It could be true that eight Chicago police officers didn’t know the Oath Keepers were a far-right anti-government militia when they joined the group.
Maybe none “had intentions of joining a violent extremist group,” as the Chicago Police Department’s Bureau of Internal Affairs Deputy Director Timothy Moore concluded in his investigation.
But we agree with Inspector General Deborah Witzburg, who wanted the police department to take another look. In our view, failing to do so makes the top brass look like they are blowing this off.
The city is hurled into a grim “Groundhog Day” loop. The inspector general’s office has pushed the police department, going back to former Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s tenure, to reopen investigations into officers’ ties to far-right groups. For the most part, the inspector general has been shut down.
The police department has reassessed some findings, which yielded disciplinary action against one officer.
But the recent denial to reexamine the allegations against the eight officers only weakens the already threadbare trust between police and most residents who don’t want our diverse city’s officers aligned with a group that played an instrumental role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
The police department has very little to lose if it reopens the investigation of the officers in question. Why not follow through with Witzburg’s request and clearly address the “deficiencies” she outlines?
One problem, according to Witzburg, was an attorney heard feeding answers to a detective and officer during recorded internal affairs interviews, WBEZ’s Dan Mihalopoulos and the Sun-Times’ Tom Schuba reported.
If Witzburg is at her wit’s end, we don’t blame her. Not only has the police department’s top brass “fallen short” of its supposed zero tolerance policy for extremist cops, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration hasn’t established a City Hall task force to address the problem of extremism within the police department’s ranks, as she recommended.
When Michael Fanone, the former Washington, D.C., cop who nearly lost his life during the Capitol attack, wrote about local officers being insurrection sympathizers in his 2022 book, top police officials there didn’t seem too bothered.
“They did not take it seriously at all,” Fanone told Politico last year.
Chicago police, and the city, appear to be doing the same.
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