Entries associated with the tag "Chicago Police Department":

As president of the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, Mark Donahue isn’t happy about any of the scores of vacancies in the Chicago Police Department. But he’s particularly frustrated that the department hasn’t filled more than 100 openings for field training officers who provide rookie cops with on-the-street training, and he's outraged that the program has just been scaled back further.

"What they’ve implemented for field training officers is probably going to devastate the entire training program," Donahue says.

As much as the union and elected officials love to talk about putting more police on the street, training and deployment strategies typically have a far greater impact on law enforcement than a handful of extra cops. And Donahue says that when the field training program is working right, the training officers can show inexperienced police how to work with the community—a key to improving relations as well as reducing crime.

But in a year when murders are up, deadly clashes between police and civilians still happen regularly, and the department rank and file is suffering low morale, the department only had 149 field training officers on the payroll as of August, well under the 267 called for in this year’s budget.

Worse, Donahue says, the department recently decided to cut in half the number of police districts that use the field training program—it’s now down to just six of the city’s 25. That’s a huge disincentive, according to Donahue, since most veteran cops would have to transfer to a new district to participate. 

"As many as 50 percent of training officers are going to be resigning because of the stipulations they’ve put on them," Donahue says. "It’s unthinkable that the department would make such a decision."

I’d like to report what the department’s take on this is, but no one from its news affairs division responded to my call.

The backdrop for all of this, of course, is the city’s $420 million budget hole, which will likely require hundreds of layoffs, unfilled positions, and early retirements to plug--though the Daley administration hasn't been saying much about it. Some aldermen, though, are quietly suggesting that Donahue’s union could pay for a few more jobs if it were willing to give up a few costly perks. On top of their regular pay, officers receive $730 every three months for “duty availability”—that is, simply being on call, even though they get additional overtime pay if they actually have to take an extra shift. They receive another $600 every three months to pay for new uniforms, and they can take a check for any furlough time they deserve but don’t use. These benefits add up to about $73 million a year.

"Apparently the aldermen grumbling about such things don’t see the hypocrisy of their grumblings," Donahue says. "The average police officer coming out of the police academy onto the force is going to make an investment of $7,000 to $9,000 dollars—the department doesn’t buy the uniform, doesn’t buy the guns, doesn’t buy the shoes. What would the aldermen say if we proposed cutting the money for their staff and expenses?"

The Chicago Police Department released data Monday confirming that crime citywide has increased from a year ago, including homicides, which are up 18 percent. Unless I missed it, no aldermen were outraged enough to call for hearings this time. Why would they? It’s August, the quiet time around City Hall. Plus, the spike in crime wasn’t unexpected; the numbers were trending upward at about the same rates last month and the month before that and the month before that. And of course the politics of the moment don’t warrant it: no one’s been shot during a festival downtown in the last few weeks, the governor has generously offered state police backup "near" crime-plagued areas, and the attention of the International Olympic Committee is on another city halfway around the world. What’s the point in publicly dressing down the police chief now?

When aldermen summoned top cop Jody Weis to a City Council hearing last month, they cited an unprecedented level of violence at the Taste of Chicago and questioned whether police handled problems as aggressively as they should have. But that analysis appears to have been based on anecdotal evidence—i.e., bad PR—rather than facts.

During the ten days of the Taste, the city’s 911 center received 2,634 calls requesting police from within the First District, which includes the Loop and Grant Park, according to the city's Office of Emergency Communications. That was a small increase—1 percent—from the 2,599 calls made during the 2007 Taste, a figure that was up slightly from the 2,581 calls made in 2006.

It seems to me that anyone seeking to understand how police actually responded to safety concerns at the Taste would need to know how many people were arrested. But a police spokesman told me the department doesn’t know offhand, and apparently no public figure has asked it to find out. "After a thorough search, I must inform you that the Department does not maintain an existing public record or program that captures the information you seek," Freedom of Information officer Matthew Sandoval wrote me. Digging the numbers up, he added, would be too burdensome.

