Oh, Chris reworked the hell yard.
He sent me to hire two. He didn't understand my attachment though, but he didn't
take the ball.
I took the ball. He
would hate for them to get it. That's why I said that
I'm maybe scared. Let's
see that. I don't know. It's like that tea out here,
mommy. But that's tea. You're a
White
Sox fan, right? Oh, that's right. I forgot where
you're from. I was born. Yes, sir.
Testing one, two. Test, test one, two.
We wait.
Testing, testing one, two, one, two, three, four.
Testing, testing.
Oh, yeah. Good to see you, man.
Yeah. Likewise.
Good deal.
Yeah.
It's Friday in my mind.
Yeah.
I wish. They're my constituent with that, so I don't even-
Oh, it is?
Saturday.
I do mine on Mondays.
I do Thursdays because-
Mm-hmm
... it's at the end of the week.
Yeah.
If they had something that we couldn't get done on Monday by Thursday, they might
say thank you.
Are yours busy?
Very.
Mine used to be.
Support tells us we are good.
We are good. Wonderful.
Good morning, everybody. The Committee on Ethics and Government
Oversight will now come to order. We have one item on today's agenda, a subject
matter hearing regarding the Office of Inspector General's quarterly report for the
first quarter of 2026. We will begin with a roll call to establish
quorum. Please note that your yes or present response will be deemed a yes
vote when this quorum call is used for a reference vote for later items.
Chairman Martin is present. Vice Chair Hadden?
Present.
Alderwoman Lee? Alderman O'Shea? Alderwoman Taylor?
Alderwoman Tabaris? Alderman Tally Ferro?
Present.
Alderman Waguespack? Alderman Spitzel?
Alderwoman Nugent, we'll get to. Alderman Vasquez?
Alderman Riley?
Alderman Lawson? We have seven members present, which is a
quorum. Alderwoman Nugent has requested remote participation in the
committee under Rule 59. Is there a motion to allow her to do so?
Alderwoman Hadden so moves. All those in favor signify by saying "I." All those
opposed? In the opinion of the chair, the I's have it.
Alderwoman Nugent is allowed to attend the committee meeting
remotely. Alderwoman, good morning. Thank you for being here.
Thank you. Thanks, Chair.
At this time, we will begin with public comment, but I don't believe anyone has
signed up. So we-- And we did not receive any written public
comment. Our first order of business is the Rule 45 report
from the March 2026 meeting which was circulated at the committee.
Can I have a motion to approve that report?
Alderman Vasquez so moves. All those in favor signify by saying "I." All those
opposed? In the opinion of the chairs, the I's have it.
We will now begin the subject matter hearing regarding the
OIG's quarterly report for Q1 2026.
Thank you as always, General, for being here, and
please get started at your convenience.
Thank you very much. Thank you, Chairman, for having me.
And I want to reiterate before we get started my appreciation for the committees
having held these hearings regularly on our quarterly reports.
That has been a tremendously valuable opportunity for us to engage with this
committee and this body about our work.
So I appreciate your doing that, Chairman, and I hope that's something that the
committee will consider continuing to do
with the next person lucky enough to do this job.
I'm sorry to say that I'm now locked out of
the computer and the slides.
Apologies. Could like sing some songs in the meantime.
See if we can do this without having a look at my password.
So no campfire songs.
All right.
Well, maybe I will just kick things off,
because I don't think that there's a perfect time necessarily to acknowledge the
fact, but I think everybody knows that this is your last meeting with us.
And so we have appreciated hearing from you consistently
throughout our committee's work this term.
I've personally appreciated working with you tremendously.
You've always been
accessible, thoughtful, proactive, and
solutions-oriented around some of the most challenging but important
issues that face not just this committee, but City
Council and all of city government.
I want to thank you for your many years of service, both as Inspector General and
Deputy Inspector General for Public Safety, and also to acknowledge
that, like your predecessors, you have, in my opinion, left the office
much stronger than when you started. You've set an incredibly high bar.
It's challenging for me to think of someone meeting or exceeding that
bar, but that is the unenviable task
you leave for them. And yes, like you've appeared
before us regularly, which I appreciate, but the work that your office
has conducted and some of the legislation that you've helped spearhead
has been phenomenal and I think something that was
long overdue when it comes to City Council working with the Inspector
General's office to do things like having an orderly transition process so that we
don't have month, after month, after month of no one in a permanent
capacity who's able to make the challenging but necessary decisions that
you make leading this important body.
As well as strengthening a number of our ordinances,
especially when it comes to accessing the information that your office
needs to provide the transparency, accountability, and oversight
that Chicagoans need and deserve.
So I want to thank you sincerely for your work.
Whoever you go next, that's that entity's gain and our loss, but
I hope that you continue to, outside of government,
or at least our level of government, because I don't know where you're
going-Provide us insights in terms
of how we can move the city forward in a thoughtful and necessary
way. So thank you.
Well, thank you, Chairman, and likewise, I've been tremendously grateful for your
partnership. So many thanks to you as well.
Maybe I'll leave now. No
.
I will talk briefly about OIG's
report for the first quarter of 2026. This was published yesterday.
I will, as I have done before, sort of go through some high points of the report,
and then if there are other questions from this report or elsewhere that are of
interest to the committee, I'd be more than happy to talk about those as well.
So,
kind of quarter one by the numbers here.
We've talked a number of times about the centralized intake function, which OIG now
uses. This is a way to make sure that we are capturing all that we
can learn from each intake we get. Every time a Chicagoan reaches out to us about
something that they're concerned about, we want to make sure we are finding the
right oversight hammer for that nail.
So through this centralized intake function, we received in this
quarter 3,397 intakes. That's up a bit from
quarter four of last year. There's a little bit of variation
quarter to quarter, but this is a number that has gone up and to the right over
time, and I continue to think that that is a good news story.
I think that's a good sign. I do not think that's because more things are going
wrong in city government. I think that's because more people know who we are and
what we do and where to find us. And maybe most importantly, more people are
willing to believe that when something goes wrong in city government, there's
someone who can help. And so I continue to think that that general increase in
intakes is a good news story. Most of those intakes are
received by email. We also try to be conscious of the fact that
access to internet is uneven and not necessarily
reliable in all of Chicago's communities, and so we take intakes in many ways,
including telephone, online portal, letter, in-person delivery.
I always say, "Well, if you want to send it to us by carrier pigeon, we'll take it
that way, too."
In addition to those intakes which we receive from Chicagoans, we
have specific authority to self-initiate intakes.
We did that 73 times this quarter.
In our investigations section in the office, as you all know, OIG conducts both
administrative and criminal misconduct investigations.
We have, as of the close of the quarter, 268 active
misconduct investigations. The municipal code requires us to report
how many of those have been open at least 12 months.
That number is 176. That's down a couple of
cases from quarter four of last year.
I note here,
we talked in the last quarterly report about
the Department of Law's compliance with the new provisions of
OIG's ordinance that were passed last summer.
I think this has an important impact on investigative delay, and so I want to
just come back to this conversation for a moment.
