He expected to find a “dirty police department.” Instead, he discovered a “dirty city.”
Anthony Driver Jr., president of the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, came to that jarring conclusion while conducting a fact-finding mission into Andrea Kersten, chief administrator of the Civilian Office for Police Accountability.
That preliminary inquiry — launched in response to an “avalanche” of complaints by COPA employees — could have triggered a no-confidence vote that set the stage for the City Council to fire Kersten. Instead, Kersten jumped to avoid being pushed.
What surprised and angered Driver, he said, were roadblocks put up by Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Law Department. City attorneys literally spent “three of four months defending Andrea Kersten,” who faces lawsuits from two former COPA employees and the police union.
The stalemate was resolved only after Driver’s panel insisted on hiring its own attorney.
“It’s not about defending our body. It’s about telling the truth. … I came into this role, God’s honest truth, expecting to find a dirty police department that needed to be cleaned up,” Driver told the Sun-Times.
“What I found was a dirty city — and every aspect of the city of Chicago touches the Chicago Police Department.”
Driver said he’s more than willing to hold CPD accountable for the painfully slow march toward the full compliance that will get the city out from under the costly constraints of a federal consent decree. That court oversight was put in place as a result of the 2014 police shooting of Laquan McDonald.
But CPD Supt. Larry Snelling, picked by the Driver-led panel, is not the main culprit for the slow pace of police reform, Driver said: “It’s the city of Chicago and all of the entities that support it that are failing right now.”
Driver hedged when asked whether Mayor Brandon Johnson is directly accountable for that systemic failure.
“I do think there’s more that the mayor can be doing. … [But] this happened under the last administration, too. … So it’s not just him. It is a systemic issue that is happening in city of Chicago. Our city government is not functioning properly,” Driver said.
Inspector General Deborah Witzburg has accused Johnson, and his predecessor Lori Lightfoot, of impeding the work of Chicago’s inspector general — by withholding documents, selectively enforcing subpoenas and demanding to have the Law Department sit in on interviews that “risk embarrassment” to the mayor.
Driver believes that’s precisely what happened while the civilian commission attempted to probe allegations from current and former COPA employees that Kersten had an “anti-police bias” and had fired whistleblowers who made those allegations.
The Law Department was standing in the way.
After finally being allowed its own attorney, the civilian commission sent a letter to Kersten outlining the case against her.
It made no mention of the anti-police bias alleged in lawsuits filed by the Fraternal Order of Police and two high-ranking COPA employees fired by Kersten.
Instead, it alleged Kersten fostered a toxic work environment and made inappropriate comments about the police shooting of Dexter Reed. The letter further alleged Kersten failed to both address troubling investigatory practices within COPA and identify patterns of police misconduct in the violence-plagued Harrison District, where Reed was shot and killed.
“We believe that COPA knew that there was a pattern of incidents in this district, particularly with [tactical] teams, over a year in advance. And they didn’t do anything about it,” Driver said.
“If you know that there’s an issue and you’re the oversight agency and you sit on that issue for over a year and then, a cop gets shot and somebody dies, then you go and play champion, I believe that’s very problematic.”
Kersten’s blistering, eight-page swan song sought to re-frame the narrative around her tenure after she became a punching bag for Snelling and the FOP.
She said the civilian commission had essentially become a kangaroo court and had fallen far short of proving that she had engaged in “gross misconduct or criminal conduct,” which is required to establish “just cause” for taking such a vote.
Driver’s panel is now conducting a nationwide search for Kersten’s replacement.
“This is not a system issue. This is a personnel issue. If the right leader is in place at COPA, I believe we have the right structure. So have to work our asses off and we have to be transparent,” he said.
“We have to be forthcoming with the public about what’s happening. We have to shine a light on all of this. And then, we have to find the right leader and we have to hold them accountable publicly.”