It’s now clear that the City Council questioning of police chief Jody Weis Tuesday had two purposes: (1) to send a message to the world, and particularly that small slice of it known as the International Olympic Committee, that Chicago’s leaders are going to crack heads and take care of this unpleasant gun violence problem (or at least make sure it’s banished from downtown); and (2) to allow the mayor to make a pointed argument—delivered via his handpicked police chief and surrogates in the council, who would not act on an issue like this without Daley's knowledge and consent—that the real source of this mess is an overly aggressive push to discipline police officers.

This second matter is the one most likely to impact the daily lives of people in Chicago. 

"I have heard from many officers that there is a degree of timidness--that people are not maybe as engaged as they should be because of fears of lawsuits, fears of [complaints registered] being put against them by criminals and by other folks who are just trying to impugn their integrity," Weis said, as quoted by the Sun-Times.

We’ve heard this argument many times before. “I understand there may be a few bad apples in the bushel, but there are gangbangers and drug dealers in the neighborhoods who learn how to file complaints against officers,” the 47th Ward's Eugene Schulter said in a hearing just last week that gave alderman an opportunity to tee off on the Independent Police Review Authority, the agency charged with vetting complaints about cops.

Schulter/Weis/Daley make a disturbing argument, but it’s certainly not the full story. Some thugs may actually file complaints to taint good cops and, as a result, undermine the process for disciplining not-so-good ones. Then again, it's also possible that some cops may actually rack up complaints from honest citizens concerned about their conduct.

From April through June the IPRA closed its investigations into 672 cases that involved either allegations of misconduct, reports of an officer discharging a weapon, or other “extraordinary occurrences” such as a suspect dying in custody, according to the authority’s most recent report (which can't be viewed on all browsers). The vast majority—at least 523—didn’t result in any finding against the officers. In fact, in 230 of these cases the person who filed the complaint refused to sign an affidavit, an assertion under oath that the testimony is true. This figure could underscore what Daley, Weis, and the aldermen are ranting about: if gangbangers are indeed filing frivolous complaints about cops just to screw with them, they’re probably not going to follow up by taking a trip to IPRA headquarters to sign affidavits.

And another 86 cases were closed after investigators ruled the allegations were simply “unfounded.”

Still, at least 203 were “not sustained,” which essentially means the evidence wasn’t substantial enough to prove misconduct or innocence.

And I can tell you from firsthand experience that it’s not that easy to file a complaint--and it’s far less easy to prove it’s justified.

A couple of years ago I was on the Red Line headed south of the Loop when a couple of cops stepped onto the car and immediately approached a teenager and asked for his ID. He provided it, and one of the officers glanced it over and then put it into his pocket. The kid demanded to have it back; the cop told him he’d return it when the kid got off the train—which, the cop said, would be at the next stop.

Sure enough, we pulled up to the 47th Street station and the officer shoved the teenager off the train, pushed him over to a support beam, and ordered him to put his hands up. As we pulled away, the officer was kicking the kid in the legs.

Maybe I don’t need to say this, but I will: I respect and admire the thousands of officers on the force who help keep me safe every day I’m in this city, and most of those I’ve interacted with appeared to be serious about their jobs because they cared about people they’d never met. But this cop’s behavior was way out of line. I wasn’t the only person who thought so—our train car was buzzing about what had just happened. So I took down the names and phone numbers of four or five others who’d seen the whole thing and put in a call right then to the Office of Professional Standards, the IPRA’s predecessor. I was told they’d look into it.

A few weeks later an investigator got in touch with me and asked me to come down to their offices on the south side. I hadn’t gotten the officer’s name or star number, and OPS couldn’t figure out which cops might have been on a southbound CTA train at the time of the incident, so the investigator needed me to take a look at the photos of a bunch of officers.