So as this committee knows, there were provisions of the
law passed last summer to narrow the circumstances
under which
the law department may sit in on OIG's investigative interviews and to
clarify OIG's authority to access certain city records.
That law was passed in July, took effect last September.
The Department of Law has yet to comply with the new provisions of that ordinance
around OIG's access to records.
This is an important area of concern in my view.
Needless to say, that law is a good one.
It was certainly a compromise solution.
I think like all compromises, it was not everything that anyone wanted.
It's a good law. It is only as good as its enforcement, and we have to date
been unsuccessful in securing the city's compliance with the
law, and its provisions on OIG's access to records.
I have asked the corporation council to meet to discuss
that. I have not gotten a response to that request.
I've asked the mayor's office to get involved, both to facilitate that conversation
happening and to be involved in that conversation.
They have said that they would do so.
That has also not resulted in that conversation taking place.
And so I say that
to sort of leave this committee with the observation that there's more work to be
done on the implementation of that ordinance.
I will say,
one reason I have asked the mayor's office to be involved in that conversation is I
think that non-compliance with this ordinance is,
at this point, a policy decision, not a legal analysis.
I think that the law is very clear,
and so I hope that that is something that this committee will consider,
visiting in some way which might move that forward.
In all events,
back to our current investigative work.
We report here the subjects of our open investigations.
Most of our investigations are into city employees.
We have some as well into elected officials, contractors, subcontractors, and
people seeking contracts, licensees.
We have no current investigations into appointed officials.
Two that fall into this other category.
That sometimes includes people who
might have, as members of the public, violated the ethics ordinance by bribing or
attempting to bribe, or attempting to give an improper gift to someone in city
employment. Members of the public can violate the ethics ordinance that way.
As is usually the case, we include in our quarterly
report summaries of our investigative work.
The municipal code permits us to publish summaries of our work without
naming the subjects of those investigations.
That's what we've done in this quarter.
We report 21 sustained administrative cases.
Highlights of those include ones selected here.
We investigated the Chicago Police Department's mishandling of a death
investigation. This death investigation followed an incident in which an
individual was struck by a vehicle being driven by a Chicago Fire
Department member. And we looked at the way that the
Chicago Police Department's response to that incident kind of unfolded.
We found shortcomings in that death investigation.
Department policies and rules that weren't followed by way of body-worn cameras
being turned off prematurely, statements that were never recorded, witnesses that
were never interviewed, reports that were never taken.Those are
policy violations, rule violations.
We also make the observation here, I think important to say in terms of the
significance of this, that the outcome of those
failures is that neither we nor anyone
else is well situated to
really understand what happened in this underlying incident.
There's kind of a window of time. There's an opportunity to investigate something
after it happens, and if information is not appropriately gathered,
then there's no way to sort of reach any satisfying conclusion about the
underlying incident. When there's this enormous scale human
tragedy in the backdrop of that, I think those investigative quality matters are
really important.
We have an investigation in which a former senior employee of the mayor's
office violated the governmental ethics ordinance in soliciting a
paid position for their child from a city contractor,
and attempting to both increase the scope of the
contractor's work with the city and to facilitate
$9.6 million in payments to which the contractor was
not entitled. This is an investigation in which the Department of Law
asserted privilege over communications.
So this is one investigation where there were records to which we did not have
access,
or communications I should say, to which we did not have access.
We have an investigation in which we
recommended that the Board of Ethics find probable cause to believe, and they did,
that an alderperson violated their fiduciary duty to the city in removing
a term-protected city officer from their position,
in contradiction to the municipal code.
This is another case in which the Department of Law withheld records from OIG's
investigation.
We have an investigation in which--
This is a sprawling case, frankly, in which we have 14
subjects, almost all of them from the Chicago Department of Aviation, some from
Water Management, some from the Department of Transportation.
The
kind of universe of conduct at issue here is that we have
people drinking at bars
while on the clock.
So people drinking at bars when they should've been working at O'Hare.
I think from a common sense perspective, we would take the position that all city
employees working at the airports have a role to play in keeping those airports
operating safely and efficiently, keeping people safe who are traveling
through one of the world's busiest airports.
And the specific conduct at issue here, there's some range.
We have people who were themselves drinking on the clock,
sitting in their car in an aviation parking lot for hours afterwards, going back
into the building just in time to clock out.
We have supervisors who were drinking alongside their subordinates, buying drinks
for their subordinates. We have people who knew about misconduct
being committed by their colleagues and failed to report it appropriately.
We had a number of people who lied to OIG in the course of our investigation,
all kind of around this same sequence of events, pattern of conduct at
the Department of Aviation.
Perhaps to no one's surprise, we recommended
termination of many of these subjects.
For each city employee for whom we recommended termination, the relevant
city department agreed to pursue termination.
There were a couple of these employees where, because of the specific allegations
against each particular person, we recommended discipline in the
department's discretion. The departments have agreed to impose discipline in those
cases as well. We did not, by the publication of this report, have firm
details on what that discipline would be.
So just to say, there may be further updates to come on that case.
Reportable investigations continued.
We had a case in which a subcontractor and its owner submitted
falsified documents to a prime contractor in connection with a city
contract.
So this is not a situation where we had someone
submitting false documents directly to a city, but under the debarment rule, it's
nonetheless still a violation for a subcontractor to falsify documents.
We had a DSS laborer who referred to their city employment in an
attempt to avoid arrest. We have seen these kinds of cases before.
We have talked about these kinds of cases. These are of real concern to me.
I think any situation where we have someone using or attempting to use
the authority of a city position to their personal gain, particularly when that
looks like trying to get out of an arrest, is a situation we ought to be concerned
about because it's an abuse of power. It's an abuse of the public trust.
It also puts other city employees here, specifically Chicago police officers, in a
really difficult
position, and I think we ought to be concerned about those cases.
We had an OMC traffic control aide who accepted cash from a driver at
O'Hare, obviously in violation of the rules.
A former high-ranking employee at the Department of Housing,
two separate violations in this case.
One was that the employee improperly negotiated
future employment with an entity which had matters pending before the
employee in their official capacity, and then also violated the ethics
ordinance post-employment restrictions after going to work at that entity.
Another thing we've talked a fair amount about here is our
ramped-up work around campaign contributions and campaign finance
oversight. As you all know, there is a cure process built
into the ethics ordinance, where if there is an improper
contribution, that is to say,
people can fall into categories of restricted contributors in a number of different
ways. If somebody is a city employee or a city contractor or seeking business with
the city or a lobbyist or whatever the case may be, they may have restrictions on
how much they are allowed to contribute to the campaign of a candidate for a city
elected office.
If we find a contribution which exceeds the
limitations on any one particular contributor, there is a cure process built into
the ethics ordinance where we will send a letter.
We send sort of matching letters to the
contributor and to the committee that says this is an excess contribution and you
committee should cure this violation by returning the contribution,
and you contributor should cure the violation by asking for the money
back.But those things don't both have to happen.
That is to say, a contributor can cure a violation of their own by themselves just
by asking for the money back, even if it doesn't actually get returned.
In all events,
I think of that cure process being in place to allow for the possibility
that candidates don't know personally
everybody who writes them a check, and there is
some information available publicly about people who fall into these various
restricted categories. I also don't think that's perfect information.
