After 12 years, Inspector General Joseph Ferguson will leave office Oct. 15 — but not before completing a probe of the botched raid.

More than two months after Inspector General Joseph Ferguson announced he would leave office on Oct. 15, the Chicago City Council on Friday finally took the first steps toward finding his replacement as the city’s watchdog.

In a follow-up to its June 2020 report, the Chicago Office of Inspector General on Thursday found the CPD still cannot ensure it is producing all relevant records in its possession for criminal and civil litigation.

“No one should ever be denied access to city services because of their political opinion, whom they may have supported in an election,” Mayor Lori Lightfoot said.

Fewer than 1 in 10 ShotSpotter alerts between 2020 and 2021 resulted in evidence of a gun-related criminal offense being found, according to a new report from Chicago’s independent watchdog.

A year after being taken to task by the city’s Office of Inspector General for inefficient weed-clearing practices, the Department of Streets and Sanitation has made some improvements but still has work to do, according to a follow-up report released last week.

For the first time since a damning 2019 audit was released by the city’s watchdog, police officials defended their continuing use of records that list approximately 135,000 Chicagoans as members of gangs, citing their need for the data to prevent “retaliatory violence.”

As the battle over control of business sign permits concludes, a new front in the struggle over aldermanic prerogative opened Wednesday over the future of the city’s ward superintendents. 

Aldermen should have input on who gets hired as their ward superintendents — but cannot have the final say, Inspector General Joseph Ferguson determined.

Inspector General Joseph Ferguson will leave his post as the city’s watchdog in October after running into a brick wall of opposition from Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the Chicago City Council during the final 18 months of his term in office.

The roadblocks preventing a new deal between the police union and city officials are unchanged since the contract expired on June 30, 2017 — and both sides are dug in and unwilling to compromise.

Aldermen are poised to settle a lawsuit alleging that four paramedics were sexually harassed by fellow members of the Chicago Fire Department — three by the same person — and another was retaliated against for reporting that she had been harassed.

A joint session of the City Council’s Public Safety and Finance committees declined to advance the measure backed by Mayor Lori Lightfoot and blasted by Inspector General Joseph Ferguson and other transparency advocates as nothing more than “smoke and mirrors.”

Independent journalist Jamie Kalven called the revised plan for the database “nothing more an exercise in smoke and mirrors.” The city's watchdog hammered the plan as “significantly smaller step, in scope and scale” than the one presented to aldermen in April.

Aldermen and Mayor Lori Lightfoot have agreed to create a database of police misconduct files dating back to 2000, an effort championed by Inspector General Joseph Ferguson as a way to start restoring Chicagoans’ trust in officers, Ald. Scott Waguespack has told WTTW News.

Just 3.5% of the approximately 5,500 residential search warrants served by Chicago police officers between 2017 and 2020 targeted white Chicagoans, according to a new report from the inspector general’s office.