I had to take a half day off work to make the trip down there, wait awhile, wait some more, then finally get escorted to the desk of an investigator who pulled up a bunch of photos of officers on her computer screen . . . only to determine what you might expect: there was no way to look at someone’s head shot and honestly say yes, that’s the guy I saw once, several weeks ago, from several yards away, most of the time with his back to me, seemingly harassing a teenager who didn’t appear to do anything other than act like a teenager.

Many weeks later I received a letter from OPS in the mail. The complaint, it said, had not been sustained. The case was closed.

Our ongoing problems with violence demand action, including vigorous public debate. But I wonder if engaging in baldly political displays shows any respect for Chicago Police officers or the citizens they try to serve and protect.

Police chief Jody Weis told aldermen Tuesday that he's looking into reorganizing and re-energizing police coverage across the city, possibly with strategies ranging from drawing up new police beats to reminding officers to be aggressive to creating new squads that could be mobilized in gang-infested and crime-plagued neighborhoods. But that all sounds a bit too familiar to John Hagedorn, a criminal justice professor at UIC whose extensive writings on gangs and crime include the new A World of Gangs: Armed Young Men and Gangsta Culture (University of Minnesota Press). The rookie police chief, Hagedorn says, is essentially continuing an anti-gang policy that's been ineffective since the first Mayor Daley introduced it in 1969. 

  
MD: The Chicago police superintendent has just told aldermen that a poor economy and gang culture are provoking the city’s problems with violence. In your newest book, though, you downplay joblessness as a cause of gangs and gang violence. Instead, you say gangs are a response to racism and “social exclusion.”

JH: I’m from Milwaukee, and one of the differences between Milwaukee and Chicago was that up there we watched the gangs form along with deindustrialization. But here the gangs preceded deindustrialization--they’ve been around for decades! Something else is at work.

Since the beginning of globalization you see a reaction of all sorts of armed groups around the world saying, “We’ve got to get our own.” And in this country it’s very deeply tied to race--in other places to ethnicity, religion, or tribe. As the state withdraws a lot of social services, the gangs work to fill in the vacuum.

You argue that the best approach to gangs is to try to reach out to them and change them into community assets. Is that practical? The superintendent's not going to pitch that to the City Council.

It’s not what people want to hear. It may be that in this climate it isn’t possible to say, “We want to work with the gang structure.” But if you don’t work with these guys, who’s going to stop the violence?

And do you think the gangs aren’t already involved with politics in Chicago? Lots have ties to local aldermen. They’re very aware of the gangs. There’s been an official policy here for 40 years of not including anybody in a community project who’s involved with gangs, but that’s not really the way it works.

So you don’t think that any new, aggressive police tactics will end gang violence.

There’s been a 40 years’ war on gangs that we’ve had in Chicago. Instead of the police getting assault weapons, maybe we should reevaluate that war. The police are at war with the gangs, and the gangs are institutions with deep roots in their community. [The police] don’t seek to convert them and it’s one side against another. That war mentality is what needs to change here, but the new police chief has bought into it. War is a funny way to confront violence.

When I came here 12 years ago I was invited to a meeting with people doing community policing and all the evaluations of it, and they asked me what I thought. I suggested they invite young people and gang members and ask them what’s going on. That was the last meeting I was invited to.

You argue that the Vice Lords tried to become a community organization in the 1960s but were targeted by the police and eventually turned to the drug trade. What are you seeing on the west side now?

Because I’ve developed relationships with the Vice Lords guys from the 1960s I’ve been trying to bring them together with some of the younger people out there. We’ve had like four generations of the Vice Lords sitting down and talking. A lot of these guys have never heard those stories of the 60s. Young people today can be influenced by the past. It’s important for young people to see that the gang has been different things through the years, and the only route isn’t the drug deal.

Have you seen progress?

Hopefully some things are coming together. A lot of people are involved with their little hustles or whatever, but that doesn’t mean they’re stuck there. There’s a reason why the drug trade is so big--there aren’t any jobs. The issue is how you see it and treat it--do you see everyone in it as evil? Well, then, you can just fill the prisons.

