LISA MADIGAN: COPS’ MCDONALD EMAILS CAN’T BE KEPT SECRET
SPRINGFIELD — Chicago Police officers’ emails discussing the Laquan McDonald shooting can’t be kept secret even though they were transmitted privately, a state official has decreed in what open- records advocates say is a solid step toward transparency on an issue that has roiled Illinois and reached as high as Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
The binding opinion last week by Democratic Attorney General Lisa Madigan follows quickly on a May Cook County Circuit Court ruling that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s emails about separate issues aren’t automatically exempt from disclosure even though they were sent on private devices.
The opinion has the force of law, requiring the police to search officers’ private accounts and turn over relevant emails — although the Police Department can ask a judge to overturn it. The dictum also fuels an ongoing national debate about access to discussions of public business on privately held cellphones and computers under decades- old disclosure laws which didn’t anticipate such an explosion of electronic communication.
The ruling determined that the Chicago Police Department improperly failed to search 12 officers’ personal email accounts for discussion of the October 2014 fatal shooting of McDonald, an unarmed black teenager, by a white police officer. Atlanta- based CNN appealed that omission to the public access counselor under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.
“This binding opinion will hopefully make clear that public employees cannot evade FOIA by using private devices when conducting public business,” said John Costello, a Chicago public- access lawyer.
Among the officers whose emails CNN is seeking are Officer Jason Van Dyke, who shot McDonald 16 times, and Deputy Chief David McNaughton, who approved the report that the shooting was justified and who abruptly retired on Monday.
A CNN spokeswoman would not comment on the matter, but it’s likely the cable network is trying to determine what other news media organizations have sought — whether officers on the scene cooperated in covering up the true sequence of events leading to McDonald’s shooting, a sequence that became clear a year later when a judge ordered police to release a dashcam video of the shooting.