And so we use this cure process sort of in that spirit to
notify people, assuming that they are not aware that the contributions are
improper.
If improper contributions do not get cured, that
constitutes a violation of the ethics ordinance.
And so this case that's summarized here is one of those situations where a
committee for a former candidate accepted 12 prohibited
contributions. We sent out cure letters to the committee and to all 12 of
those contributors.
11
of the contributors cured by asking for the
contributions back, but the committee itself and one
contributor failed to cure.
We proceeded with that as an ethics investigation, sent that case to the Board of
Ethics, and recommended that they find probable cause, which they did.
And then finally, we had two matters where
a current and a former OIG employee, I'm sorry, two former OIG employees
failed to timely report to us that they were applying for jobs
in entities where our internal policies would require that disclosure.
I also want to
update separately on the universe of our PPP fraud
investigations. This is another matter which I know has been appropriately of a lot
of concern to this body. There's been a huge universe of
investigative work to do into city employees who received PPP
loans. There are certainly some city employees who received legitimate and
appropriate PPP loans for the purposes for which those were intended.
But there has been widespread fraud, obviously, in this program, not just here in
Chicago, but in many places and in many government entities.
I continue to be firmly of the view that you don't get
to both defraud the government and cash a government paycheck.
Because of the scale of this problem,
this has been a triage exercise where we have sort of prioritized these
cases.
And we've done that according to a number of
different measures. One area of important priority in our PPP
investigations has been into members of the Chicago Police Department, and that is
because the credibility of police officers is an issue of
constitutional importance. Police officers are regularly writing
police reports and landing on the witness stand.
We cannot have people who lied to the government
writing police reports and landing on the witness stand.
And so we've prioritized CPD investigations into PPP fraud for that
reason. In this quarter, we report a total of 10 sustained
PPP cases. Nine of those are current or former
CPD members. One was a city council employee.
Additionally, outside the four corners of this report, but just by way of kind of
forecasting more of this effort, we currently have eight
more sustained PPP cases that are
currently out with city departments awaiting a response to OIG.
Now, moving on from our Investigations section to our Public Safety
section. This is a document that many of you all have seen and have offered
feedback on, which I sincerely appreciate.
The Public Safety section in this quarter published the 2026 Outlook on
Police Oversight and Accountability.
This is kind of a
menu of potential projects for the year, where in these three
strategic priority areas that the Public Safety section has identified, we are
identifying topics that we might look into.
Those are
assembled and gathered and drafted with information
from a variety of sources, including engagement with you all and your
constituents. These are organized into these three areas of
strategic priority. That is the police department's operational competence.
CPD is, among many other things, a large and administratively
complex organization, and so we have some topics that look at how well-built
it is to manage its functions. We have projects on discipline and
accountability. Oversight of the police disciplinary system has been an area of
tremendous importance to me, given how important I think it
is to have a robust and transparent disciplinary system as
sort of a pressure release valve.
Law enforcement is messy and difficult work, even good law enforcement.
And I think as we think about managing Chicago's reform
effort, we ought not to be planning for a system in which
nothing ever goes wrong. We ought to be working toward a system where we are
well-equipped to deal with things that go wrong, and where the city can
run a disciplinary system in which both members of the public and members of the
department have reason to be confident.
And so that's sort of the driving principle behind these
project topics. And then we have a
collection of projects around constitutional policing, where we are looking at
various police practices and the management and protection
of civil rights.
Another statutory function of our Public Safety section, as you all know, is the
review of closed disciplinary cases conducted by the Bureau of Internal Affairs
and by COPA. When BIA and COPA close a misconduct investigation, our Public
Safety section reviews it
for two purposes. One is to make any recommendations to inform
and improve future investigations, and the other is to identify any of those
investigations where we believe a deficiency materially affects their
outcome. If we identify that sort of deficiency, we make a recommendation to the
investigating agency that they reopen the investigation to address the
deficiency. So in this quarter, that unit, that's our investigative analysis
unit, they examined 314 closed cases and conducted
an in-depth review of 31 of them.
Among the
cases that reached a final landing place in which we therefore reported in this
quarter was a COPA investigation,
which is complex in the facts, and so apologies for theSomewhat
dense summary here, but this was the COPA investigation where there were 14
allegations against a field training officer.
I should say, this is not OIG investigative work, and it therefore is not covered
by our municipal code-driven confidentiality obligations.
These are FOIA-able, these are public records, these recommendations.
And so I just want to make that clear as to why we treat the
information related to these cases differently than our own investigative work.
So COPA investigation, 14 allegations into a field training officer
arising out of an interaction with a juvenile subject.
A wide range of allegations here, including that the FTO placed
their knee against the subject's chest applying pressure, applied direct pressure
to the subject's throat, pulled the subject from a CPD vehicle,
used force while the juvenile was restrained, and failed
to accurately document those uses of force.
COPA did not, in the course of its investigation, conduct any analysis as to
whether the subject lied when they failed to
include statements about some of these uses of force in their reporting.
We recommended that they reopen the investigation to do so.
COPA declined to reopen that investigation.
Moving now to our audit and program review section.
As you all know, this is the piece of our office where we look at whether
programs and city government are operating as effectively, efficiently, and
equitably as they might.
So
during this quarter, our APR section put out its annual plan for
2026, which looks much like the annual outlook from the public
safety section, where we're kind of forecasting potential topics.
Again, this is a product where many of you and your staff and your
constituents were very engaged. We sincerely appreciate that.
It is very helpful for the formation of these annual plans.
I will also just say here that
this is your annual reminder that engagement with our office about
areas in government where you and your staff and your constituents are particularly
concerned, that is not a speak now or forever hold your peace exercise.
We go through this annual planning process, and engagement at that time is very
helpful, but OIG is always looking for feedback from you
and your staff and your constituents about the things you are most worried about so
that we have a better sense of where to focus our efforts.
We also published a report, and this committee held a subject matter
hearing on this report on 311 service request performance.
So I know this was a topic of interest to
many of you. I really appreciate that.
We have appreciated ongoing conversation about this.
Welcome any further feedback. As you all recall, this report
found at a high level that service request information, which is provided
on 311's public-facing platforms,
is confusing and contributes to people's confusion about what city
services are available and whether and when help is coming and kind of
how to manage that process. We found that 311's potential
impact on city services and their ability to provide any kind
of
deeper and more proactive view of what needs doing is really limited by
resourcing problems. My hope is that given the time of
year at which we put these findings out, that by the time the
2027 budget process rolls around, that these findings and
recommendations might be of value to OEMC in thinking through its
budget needs for next year. And then finally, that
311 did not carry out those of its responsibilities that require this more
in-depth engagement with other city departments.
There's a lot of discussion, and we've had a lot of discussion here about whole of
government approach to a problem.
That only works if there are actually resources and structures in place that
allow departments to work together and to coordinate efforts.
Advisories and notifications coming out elsewhere of the
office. I want to highlight a couple of things.
