CHICAGO (CN) — The Circuit Court of Cook County handed Chicago progressives and police reform advocates a partial defeat on Thursday, siding in large part with the city's police union in a long running legal fight over the issue of police discipline.
The ruling by Judge Michael Mullen specifies that Chicago police facing dismissal or suspension of more than a year can take their case to labor arbitration. For decades, those severe misconduct cases have been handled publicly by the city's police board. Mayor Brandon Johnson and progressive city councilors have fought for months to keep it that way, but Mullen's decision largely scraps their efforts.
"The City of Chicago is required... to offer any police officer, who is protesting a suspension in excess of 365 days or separation, with the option to present any grievances to final and binding arbitration instead of having the Chicago Police Board decide the disciplinary action," Mullen wrote in his ruling, stipulating that it applies to any officer charged on or after Sept. 14, 2022.
As a consolation prize, Mullen ruled that any arbitration hearings for officers facing a year-long suspension or termination should be open to the public. The Fraternal Order of Police had hoped to keep those arbitration proceedings private.
"It is clear that accountability and transparency is a well-defined and dominant public policy of the state of Illinois," Mullen wrote. "The restriction of public access to arbitrations for serious police discipline is in direct contravention of the well-defined and dominant public policy of accountability and transparency of the government services in general and the Chicago Police Department specifically."
Mullen's ruling was the latest development in a lawsuit the union filed against the city in January, itself part of a longer struggle between the police union and city hall. The issue more broadly stems from labor negotiations between the city and the Fraternal Order of Police to implement a successor to the union's 2012-2017 collective bargaining agreement.
While the city council has already ratified many elements of a successor contract that stretches to 2027, including an increase to planned raises and a signing bonus for new officers, talks over the issue of police discipline have been at an impasse since 2017.
An independent Illinois labor arbitrator named Edwin Benn has issued multiple rulings on the side of the union since last year, culminating in a final award last October that found Chicago police have a right to private arbitration under the 1984 Illinois Public Labor Relations Act. The city council voted his decision down in December.
Benn issued another award, largely echoing his October decision, in January. The following month the city council rejected that one, too.
Opponents to Benn's rulings, which besides the mayor and progressive city council members include other labor arbitrators, have argued that to allow the worst police misconduct to go to private arbitration would be a step backyard for the city's ongoing police reform efforts.
The Chicago Police Department is in the process of enacting federal court-ordered reforms amid a history of officers committing crimes ranging from racial profiling and witness intimidation to torture and outright murder. Shunting the most heinous misconduct cases "behind closed doors," reform advocates have argued, will damage transparency and public trust in an institution whose legitimacy has been heavily scrutinized since before the nationwide 2020 protests against police brutality and over-funding.
"All of you know my story very well. If arbitration was an issue, my story would have been swept under the rug," Chicago local Anjanette Young said in a workforce committee hearing on the issue this past December.
Young won a $2.9 million settlement from the city in 2021 over a botched police raid on her home in 2019 and has since become a high-profile police critic.
Benn acknowledged in his filings the moral opposition that Young and many city council members had to private arbitration for the worst police offender. But he argued those concerns were secondary to upholding state law, which he accused the city council of flaunting.
“Adherence to the rule of law is not a request or a cafeteria selection process for the city to choose which state of Illinois laws should apply and which should not," Benn wrote in his January decision. "Compliance with the rule of law is an obligation."
But opponents of the push for private arbitration fired back. Labor arbitrator Cicely Porter-Adams said Benn's rulings prioritized private interest over public good. Calling the insistence on private arbitration hearings "nonsense" in a dissent to Benn's October award, she said public accountability was paramount for Chicagoans suspicious of the police.
"It is not sufficient for an arbitrator to say: trust me. Absolutely no good can come from a situation where the disciplinary process refuses to acknowledge this reality," Porter-Adams wrote in her dissent. "For our part, the City stands willing to present our disciplinary cases in the bright light of day."
Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7 President John Catanzara, who has become famous in Chicago as a conservative, pro-police firebrand, threatened the city council with legal action in December for voting down Benn's decision. The union made good on that threat in early January, after which Mullen issued an order that paused all of Chicago’s current police misconduct proceedings pending another council vote on the arbitration issue.
When the city council again voted against private arbitration in February, Catanzara told reporters that he would personally fight against Mayor Johnson's reelection bid.
"He has just made himself public enemy number one in 2027,” the union president said.
Both the union and city presented arguments to Mullen on Wednesday over the police union's lawsuit, and the county judge indicated at that hearing that he would hand down a decision before the end of the week. But even before he issued his ruling on Thursday, Mullen expected it would not be the end of the dispute.
"Is this the end of it? I don't think so," Mullen said Wednesday.
Neither the city nor union leadership responded to requests for comment on Mullen's ruling. As of Thursday afternoon there are no publicly available records of the city filing an appeal of Mullen's decision.
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