Analysis: Here’s how Chicago’s
most powerful police union preserves tradition of problematic leadership
By Emanuella Evans and Adeshina
Emmanuel | September 13, 2021
Timeline: Chicago FOP presidents’
turbulent relationship with race and police reform
Injustice Watch reviewed the
tenures of past FOP presidents elected by Chicago police, from the civil rights
movement to the Black Lives Matter era. We found a history of police union
leaders making inflammatory statements, antagonizing racial justice and police
reforms, and shielding allegedly brutal cops from accountability.
And then in the spring, Catanzara
said the cop who killed 13-year-old Adam Toledo was “heroic” and described the
killing of 22-year-old Anthony Alvarez, shot in the back by another Chicago
cop, as “a 100% good shooting.”
A growing chorus — including
dozens of community groups, Chicago city councilmembers, and state lawmakers —
have demanded that Catanzara either resign or be fired. The police department,
too, has attempted to remove Catanzara.
In February, Police Supt. David
Brown suspended Catanzara and filed charges with the Chicago Police Board
alleging that he violated nearly a dozen department rules. Some of the charges
stem from inflammatory social media posts, including a 2017 Facebook post in
which Catanzara referred to Muslims as “savages” who “all deserve a bullet.”
He made the comments in reference
to a video of a woman being stoned, also adding that “this is the life many
want to bring to this country,” though he later claimed in another post that
his comments were not specifically targeting Muslims.
Still, Catanzara’s words are not
surprising within the history of the FOP.
Injustice Watch reviewed the tenures of each
of the eight past FOP presidents elected by Chicago police and found a pattern
of leadership defined by inflammatory public statements, resistance to
accountability, and antagonism to racial justice and police reforms. Police
union leaders also tend to stand by police officers who have killed civilians,
from Fred Hampton and LaTanya Haggerty to Laquan McDonald and Toledo.
Illinois FOP President Chris
Southwood said by defending officers’ actions in violent encounters, Catanzara,
like his predecessors, is doing exactly what rank-and-file cops elected him to
do.
“That’s his job as the president
of Chicago Lodge 7,” Southwood said, “to stand up for his membership,
especially in situations where they’re being portrayed as doing something wrong
or terrible.”
“All I did was follow the lead of
previous presidents”
The defining issues of Dean
Angelo Sr.’s three-year tenure as FOP president was the police killing of
17-year-old Laquan McDonald and the subsequent calls for reform. Angelo
staunchly opposed the demands emanating from a wave of protests, blaming the
“anti-police movement” for cratering member morale and jeopardizing public
safety. Nonetheless, Angelo was voted out of office in 2017 by members who
found him too accommodating. (Illustration by Veronica Martinez for Injustice
Watch)
Our research spanned six decades,
from the civil rights movement to the Black Lives Matter era. We reviewed
dozens of news clips, FOP newsletters, academic studies, and interviewed
experts who shed light on FOP presidents’ problematic history. Retired Chicago
Police Department Sgt. Shawn Kennedy, the information officer for the National
Association of Black Law Enforcement Officers, said the problem has deep roots.
“When you look at modern-day
policing, you have to look at the foundation in which law enforcement was built
upon,” Kennedy said. “It was built upon systemic racism and white supremacy, so
when you look at police unions, they are there to maintain the status quo.”
Why I’m terminating my membership
with the Chicago police union
Chicago police officer Julius
Givens pens an open letter to John Catanzara, president of the Fraternal Order
of Police's Chicago chapter.
Many Black officers don’t feel
represented by Chicago Lodge 7, Kennedy said. In addition to actions such as
endorsing Donald Trump as president, the union has previously backed hiring
policies that have helped prevent Black officers from joining the force and
uphold a majority white union membership.
Dean Angelo Sr., the sixth
president of the FOP, said many officers don’t feel represented because they
don’t realize everything that is done by the union to secure their livelihood.
“The purpose of your job as the
head of a union is to protect the greater number of membership,” Angelo said.
“I’m not saying they didn’t experience racism, but I don’t know that it was 25
or 30 years of systemic racism that they faced. I tend to look at that with
questionable eyes.”
Since the FOP opened its Chicago
lodge in 1963, only white men have served as the labor organization’s
president. While demographics alone do not determine how police unions
function, or their impact, Craig Futterman, a longtime police critic and
director of the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project at the
University of Chicago, argues that white police leadership has largely wielded
its power in ways that uphold white supremacy and police impunity.
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“There is no enlightened history
of police unions and police union leadership,” Futterman said. You have a long
history of an overtly racist police union and overtly racist union leadership
that has been protected, served racist interests within the police force, [and]
has not represented officers of color and particularly Black officers,”
Futterman said.
He and other experts said the
presidents’ leadership exemplifies the ways that police unions function as
truth-denying bodies that perpetuate violence and act as barriers to police
reform, racial reconciliation, and justice.
“The problem with police unions
is that it all seems to be very narrow-minded thinking about the best way to
protect police, which is essentially to close ranks, not share information, to
deny systemic problems,” said Kim Ricardo, a law professor at the University of
Illinois at Chicago’s law school who has represented plaintiffs in police
brutality cases and published scholarly writing focused on reparations law and
social movements.
