Page 20 - October 2019 FOP

What exactly is COPA?
There comes a time when police officers have to ask themselves a very simple question: What ex- actly is the Civilian Office of Police Account- ability, otherwise known as COPA?
Is it an administrative agency whose mandate is to oversee the disciplinary pro-
cess, or is it a criminal prosecution agency
tasked to criminally prosecute police offi-
cers? If you were to look at the news coming
out of 1615 W. Chicago Ave., you may find your- self believing it is a lot more of the latter than the
former.
To understand this beast, it is important to understand 40
years of civilian oversight of the Chicago police. In 1974, the City of Chicago created the Office of Professional Standards (OPS). Headed by civilians, the office was to act as oversight on excessive force complaints, shootings by police, deaths in cus- tody and domestic disputes involving officers.
It was found that OPS generally sustained 10 percent of all police misconduct cases. Of course, this was not enough for the social justice warriors, and OPS came under attack starting in the 1990s and into the turn of the century.
I suppose if you believe that during every waking hour every police officer is ⁠— or thinking about ⁠— violating civilians’ rights, then a 10 percent sustained rate does not fit into that narrative. Under much pressure from these groups, OPS was abolished, they jumbled the alphabet and in 2007, came up with the Inde- pendent Police Review Authority (IPRA).
IPRA came into existence with the usual bureaucratic fan- fare. Many stern-faced politicians and legal scholars claimed that more oversight was needed, and they screeched that police must be reined in. They pointed to an off-duty incident involv- ing an officer in a tavern and other outlying events for evidence of a need for reform.
Amazingly, after all this saber-rattling, the sustained rate of police misconduct barely moved from that of OPS. How could this be? More money, more resources, more oversight? Some- thing must be wrong with IPRA, they decried. It must be abol- ished, they pontificated.
Perhaps they should have asked themselves to examine the premise upon which their entire argument rests. Maybe Chica- go Police Officers are not routinely violating the constitutional rights of the people of Chicago. Heresy!
Then, in 2016, came the Department of Justice Report (DOJ). The DOJ under Obama’s attorney general published a report that destroyed many trees and keyboards to conclude that there is a pattern and practice of Chicago Police Officers violating the constitutional rights of Chicagoans, and a systematic, ingrained process of covering up this misconduct. This is what we know as the great “blue code of silence.”
The report was heavy on conclusions, filled with words only people who have never engaged in real policing would use and very short on substance...almost no statistical data or indepen- dent evidence to prove their assumptions, but lots of baseless conclusions and unsupported facts.
If you read the report and closed your eyes, you might think you were living in the 1970s Soviet Union. This report was con- sidered by the social justice warriors to be akin to the Sermon
20 CHICAGO LODGE 7 ■ OCTOBER 2019
on the Mount. This report was the catalyst that led to the con- sent decree and, most importantly to every working Chicago
Police Officer, COPA.
The Chicago City Council passed legislation to estab-
lish COPA and in September 2017, it was open for busi- ness.
The Chicago Municipal Code clearly states that COPA
“is to provide a just and efficient means to fairly and timely conduct investigations within its jurisdiction, in- cluding investigation of alleged police misconduct...to identify and address patterns of police misconduct...[and] to make policy
recommendations to improve the Chicago Police Department.”
That’s a lot of big words, but what exactly is COPA? To be quite honest, it is one of the most weaponized civilian oversight agen- cies of police officers in the country. They are highly funded (1 percent of the entire budget of the Chicago Police Department by law), with a dramatic increase in staff (climbing to more than 150 eager beavers, as opposed to IPRA’s 98 in 2015) and massive expansion in jurisdiction.
The increased power is too much to enumerate here, but one example is that COPA investigators are now the lead investiga- tors at the scene of every officer-involved death. Let that res- onate. People who cannot be certified by the Illinois Law En- forcement Training Standards Board because they are not peace officers are leading homicide investigations.
The experienced homicide detectives, who understand ev- idence and crime investigation, are taking orders from COPA when an officer is placed in the unfortunate position of having to use deadly force.
With all this new power, at the very least, we can count on the fact that COPA is still an administrative agency. It is not a crimi- nal prosecution entity, right? Not so fast.
Recently, we learned that COPA is going to judges and getting search warrants issued. Remember, in order to get a judge to issue a search warrant, to go around the Fourth Amendment, a police officer with the approval of a prosecutor must allege a crime.
COPA is alleging to judges that there is probable cause of evi- dence of a crime. If there is a crime, and COPA is only mandated to administratively investigate police officers, then the next log- ical step is that a police officer has committed a crime. COPA is not criminally investigating the offender, but rather the police.
If you read the notification of allegations presented to many police officers, you’ll see that these are not Chicago police rule violations found in the general orders; instead, they are crimes. And if you think you can “Take 5,” you are mistaken. You are compelled to answer these questions, as it appears only crimi- nals are allowed that luxury.
The landscape has undergone a very gradual change. Each new agency has continued to grab more power and we now see it manifested in COPA. The problem is that a funny thing has happened during all of this. According to COPA’s 2018 annual report, there was a sustained rate of 9.8 percent.
After 40 years of police oversight, money and handwringing, the numbers have not changed. Approximately 10 percent of all complaints filed by citizens are actually valid.
Maybe it’s time for a new agency?
TIM GRACE