State Law Protects Police Contract Provisions Blasted by Task Force
ICPR Executive Director Sarah Brune was quoted in this article
via Chicago Magazine
“While Chicago’s police union contracts have faced scrutiny in the aftermath of the Laquan McDonald shooting, culminating in the scathing 190-page report released by the Police Accountability Task Force this month, critics have so far skirted a potentially more challenging roadblock: a state law that mirrors parts of the contracts and bears the police union’s fingerprints.
Back in the early 1980s, shortly after the Fraternal Order of Police became the sole bargaining unit for rank-and-file Chicago cops, the union helped craft and lobbied for the Uniform Peace Officers’ Disciplinary Act. The bill influences how civilians file complaints against police, how misconduct investigations are conducted, and how interrogators question cops.
In 1983, Illinois Rep. Roger McAuliffe, a former Chicago police officer whose district included much of Chicago’s Northwest side and nearby suburbs, argued on behalf of the law, saying it was needed to take officers ‘out of the class of being second- and third-class citizens and makes them equal to the people they’re arresting.’ According to transcriptions, the now-deceased Republican lawmaker said, ‘Criminals have much more rights than police officers currently have when they’re faced with disciplinary action by their superiors.’”
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