You try to keep organizing. I think giving up and waging war are two sides of the same coin. What’s needed is some quiet diplomacy—sitting down with these young people and saying, “What do you need?” And then acting on it.

But I think Chicago’s going to continue to get hot. The city wants the Olympic bid and they don’t want to be seen having a problem with gang violence. They’re going to try to crack down, but that’s just going to end up hurting their bid.

Starting with the mayor and the police superintendent, public officials are compelled to respond to outbreaks of violence swiftly and decisively and—this is very important—publicly, so that everyone in town knows they have ordered more cops to be more aggressive on more patrols.

The previous couple of superintendents embraced this idea, which meant that rank-and-file cops were told to go get the bad guys. Now those superintendents have been sent out to pasture and the city is paying millions of dollars a month to settle lawsuits alleging police misconduct. Through April, the city had agreed to pay $53 million in settlements this year, most of them involving the police department. That’s more than the full-year totals for 2007, 2006, or 2005.

On Tuesday the City Council’s finance and police & fire committees held a joint meeting to hear the chief administrator of the Independent Police Review Authority testify about “the fate of all officers involved in settlement cases of police brutality,” as the resolution calling for the meeting put it.

Turns out, nothing is happening to these officers, at least not in a systematic way. “We do not currently look at patterns outside a specific investigation,” said Ilana Rosenzweig, chief administrator of the IPRA, which examines police shootings and allegations of misconduct.

Rosenzweig added that the police department is “looking into” a system for tracking them. In the meantime, though, her agency had investigated 23 police shootings of civilians and looked into 2,367 separate complaints about officer conduct in the first three months of the year. It deemed 590 of these complaints worthy of additional investigation*, and so far 13 have been “sustained,” or upheld. Punishments ranged from short suspensions to firings.

But this hearing was requested by maverick alderman Toni Preckwinkle, of the Fourth Ward, and most of the others present didn’t seem interested in police accountability—they wanted to know what sort of operation Rosenzweig thought she was running. Finance committee chairman Ed Burke, a former cop, asked how many of her 44 investigators have gone through police academy training (most, and the rest are supposed to by the end of the year), how many were previously on the force themselves (one), what hours of the day they work (usually normal business hours, though someone’s always on call), how they get to the site of police shootings (by driving IPRA cars), and how, if they don’t use their police radios, they communicate with officers (by cell phone).

“I understand there may be a few bad apples in the bushel,” 47th Ward alderman Gene Schulter told Rosenzweig, “but there are gangbangers and drug dealers in the neighborhoods who learn how to file complaints against officers.” Rosenzweig said she hadn’t come across any such complaints yet.

Alderman George Cardenas of the 12th Ward wanted to get right to the point. “Is there a book that defines ‘police brutality’?” he asked. “Are there guidelines for this?”  

“The question we try to answer is whether the force used is within the guidelines for a Chicago police officer as defined by the superintendent,” Rosenzwig told him.

“So kicking a man down when he’s handcuffed—what would that look like?” Cardenas wondered.

“It depends,” Rosenzweig said. “You can kick him if he’s assaultive.”

“And what statistics do you have about officers getting hurt on the job?”

“The police department would have to provide that.”

Cardenas pondered this for a moment, then let it be known that he thought Rosenzweig needed to proceed with caution. “Because I think communities want the police to be their enforcers.”

Willie Cochran, a former cop who’s now alderman of the 20th Ward, had a suggestion. “I’m wondering if we could get a flowchart for everybody that shows the rules and regulations of the department,” he said.

Rosenzweig didn’t object.

*UPDATE: I received a call from a spokesman for the IPRA who pointed out that, under city law [PDF], it's the authority's job to "receive and register" all complaints against police officers, but it can only investigate those that involve allegations of domestic violence, excessive force, coercion, and verbal abuse. So in the first three months of this year, the IPRA received 2,367 total complaints against officers and determined that 590 fell under its purview. The others were all forwarded to the police department's Internal Affairs Division.

