Weeks after Chicago’s police oversight chief learned she was facing a vote that could’ve led to her firing, she sent a scathing letter accusing a civilian-led commission of serving as a kangaroo court.
Andrea Kersten announced her resignation as chief administrator of the Civilian Office of Police Accountability on Feb. 13 — the same day she slammed the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability for conducting an “inherently unfair” inquiry into allegations of misconduct lodged by a group of current and former staffers.
CCPSA wrote to Kersten on Jan. 28, saying the commission was beginning a process that could’ve led to her ouster. After 30 days, or any time after she responded, CCPSA could take a no-confidence vote, Anthony Driver and Remel Terry, the panel’s president and vice president, wrote.
If they had the votes, it would’ve been left up to the City Council to remove her.
Instead, Kersten wrote an eight-page response that served as a blistering swan song and sought to re-frame the narrative around her tenure after she became a punching bag for Police Supt. Larry Snelling, the city’s largest police union and ultimately the commission that’s now conducting a nationwide search for her replacement.
Kersten said CCPSA had fallen far short of proving that she had engaged in “gross misconduct or criminal conduct,” as is required to establish “just cause” for taking such a vote. She also claimed she was denied due process, insisting that CCPSA provided “minimal information” about the accusations against her and refused to identify the employees who alleged wrongdoing.
“CCPSA’s admitted and inherent lack of tools, resources, and expertise to conduct this inquiry are now made plain by its failures to take the most basic investigative actions: a probe into the facts surrounding this allegation; interview any other members of COPA leadership who may have information; attempt to determine the actual truthfulness of these allegations; or educating itself on COPA operations as they relate to these allegations,” she wrote.
“These failures call into question CCPSA’s impartiality, motives, dedication to veracity, and basis for seeking the no-confidence vote.”
Driver scoffed at that assertion during an interview, saying “the commission’s process was thorough and complete.”
“The ordinance that created the CCPSA allows for several layers of due process,” Driver said. “By resigning, Chief Administrator Kersten opted out. Draw your conclusions from that.”
Kersten said, “I stand by the contents of my response and remain incredibly proud of the work that I contributed both as chief administrator and in my four years in the agency prior to that.”
Kersten and a COPA spokeswoman couldn’t be reached.
A list of grievances — roundly dismissed
Some of CCPSA’s core findings were tied to some of the most controversial investigations Kersten led: A probe into an unfounded rumor about a cop impregnating a migrant teenager and another targeting officers who got into a deadly gunfight with Dexter Reed.
CCPSA seized on Kersten’s comments and preliminary findings in the Reed case, including questions she raised about whether the officers were being truthful about the reason for the deadly traffic stop.
“While the Commission agrees with the need for transparency, the subsequent media tour that followed the video’s release called into question COPA’s judgment and impartiality in the investigation, directly jeopardizing COPA’s ability to fulfill its core mission to conduct just and fair investigations,” Driver and Terry wrote.
Kersten said her statements about the Reed shooting were “were grounded in sound public policy and my transparency mandates.”
She accused CCPSA of conflating her public statements about the shooting with her comments in a letter to Snelling, which was provided to the Chicago Sun-Times and other news outlets through public records requests. She noted that the letter included her opinion that the use of force was “unreasonable” and that the officers should be taken off the street pending COPA’s investigation.
She also stood by her other initial conclusions, including the assertion that “it was unrealistic that officers could have observed a seatbelt violation of Reed as a basis for the stop.”
In the unfounded migrant sex abuse case, CCPSA alleged that “off-the-record interviews” were conducted and COPA leaders directed staff not to take notes in an internal computer system. In another case, the commission alleged that leadership ordered an investigative note deleted.
CCPSA also alleged that Kersten fostered a toxic work environment that “raises concerns among some staff members about the quality and integrity of COPA decision-making.” And the panel alleged that Kersten wasn’t doing enough to proactively investigate “patterns of misconduct” within the police department.
Kersten flatly denied that she had done anything wrong and instead turned the focus back on CCPSA, a relatively new city body that’s still testing the lengths of its power.
She recalled the fallout from the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, whose death in a hail of bullets sparked a Department of Justice report that pushed the city to “create impartial, transparent, and effective internal and external oversight systems that will hold officers accountable.” The city remains under a federal consent decree demanding sweeping reforms in the wake of the shooting.
“Now that a chief administrator has finally begun fulfilling these mandates that became enshrined in the consent decree — to do the hard things that the city asked of it — CCPSA has apparently decided that it wishes that COPA and the city’s accountability system retreat from this reform pathway,” Kersten said.
“CCPSA has rendered one of the hardest jobs in city government even more difficult.”