Politics
Illinois Supreme Court Set to Decide Whether Serious CPD Discipline Hearings Must Take Place in Public
(Randy von Liski / Flickr)
Illinois Supreme Court justices pressed lawyers for the city of Chicago and its largest police union on Thursday about whether officers accused of serious misconduct must have their fates decided in public proceedings.
The Supreme Court could decide before the end of the year a case that has frozen the system Chicago officials used for 60 years to hold accountable officers accused of the most egregious misconduct, ending a legal dispute between the city and the city’s largest police union that has lasted for more than two years.
Matthew Pierce, a lawyer for Asher, Gittler and D’Alba, representing the Fraternal Order of Police, Lodge 7, told the justices that Chicago police officers should be treated no differently than other municipal employees facing termination or lengthy suspensions and have those decisions made in private.
Allowing an individual arbitrator — who must be hired with the approval of both the city and the police union — to decide whether officers should be suspended for at least a year or terminated in private ensures that process will be “fast (and) cheap,” Pierce said.
However, Assistant Corporation Counsel Aya Barnea told the justices that Chicagoans have a right to know what happens to officers accused of the most serious misconduct.
For six decades, the Chicago Police Board — whose seven members are appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the Chicago City Council — have made those decisions in public. That process has been frozen since early 2024, leaving 31 cases in limbo — including three that seek to terminate officers who caused the deaths of Chicagoans, including the officer who shot and killed 13-year-old Adam Toledo in 2021, records show.
“What has been open must stay open,” Barnea said.
Most of the questions during the oral arguments that lasted for less than an hour were posed by the newest Supreme Court Justice, Sanjay Tailor, one of five Democrats on the seven-member court.
Preventing members of the public from witnessing the most egregious police misconduct hearings would violate Chicagoans’ First Amendment rights to access governmental actions, Barnea said.
However, Pierce argued that right has never been extended to non-criminal proceedings by the U.S. Supreme Court or by the Seventh Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals. Creating such a right would have a profound impact on law enforcement agencies throughout the state, Pierce said.
“If this court finds that either a First Amendment or some other ill-defined public policy applies in this case, that is going to uproot and turn on its head every other case where labor unions have asserted this statutory right to grievance arbitration throughout the state,” Pierce said.
Chief Justice P. Scott Neville questioned both sides about Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s warning that allowing disciplinary hearings about serious misconduct to take place in private would cause the more than seven-year effort to reform the Chicago Police Department to fail.
Nothing in the court order known as the consent decree requires disciplinary hearings about serious misconduct to take place in public, Pierce told the justices.
However, Raoul’s friend-of-the-court brief noted that when the consent decree was negotiated back in 2019, no one could have predicted that the police union would object to the way the system had been operating for decades.
As part of that negotiated settlement, the state of Illinois pledged to ensure that CPD would operate with more transparency, Barnea said.
“The consent decree is formal recognition by the state that public access and public engagement with CPD is of critical importance,” Barnea said.
WTTW News coverage of policing and police reform is supported by The Joyce Foundation.
Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone | (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]
