“Many educators have been pushing for this for a long time, particularly adoptive parents, so I’m glad that this is moving forward,” board member Elizabeth Todd-Breland said during Wednesday's agenda review committee meeting.
Inspector General
That toll is set to grow in the coming weeks, as the Chicago City Council considers paying $25 million to resolve separate lawsuits filed in 2016 by two men who spent a combined 34 years in prison after being wrongly convicted of killing a basketball star in 1993.
In a letter sent this week, Reinberg Elementary principal Edwin Loch informed parents and families that a staffer has been pulled from the school following an allegation that they “engaged inappropriately with a student.”
Inspector General Deborah Witzburg said city officials and police brass are “ill-equipped to evaluate and improve response times, simply because, more often than not, we have no information on when the police arrive to respond to an emergency.”
Chicago spent $197.7 million to resolve lawsuits alleging more than 1,000 Chicago police officers committed a wide range of misconduct in 2019, 2020 and 2021. Of that total, $91.3 million came from settlements involving 116 officers whose conduct led to multiple payouts.
At Ludeman Developmental Center in Park Forest, 37 employees have been fired, resigned or face pending disciplinary action after a state watchdog found that they defrauded a federal pandemic-era small business loan program.
Congress intended for the loans issued by the U.S. Small Business Administration, most of which were later forgiven, to keep small businesses afloat and their employees on the payroll as COVID-19 resulted in lockdowns and interrupted commerce.
“We are writing enormous checks and leaving a tremendous opportunity for reform on the table,” Inspector General Deborah Witzburg said. “It is a staggering amount of money.”
“These are the rules that stand between us and government illegitimacy,” Inspector General Deborah Witzburg said.
It took less than five months for the Chicago Police Department to exhaust the $100 million earmarked for overtime set by the Chicago City Council as part of the city’s 2023 budget, according to data obtained by WTTW News through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The former mayor failed to uphold her fiduciary duty to the city, misused city property by identifying herself in campaign emails as the mayor of Chicago and solicited campaign contributions from employees she supervised, according to the city’s watchdog.
Ald. Jim Gardiner (45th Ward) could face a $40,000 fine for violating the city's ethics ordinance.
The number of homes searched by Chicago Police officers dropped nearly 90% since 2019, the same year a botched raid left social worker Anjanette Young handcuffed while naked and pleading for help, according to new data.
The failure likely sent hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete, wood, brick, metal and glass into landfills that could have been reused or recycled, according to the audit by the city’s watchdog.
“It’s so important that we actually get this information out, not just for me, but for any of these other cases that they are holding back, giving us all the details," Shapearl Wells said. “It is so crucial for the public to find out what’s actually happening in Chicago.”
An audit by Inspector General Deborah Witzburg reveals the Chicago Police Department has allowed more than 100 officers who filed false reports to stay on the job. Some were even promoted after being found to have lied.
