The union representing Chicago’s police officers has sued the city itself and the Chicago Police Department to block decades of police misconduct records from being released, via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), to Chicago’s two leading newspapers.
The Chicago Sun-Times reports that the Fraternal Order of Police’s Chicago lodge filed suit Tuesday in Cook County Circuit Court, seeking injunctive relief.
Initially, the Department was sent to release police misconduct records dating back as far as 1967, according to the Chicago Tribune . However, in the filing, the Chicago Police union argues that releasing those records violate’s the union’s collective bargaining agreement with the city, which requires that records related to the Police Board be destroyed after no more than seven years.
“The fact that the City maintains Lists is a clear indicator that it violated its collective bargaining agreement with the Lodge.”
Chicago’s Police Department is consistently ranked by watchdog groups as one of the most ineffectual, corrupt, and brutal police departments in the country. A blistering report issued in August by the human-rights group We Charge Genocide, and intended for the United Nations Committee Against Torture in Switzerland, claimed that the Chicago Police Department’s treatment of citizens — particularly minority youths — is tantamount to torture. One Chicago minority youth reports that his treatment in Chicago police custody left him, literally, scarred for life.
“They hit the sirens, I come out, put my hands behind my head, and ‘Get on the ground! Get on the ground!’ Cool, I get on the ground. Next thing I know, I wake up in the back of a police station, and I don’t even know what happened to me, to be honest with you, that’s how bad they beat me… I’m sitting in the Cook County Jail with 22 stitches in my tongue, two facial fractures, bruised ribs, scrapes all over my body, I still can’t talk right to this day.”
When they’re not beating minority youths within an inch of their lives, the Chicago Police are writing bogus parking tickets for vehicles that don’t exist. According to this Inquisitr report, one Chicago man received dozens of parking tickets for a vehicle he didn’t own, all written by the same Chicago cop at the same time each day, in sequential order. The Chicago Police Department’s Internal Affairs unit initially resisted the man’s pleas to investigate the issue; that is, until the Chicago Tribune got involved.
The Chicago Police union claims that releasing the decades of records of police misconduct would cause officers “irreparable injury” and “public humiliation and loss of prestige in their employment.”