One was an advisory concerning overtime payments to ineligible
employees. This is also sort of both a fact and law
dense product. So I will summarize this at a high level here,
and then if this is of particular interest, I'm happy to talk more about this.
This is a product in which we advise the Department of Human Resources and the
Department of Finance that some city employees may have
received overtime pay to which they were not entitled.
Whether or not a city employee is eligible to earn overtime
is dependent upon a number of different factors, including
whether they are covered by a collective bargaining agreement and what that
collective bargaining agreement says, but then also what that employee's
status is under the relevant federal law, which is the Fair Labor Standards
Act. The Department of Human Resources makes a determination by job
title of whether city employees are eligible for overtime pay or
not, depending on this collection of factors.
We found that in this four-year period, between 2020 and
2024, given all of those inputs and those considerations,
more than $26 million went to city employees in overtime
payments for which those employees were not eligible.
And so the spirit of our
recommendations here,
frankly, was that we not do that.
DHR and DOF acknowledged the need for what they called additional steps
to prevent overtime payments to ineligible employees.
With apologies for stating the obvious here,
the city's
financial circumstances are such that we can ill afford
to be spending tens of millions of dollars in overtime.
We ought to be paying city employees every dollar they have earned
and exactly that amount.
Secondly, we sent an advisory to the Department of Law on its
cooperation with our oversight of its employment actions.
So again, as you all know, in addition to our
other work,
which is sometimes more reactive in nature, OIG has kind of proactive,
ongoing monitoring responsibilities around the city's employment
practices that grew out of the, or are kind
ofrelics of the Shakman litigation.
So the city was under a court-ordered monitorship in the
Shakman litigation for decades. And when
the city reached substantial compliance
with the Shakman decree in 2014,
the Department of Law went before the federal court and argued that
the city should be released from the monitorship, should be found in substantial
compliance, because
the argument was that the city no longer needed the court to monitor the city's
employment practices because OIG was equipped to, and
permitted to, comprehensively and thoroughly monitor the city's employment
practices.
The Department of Law well articulated that view to the federal court, and
the city was in fact released from the monitorship.
And the ongoing work of monitoring employment practices therefore came to
rest with OIG.
And that work is regular and ongoing, and we report it every quarter.
In the course of our hiring oversight efforts, we requested
records from the Department of Law itself related to two hiring
sequences.
The Department of Law refused to provide those hiring records to
OIG,
explaining, at least in part, that those records related
to a, quote, "high-profile position."
Needless to say here,
neither OIG's authority to monitor hiring practices nor the Department of Law's
duty to cooperate contain exceptions for high-profile positions.
Following the Department of Law's refusal to provide those hiring records,
we waited a few months and then submitted a covert
FOIA request to the Department of Law.
That is to say, we FOIAd the records without disclosing ourselves as the
originator of the FOIA. And the Department of Law produced the same hiring
records in response to the FOIA request, which they had refused to produce to OIG.
I think that is frankly difficult to reconcile with any notion that
those records were so confidential as to not be subject to
oversight. And so we issued this advisory recommending that the Department of Law
cooperate with oversight of its employment actions.
Speaking of our monitoring of employment actions, the final section of our
quarterly report is the regular update on that work as it continues in the
ordinary course.
Among those efforts in this quarter, we monitored 13 hiring
sequences across six city departments.
Our hiring oversight unit does both this kind of proactive
regular monitoring work, also handles escalations of
concerns that arise out of the hiring process.
By way of example, one of those is here.
We received information about a candidate for a Chicago Police Department
position who had been disqualified because they had lived
outside of the United States.
OPSA, Office of Public Safety Administration, which kind of
conducts the CPD HR processes, has a policy that
requires the disqualification of a candidate if they have not lived in
the US continuously for five years before their application.
But that policy doesn't appear to be publicly available.
That doesn't appear to be information that a candidate would have a way to know
unless and until they get disqualified for that reason.
So
we recommended here that the recruiting materials be modified
to include that, so that there was more transparency around that
requirement.
That is what I have to say in summary sort of about the quarterly report, and if I
could just put one other thing on your collective radar, and then I'm happy to
obviously answer any questions. This is outside this quarter.
I will just ask for indulgence in telling you about it anyway.
We published a report this morning,
which I want to make sure is on your radar, and that looked at the Department of
Finance's management of outstanding debt owed to the city.
The
kind of high level
finding in that report is that
the city is not well positioned to account
for all of the outstanding debt owed to the city.
Again,
given the city's financial circumstances,
we ought to be approaching collection of outstanding debt in a really thoughtful
way. There are certainly policy decisions to be made about
when and how much and which of the city's outstanding debts are
collectible and which we want to collect.
But we are not well positioned to strategically or comprehensively manage a number
that we can't get ahold of.
We find in this report that the city has at least $8.1
billion in outstanding debt.
And I should be clear in saying that's a floor.
We are saying that's how much we can identify,
and we don't have any reason to think that that is a ceiling.
So
that's a big pile of dollars.
Nicest thing that's happened all day.
No.
The scale of this is enormous. And again, I want to
emphasize here that OIG's recommendations in this report are not
necessarily that the city
march into every home where somebody owes an outstanding debt and collect it in
any way other than what is most strategically appropriate and equitable and
fair. The fact of the matter, again, is that we cannot manage
what we cannot measure. And where we have at least
8.1 billion outstanding dollars, there is an awful lot of work to do
here. So thank you for the indulgence in just highlighting that, recognizing that
that is by about 24 hours outside of the quarterly report.
So Chairman, with that, I'd be happy to answer any questions.
Thank you, General. Before we do so, Alderman
Lawson has requested remote participation in the committee under Rule 50.
Okay. So Greg can-
Make a motion to allow him to do so.
Yeah. I'm sorry.
So moves. All those in favor?
All those opposed? In the opinion of the chair, the ayes have it.
We will turn to questions from committee members, starting with
Alderman Vasquez, then Alderman Taliaferro, and Alderwoman Hadden.
Thank you very much, Chairman.
Can you hear me okay?
Yes.
Yeah, thank you.
Because of the amount of questions, the normal time I would say to thank
you at this last one, I'm going to forego that.
I'll be able to follow that up or send it through the chair back to you.
But
so much to start off with, I'm just going to go in order.
So related to the Department of Law not complying with the existing law that's
currently in the books-
Yes
... either through the chair or
directly, if you have ideas on what enforcement could look like, because if
this is just about somebody's willingness to comply,
I don't think that's going to change much, and I've got concerns that depending
on who the next
inspector general is, it may be even harder to get any level of
compliance. What could enforcement look like?
This is a good question, and one which I have worried a lot about for similar
reasons. It is
illegal for city employees to fail to cooperate with OIG's investigative work,
and I think when it comes to certain city records,
including those over which the city asserts attorney-client privilege, in my
view, withholding those records from OIG has always been improper.
It is now, I think, clearly illegal.
It is a little bit hard for me to nail down where the
issue lies exactly because I have not been able to
have a direct conversation with the city's corporation counsel about this issue.
I think there's a lot that might be resolved in a conversation like that.
I am in the market for a practical solution here.
I frankly don't know what that would be.
