Chicago Inspector General Deborah Witzburg speaks at a City Club of Chicago luncheon at Maggiano’s Banquets last November.
Jim Vondruska/Sun-Times
Chicago’s top watchdog revealed Monday that she pushed to fire a police supervisor accused of lying to her office about a botched investigation into allegations of sexual assault against a fellow cop.
Details of the case were included in a quarterly report published by Inspector General Deborah Witzburg’s office that details serious misconduct investigations involving city workers. It was just one of several that found evidence of apparent police cover-ups.
Witzburg’s office reported that a police lieutenant who now faces dismissal “conducted an untimely and incomplete investigation” into allegations that a colleague sexually assaulted another person while working as a beat cop.
During the initial investigation, both police officials were sergeants working in the Bureau of Internal Affairs, the department’s office dedicated to conducting internal misconduct probes, the inspector general’s office said. Like other officials highlighted in the report, neither of them were named.
After initially working the case, the lieutenant paused the investigation from October 2012 until May 2018, according to the inspector general’s office. In an interview conducted “over five years after the last investigative activity,” the lieutenant asked the sergeant “complex, compound questions that allowed the sergeant to avoid addressing the alleged conduct.”
The lieutenant didn’t interview the sergeant’s partner and other “potentially significant witnesses,” and an investigative report “failed to account for evidence that weighed in favor of the alleged victim’s credibility.”
While the lieutenant told Witzburg’s office that the investigation was halted at the behest of a commander, the lieutenant never documented that order and the commander denied giving it.
The inspector general’s office found the lieutenant had violated a range of departmental rules, including a rule against making false reports. That prohibition is colloquially known as the “you lie, you die” rule because dismissal is considered the appropriate form of discipline.
However, the inspector general’s office reported last May that more than 100 current and former police officials were allowed to stay on the job for making false statements — a trend Witzburg said undermined the department’s integrity.
Her office recommended the lieutenant be fired and placed on a list of former city employees who can’t be rehired. The department concurred with the findings and asked the city’s Law Department to draft charges seeking to dismiss the lieutenant, according to inspector general’s office.
The quartery report, which covers the first three months of this year, also detailed the troubled response to a call involving a drunken, off-duty officer who “unlawfully and unnecessarily displayed a firearm in a rideshare vehicle.”
A sergeant ordered officers to shut off their body-worn cameras after learning the call involved a cop, and two officers failed to document the incident in any report. Perhaps most glaring, a former sergeant “wrote a false report that minimized the extent of the intoxicated officer’s misconduct, resulting in the officer receiving unduly light discipline,” Witzburg’s office said.
The inspector general’s office asked the department to reconsider the case, and the drunken cop was ultimately suspended for 25 days. The sergeant was suspended for 14 days, while the other officers were benched for seven days.
The retired sergeant was added to the city’s do-not-rehire list, Witzburg’s office said. Jeffrey Kriv, a former officer facing felony charges for repeatedly forging documents to get out of parking and traffic tickets, was also added to the list.
Another officer was suspended for 30 days for failing to arrest another city employee who was found with a gun during a traffic stop.
The driver, an inspector with the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection, didn’t have a license to carry the gun in public, the inspector general’s office said. But when the officer learned the driver worked for the city, the officer deactivated a body camera, gave the gun back and let the driver go.
The officer didn’t complete the required reports and admitted to giving the driver special treatment, the inspector general’s office said.