Chicago Cops Balking At Reporting Vaccination Status Have Rights

CHICAGO — The way I see it, cops have a right to be angry that Mayor Lori Lightfoot is yanking their police powers, confiscating their badges and service weapons and putting a brick on their paychecks for not reporting their coronavirus vaccination status.

That's not the Chicago Way. Mayors aren't supposed to punish the police in this town.

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That goes against the life's work of generations of Democratic Machine power brokers responsible for artfully crafting the crooked system of state laws and union contract provisions to prevent cops from being punished for committing acts of police misconduct.

I believe that's what 20-year veteran police officer Elizabeth Alaniz was taking about when she told NBC5, "We have a process that needs to go through our union, and this is not being met."

She's absolutely right. I've written stories about Chicago cops keeping their badges and guns after getting caught lying and filing false reports, planting drugs, shooting an unarmed black teenager, covering up for a top cop's boozy traffic stop and intentionally destroying dashcam audio devices.

Cops are supposed to be untouchable heroes in our town, even the dirty ones. If you don't believe me, go to a cop bar in Mt. Greenwood or Edison Park and one of them might tell you himself.

To me, the only thing more dumbfounding than the fact that Mayor Lori Lightfoot is getting away with it, is that Chicago leaders have refused to cull the herd of insubordinate police officers by treating badge-wearing rule-breakers like a goldbricking city worker that doesn't have clout at City Hall.

So far, about 33-percent of Chicago cops are at risk of losing their jobs for refusing to confess whether they secretly got jabbed with vaccine shots that save lives. Some folks have argued that cops refusing to get vaccinated is as ridiculous as not wearing a bulletproof vest while patrolling the West Side. I completely disagree. Vaccine mandate scofflaws in the police department are fighting for something bigger than their own safety.

They're battling to preserve what's left of the rigged rules and laws that for generations have kept corrupt cops on the street — and collecting their pensions — no matter what they do. In Chicago, a cop's right to work, and retirement benefits are supposed to be sacred, even if they get confessions from an innocent Black man by clipping his testicles to a car battery, for instance.

“The collective bargaining agreement has always been at the heart of this,” Fraternal Order of Police boss John Catanzara said.

Officer Alaniz, a member of the police department's extradition unit, told NBC5 she's worried.

“These are rights that our union is fighting for, and if we let them take this from us, what else will they take away?” she said.

The standoff with City Hall, Alaniz says, is "emotional for everyone."

I totally understand where she's coming from.

Chicago cops like her have rights … to get a job somewhere else.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docuseries on CNN and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary "16 Shots."

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