CHASE BLUE CODE OF SILENCE WHEREVER IT MAY GO
As the U.S. Justice Department embarks on a civil rights investigation of the Chicago Police, we urge the feds to emphasize the word “Chicago” as fully as the word “police.”
If the Chicago Police Department is, indeed, guilty of patterns and practices that cause cops to violate the rights of citizens, particularly in their use of deadly force, there is no reason to exclude from scrutiny other city departments that might, intentionally or unwittingly, be aiding and abetting that bad behavior.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel sees it differently, but we can’t help think he’ll come around. He has circled the wagons before at City Hall as this police scandal has unfolded, only to shift to a more open embrace of accountability and reform as reality hit him over the head. The mayor was dead set against firing his police superintendent, Garry McCarthy, until the moment he fired him. He opposed a federal probe of the Police Department until it became obvious it was coming anyway.
Now the mayor may have to play catch-up again.
The reality this time was a ruling Monday by a federal judge that a lawyer for the city intentionally withheld evidence in a civil suit against two police officers accused of wrongfully shooting a man to death in 2011. Another lawyer for the city, the judge concluded, “failed to make a reasonable inquiry,” as required by court rules, to search for that evidence— a recording of a police radio dispatch.
U.S. District Judge Edmond Chang has cited and rebuked five city attorneys within the last year for withholding evidence in two separate police misconduct cases.
This, to our thinking, amounts to a big new development in Chicago’s police scandal, like a fire jumping from one house to the next. If before a central question was whether a “blue code of silence” protects misconduct by the police, the judge’s rulings raise the possibility that the code of silence reaches into City Hall’s Law Department.
Emanuel on Tuesday said there is “zero tolerance” for any city lawyer who fails to uphold professional standards, and he ordered the city’s top attorney, corporation counsel Stephen Patton, to make sure no city attorney ever again conceals evidence.
But when asked by a reporter, Emanuel dismissed— or, at the very least, failed to sign on clearly— to the notion that the Law Department’s patterns and practices now should be scrutinized as part of the federal civil rights investigation. “No,” he said, the feds “are working where they are.”
Defenders of the mayor’s position insist that the federal statute guiding the range of the Justice Department probe limits it to the Police Department. The probe is intended to look at police misconduct related to violations of constitutional civil rights in criminal cases, not violations of court rules in civil suits. And, the mayor’s defenders said nothing in Judge Chang’s rulings even hints that the mistakes or misdeeds by the five named lawyers might be part of a larger pattern of misconduct by the Law Department.
This may well be the case, but we don’t understand why Emanuel doesn’t take a more explicitly welcoming tone to a broader federal investigation all the same. It is not enough to say rather neutrally, as the mayor did at a Tuesday press conference, that the decision is up to the feds. The people of Chicago are looking for assurances from the mayor himself that anything that can be done will be done.
Mayor Emanuel has pledged to “fully cooperate” with the federal investigation, wherever it goes. And why not? It may prove painful, but it’s what’s best for Chicago, for the mayor’s continued effectiveness in office, and for his legacy.
If before a central question was whether a “blue code of silence” protects misconduct by the police, the judge’s rulings raise the possibility that the code of silence reaches into City Hall’s Law Department.