Ronald Johnson's mother, Dorothy Holmes, speaks to media and activists at the site of her son's death last year. Photo by the author
When Lorenzo Davis arrived at the corner of 53rd Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive on October 12, 2014, he found a familiar scene: A black man had been shot and killed by a Chicago police officer, and detectives were running the show. So Davis, an investigative supervisor with Chicago's Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA), started working outside the crime tape, looking for nearby surveillance cameras that may have captured the incident—the fatal police shooting of 25-year-old Ronald "Ronnie-man" Johnson.
He knocked on doors in case anyone in the graystone apartments that line King Drive across from Washington Park had seen the shooting. Davis hoped to find people milling about the sad scene and to learn what they knew, what they saw, and what they heard. But he found no witnesses and no cameras.
So he waited.
With the announcement on Monday that the Department of Justice is launching an investigation into the Chicago Police Department, there has been much talk from federal, state and local officials about how CPD can and should change. The release of grisly dashcam footage of Johnson's killing on Monday only fanned the flames. But IPRA—where Davis worked following a 23-year career at the Chicago Police Department that ended with his retirement at the rank of commander—has been a virtual afterthought, despite being the body tasked with holding local cops accountable.
At a press conference two weeks ago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and since-resigned police Superintendent Garry McCarthy announced the creation of a new police accountability task force, essentially conceding at the agency wasn't doing its job.
"Since then," Davis said of police and the mayor, "they're staying away from talking about IPRA."
The IPRA plays an important, if somewhat vague and secretive, role in Chicago. Each time someone is shot by police, news stories end with, "the Independent Police Review Authority is investigating." But what does that mean? How, exactly, does an investigation work?
The agency does not make its internal policies public, as CPD does with many of its directives, so some in political, media and legal circles have a fuzzy understanding of the procedural work IPRA performs in the wake of an officer-involved shooting—or "OIS," in Chicago police jargon.
But Davis, who very publicly quit IPRA after he claimed former Chief Administrator Scott Ando told him to reverse his findings on three fatal police shootings, opened up to VICE about how the agency operates. (A request for comment from the agency was not returned.)
Davis was the investigative supervisor who worked Johnson's death last October, and his account of events that night not only shows what happened in the wake of the killing, but provides an inside look at just how hard it is to make bad cops pay in Chicago.
After canvassing the scene for witnesses to the shooting—and finding none—Davis says he followed detectives back to the District 2 police station at 51st Street and Wentworth Avenue, where a march and protest over Johnson's death was held Monday night.
The cops at District 2 and other stations had an unofficial policy that IPRA investigators were not allowed to walk freely around the station, Davis told me. So he waited in an interrogation room for his chance to interview the two categories of witnesses—responding officers (or R/Os in police jargon) who saw the shooting, and civilian witnesses who might also have information regarding the incident.
"Sometimes you're waiting for six, seven hours," Davis said.
He had learned through his experience at the agency to ask cops to let him know when detectives and representatives from Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez's office were finished with their interviews. That night in District 2, Davis recalls a familiar scenario: After waiting for hours for his chance to conduct interviews, he finally asked an officer whether the witnesses were available.
"Oh, some of them already left," Davis remembers the cop saying.
This was not an uncommon practice, he claimed.
"They're sneaked out often," Davis said of witnesses, "and you're told, 'Oh, well they went home.'"
Exacerbating Davis's struggles, witnesses were sometimes reluctant to speak with IPRA investigators after being interviewed by detectives and state's attorney representatives—whether because they were exhausted or feared getting wrapped up in the terrifying web of local law enforcement.
"In one case," Davis recalled, "a witness left town after talking with detectives."
Read a first-person account of an alleged police beating in Chicago and its aftermath
After interviewing anyone they can get a hold of—and Davis insisted police sometimes do everything they can "just to give you a headache, just to harass you," said Davis—Chicago's independent investigators file a report back at IPRA headquarters.
That report goes to a supervisor, like Davis, who often performed the role both of primary investigator and supervisor, and then to IPRA's chief administrator. Until last week, that was Scott Ando, the former head of the Chicago office of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) who has deep ties to law enforcement in the city. Many in the activist community here, and Davis himself, have criticized Ando for being excessively pro-police and failing to objectively investigate officers involved in shootings and accused of wrongdoing.
After receiving a report on a police shooting, the agency's head then decides whether or not to pass the case onto Alvarez's office for possible criminal charges.
"In a typical case, the shooting officer would not be interviewed until after Alvarez made her decision," Davis told VICE.
For Dante Servin, the officer who fired out of a moving car and killed Rekia Boyd in 2012 and was acquitted in April, that interview with IPRA didn't come until years after the incident.
But there's another hindrance to IPRA investigators' ability to interview officers who kill civilians: The union that negotiates with the city and the Chicago Police Department on behalf of the roughly 12,000 police employees has a contract that stipulates officers must be given 24 hours before IPRA can interview them following a shooting.
Ando, according to Davis, extended that window even longer—out of "professional courtesy."
"But whatever (the shooting officer) tells us," Davis added, "would not be able to be used in a criminal case."
The information gleaned from an IPRA interview can only be used to make a recommendation to the police board—which is made up of civilians and politicians appointed by the mayor. In the case of Servin, IPRA recommended the cop be fired. The police board agreed, but the final decision on the firing of all police officers is up to the Department's superintendent.
With 90 days to make a decision, then-Superintendent McCarthy fired Servin before the deadline—but only after a judge ruled that the dashcam footage showing 17-year-old Laquan McDonald being shot 16 times by officer Jason Van Dyke must be released.
That ruling came on November 19, and set in motion a chain of events that continued on Monday with the announcement that the federal Department of Justice is launching an wide-ranging investigation into the Chicago Police Department.
Five days after the release of the McDonald video, under tremendous pressure, McCarthy announced he would fire Servin.
"It's all political," Davis said.
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