Okay. I appreciate your optimism- ...
because it's a willingness. If you're not even willing to meet to have the
conversation, you're not complying, that'd be the problem.
So I would imagine, and I'm glad I've got my colleague, Alderman
Riley next to me, maybe an independent counsel,
and actually taking legal action against
the Department of Law, if we had a counsel, might be a step to take if we can't
find any other ways to have enforcement.
So I guess I'm just naming that because when we have conversations about what it
means to have a more independent counsel and the levers in place to have that
accountability, it might be something to explore. So I appreciate that.
I think along the next question is related to the--
You mentioned something about an alderperson firing a term-protected
city officer, and that just left me with questions as
to
what office would be term protected in that way, because the only ones I can think
of are kind of larger ones.
Yeah. I
appreciate the question.
Oh.
I want to be careful here in not discussing facts that are outside of our published
summary, recognizing that that is unsatisfying in this case.
I think I will leave that-
Fair
... I will leave that there.
Okay.
I think I feel the next one's the same kind of question because we've had time and
time again about the Rule 14 violations
and the way COPA sometimes does not do the investigations
that are necessary. Would it be the same answer as far as trying to enforce
that?
I think
the enforcement of Rule 14, of CPD's rule against lying, is something that we have
looked at on both a case-by-case basis and in a larger sort of
programmatic and policy-driven view.
There continues to be kind of case-by-case work to do here.
I also think there are some larger kind of policy--
Policy's probably the wrong word.
There are programmatic solutions that are available, which might include, for
example, requiring COPA and BIA to,
in each investigative report, I mean, this is maybe more in the weeds, with
apologies, than what you had in mind, but if those investigative agencies were
simply required in every investigation to include a statement in their summary
report which said, "We have considered the question of whether there are any Rule
14 violations here and we don't believe that there are," or,
"We've considered that question, we had some credibility concerns, but we don't
believe that those rise to the level of a Rule 14 violation," whatever the case may
be. I think some of this is really about kind of showing the work.
Under enforcement of a rule is really hard to get at because we don't
know what we don't know.
I'm inclined to think that if there were some way, and there obviously would be a
way, it would simply be a required modification of the final
reporting. If we could at least ensure that this was a question that
got addressed, that had eyes on it in the conclusion of each appropriate
investigation, I think that that would go a long way.
And is it-- I mean, I imagine so. It's something we just codify and say in the
instances where COPA's declined to then,
or doesn't agree with the finding or does not want to go forward,
explain the why.
Or even just before we get to a recommendation to reopen, if every time COPA and
BIA closed a misconduct investigation, if they were simply
required to include in their closing report a statement that
said, "This investigation does not raise any Rule 14 concerns," or, "It
does raise those concerns and we've considered them as follows,"
we might be better off.
Okay. And then the last question I have, and I'm trying to be
very nice, 8 billion being a floor
is insane.
So I think my question is
more to the chair to
your ability to be able to provide your analysis that led to those numbers.
Yeah.
Because then the questions I've got are related to the rest of the city and their
numbers and what the discrepancies look like in tracking-
Yeah
... and why they're not doing a good job of even knowing and measuring what
those amounts are-
Yeah
... knowing the fact that every single year we've got a billion dollar hole.
Yeah.
So
I think that's exactly the right question to ask, and what we know about that is in
the report that has been published, like while we have been sitting here this
morning. So it's in your inboxes hot off the
presses.I will say a couple things.
I think the challenge in... The Department of Finance was our
auditee here. That was the city entity we were engaging with in this audit.
This is clearly a problem, and therefore a set of solutions, which goes
well beyond the four corners of the Department of Finance.
The municipal code positions the Department of Finance and the city's comptroller
as responsible for managing all of the city's debt,
and the reality is, we talked a few minutes ago about problems and solutions which
expand beyond one department. This is very much one of those.
And so, this is really about whether we have equipped the Department of Finance and
the comptroller with the tools that they need to kind of wrangle
debt in all of the places where it lives.
This is a challenging audit from a fact perspective.
I think the facts here are deeply, deeply concerning.
I also think there are some practical steps that can be taken to improve this
situation. We've made those recommendations, and I want to
be fair and clear in saying that the Department of Finance,
while I think expressing some disagreement with some of
our findings here,
largely accepted those recommendations and committed to taking a number of steps,
which I think we should sensibly expect to improve the
situation going forward.
Yeah, and I appreciate you kind of adding the context.
I think it's really about the intentionality and focus of us as city
government, period. Right? To put that all on one department
is simplistic and allows us to point fingers rather than keeping the focus
necessary. So, I think a parallel would be last
year's budget process, right? The conversation related around efficiencies and
having a separate body look through efficiencies might have yielded
some level of response, but it's still up to us to make sure we're
continually having the conversation to improve.
And so, I think similarly, keeping our eye on the ball and collecting debt and
what that looks like is just something that we need to figure out the tools.
Everything you're pointing out, which is why your presence
and time has been invaluable, is about different departments doing the same.
311, there are plenty of things to improve there, but it's also our ability as a
body to stay on it, and what that looks like to track baselines and continue
improving. I think the more information we get, the better we are.
But then, as has been my experience, we have to
codify quarterly reporting-
Right
... and regular information-
Right
... so that we don't get distracted, for lack of a better term, with the
millions of other things that we then have to address.
And so-
Yeah.
I agree all around with that, and I'm sorry to interrupt you.
No, yeah.
There's one other thing I will say,
which is frankly outside of the scope of this report, but while I have
you. As this body and as the council continues
to work through the tremendous fiscal challenges facing the city,
I think there are also probably a set of questions to think through about the
structure of the city's financial management system, and who
works for whom, and how independent the city's various financial
actors are, and whether that entirely makes sense, whether some of these
actors need more independence.
Yeah.
I think there's some thinking there to do.
And also being well-resourced to do so.
So, I think to your point, when we head into budget season and we're talking about
which departments need more help and what that looks like, figuring
out the administrative roles that are needed, how are we even looking at any level
of technology or lack thereof being used by the departments, that I
think we're going to have to continually have these conversations.
So, I am greatly appreciative for the work.
We miss you already. And
I remember, as many people here do, how much it took to get you in
the role. So even when we had-
That sounds familiar to me, too.
Yeah, when we had General Ferguson, right?
Many of us had a feeling you'll be an improvement.
I think you've more than met that expectation, and we knew
how much it took to get you in the position.
So similarly, the concerns about what happens next are important.
So, thank you for your work. The city is much better for it.
We're grateful for it. That's all I have. Thank you, Chairman.
Thank you, Alderman.
Thank you. Alderman Taliaferro, followed by Alderwoman Hadden.
Thank you, Chairman.
Of the 8.1 billion debt that's
owed to the city,
I've seen recently in our local media that
we have an extensive number or extensive list of
employees,
which certainly makes
debt more collectible.
Do you know if that amount-
Sure, because we know where to find those people to send their paychecks, right?
Yeah. Do you know how much of that debt
is debt that is owed by current
city employees?
This is an important question, and that is not a number that I have at my
fingertips at this moment. I can see what we have on that, and I can get it to you
through the Chair.
Okay.