Our timeline of Chicago FOP Lodge
7’s past presidents, which you can read here, takes a deeper look at their
tenures, focusing on their words and leadership during tenuous times and
examining how their actions have strained the relationship between police and
Chicago communities, specifically overpoliced Black neighborhoods that have suffered
the brunt of state violence and police misconduct.
Chicago’s first police union
president started his tenure during the height of the civil rights movement. As
organizers like Martin Luther King Jr. put the spotlight on the vicious
segregation and police brutality in northern cities, including Chicago, Joseph
J. LeFevour aggressively defended officer misconduct and attacked prominent
movement leaders. After nine years as president, LeFevour ended his term in
1972. He died in 1984.
The first president of the FOP,
Joseph Lefevour, accused Martin Luther King Jr. of inciting violence in the
city. When King’s assassination sparked riots in Chicago’s Black communities,
Lefevour applauded then-Mayor Richard M. Daley’s shoot-to-kill order to police
responding to the chaos.
In Mount Prospect, a village
divided over the ‘thin blue line’
Mount Prospect, Ill. is the
latest of dozens of U.S. cities and towns to take steps toward restricting use
of the 'thin blue line' by police and other government agencies. The
controversial symbol has become a focal point for community tensions over race
and policing in recent years — especially in the wake of the nationwide
protests against police violence last summer.
In the post-civil rights era, the
second and longest-tenured FOP president, John Dineen, opposed efforts to
diversify the police department. He was one of several union leaders over the
years to express support for disgraced former police Cmdr. Jon Burge. And their
support has continued, despite mounting evidence that Burge tortured scores of
mostly Black men from the early 1970s to the early 1990s.
After former police officer Jason
Van Dyke shot and killed McDonald in 2014, Angelo remained one of Van Dyke’s
most vocal supporters, even offering him a job as a janitor at the lodge after
he was suspended from the force.
“All I did was follow the lead of
previous presidents, where we brought in people that were found in
circumstances that were headlines and that did not put the officers in the best
light,” Angelo said. “Did it turn off the community? The community was already
turned off.”
Angelo is the only past FOP
president interviewed for this story. Injustice Watch reached out to all living
FOP presidents by phone, email, and certified mail.
In a response sent by mail to
Injustice Watch, Kevin Graham, FOP president from 2017 to 2020, wrote, “The
fraternal order of police works hard for its members and the public. It is
essential that workers are treated fairly by their employers.”
Other past presidents either did
not respond to requests, were unreachable, or had passed away.
A political playbook
FOP presidents wield considerable
power as the leaders of a labor organization that elected officials have to
reckon with from city hall in Chicago to Illinois’ statehouse in Springfield.
The union represents a formidable political bloc that includes current and
retired cops, their families, and others who support police or align with FOP
stances.
Peter Pihos, an assistant history
professor at the Western Washington University with research in policing, race,
and politics in Chicago, said police union leaders’ largest political impact is
in helping to push a law-and-order approach to public safety. This makes it harder
for politicians to address the root causes of crime in social, economic, and
political systems for fear of being called “soft on crime.”
“They really set the marker for
others to also use this kind of often dehumanizing, very racist language and
frameworks,” Pihos said.
The FOP has a history of
endorsing and financially backing political candidates who will protect their
membership while opposing those who run on criminal justice reform platforms.
The union helped get former State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez elected in 2008 and
2012 before Kim Foxx defeated her in a landslide victory in 2016. Alvarez’s
critics alleged she was beholden to police and lenient toward cops accused of
wrongdoing. She infamously waited more than a year to charge Van Dyke after he
shot McDonald 16 times.
The union also has a history of
negotiating contracts that organizers and police accountability experts say
make it harder to hold cops accountable, and lobbying lawmakers about policies
that govern how the city handles police misconduct complaints, investigations,
and records.
“Any type of policy, procedure,
[or] law that’s going to strengthen the accountability and transparency of
police officers, the unions are going to fight it,” Kennedy said.
However, Angelo said politicians
are to blame for the relationship between the police and communities because
they choose police department leaders, vote on contracts, and create policy.
“Laws are put into place and officers follow it. … You have inexperienced
people with no knowledge of the job dictating how the job should be done,” he
said.
New deals, same old FOP?
John Catanzara is the first FOP
president to be elected while stripped of police powers, after having them
stripped in 2018 for a report he filed against the former police
superintendent. Since joining the police department in 1995, Catanzara has
racked up at least 35 misconduct complaints and been suspended about half a
dozen times. (Illustration by Veronica Martinez for Injustice Watch)
This summer has seen several
major developments in city hall that will have a big impact on the FOP and its
members. But even though the changes are seen as progress on several fronts, in
many respects, the FOP president has sung a familiar tune.
In late July, the Chicago City
Council voted to establish civilian oversight of the police department. On the
eve of the vote, Catanzara complained during a public safety committee hearing
that giving civilians more power to influence policy “is absolutely absurd and
dangerous and reckless” and maintained that the city already has enough layers
of police oversight.
