Frank Main
Two of Chicago’s dirtiest cops
are at the top of a list of police officers who had generated more than 10
misconduct complaints between 2001 and 2006, according to newly released
records.
Keith Herrera and Jerome
Finnigan were members of a crew of rogue police officers convicted of home
invasions and rip-offs of drug dealers.
Finnigan was convicted in
federal court of seeking to have a fellow officer murdered because he thought
the cop was a rat.
Herrera was cooperating with
law enforcement authorities investigating the crew. He served a short prison
sentence, and Finnigan remains behind bars.
According to a list released
Tuesday, Herrera was the subject of 53 citizen complaints over the five-year
period; Finnigan was named in 52 complaints. The police department didn’t take
any action on any of those complaints, except for a 2003 complaint against
Herrera in which he received a reprimand. The top four officers on the list
were members of the now notorious Special Operations Section, which was
disbanded after allegations of corruption.
Herrera and Finnigan also were
on a separate list of officers who had received five or more complaints of
excessive force between 2002 and 2008.
Herrera had 14 complaints, and
Finnigan had eight. No action was taken against Herrera. The police department
sustained one of the complaints against Finnigan, but he didn’t serve a penalty
because he resigned from the department, according to the records.
Finnigan resigned after his
arrest in 2007.
“My bosses knew what I was
doing out there,” he told Judge Blanche Manning at his sentencing in 2011 when
he received a 12-year prison term.
Herrera was sentenced to two months in federal custody in 2012 because
of his cooperation.
On Tuesday, the city turned
over a batch of documents — including the list of 662 officers — to independent journalist Jamie Kalven, who
had filed an Illinois Freedom of Information Act request to obtain them.
The city initially fought
Kalven’s request, saying complaints against police officers should remain
secret.
But in March, a state appeals
court ruled complaint files ¬— and lists of officers who generated the most
complaints — are open to the public.
Earlier this month, the city
decided not to ask the state Supreme Court to review the appellate decision and
agreed to turn over police complaint files to the public.
“After seven years of
litigation during which the Kalven legal team argued that documents of this
nature are public, it gives me deep satisfaction today to complete the process
of making them so,” Kalven wrote on his web site, whose address is
the.invisible.institute.
Kalven uploaded the newly
released documents to his web site for public viewing.
Kalven’s quest for the
complaint records came in connection with a police misconduct lawsuit filed in
2004.
University of Chicago law
professor Craig Futterman, who represented the plaintiff in that lawsuit, found
that less than 1 percent of misconduct allegations against Chicago Police
officers were sustained by the department’s internal investigations, a far
lower rate than the national average.
In a related legal action
Tuesday, the city settled a lawsuit brought Monday by the Fraternal Order of
Police.
The FOP sought an injunction to
keep the city from releasing a 2006 list of officers placed in the city’s
Behavioral Intervention System and Personnel Concerns Program until the union
could review the list for accuracy.
Under the settlement, the city
will release the list but will note that 36 officers successfully challenged
being placed in the intervention programs, and their enrollment in the programs
was removed from their personnel records in 2008.