One of the things we do look at here is whether
the system for checking debt owed by city employees is kind of equipped to work
well, and we identify some shortcomings there.
So, with apologies, let me find out what exactly we have on that number, and we'll
get you that.
Okay. And because I think we certainly have a better vehicle
for collecting that debt
than we do with some of our
debt that's owed from outside entities.
Agreed.
And that's the only question I had.
I just really wanted to thank you for
your leadership and your commitment to the City of Chicago.
And I know you've met roadblocks during your travels,
but you've stood steadfast in making sure that we are
on solid ground. So, I want to sincerely thank you for your commitment,
and thank you for your partnership as well.
I've always been able to call you, and you've always returned a call or answered,
and I certainly appreciate that.
Accountability means a lot, and I think you're holding the city to
what you believe is best for the city, and its
accountability. It speaks a lot to you,
and I was really amazed when you
sponsored and introduced an ordinance.
I remember asking you, "ButYou would have to leave.
But that told me a lot about you. It was not
about your job or your salary. It was more about
the city moving forward on solid ground,
and having the best city that we could possibly have.
So, I do want you to know that we sincerely thank you.
And you do need to know that I just checked, and the Red Sox are
at the bottom of the AL East, but it's-
It's a long way from over
... the season is young.
It's a long way from over.
So I'm going to follow them this year.
And every time I see a win, I'll think about you.
But we-
I appreciate it
... certainly appreciate, and thank you so much, Deborah.
Thank you, Alderman. I will say it was the
necessary optimism bred by being a Red Sox fan in the '90s that best equipped me
for this job, so.
Thank you, Alderman. Alderwoman Hadden, followed by Alderman Riley.
Thank you, Chair.
Hello, Inspector General. Thank
you, I'll put my thank yous at the beginning. Thank you for your service.
I think that
during my
tenure, I've certainly learned a lot about city government, about
the insights that from our position as alders, I think we
often just aren't privy to.
We
all have a time and a place for our roles.
And as
elected representatives serving on the city council,
we have responsibilities to take action on the
types of issues that you bring to us in these reports.
But without your office, we wouldn't really have the power
to have
access to this information. So,
that may not be the most elegant way to say it, but I appreciate your
work and the work of your team-
Thank you
...
in continuing to just help us reflect and be better.
And the recommendations that you have left
through these processes as well.
A couple questions that I had just to follow up on from this report.
Yeah.
One is more broad, so in looking at the recommendations that
she made,
and I guess it would be part one, so
recommendations
through your investigations into city employees, maybe that was section
two. In going through that,
yes, in maybe B, the sustained
administrative investigations piece.
Yeah.
So one, the table's always helpful.
I'm just wondering, not just for this report, but as you are
ending your tenure here,
how would you rate departments and their agency
action? So like in reading this quarter's agency actions,
it seems like, hey, people are responding to
these recommendations in a way that will hopefully prevent this
from happening.
How would you characterize, I guess, not just from quarter one,
but in your experience,
are we in a pretty good place and other than maybe the Department of Law,
are you finding that most departments are responsive
to the OIG's recommendations?
I think generally speaking, yes, we are in a
reasonably good place. And I think there's a fair amount to say about this, and I
won't take up all of your time to say it.
But I think
one of the things I am proudest of about what we have accomplished this term is
that we have very positive, very productive working relationships
with many people and departments across city government.
That is not to say that everybody is happy to see us when we show up, and that's
not to say that we agree with everybody about everything.
If we did, we wouldn't be doing our jobs.
But I have been sincerely grateful for what I think is
a widespread recognition across city departments that the work of the office
is necessary and productive, and that we
all ought to be pulling in the direction of a government that more closely
resembles the one Chicagoans deserve, or else some of us are in the wrong line of
work. And so I think
you're right, that when it comes to our disciplinary recommendations arising
from our misconduct investigations, I think we are in a place where city
departments are, with some exceptions, but generally speaking, pretty
responsive. And I think that that's a product of that
shared view of the sometimes uncomfortable necessity of effective
oversight.
I have not agreed with every
response. We see in this quarter, we talked about this
mishandled death investigation.
That's a case where the police department disagreed with some
of our findings altogether on some-
Yeah
... subjects. Where they did agree with our findings, the only
penalties imposed were violations noted on disciplinary records.
On any one
case, any one recommendation, there's some room for good faith disagreement.
I have found generally, you see elsewhere in CPD cases in
this quarter, in every PPP case where we recommended termination, the police
department agreed to pursue termination.
I think the police department has been a good partner in our work,
individual disagreements and recommendations aside.
And so I guess I say all of that to say, I think roughly
yes. I think we are in a reasonably good place in terms of
responsiveness to our disciplinary recommendations.
That's good to hear. In reading the reports and in
tracking this over these last couple of
years, that has been my assessment, but it's-
Yeah
... it's good to hear. And hopefully that's something as we think
about who will... be in your
shoes next, the kind of maybe direction we want to
continue to support,
and the environment we want to support.
My last question is actually really touching on
the findings of the overpayment.
Notably, that 2020 to 2024 period.
I'm thinking about
the pandemic. I'm thinking about the migrant crisis.
I'm thinking about
a lot of the
kind of new transition, a new
mayor in office. And the first thing that came to my mind
was the chaotic nature of
what everybody was doing at that time, and how many city
employees were asked to be
all hands on deck all the time.
Yes.
So I was wondering,
did your investigation look at any time period before or after
that? Was this notable for any reason that you could track?
And also,
it's not
clear here, but are the departments, have they corrected things
so that we're not doing that anymore?
In the spirit of a recommendation, which once again boiled down to, "Don't."
Yeah.
So on the second of those questions, we don't know yet.
We have not yet kind of gone back-
That's pretty good
... to look at the status of these corrective actions, because this was pretty
recent. We will.
To your first question, I think that's a really important observation, that the
years between 2020 and 2024 were not like any others,
and that
the kind of on the ground reality of city government during those years was
different, and you're absolutely right.
Those were years when who was working and when and where was...
There was an awful lot going on, and there were a lot of hands on a lot of decks.
I think those are good and important, and worthwhile contextual
observations.
And the short answer is that no, we did not look at any period of time, either
before 2020 or after 2024. I do think that the
problems we identified that led to this outcome were
kind of administrative ones that had less to do with
the operational realities of the kind of overtime assignments people were working,
or even how many hours people were being asked to work.
This has, I think, more to do with the kind of back end payroll
system administration. But it's a really good observation.
I think that's important context.
So more about the classification of a particular employee type
when you get to the eligibility. So it wasn't like, "Oh, this library
staffer was working seven days a week making hand
sanitizer."
Right.
And they worked a lot of hours, because that happened, right?
Right.
This was more of an employee who was never
eligible for overtime.
By virtue of whether, yeah.
Was somehow not classified the right way, and then hours
were allotted.
Yeah.
So then maybe my follow-up to that is,
again, within our department of city council,
I'd say our time tracking and kind of
the variety of positions we have is
really narrow, right?
Yep.
So I can't imagine our department making that type of
mistake. And so I'm wondering
in what you found, do you think any of these
miscategorizations were intentional?