The ordinance creating the IPRA was passed last November by a 49-0 vote. 

The city appears to be experiencing an uptick in violence, the police department has announced extra patrols, a group of citizens protested police shootings of civilians over the weekend, and the Supreme Court just announced a decision that may overturn Chicago's handgun ban.

So naturally this is the time for the City Council's police and fire committee to ponder whether to increase fines for drivers with tinted windows.

The logic of the measure was best articulated by police spokeswoman Monique Bond: "Tinted windows are against the law anyway, so perhaps this will be a greater deterrent."  

In fairness, though, the committee also had to decide [PDF] whether to donate a few old ambulances and fire trucks to communities that can use them.

"People don't want to hear it, but people act crazy when it gets warm, and it's too bad but something like this ends up happening," a police officer told me Wednesday when I asked what he thought was behind Chicago's recent burst of gun violence, including the fatal shootings of five civilians by cops in the last two weeks.

"The police didn't have any choice," said his partner. "And everybody always talks about how they shot somebody 'multiple' times. That's because those people don't drop their weapons!"

"At least this isn't New York. They might've been shot 50 times," said the first one.

The officers said morale among the rank and file is low. Last year Mayor Daley created a new misconduct investigative body and hired a new police chief from outside the department, and ever since, these officers said, cops on the street are routinely second-guessed by citizens, the media, activists, politicians, and, sometimes, their superiors. "We're guilty until proven innocent," said the second officer.

The first made the "few bad apples" argument--that most cops are in the business because they genuinely want to help people, but a handful without common sense or regard for the neighborhoods they patrol cause all the problems. Most confrontations, he added, can be avoided long beforehand if officers communicate with people in their communities and get their help. He spoke of a colleague who's known and widely respected throughout the neighborhood where they work, even by gang members and drug dealers, because he takes the time to stop and talk to people. "He's not one of those John Wayne types kicking down doors," he said.

So how do you teach the John Waynes another way--or keep them off the force altogether? "Maybe that goes back to the police academy," he said. "Maybe you need to train them to interact with the community--to get them out here when they're training. Listen, you wouldn't put a reporter on the job if they didn't know how to talk to people and listen to people, would you? We shouldn't either. Especially us."

From Wednesday's Tribune:

"An 18-year-old man on probation for a weapons conviction was shot and killed by a Chicago police tactical officer Tuesday afternoon on the city's Northwest Side after police say he confronted officers with a loaded pistol.

"Some witnesses and family members told a different story, saying that Luis Colon, 18, had turned and was running from plainclothes officers about 5 p.m. when he was fatally shot in the 2700 block of North Kilbourn Avenue in the Belmont Gardens neighborhood.

"The incident was the eighth shooting by Chicago police officers in the last two weeks, and the fifth fatality."

Here's what the Tribune reported on April 27:

 "Mayor Richard Daley said Saturday he is backing a plan by his new police superintendent to equip all Chicago police officers with semiautomatic assault rifles, which Daley said would put officers on equal footing with armed gangs and criminals. 'Many times [the police are] outgunned, to be very frank,' Daley said....

"[Police superintendent Jody] Weis' weapons proposal is part of an overall crime-fighting strategy and not a reaction to the recent violence, police spokeswoman Monique Bond said. 'It's part of the superintendent's comprehensive plan to address violence and to ensure officers are equally equipped to confront threats against them and the communities they protect,' she said."

Of course police chief Jody Weis named an African-American as his top deputy this morning. The deal was struck weeks ago.

In the January edition of her monthly newsletter for constituents, Sixth Ward alderman Freddrenna Lyle wrote that things had been “a little strange” around City Hall. Most notably, she said, “The Mayor selected an FBI agent to head the Chicago Police Department.”

