Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Chief ’s firing before retirement spurs debate
Career finished early over an ‘indiscretion’
CHICAGO — The unceremonious firing of Chicago’s police superintendent weeks before his retirement has rattled a department that, under his leadership, was seeking to restore public confidence since the release of a 2014 video showing a white officer killing a black teenager with 16 gunshots.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot blasted Superintendent Eddie Johnson on Monday for “ethical lapses” stemming from an October incident in which officers found him asleep behind the wheel of his official SUV. Johnson blamed his medication for being drowsy, but media reports in the coming days disclosed that the married superintendent had been drinking for hours and kissing a woman on his security detail and that the responding officers took steps to keep it secret.
Still, the abrupt firing rattled both supporters and critics of the native Chicagoan who joined the force three decades ago as a patrolman and took over as chief in 2016 amid public outcry over the release of the video showing officer Jason Van Dyke pumping bullet after bullet into Laquan McDonald’s body.
“Here is a man who almost literally saved this city from going up in flames now only being measured by an indiscretion in his car,” said Jedidiah Brown, executive director of the community organization Justice Family. “It hurts all police officers, and when you take the actions of the other (commanders) for misbehaving, it reinforces the notion that we should not trust one of the most important parts of our society, the police.”
Lightfoot’s action to fire Johnson came less than a month after she lauded him as he announced plans to transition out of the job early next year and help his interim successor transition into it. With the mayor looking on, Johnson recounted all he had done to reduce crime and boost public confidence in the department since the McDonald shooting, which landed Van Dyke in prison for murder.
Brown called Johnson’s firing an “unnecessary humiliation” given that he was so close to retirement. Even the Fraternal Order of Police, which had cast a no-confidence vote for Johnson after he boycotted President Donald Trump’s October speech in the city, argued that firing him before the investigation of the October incident is complete sets a troubling precedent.
“It’s not about Eddie Johnson,” FOP President Kevin Graham told the Chicago Sun-Times. “It’s about any police officer getting fair and due process. … There is going to be a division as to whether or not people are skeptical about the police because you’re not treating the police fairly.”
Revelations about Johnson came during a week of other troubling stories for the department. A commander was demoted for using on-duty officers to babysit his son, and a recently retired commander was sentenced for continuing to cash his mother’s Social Security checks nearly a quarter century after her death.
”If we focus on Eddie’s personal life, we ignore the real issues of the CPD,” said the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a Roman Catholic priest and activist on the city’s South Side. He gives Johnson high marks for his efforts to restore public trust and to reduce the number of shootings and killings that spiked to levels not seen in nearly two decades the year he became superintendent.
While Pfleger said he is sad for Johnson, he also believes the new mayor had no choice but to fire him after she learned he had lied about having “a couple of drinks with dinner.”