![]() ![]() She is also active as a community organizer in Chicago. Trina Reynolds-Tyler, MPP'20, is director of data with the Invisible Institute, a journalism production company on the South Side of Chicago that works to enhance the capacity of citizens to hold public institutions accountable. Get our latest editorials, op-eds and columns, delivered twice a week in our newsletter. Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email. Jamie Kalven is executive director of the Invisible Institute, which focuses on accountability and transparency in public institutions. We are thus left with the sad spectacle of our mayor, having squandered the mandate conferred by the landslide that swept her into office, trying to hoard power in petty, self-defeating ways, as it continually slips through her fingers. Once again, however, Mayor Lightfoot has shown herself incapable of exercising power by sharing power. ![]() It is best understood as a redistribution of power. Transparency is a necessary condition for citizens to effectively play their roles in holding public institutions accountable. The aim of the original ordinance eviscerated by the mayor was to transfer that function from civil society to the appropriate governmental agency - the Office of the Inspector General.Įvery effort should now be made to derail the sham substitute ordinance scheduled for a vote Monday. Chicago, the 2014 ruling of the state appellate court that police misconduct files are public information in Illinois, it is housed in the Citizens Police Data Project of the Invisible Institute. The ultimate absurdity here is that the process of building the public library of police misconduct investigations has been steadily progressing for years and is now far advanced. The original ordinance would have included such documents in the repository at very little cost. It would thus not make available thousands of related documents already made public in response to Freedom of Information Act requests by individuals. (Among other things, this means that the repository would not include cases investigated during the period when Lightfoot was the head of OPS.)įinally, the repository would not include the full files of investigations but only the summary reports of investigations as curated by the city’s Law Department. It would not include cases handled by the agencies that performed the investigative function prior to the establishment of COPA in 2017 - the Independent Police Review Authority and the Office of Professional Standards (OPS). Second, the repository would only include investigations by the CPD’s Bureau of Internal Affairs and the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA). It is through analysis of the full universe of cases that we can diagnose where and how the system failed and how to fix it, as well as identify patterns of problematic behavior by particular officers and groups of officers. In sustained cases the accountability system actually worked. This would eliminate something on the order of 93% of all investigative files, rendering the proposed database virtually useless. There are three main points.įirst, the Lightfoot ordinance would only include in the repository investigations of misconduct complaints that have been sustained and in which discipline has been recommended. Rather than building upon the work of the OIG and its civil society partners, the city has dismantled it. Finally, she embraced the ordinance for the purpose of gutting it. The mayor’s orientation toward this effort passed through several stages: refusal to engage, fierce public opposition to the proposed ordinance that emerged and dissemination of absurd misinformation about the cost of the proposed ordinance (since definitively impeached by the City Council Office of Financial Analysis). Waguespack, the Office of the Inspector General, the Invisible Institute and the Better Government Association worked together to craft an ordinance that would establish a realistic, cost-effective process for building a public repository of police misconduct files over time.
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