Weis is white, and now that he’s winning praise for surrounding himself with a diverse group of experienced cops, it’s almost hard to recall that plenty of black leaders were dismayed last fall when Mayor Daley picked him for the top job. Daley, these leaders believed, should have named an African-American as Phil Cline’s successor—if only to show he understood police relations were at a crisis point in some of their communities. Others were doubly upset because it seemed Daley had made the choice out of his zeal to host the 2016 Olympics—as an FBI man, Weis would appear to have better terrorism-fighting credentials and thus impress the selection committee more than a regular old police officer who’d built a career in Austin or Englewood.

Of course, the City Council had to approve the appointment before it became official. While that was never in doubt, several aldermen did raise a a bit of a stink by complaining that Weis was evasive and unimpressive during a police and fire committee hearing. Then a few threatened to vote against him in the full council meeting a couple days later. But Daley’s council lobbyists went to work, huddling with the reluctant in the lounge behind council chambers up until minutes before the vote. In the end, only the Third Ward’s Pat Dowell opposed him.

In explaining her own rationale for supporting Weis, Lyle, who is black, unintentionally outlined what had happened for a few of her colleagues as well: “When [Weis] appeared before the Police and Fire Committee Monday afternoon, I had some very serious questions which he could not answer,” Lyle wrote in her newsletter. “On Tues. and Weds. the Mayor’s Office provided me with most of the answers and I voted to confirm.”

She continued: “After the vote to confirm, the Mayor spent 5 minutes thanking us for the hard questions and assuring us that Weis will respond to and provide better services to every community.”

In a subsequent interview, Lyle said she’d been concerned that Weis had never been a cop—in Chicago or anywhere. The mayor’s office promised her that he would hire veterans as top aides. “I was assured his first deputy would be someone from the Chicago Police Department,” she said.

Some aldermen have said privately that they were also assured the first deputy would be an African-American, though they weren’t allowed to talk about it while Weis publicly and repeatedly refused to commit to the idea.

And most of the late converts gave other accounts of their decisions. “I had to think about it,” said 20th Ward alderman Willie Cochran, a former cop. “I found myself in dual roles. As a police officer, I struggled with someone else [outside the department] doing the job. But I supported the idea of bringing in a new dynamic. So I decided to support Mr. Weis for being the professional he is.”

A mayoral spokesman told me no promises were made except that Weis would find the best deputies possible. Police department spokeswoman Monique Bond did not return any of the half-dozen messages I left her about this over the last couple weeks.

Ike Carothers, the chairman of the council’s police and fire committee, had said that he hoped the top deputy would be black. But as I’ve mentioned before, he mostly stuck to the company line that Weis is truly an independent operator. “I don’t think he’ll be beholden to anyone,” was how Carothers put it. “He’s not a product of Chicago politics or anything like that.”

You could say that as a clergyman, Reverend Marshall Hatch is in the business of hoping. And before Thursday, he'd been hoping for signs that the Chicago Police Department was headed in a new direction. When interim police superintendent Dana Starks disbanded the maligned Special Operations Section a few weeks ago, Hatch saw it as an encouraging step.

Of course, Hatch has also engaged in some politics from time to time--he once ran unsuccessfully for 29th Ward alderman against Ike Carothers, and he's now a primary force behind the Leaders Network, a new alliance of "independent" clergy promising to speak out on policing and other city policies impacting African-American neighborhoods.

So he was hardly surprised--or impressed--to get a call Thursday from an aide to Mayor Daley who serves, as Hatch puts it, as "their negro preacher liaison whose job it is to find out what the fallout has been" from various decisions out of City Hall. This time the aide wanted to tell Hatch, an outspoken critic of police misconduct, that the mayor was naming a new police superintendent: career FBI man J.P. "Jody" Weis.

"They wanted to find out what some of us were thinking in the community," said Hatch, pastor of the New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church on the west side. "At the time, we didn't know what to think."

