly told aldermen she will look into the policies that led to IPRA taking so long to investigate the McDonald shooting before the video of the incident was released on a judge’s orders.
Asked why the video wasn’t made public sooner, Fairley said, “I don’t believe it’s illegal (to release video before an investigation is complete), and that is definitely a policy that needs to be revisited.”
Ald. Daniel Solis, 25th, expressed frustration with Fairley’s inability to talk specifics. “I think that’s a ridiculous response,” Solis said when Fairley said she did not have numbers about the results of IPRA investigations. “Maybe there’s somebody on your staff who can talk about it, since you just started.
“Again, this is about understanding the system is broken,” Solis said. “We need information, we need understanding of how the system works, and if you can’t answer the questions, then this is not going to be — it’s a waste of time.”
And Ald. John Arena, 45th, said Fairley’s predecessor, Scott Ando, should have been the one on the hot seat to explain the reason for the McDonald investigation stretching for more than a year. But Ando “conveniently resigned” before aldermen could call him in, Arena said.
Fairley, who formerly served on city Inspector General Joseph Ferguson’s staff, asked Ferguson to take over the still-ongoing administrative investigation into the McDonald shooting. “I did not think that if IPRA undertook that administrative investigation at this time that it would have that degree of confidence,” she said. “And I think it’s critical for the city that everyone feel confident that that administrative investigation was conducted with the integrity you expect.”
Up next at the hearing was Lori Lightfoot, president of the Chicago Police Board, who will recommend to Emanuel three finalists to replace Garry McCarthy as police superintendent after the mayor fired his top cop early this month amid the McDonald video fallout. She told aldermen the board plans three or four hearings for the public to weigh in on what residents want to see in a new superintendent. Lightfoot said the board will likely have hearings on the North, South and West sides, and possibly one downtown. She said the board hopes to have a hearing schedule set by early next month.
Lightfoot also is a member of Emanuel’s hand-picked task force that will make recommendations for Police Department reforms by the end of March. Lightfoot said the task force will look at developing “an early warning system” when police officers start getting accused of wrongdoing on the job. Van Dyke had been the subject of numerous complaints before he shot McDonald.
She said the task force also will look to establish “a very clear policy on when videotape and other evidence gets released in connection with important police actions such as police-involved shootings or other in-custody incidents.”
And she said they will try to set clear directives for police to deal “with individuals who are in duress, and particularly those who are exhibiting any mental illness or mental disability.” McDonald was behaving erratically the night Van Dyke shot him.
But Ald. Chris Taliaferro, 29th, questioned Lightfoot’s objectivity. He said her membership on the Police Board and onetime participation in the police Office of Professional Standards, which then-Mayor Richard M. Daley replaced with IPRA amid a series of high-profile instances of police misconduct, makes her part of a “broken system.”
Taliaferro, a former police officer, said it’s inappropriate for Lightfoot to now serve on the task force picked by Emanuel to recommend changes to the Police Department, and asked her to consider resigning. Lightfoot refused.
During later testimony, Fraternal Order of Police President Dean Angelo Sr. told aldermen it was “very disturbing” to rank-and-file officers that the mayor said during a high-profile speech to the City Council this month that the city needs to deal with the “code of silence” in which Chicago police protect each other when they engage in misconduct.
“We have kids, we have bills, we have families,” Angelo said. “And to think, in 2015, with all the cameras that are around and all the videotaping that’s going on, that a police officer’s going to risk his livelihood for his family is ridiculous. And to think we have a population of people that say, ‘Oh, it’s not a big thing. We do it every day.’ We don’t do that. This is not 1950.”
But when Ald. Proco “Joe” Moreno, 1st, asked Angelo to state for the record that a code of silence doesn’t exist in the Chicago Police Department, Angelo hedged. “There is not an answer I could give you that would be a blanket statement that someone out there is not doing something they should not be doing,” Angelo said. “I can’t say that.”
Angelo also estimated that only 1 in 5 officers on the Chicago Police Department has been trained on how to use a Taser.
Before the hearing, the Latino Caucus sought to draw attention to another controversial police-involved shooting. Cardenas called for the city to initiate settlement talks with the family of Emmanuel Lopez, who was killed by officers in 2005.
As the Chicago Tribune reported, Van Dyke admitted as part of an ongoing civil case in the Lopez shooting that he copied the work of other officers on the scene, which made his official report match theirs, without conducting his own interviews of witnesses.
“Isn’t it a high risk to taxpayers to really be going to trial in this case?” Cardenas asked Tuesday.
Multiple aspects of the official police narrative of the September 2005 shooting of Lopez have been challenged in the Cook County lawsuit accusing the Police Department of excessive force and lying to cover up officers’ conduct.
Lopez was driving to his overnight shift as a janitor in a sausage factory when he led police on a brief chase after a hit-and-run fender bender. Police said he used his Honda Civic to partly run over one of the officers as he was trying to escape. The Lopez family’s lawsuit heads to trial in February over allegations Chicago police shot the 23-year-old janitor 16 times without justification and then concocted a story that they were acting in self-defense because Lopez tried to run over an officer with his car.
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