We
didn't set out to look for and did not find any evidence of kind of intentional
overtime padding. There have been other matters where we have found just that.
But this, to be clear, is not one of them.
No? Okay.
We didn't look for that and didn't find it.
I really do think this is sort of a systems classification problem.
And one which, again, to which both DHR and DOF were
receptive, in terms of the need for corrective actions.
I do think, looking ahead to the next budget process, especially in the hopes that
that's a process that starts sooner, and where there's a little more room for
legislative oversight. I think that in talking with city departments
about how they are planning for overtime expenses and budgeting for them, this
would be a conversation worth having to make sure we're thinking about those
costs and controlling for them in an appropriate way.
Thank you. And thank you, Chair.
Thank you. Alderwoman Taylor.
Thank you, Chairman.
I would say thank you for your honesty.
I don't feel like we got, before you got this seat, that
people were being honest with us just about different systems
we have and the way we kind of operate with the city.
I got a bunch of questions about the billions of dollars that is owed to
the City of Chicago. Is it more employees?
Because in a report that came out in the news,
it said CPS employees and Water Department employees
owe the most amount of money to the City of Chicago.
Did you all find that to be true?
So I think that's related to Alderman Taliaferro's
question. That specific question is not a focus here.
Let me find out exactly what information we have about debt owed by city employees,
and we will pass that along. I think we are more focused here on whether the
DOF systems that are in place are well equipped to kind of capture that and
pursue it. I do think there is this common sense observation that if
we are sufficiently certain about where to find people so that we can send them a
paycheck, we also ought to be able to collect outstanding debt from them.
I think that is a sensible, common sense question.
Let me get ahold of exactly what information we have about that, and we'll pass it
along.
Because that happened in January.
Employees who were supposed to be on a payment plan for their tickets,
they actually at the beginning of the year just snatched whatever they owe
without any notice, without anything happening.
So the thought that people owe
the City of Chicago a billion dollars and we're not able to collect
seems disingenuine to me.
Even when I first got into office, I will never forget, it was a week
before inauguration, andThere were tickets in
my name for a car that I didn't own.
Yeah.
And they told me if I did not pay them, I would not be able to participate in
inauguration. And so please explain to me how
we're owed, what did you say? 1.8 bi-
8.1. 8.1.
$8.1 billion in fines, and
there is no
work to try to collect that debt. In other states, in
Indiana, I know if you owe child support, they suspend your license.
Right.
And so people have lost their good city jobs because of that.
And so is there a recommendation of what the city could be doing to
collect some of this debt?
Yes.
And in that debt, does it include municipalities?
Because there are different municipalities that owe us money for water, but
we'll cut off our constituents in the ward for less than $1,000,
but these people owe thousands and thousands of dollars and they continue to get
water.
Yeah. You're absolutely right. So a few things on that.
We do make recommendations here for what the city could do to better get a
hold of the debt. Part of the problem is exactly the kind you're describing, where
it seems that there is sort of like a very tight catch on some
outstanding debt-
Mm-hmm
... and none at all on others. And I also think
the
water debt, the institutional debt, is also a really important
observation.
There are absolutely equity questions
to be wrestled with in any debt collection strategy.
Mm-hmm.
Any strategy that the city adopts to collect outstanding debt
must include considerations about how to do that in an equitable way.
The observation we are driving at here is that there is no way that
we are positioned, we as a city are positioned to make those sensible
decisions about the equity of a debt collection program if we can't
even, in the first instance, identify-
Who the debt is
... what the debt is and where it's coming from, and how long it's been around.
Is there a recommendation to create something?
Because we're quick to create a committee, a
task force, do all the things except for actually do the work.
And so there's a recommendation to create a small office
or-
Yeah
... it be in finance or something with the city clerk, some way for us to
collect debt?
Yes, is the short answer. You're absolutely right.
The city is much more inclined to sort of convene a new blue ribbon committee than
to-
Okay
... than to maybe implement the structure that could actually get something done.
And so we've tried to make really concrete, really practical recommendations here.
They are to DOF. DOF notes in its response, I think
appropriately, that some of these things certainly will require it to work with the
office of the city clerk, with the
section of the law department which pursues debt collection.
So we've made a whole series of recommendations, and DOF has responded, committing
to implementing a number of these things.
I'm really concerned about where we get support
for your office, or formerly going to be
your office, because I'm
concerned that you all make recommendations about firing folks, and we
just keep them around. And then when they do two or three things later
on, the taxpayers still pay because they wind up suing the city.
And so is there any recommendation of what we can do?
Is it going down to the state? Is it adding new laws?
What do we do to make sure that the recommendations...
Because I remember in the report you recommended we
fire a CPD officer, and he literally had like
four more cases after that time. And so it's
like you do these reports and give recommendations, but
unless it's something
that they just can't get away from in the news, they don't take the
recommendations. So is there any thought behind what we should do
as a council to make sure when you all make recommendations that they're actually
implemented?
So I really appreciate this question because I think, to Alderman Hadden's
question, it is often true that city departments accept our recommendations, and
sometimes it's not. And sometimes the situations where those recommendations are
not accepted, however small a percentage of cases that might be, sometimes it
really matters.
I think this is a,
if you want to fix a problem, shine the light of truth upon it question.
And I think the work that this committee has done to
make sure that our quarterly reports and the responses to those recommendations
get city council eyes on them, I think is a really important part of the process
here. And maybe there are some legislative fixes, although I think it is also
the case that you all have these reports, you see our recommendations and the
responses, and when you have these city departments in front of you, I think
asking city departments to talk about decisions not to implement disciplinary
recommendations seems like good and fair legislative oversight to me.
Thank you. You're running, and I understand why.
Don't do what most people do, which is come back.
Thank you, Chairman.
Thank you.
You don't have... I'm just looking towards you. Yeah?
Fantastic.
I share that problem.
I'll say, Jessica did a pleasure work on the job.
Appreciate the job you did, and your friendship also working
together. But it's not all that's all.
Oh, can you hear me? There we go. Okay.
Say all those nice things again, Alderman. That's okay.
Okay. I just
want to say thanks for everything.
Appreciate the job you did, appreciate your friendship, appreciate your
responsiveness to me.
So just want to say best wishes to you.
I know it was a tough job and I don't think anybody's chasing you out.
I think you're leaving on your own terms.
But I do have one question, just a general question about the investigation, and
I'm just going to use one of the examples you gave about individuals drinking
on the job. So how do you notice? You send a detective to watch them?
Does somebody call and say, "Hey, Johnny's drinking on the job," and you
send somebody to watch him? Is it through an investigation or is it through like a
stakeout? These
I'm just using the drinking one-
Yeah
... as an example.
Yeah. This is a good question.
Yes to all, in this particular case.
Across our investigations, we have a variety of overt and covert
investigative methods that are available to us.
Speaking broadly, any one investigation like this one might
include a tip from
a witness, might include surveillance, might
include undercover work where we would send somebody into a bar, for example.
We do our own surveillance? Your office does surveillance?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yes. In cases like this, including in residency cases, others.
Yeah.