Hatch said he was floored to learn that the next superintendent has never run or helped run a police force before, and that Daley bypassed the recommendations of the Police Board, the civilian advisory body charged with vetting superintendent candidates, as law requires. "It's a bizarre appointment," Hatch said. "It does nothing to address the number one issue: the crisis in confidence and trust in the African-American community. . . . There is no reason for anybody to be any more clear about the direction of the police department today than the day before yesterday."

Weis vowed Thursday to reach out first to the neighborhoods with the "widest gulf between the police and our residents." Hatch said he would welcome leadership that genuinely seeks input from his community. "But if he expects that some meetings and conferences will be enough, he's sadly mistaken."

Like other police critics and watchdogs, Hatch believes several reforms are needed immediately: a fully independent Citizen Review Board should oversee police misconduct investigations, a citizen representative should participate in the "roundtable" discussions held by law enforcement officials after cops shoot civilians, and beats should be realigned so that more officers are assigned to high-crime areas. The first two reforms couldn't be made by the police superintendent alone, but Hatch said he'd like to hear Weis back them publicly. "He said yesterday that he had the backs of police officers, and he should sent a statement to citizens that our backs are covered as well."

He called on aldermen to ask Weis some tough questions before signing off on his appointment. "He has not been very properly, publicly vetted, and there ought to be some real hearings here," Hatch said. "We should find out more about who he is, what his plans are, and whether he understands the firestorm he's walked into."

"We would expect the City Council to do its job," he said.

That's either an attempt at political pressure or a reminder that hope in things already seen is not hope at all.

Thursday night I took a group of journalism students to a community policing beat meeting in the hopes they'd catch a glimpse of how the Chicago Police Department works.

They did.

The police department began implementing its community policing programs, known as CAPS, in 1993 and '94, and officially it still touts the cops-and-residents-working-together approach as an effective way to keep city streets safer. "The City of Chicago has a new weapon in the fight against crime--and that new weapon is you, the community," declares the community policing page on the department's Web site. "By opening up the dialogue between police and community, CAPS is producing a number of important success stories at the neighborhood level."

The officers in each of the city's police beats hold a meeting every month with a neighborhood volunteer known as a "beat facilitator" and anyone else who decides to come by. (Meeting dates, times, and places are posted on the department's Web site.) Generally the sessions consist of a police update on recent crime statistics from the area, complaints or questions about criminal activity or police inaction from residents, and pledges from the cops that they're all over it.

At Thursday's meeting, though, the police officer who was supposed to give the monthly crime statistics report didn't show up, so less than five minutes after the facilitator had called everyone to order, she opened the floor to questions. 

A resident of a nearby condo building asked how police are dispatched once a 911 call is placed. A plainclothes officer who identified himself as the district commander's community liaison began to answer the question, then looked at the students and stopped.

"By the way, you can't record this without prior permission," he said.

I've been attending CAPS meetings for years, and I'd never heard such a thing. Plus, I didn't think it was legal. So I said so to the officer. "This is a public meeting," I said.

"No, no, no, it's our meeting," he said. "It's a public meeting hosted by the police department, so you need prior consent."

"There are eavesdropping laws, too," said another officer. 

The first officer told me I had to call the department's news affairs bureau downtown and get approval. 

But when I called news affairs Friday morning, a different standard was explained to me. "It's been the general policy at these meetings that you're welcome to attend, but with any electronic media, you need to get the permission of the people at the meeting,"said Pat Camden, the deputy director of news affairs.

I asked if this policy was in writing, and Camden said he'd check and call me back. A little while later he did. "Talking to our legal people, it's their interpretation that CAPS meetings do not fall under the Open Meetings Act," he said.

The Open Meetings Act states that public agencies and officials cannot hold official meetings without opening them to citizens. "In order that the people shall be informed, the General Assembly finds and declares that it is the intent of this Act to ensure that the actions of public bodies be taken openly and that their deliberations be conducted openly," it says. It defines public bodies in broad terms as "all legislative, executive, administrative or advisory bodies of the State, counties, townships, cities, villages, incorporated towns, school districts and all other municipal corporations, boards, bureaus, committees or commissions of this State, and any subsidiary bodies." And it expressly states that "any person may record the proceedings at meetings required to be open by this Act by tape, film or other means."

