Jan. 06--The "I" in IPRA is supposed to stand for independent.
Yet the former chief of Chicago's Independent Police Review Authority routinely consulted with Mayor Rahm Emanuel's staffers as they struggled to contain the damage after the shooting of a black teenager by a white cop in October 2014.
Emails show that the statements attributed to then-IPRA Administrator Scott Ando were vetted and tweaked by the mayor's communications staff and the city's top lawyers. Ando also passed along lists of police misconduct cases under review by prosecutors and sent links alerting City Hall to news coverage.
Independent? Clearly not.
Last week, the city released more than 3,000 pages of emails related to the Laquan McDonald case, in response to media requests under the state Freedom of Information Act.
Thumbing through them, we were struck most by city staffers' unholy obsession with shaping the narrative to reflect positively on Emanuel.
For 13 months, they fielded -- mostly ducked -- questions about why the investigation was taking so long, why the city wouldn't release police video of the shooting even after paying $5 million to pre-empt a wrongful death suit, why Officer Jason Van Dyke was still on the public payroll.
City Hall, the Police Department and IPRA repeatedly declined comment, saying they did not want to jeopardize the ongoing criminal investigation or an eventual administrative review by IPRA.
You'd think that protecting those investigations would require the mayor's team to maintain an arm's-length relationship with IPRA. It doesn't.
No, the emails don't reveal overt meddling in pending investigations. But IPRA answers directly to the mayor's office, and it's clear Ando knew who was the boss.
When an NPR reporter sent a Nov. 25 email requesting an interview, for example, Ando forwarded it to Emanuel spokesman Adam Collins and Janey Rountree, the mayor's top public safety aide, with the note, "Let us know if you'd like me to do this or not." (Answer: Not.)
Less than two weeks later, Emanuel replaced Ando with Sharon Fairley, a former federal prosecutor who worked most recently in the city inspector general's office. She quickly handed the Van Dyke case to her old boss, Inspector General Joe Ferguson, a smart move designed to enhance public confidence in the investigation. (It also invites an argument with the police union over jurisdiction. Bring it on.)
This week, Fairley announced some personnel changes -- a new chief of staff, a top investigator, a community outreach officer to work with complainants and witnesses. She also pledged to be more open with the public.
"We are no longer going to be standing by a hard-and-fast rule that we will never discuss the details of an investigation until it's complete," she said. "I think that position is now untenable in the world that we're in."
Still, she warned reporters, "I am not going to jeopardize an investigation simply because you guys are hungry for information." Fair enough. But watch the nightly news, and you'll notice that other agencies manage to release basic information without compromising their investigations.
There's no reason, for example, to withhold so many details about what happened the night of Dec. 26, when a police officer shot and killed 19-year-old Quintonio LeGrier and bystander Bettie Jones. Once again, the city cited a pending IPRA review. But the public is due a straightforward accounting of the incident, just as it would expect if only civilians were involved.
The absence of that sort of information after the McDonald shooting allowed a police union spokesman to step in and offer a false narrative, which was largely seconded by the Police Department and not corrected by anyone in authority until that damning video forced the city into a $5 million settlement.
That's why the public doesn't trust IPRA and its sluggish investigations, which bury the facts for months or years and almost never result in a police officer being disciplined.
Fairley seems determined to rebuild that trust. But the internal changes she outlined won't do the trick by themselves. The single most important reform -- the "I" in IPRA -- is independence. It falls on Emanuel, who has promised a top-to-bottom overhaul of the Police Department and its disciplinary system.
That revamp must put the most serious police misconduct investigations -- the ones currently assigned to IPRA -- in the hands of a stand-alone entity, walled off from the Police Department and from City Hall. It needs a guaranteed budget and a director who doesn't have to worry about being axed in a political crisis.
A police oversight agency that does its job right can't afford to worry about what the headlines will say.
