Acknowledging that misconduct by city employees merely confirms the public’s “dim view of government,” Inspector General Joe Ferguson issued a quarterly report on Tuesday filled with more of the same.
The transgressions run the gamut — from sexual misconduct, criminal theft, solicitation of bribes and misappropriation of funds to time fraud and disclosure of sensitive law enforcement information by a police communications officer at Chicago’s 911 emergency center.
The 911 center case is among the most troubling, particularly for a city struggling to rebuild shattered trust between citizens and police needed to bolster the Chicago Police Department’s dismal homicide clearance rate.
The on-duty police communications operator, whom Ferguson refused to identify, “knowingly disseminated confidential, operationally sensitive information” received during a 911 call, the report states.
“The PCO received a 911 call regarding a woman who allegedly placed a gun in the trunk of her car. The PCO then, using a personal cell phone, communicated that information to the PCO’s daughter, who called the woman in question alerting her to the police’s arrival,” the report states.
“In addition, the PCO did not send the 911 call to dispatch until the PCO’s daughter contacted the subject of the call and called the PCO back, thus purposely delaying the provision of highly-relevant information to CPD, which responded to the call without knowledge that the matter was compromised by the unauthorized disclosure.”
Ferguson recommended that the police communications officer be fired and placed on a do-not-hire list, but the officer quit — jumping to avoid being pushed.
The sexual misconduct allegations are equally troubling at a time when the City Council has strengthened Chicago’s sexual harassment ordinance five times in six months to drive home to city employees the powerful message of the #MeToo movement.
An employee of the city’s Department of Fleet and Facilities Management “on multiple occasions used a personal cell phone to record the employee masturbating while on-duty at a city facility,” then sent the videos to a teenager the employee had met on Facebook.
The same employee, who has since been fired, also twice used a personal cell phone at a city workplace on city time to take a photo “in which the employee’s genitals were exposed and sent” to the same teenager.
That wasn’t the only worker accused of such behavior.
A unidentified clerk in the city’s Department of Planning and Development “accessed 356 pornographic images and videos on two city computers” and used the internet to “search for and view images of nude men and women in various sexual positions while at work,” the report states.
Somewhat surprisingly, the clerk used his or her “own unique user ID’s and passwords” to access those illicit materials, Ferguson said. The same clerk, who has since resigned, also made “inappropriate comments to customers on three occasions by referencing sexual terms,” he said.
A now-terminated parking enforcement officer was nailed for soliciting cash bribes in exchange for deleting parking tickets on three separate occasions, and receiving money in two of those instances. (In the third case, the officer took the cash and still issued the ticket.)
A support services coordinator for the Department of Family and Support Services was slapped with a 29-day suspension for using a city computer, email account and phone to conduct “unauthorized work for the employee’s mother’s funeral home business.”
“In 2017, the employee, without authorization downloaded and accessed the Illinois Vital Records System on a work computer to submit death certificates to the funeral home,” the reports states. “The employee also received or sent approximately 55 emails related to [those records] to the funeral home from the employees’ email account.”
Yet another investigation targeted two Health Department employees supervising disease control investigators.
The two supervisors, who have since been slapped with 29-day suspensions, were accused of directing communicable disease control investigators to “add sex partner names to patient files when there was no apparent connection between the patients and the partners added.”
An administrative assistant at O’Hare Airport solicited money from a customer service agent who applied for an ID badge while working for a “ground-handling cargo company” at the airport. The same city employee “improperly terminated the agent’s badge two hours after the agent received it by making the badge stolen in the Department of Aviation system,” the report states.
An employee of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events was suspended for two weeks for failing to collect the application processing free for an event organized by an alderman and failing to collect processing fees for over 90 other special event permit applications last year. That resulted in “$32,200 in outstanding fees,” the report states.
The report makes no mention of whether any of the unnamed employees in the report were referred for potential prosecution or faced criminal charges.
In a cover letter to the mayor and aldermen, Ferguson acknowledged that the allegations come at a difficult time.
“Such matters are often viewed through a public lens jaundiced by the troubling fraying of behavioral norms by government actors and factionally-based fracturing of institutions of government, most particularly at the national level,” Ferguson wrote.
The findings “are readily processed as confirmation for those inclined to a dim view of government,” but that’s “as understandable as it is unfortunate,” the inspector general wrote.
“Our quarterly reports might be better understood as confirmation of a government that cares to be better, working diligently from within to improve.”
