Mayor of Chicago may have suppressed police misconduct report to win re-election

[ronburgundy]

Some Aldermen in Chicago are facilitating a movement to push Emmanuel to resign, or force him out via a recall vote.

If most of the claims in this report are accurate, these efforts to oust Emanuel might and probably should succeed , and would show the recently fired Police Super, McCarthy, was a scapegoat who tried to get Emmanuel to enact police discipline reforms 2 years ago.

A top Police Department source said that in early January of 2013, McCarthy asked the mayor to appoint a blue-ribbon panel of experts to recommend sweeping reforms to how the city investigates police misconduct and disciplines officers.
The source familiar with McCarthy’s pitch said the superintendent aimed to give the mayor justification to push for major changes to city laws and the police union contract, which was being renegotiated at that time, to make misconduct investigations more transparent.

An intensive study was done by an independent management firm, and the article lists many specific and major changes recommended to the Mayor by the study.
The Mayor sat on the report for 18 months, releasing it conveniently a month after police Union contracts had been renegotiated, thus impeding many of the changes that would require concessions from the Union, whose endorsement Emanuel was seeking in his upcoming re-election. It was released quietly as a link buried on a government website.

About a week before the study report was unceremoniously released, Emanuel’s Commission For A Safer Chicago released a “collaborative anti-violence report.”

That anti-violence report, which focused on youth violence, was long on proposals for expanding summer jobs, creating “peace rooms” in public schools and bolstering after-school and mentoring programs. It did not contain any Police Department reforms, particularly related to disciplining officers found guilty of engaging in misconduct. City attorney Patton worked on the report.

When the “Safer Chicago” report was released on Dec. 16, 2014, then-Supt. Garry McCarthy did not attend the news conference. Several city sources told DNAinfo Chicago he was upset because he had believed Patton was involved in blocking his effort to bring real reform to the department which turned it into “absolutely nothing … a bag of s---.”
...

Both the police discipline study and the "Safer Chicago” commission's report were released about a month after the police union contract was ratified by the rank and file, a move that the Sun-Times declared guaranteed “pre-election labor peace” for Emanuel.

The article goes on to say that Emanuel refused to allow Patton to be interviewed and refused requests for him to discuss why he is not implementing the independent reports recommendations. Now, in the wake of the McDonald case and protests Emanuel has commission yet another "task-force" to put together a report, and refuses to answer questions why he need another report when he ignored the intensive report released just a year ago.

Given Emanuel close ties with Obama, this raises concerns about whether the DOJ investigation will be willing to lay blame at Emanuel's feet, if these claims are true.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Ya, but it's Chicago. Wouldn't not doing that be the impeachable offense?

 

[braces_for_impact]

Excuse me, are you attempting to imply that the Chicago city government is in some way...corrupted?