The Oath Keepers organization is considered by the FBI to be a “large but loosely organized collection of individuals, some who are associated with militias” who have vowed to “not obey unconstitutional (and thus illegal) and immoral orders.”
Inspector General
The push for the Bring Chicago Home proposal comes as the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless found an estimated 68,440 people experienced homelessness in the city in 2021. That’s a 2,829-person increase from the previous year.
Inspector General Deborah Witzburg’s determination that Gardiner violated the city’s Governmental Ethics Ordinance is the “first-ever finding of probable cause in an inspector general ethics investigation of a sitting member of City Council,” officials said.
The inspector general’s probe found that while the officer’s former partner was moving out, the officer “told them to call everyone they loved and tell them goodbye” and told them they were going to kill them and their family if they appeared at the apartment later that same day.
Benjamin George, a construction worker, said his life was upended on Aug. 19, 2019, when he stopped at a 7-Eleven store in Jefferson Park and mistakenly picked up a cell phone left on the checkout counter that did not belong to him.
“The record is clear that Gardiner engaged in both content-based and speaker-based restrictions on his Facebook page, according to the ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman. The Court thus finds Gardiner in violation of the First Amendment.”
“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.
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.
