Ending Code of Silence Policies in the Chicago Police Department’s Collective Bargaining Agreements
The Coalition for Police Contracts Accountability (CPCA) offers recommendations to end the provisions in Chicago Police Department’s Collective Bargaining Agreements that perpetuate the “Code of Silence”
According to the Better Government Association (BGA), it was estimated in 2018 that the City of Chicago had spent over $700-million settling cases of police misconduct in the previous decade. The Chicago Tribune reports that the City of Chicago has spent over $750-million on Chicago Police Officers’ misconduct-related payouts, settlements, and losses at trial since 2004—this includes civil rights cases, car crash claims, racial discrimination complaints, sexual harassment suits, and some other legal matters. The annual amount the city spent paying the fees of private lawyers to defend the Chicago Police Department (CPD) against civil rights lawsuits has grown steadily from around $12.5-million in 2013 to over $30-million in 2018. As stated by attorney Stuart Chanen, the City needs to “reevaluate the degree to which they’ve allowed the [police unions] to drive civil rights defenses in a way that’s very harmful to the citizens of the City of Chicago.”
The economic burden placed on Chicago tax-payers to pay for police corruption is a minor issue compared to the detrimental intergenerational affects such entrenched systemic CPD misconduct has had on our City’s marginalized and divested communities. For instance, officers involved in or witnessing shootings are allowed a 24-hour grace period before being required to submit statements to the Independent Police Review Authority. As a result, in 2015, this process led to the false statements of sixteen CPD personnel, which demonized the teenage victim, Laquan McDonald, and permitted his shooter, Jason Van Dyke, to avoid murder charges for almost a year.
Police departments across the country have proven time and again that they do not have the capability, impartiality, or – frankly – the willingness to provide the internal oversight necessary to police themselves. Thanks to local journalists, Van Dyke was held accountable only after a judge ordered the release of the dashcam footage to the public. None of the cameras on squad cars at the scene of Laquan McDonald’s shooting, recorded sound and at least three did not work at all. The Columbia Journalism Review states that 80% of CPD dashcam systems present failed to record audio due to “operator error or in some cases intentional destruction” by the officers.
The federal consent decree, approved in January 2019, aims to dictate the direction of police reform in Chicago, likely for decades to come. While the consent decree is certainly a step in the right direction, “no part of that decree transforms the deeply rooted biases and barriers to justice that are inscribed within the Chicago police union contracts.” There are three collective bargaining agreements governing the supervisory positions at the Chicago Police Department. These current contracts – all of which expired almost three years ago and are expected to enter arbitration this month – include specific “limitations on transparency and protections that inhibit accountable government” by enabling officers to lie about misconduct.
The Coalition for Police Contract Accountability (CPCA) is a group of local organizations joined in their advocacy calling for the end of union contract provisions that enable the “code of silence” inside the CPD. In addition to the Civil Liberties & Police Accountability Committee of Chicago Appleseed and the Chicago Council of Lawyers, coalition members include ACLU of Illinois, Action Now Institute, Better Government Association, BPI, BYP100, Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, Community Renewal Society, Jewish Council on Urban Affairs (JCUA), A Just Harvest, Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), Southsiders Organized for Unity & Liberation (SOUL), ONE Northside, and the Workers Center for Racial Justice.
The Coalition for Police Contracts Accountability believes that until the harmful provisions in police contracts are changed, CPD officers will continue to operate under a separate – and ultimately unequal – system of justice:
For decades, the Chicago Police Department has had a “code of silence” that allows officers to hide misconduct. The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) Lodge 7 and the Illinois Policemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association (PBPA) union contracts with the City of Chicago effectively make this “code of silence” official policy, making it too hard to identify police misconduct and too easy for police officers to lie about it and hide it.
CPCA has provided fourteen recommendations to the City Council and Mayor of Chicago to eliminate the police contract provisions “that discourage people from filing complaints, make it easy for officers to conceal the truth, and obstruct investigations into claims of misconduct.” The fourteen recommendations include:
- Protections for police misconduct victims (such as eliminating the requirement of sworn affidavits, allowing for anonymous complaints, preventing disclosure of a complainant’s name prior to the interrogation of an accused officer);
- Improvements toward timely, appropriate transparency (like eliminating the 24-hour delay on officer statements in shooting cases, creating a clear process to receive statements from all involved officers, fully stopping the destruction of police misconduct records);
- Prioritizing officer accountability and responsibility (removing the requirement for the Superintendent’s authorization to investigate older complaints, considering past disciplinary records to be used when investigating present complaints, allowing identities of officers who are the subject of civilian complaints to be disclosed, penalizing the seniority of officers who have been repeatedly recommended for suspension because of the complaints against them); and more.
Chicago Appleseed and the Chicago Council of Lawyers urge the City Council and Mayor Lightfoot (who co-chaired a Task Force on Police Accountability that demanded changes to contracts that made it “easy for officers to lie,” and again went on record supporting contract accountability during her mayoral campaign) to remain dedicated to making Chicago safer and more equitable by adopting CPCA’s recommendations.