Chicago has nearly tripled per
capita police spending since 1964, data show
For activists and city leaders
calling on Mayor Lori Lightfoot to cut the police budget, it’s clear that the
money could be better spent elsewhere.
The tentative contract agreement
between the FOP and the city also includes reforms that could enhance oversight
and accountability. In late August, police officers voted in favor of a new
eight-year contract with the city affording them a 20% pay hike over eight
years. On Tuesday, the city council workforce committee gave the labor deal the
green light, setting it up for a Sept. 14 vote before the whole council, in
which at least 26 alderpeople must sign off.
During the committee meeting, the
city’s legal team walked the council members through 10 key accountability
reforms in the draft contract. The agreement would remove the ban on the
investigation of anonymous misconduct complaints and allow disciplinary records
older than five years to be preserved. It would also eliminate a requirement
for people alleging misconduct to submit sworn affidavits and allow CPD to
recognize officers who report misconduct.
Here’s what you should know about
Chicago’s latest police accountability ‘compromise’
Injustice Watch reviewed the new
civilian police oversight ordinance and the changes that it will bring to
policing in Chicago.
Negotiators for the city and the
FOP say these changes would bring the contract in line with federally mandated
reforms spelled out in Chicago’s 2019 consent decree. But several key reforms
pushed by advocates in recent years — including an end to the 24-hour delay
that cops are afforded before speaking to investigators following a shooting
and a requirement that they disclose any employment outside the police
department — didn’t make it into the draft deal.
Ald. Mike Rodriguez (22nd Ward)
questioned this omission.
“I am still concerned about a
number of items here,” Rodriguez said. “I, for one, think it’s important — particularly given the sensitive nature of
police officers’ work — that they don’t come to work tired.”
The workforce development
committee voted unanimously to endorse the deal, which would resolve most of
the central issues between the city and the FOP. But the two sides could still
continue negotiations over areas in which no agreement has yet been reached.
Ahead of the full city council
vote, organizers are urging a careful review of the agreement.
“We need the community to
scrutinize line by line,” said April Friendly, mass liberation organizer at The
People’s Lobby. “Any little T-crossing, I-dotting, comma-adding inside of the
existing system’s contracts is still not really going to save or mitigate harm
for our communities.”
No one knows how many Chicago
cops are vaccinated against Covid-19
How many cops have gotten their
vaccine shots? The question has a definite answer. But no one in Mayor Lori
Lightfoot's office or the police department seems able to put a number on it.
Meanwhile, a contentious debate
is brewing around the mayor’s vaccine mandate for city workers, of which
Catanzara has been one of the fiercest critics. In late August, after Mayor
Lori Lightfoot announced a Covid-19 vaccine mandate for all city employees,
Catanzara made comments to the Chicago Sun-Times that critics interpreted as
comparing the mandate to the Holocaust.
Infectious disease experts
interviewed by Injustice Watch said unvaccinated police officers put the public
at risk because they’re constantly in contact with people, making them likely
to contract the virus and likely to spread it. The city’s Black and Latinx
communities, which tend to be the most policed, have suffered
disproportionately amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
On Sept. 3, before Labor Day
weekend, Catanzara gave members an update in a nearly seven-minute video, of
which he spent almost three discussing the pending contract and the FOP’s plans
to fight the vaccine mandate. He spent the remaining four minutes opining about
a recent incident in which a Black woman found walking her dog on the lakefront
after hours was violently accosted by a white police officer. She had allegedly
failed to comply with his order to leave the area. The police union president
called for the officer, who was put on desk duty pending an investigation, to
be reinstated “effective immediately.”
“He didn’t throw her to the
ground and arrest her like he would have been entitled to do. … I don’t care
how bad it would have looked, he would have been justified in doing that,”
Catanzara said.
He continued: “It is the
recurring theme in police shooting after police shooting; any police incident
across this country, [with] few exceptions, is all about a lack of compliance
by the subject the police are encountering to start with.
“If that mindset changes, we will
not have incidents like Mike Brown, like Laquan McDonald, you name it; there’s
name after name after name, and the reoccurring issue is a lack of compliance.”
As the nation continues to
envision solutions to racism and police violence, from reforming to defunding
or abolishing police, the FOP and its presidents are likely to remain prominent
fixtures in the conversation, for better or for worse.
Sarah Wild, an activist with the
Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, emphasized that
issues with the police union are impossible to separate from broader problems
with the department.
“The problem of the police and
the issues with community control and abolition become the real issue,” Wild
said, noting that organizers are continuing to push for more robust community
control of the police, including democratic input into the department’s budget
and the FOP’s contract. “The union is an expression of the bigger issue.”
Update: On Sept. 14, a group of
community organizers and police accountability advocates held a rally in front
of City Hall before the contract vote. They urged council members to reject the
agreement, calling for the city to work more accountability measures into the
deal before giving it the green light. But the city council ultimately approved
the contract, with only eight council members rejecting the deal.
Olivia Louthen and Aviva Waldman
contributed reporting and research.