So, a range of those kind of both overt and covert
investigative activities. We have administrative subpoena power.
We might subpoena receipts from a bar or restaurant, subpoena security video,
that sort of thing.
Okay. All right, well thanks for everything. Best wishes to you.
Likewise.
Enjoy your summer.
Thank you.
Hopefully you don't go back to work till September.
Thank you, Alderman.
Thank you, Chair.
Thank you. Two final questions from me.
One is, and apologies if this already came out with your Q&A with Alderman
Vasquez, the COPA case that you had flagged towards the beginning-
Yeah
... and their decision not to reopen an investigation into an
FTO, what was their reasoning behind not wanting to
reopen?
Yeah.
COPA's response is detailed in a little bit more depth in the report than
my kind of CliffsNotes version of it here.
The gist of that response was that they had already
recommended substantial discipline for that officer, and that
the case had happened four years before.
There are pragmatic resource management decisions to be made in all of our
investigative work.
I do think maybe particularly with Rule 14 violations,
the life cycle of cases is uncertain, and where sometimes cases get overturned
or
outcomes change, disciplinary recommendations change.
Good and complete disciplinary records, which include all
appropriate Rule 14 violations, are really important.
And so I worry about that rationale. Like, well, we've got them on something else.
I worry about whether that's the right one for not pursuing Rule 14 violations.
Understood.
Do you know, and this is somewhat of an evidentiary question,
say this FTO was to testify in court pursuant
to a case. Do you know if your
recommendations alone would be admissible for purposes of impeachment?
Because part of why I think we rightly treat
Rule 14 as quite serious-
Yeah
... even relative to other rules, is that if an
officer has been found to violate that rule,
it's very challenging for them to do certain types of work that could
ultimately culminate in them participating in court.
Yeah. This is a really good and insightful question.
And, as a recovering prosecutor, this is something I've worried about a
lot, whether the city is positioned to meet
government obligations under Brady versus Maryland and following cases around
exactly this.
I do
not think that our recommendation to reopen an
investigation in order to conduct a Rule 14 analysis, I do not
think that that recommendation in itself would necessarily
constitute Brady material. I do think
that one of the yawning risks that we
are exposing the criminal justice system here to is,
is that we have CPD members where the city is in
possession of evidence which should have given rise to an adverse credibility
finding, which would've been Brady material, and we haven't done the work.
I think that's a risk of constitutional proportion.
One of the other products that we summarized here, which wasn't included on the
slides, was a notification we sent to the police department about
a member who had been investigated by BIA for
an off-duty arrest, conduct related to an off-duty arrest.
The concern that we flagged for BIA was that in the course of that
incident and the arrest, which was outside of the city of Chicago, the member had
made false statements. And the concern we raised there was exactly this one, where
the police department is holding this evidence, which pretty clearly shows that
this officer lied, but there is no kind of record
of that which would allow anybody to meet Brady obligations if that
officer landed on the witness stand.
And so we brought that kind of by way of notification to
the police department's attention, and
the response we got from the police department was, I think, a thoughtful and
totally appropriate one, which was that they would open a separate log number
into those false statements to look at whether there was an appropriate finding
there. I think that is a good and thoughtful response,
which gets at the same risk you're identifying.
I think that's an important ball to keep our eye on.
Understood. And then last question, somewhat big picture with an
eye towards budget hearings, to be sure, but also your
successor.
There are, and we talk about this every time you come with quarterly reports, a
number of cases that have been open for over a year, and we recognize that
many of those cases are maybe on
ice for purposes of your department, for reasons outside of your control.
Say there is a county or federal investigation
underway that supersedes yours.
Maybe there's noncompliance or poor compliance
with particular departments that can require a lot of back and forth.
Putting those things aside, I'm wondering if moving forward, there are
ways where either city
government or your department could take steps
to help speed up those investigations.
Yeah. I hope that there are those steps, including ones that we could take
internally. Investigative timeliness is a tremendous challenge.
We have taken some steps to attend to this.
We certainly haven't solved the problem.
I think
it is not a satisfying answer, and this is not the moment for me to
tell you that if we had more investigators, our cases would move faster.
That is true. If we had more investigators, the cases would move faster.
But it can't be the first or the only solution to the
problem.We
have made some changes. We've made some improvements to internal policies and kind
of internal management mechanisms around case timelines.
We can and should continue to work on those things internally.
I also think
that there are some areas of investigative work
where we spend huge amounts of time and
resources in a way that might not match up with the
return that we get.
The category that I have in mind there is
residency cases, where we're investigating violations of the city's residency rule.
Interestingly, the requirement that city employees live inside the city
limits is the only violation
in the municipal code which carries mandatory termination as a penalty.
And so in that way, it's a very serious violation, and we take it very seriously.
Also, a lot of the other things we are looking at, I think, are also very
serious and of tremendous public policy concern, even though they don't carry that
same mandatory penalty. Residency investigations, in part because of the
investigative steps we take to
pursue those cases, are immensely
resource-intensive. They just take a huge number of
person-hours, mostly at OIG, but also frankly in other city departments from
whom we're requesting records and so on.
It is just an enormous resource investment.
I could see a decision
being made that we are going to kind of reallocate
some of the investigative resources we're spending on residency cases to other
kinds of cases in order to move them more quickly.
That might mean kind of backing off on enforcement of the
residency rule, which has other policy implications, I think.
It might mean that we, as a city, think through whether there are
other non-investigative mechanisms for enforcing the city's residency
rule.
If, for example, there was some systems-based way
to be more proactive in collecting certifications from city employees
that they continue to live at their reported city address or asking people-- There
is now all this e-learning. You all have these, too.
You have mandatory e-learning every year for sexual harassment training and ethics
training and so on. The city has better systems than it used to for--
I'm going to go back to my desk and finish those before the deadline now that we've
talked about it, but the city has better systems than it used to for that kind
of
digital engagement with people, having people submit documents and certifications
and so on.
I think that there might be a less
investigative resource-intensive way to enforce that rule.
So that's a long and winding answer to your question.
We have got to do better on investigative timeliness.
That is a challenge, I think, across the practice.
That is not unique to our office, which does not excuse us from working to make it
better. I think there are both some office-specific things we
can do and probably some bigger questions to think through about resource
allocation.
Understood. Well, those are all my questions.
Is there anything else you want to share that we haven't touched upon?
I guess we'll give you the last word.
I appreciate that. I hate to miss an opportunity to share my thoughts and feelings.
No, I think I really appreciate this committee's time, and Chairman, as I
said, your partnership and your attention to our work.
So many thanks to all of you.
We've appreciated your service tremendously.
You and your team have done top-notch work, so thank you for that.
We're interested to see what comes next.
Me too.
And with that, we have no further business.
Can I get a motion to adjourn? Alderman Sposato so
moves. All those in favor signify by saying aye. All those opposed.
In the opinion of the Chair, the ayes have it, and the meeting is adjourned.
Thank you, everybody.
Wonderful.
I'm telling you, God bless you.
Likewise.
Thank you.
So fantastic. Thank God for people like that.
Take it, Deb. Thanks for everything.
Good to see you.