Heather Kimmons, assistant public access counselor for Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, said CAPS meetings should not be exempt. "Under the Open Meetings Act, they would absolutely be open to recording," she said. 

The law does allow some "responsible" restrictions that would interfere with conducting a meeting, such as noisy equipment or distracting lighting. "But a responsible rule would not include 'No taping without prior consent,'" Kimmons said.

At the Thursday night meeting I simply told my students to shut off their recorders and take notes. They did, and for the next few minutes, they listened to police officers complain that members of the media sensationalize problems within the police department and far too often don't bother to get the facts right.

On Wednesday Rev. Marshall Hatch presided over the funeral for 18-year-old Aaron Harrison Jr., who was killed by police August 6 after he either ran and got shot in the back or pointed a gun at officers, depending on who's telling the story.

The police department says it's investigating the incident. In the meantime, Hatch said in an interview this afternoon, the North Lawndale and Austin neighborhoods on the west side are a "powder keg" of anger and frustration toward the police.

"I don't know that I've seen it quite as tense as it is now, with as much mistrust of the police," said Hatch, 49, a lifelong west sider. "I don't think the people on the west side are waiting for leaders to tell them to do anything. This is really coming from the bottom up. I think it's a very volatile situation--and that's not a threat. It's just an accurate assessment. We need to take very seriously just how tense and volatile this situation is. People are fed up. I'm very concerned about our ability to keep a lid on things."

Harrison's shooting is just the latest high-profile incident to turn emotions "raw," said Hatch, an ally of Jesse Jackson's who unsuccessfully challenged 29th Ward alderman Isaac Carothers in 2003. The main problem, he argued, is that residents of the high-crime area want and need additional beat police officers who invest the time to get to know their communities. Instead, the police department has dispatched cops from its roving Special Operations Section who swoop in for short periods of time and show little understanding of the neighborhoods. West siders derisively refer to SOS officers as "jump-out boys." 

"It is in the interest of regular beat cops to have good relations with the community, because they need their help to solve crimes," Hatch said. "These other guys come in and abuse people. There is a qualitative difference between police being part of the fabric of the community, working to weed out the people who are corrupt but also working with kids who are salvageable--that's what policing is really about, not just locking everybody up."

As the link above details, four Special Operations officers dominate the city's list of cops accused repeatedly of misconduct. The Daley administration provided copies of the list to aldermen earlier this summer when the City Council was considering whether to give Mayor Daley direct oversight of the Office of Professional Standards, the agency responsible for investigating misconduct allegations. After pressing for a few amendments, aldermen passed the proposal, though critics like Hatch say it's inadequate because it doesn't create an independent citizen review of police misconduct cases.

As it is, Hatch said, SOS officers make the community feel like police are "an occupying force." And the situation is even worse right now because the department is being led by an interim superintendent. 

"We have very weak leadership at the top of the a police department with major problems," he said. "The mayor really needs to take responsibility."

A mayoral spokeswoman told the Sun-Times yesterday that the mayor's reform of OPS shows he's serious about holding abusive officers to account. And this afternoon Vance Henry, executive director of the city's community policing program, known as CAPS, told me police officials have met with west-side clergy and residents to hear their concerns and keep them abreast of the Aaron Harrison investigation.

"We plan to keep following up and holding additional meetings," Henry said. "We're addressing a range of concerns, and we continue to monitor the situation."

But he played down Hatch's warnings about rage boiling over in the community. "I live within walking distance of where that incident took place, and I grew up on the west side--I'm not just the director of CAPS. I've lived in the community for 42 years," Henry said. "I can tell you that we enjoy a great working relationship with the community. A lion's share of the residents there are working with us every day.

"I think the [Harrison] incident raised people's concerns, and rightly so, which is why the police moved very swiftly to investigate it and very swiftly to meet with people in the community."