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INVESTIGATING CONTINUED FROM PAGE 37
Fioretto participated in a telephone conference with then- U.S. Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta and Zachary Fardon, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, to question whether the section about the pattern of exces- sive use of force relied on or had an underlying judgment of racism.
“It did make some mention, but unlike the DOJ reports in Ferguson and New Orleans, it seemed to take a back- seat,” Fioretto explained. “While we expected more of the same narrative that would read like the DOJ telling police officers how to do their jobs, we can’t let groups that don’t know about policing tell officers how to do their jobs. As President Angelo has told them, that will do two things: create more crime, which we’ve seen, and put officers more at risk.”
The report devotes 57 pages to conclusions like the “CPD does not provide officers with sufficient direction, super- vision or support to ensure lawful and effective policing,” and the “CPD must better support and incentivize policing that is lawful and restores trust among Chicago’s marginal- ized communities.” The report concludes with 10 pages of recommendations that read with glass half-full of positive outlook for members, some of which include:
• Implement changes to the City’s discipline and dis- cipline review systems, including the Chicago Police Board, to ensure disciplinary decisions are fair, timely and transparent.
• Training is the foundation for ensuring that officers are engaging in effective and constitutional policing.
• Provide training that is comprehensive, organized, based on adult-learning principles and developed with national best police practices and community policing principles in mind.
• Take steps to ensure the creation of a well planned, comprehensive training program that is carefully tai- lored to Department needs, and is properly resourced.
• Reform CPD’s supervisory structures and incentives to provide all officers with meaningful direction and over- sight.
• Incorporate officer wellness principles into all facets of CPD operations.
• Schedule promotional exams with sufficient frequency to allow qualified candidates frequent opportunity for promotion throughout their careers.
The Lodge would like these statements to translate into increasing resources that will have the greatest impact on reducing crime and protecting officers. For example, can those resources be a purchase of much-needed patrol cars to be deployed in high-crime neighborhoods as the Lodge requested as part of its last contract negotiation in 2014?
Toward that end, Fioretto said Lodge 7 will be watching “how the new Department of Justice monitors and enforces the report going forward.” But the recommendations not- ed above not only dial down the pressure; they lend some oversight to actually getting them done.
“We have always asked for more training, and now we have a DOJ report to support us,” Fioretto added. “And with regard to accountability, Dean has always said that if an of- ficer has done something wrong, let him know and follow the due process. That starts with proper supervisors.”
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Consequently, the report indicates the Department is woefully understaffed with regard to supervisors. It’s also reasonable to surmise that if the DOJ is requesting more sergeants, for example, to be hired, then those sergeants must be properly trained, “and they have to have the skills to earn the position and not be just a patronage job,” Fio- retto underlined.
The Con
No screams of “lies” or “total crap” could be heard from the Lodge 7 offices on Jan. 13, but there certainly seemed to be probable cause for scourge. Perhaps the most readily available dispute targeted the report narrative contending that the community as a whole has no trust for the police. The Lodge contends such a statement hits at the core of the report’s credibility.
“Dean thinks this is false,” Fioretto asserted. “As we have said, if you go into some of the neighborhoods where crime is high and knock on the doors of average, law-abiding citi- zens, they would say they welcome the police and trust the police to do their jobs. But the DOJ never really interviewed those people who are afraid to leave their homes or who don’t want their kids to go to school because they have to cross gang lines.”
According to the report, investigators spent more than 300 days meeting with community members and City of- ficials and interviewing current and former Department officers and Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) investigators. In addition, the report confirmed that inves- tigators met with the command staff of several Department specialized units and divisions, toured CPD’s training fa- cilities and observed training programs, visited each of the 22 districts where they addressed roll call and spoke with command staff and officers, conducted more than 60 ride- alongs with officers and met several times with Lodge 7. That added up to hearing from more than 340 individual CPD members.
“We’re glad that a number of police officers were inter- viewed, but we don’t think it’s enough,” Fioretto reasons. “We hope one positive thing that might come is that the Department solicits more input from the Lodge as a whole. Not only the entity, but also the rank-and-file police offi- cers we represent.”
What’s been on the minds of all rank-and-file officers since the investigation began is the big question about use of force. It’s obviously disconcerting to look at the Table of Contents and see the first section titled, “CPD engages in a pattern of unconstitutional use of force.”
Whether the DOJ gathered an accurate picture of offi- cers’ approach to use of force is unclear, and that circles back to the argument about whether investigators talked to enough cops to understand how much goes into the split-second decision to use force when policing in Chica- go. When attempting to understand the case made against officers’ use of force, Fioretto assessed that it was made on “cursory facts” and he certainly speaks for every member when imploring that any changes made to the policy “don’t place officers in more danger.”
Pressure Points
Questions, issues, challenges, clarifications – the report features many, as expected, and some are cause for vary-