Chicago police to disband unit under investigation

CHICAGO -- The Chicago Police Department will disband an elite drug and gang unit under state and federal investigation for allegations ranging from armed violence and home invasion to kidnapping and plotting a murder-for-hire, officials said Tuesday.

"The recent incidents involving officer misconduct have been disheartening and demoralizing, especially to the officers who serve this department honorably every single day," interim Police Superintendent Dana Starks said.

Seven members of the Special Operations Section have been charged with belonging to a rogue band of officers who used their badges to shake down residents and intimidate people. All have pleaded not guilty.

One of those officers, Jerome Finnigan, was charged two weeks ago with plotting to hire someone to murder of another member of the unit to keep him from talking to the government.

Starks said the SOS will be reorganized and all specialized units -- including SWAT teams, the helicopter unit and mounted patrol -- will be organized under one unit and closely supervised.

"We cannot monitor every single police officer's behavior," Starks said. "But we can enforce accountability measures combined with a disciplinary process to demand that members at supervisory levels are held accountable. I am confident that this is a positive step forward."

More officers will be assigned to an internal affairs division to monitor citizen complaints more closely and to make unannounced audits at districts, Starks said.

Also last month, the department stripped three members of the unit of their badges and assigned to desk work after surveillance camera video at a bar contradicted officers' version of a search and arrests there.

Officers said in a police report that they searched Reymundo Martinez outside the bar in March 2004 because he was drinking on a public street, and arrested him when they found a plastic bag of cocaine sticking out of his sleeve.

But video from inside and outside the bar, obtained by the Chicago Tribune, showed more than two dozen SOS members raiding the bar and searching everyone, and showed them arresting Martinez inside.

Tuesday's announcement is the latest chapter in what has been one of the most difficult periods in the department's history.

Since July of last year when special prosecutors released a study that determined Chicago police beat, kicked and shocked black suspects in the 1970s and 1980s to get confessions, there have been a series of embarrassing incidents involving officers.

In March, for example, department veteran Anthony Abbate was charged with beating a female bartender after a surveillance camera video of the incident was shown around the world. Allegations soon followed that another group of off-duty officers beat up four businessmen in a bar -- an incident that led to charges against three of them. Abbate and the other officers have all pleaded not guilty.

Amid the controversy, Police Superintendent Phil Cline announced his retirement, and the Rev. AL Sharpton opened a local branch of his National Action Network. And just days ago the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. said that he would spend a night in a South Side public housing complex after hearing complaints from several residents and visitors that police are harassing them.

University of Chicago law professor Craig Futterman said the police department's announcement was not a surprise and was an attempt to fix public perception of the police department.

But he worries that "bad apple" officers will still exist.

"A Band-Aid isn't going to cure a broken system," he said. "You're just putting the same officers in other units ... transfer them and make them somebody else's problem."

Locke Bowman, legal director of Northwestern University's MacArthur Justice Center and a vocal critic of the department, said disbanding the unit was overdue -- and necessary.

"Because one sees as an observer that where misconduct becomes a part of the culture it proliferates geometrically," he said.

The Rev. Ira Acree, pastor of the Greater St. John Bible Church and a local activist, applauded Tuesday's announcement as a long overdue "step in the right direction."

"This is a big deal for our community," he said. "We feel there is hope in restoring police and community relations."