Did Police Board Ruling Include A Secret Message To Chicago Cops?

When Chicago Police Board members last week voted to fire three cops for violating Rule 14 — a little-known provision in the police disciplinary code related to making false statements — their shocking decision gave decent, honest, hardworking Chicago cops reason to celebrate.

Now, I haven't talked to any of those cops recently, but I know they're out there.

And somewhere, maybe not at a well-known cop bar, but somewhere, they wish they were toasting to the end of a longstanding police department tradition that all but forced them to “get your story straight” to protect dishonest colleagues whether they wanted to or not.

I started writing about Rule 14 in 2013, years before former police officer Jason Van Dyke fired every bullet in his gun at Laquan McDonald until the black teenager was dead.

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Former DNAinfo.com reporter Quinn Ford and I decided that rather than documenting lies told to cover-up the worst police brutality — stories that often made big news — we’d shine a light on made up narratives, false reports or lies cops told to cover up their actions or to back up the lies of fellow cops in everyday encounters with regular folks.

The four-part series detailed the lies cops told about throwing a bag of dog excrement on a neighbor's front porch, planting drugs, shooting an unarmed teenager, aggressively flirting with twin sisters at a Walgreens, and accidentally discharging pepper spray at a River North steakhouse, to name a few.

The phrase — "get your story straight" — is code among officers that signals “an expectation to fall in line with the narrative of an event, even if it differs from what you actually saw,” according to an officer who told me about the practice in 2013 and asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation.

I’d like to think that officer is sipping a cold one celebrating the police board decision to fire officers Ricardo Viramontes, Janet Mondragon and Sgt. Stephen Franco for violating Rule 14 as part of what the Tribune described as the “alleged cover-up” of McDonald’s murder.

And maybe that same cop, like me and a dissenting minority of police board members, is dumbfounded that officer Daphne Sebastian got fired for other acts of misconduct but was deemed “not guilty” of violating Rule 14, even though she “misled those investigating the shooting by consciously omitting key facts from her account” of the moments leading up to McDonald’s murder.

It's hard to tell why a majority of police board members decided Sebastian’s conscious omissions of key facts were “insufficient, in this case to constitute a violation of Rule 14." But it is the kind of backwards logic that Chicagoans have come to expect from police board decisions when it comes to punishing cops for telling lies and filing false reports.

In police departments in other parts of the country, Rule 14 is known as a “career killer.” The Boston Police Department has a saying about Rule 14: “You lie, you die.” And in Chicago, the former Independent Police Review Authority boss, Scott Ando, told me in 2013 that he gave every police recruit a warning — “If you lie, you’re done.”

The thing is Ando’s warning didn’t mean much. Cops had no real reason to fear getting fired for filing false reports because it almost never happened. DNAinfo.com’s probe of Rule 14 cases found that IPRA recommended firing only 55 percent of officers found guilty of making false statements or filing false reports.

And the police board didn’t terminate a single one of them.

Last week's police board decision to fire four cops might have signaled those days are over, if not for the ruling that Sebastian's omitted "key facts" were "insufficient" lies to find her guilty of violating Rule 14.

It's the kind of decision that makes a guy scratch his head, like the Cook County jury ruling that officer Van Dyke was guilty of second-degree murder, but innocent of official misconduct. It could be enough to make some people wonder if the ruling on Sebastian was actually a signal to rank-and-file officers that they shouldn't worry about getting fired for filing false reports or telling lies, so long as they're not fibbing about, say, a brutal shooting murder of a black teenager that goes viral on the internet, leads to a U.S. Department of Justice investigation , lands an on-duty cop in prison, and is the subject matter of feature film on Showtime.*

That's why I was grateful that four police board members — board president Ghian Foreman, the executive director of the Greater Southwest Development Corporation, vice president Paula Wolff, director of the Illinois Justice Project, Winston and Strawn partner Steve Flores and the Rev. Michael Eaddy of People’s Church of the Harvest — included a message to any honest officer who might feel pressure to cover for crooked colleagues in the 55-page decision.

The dissenters' statement didn’t make it into the news stories that I read about last week’s four-cop firing. So, if you missed it, here it is:

“We wish to make clear through this dissent that the Board’s goal is to impress upon members the Department of the importance of telling the complete truth inclusive of the relevant circumstances and context. The Board regards a Rule 14 violation among the most significant actions to be judged by the Board. An officer’s responsibility to tell the truth is at the heart of Rule 14 and at the heart of community trust in the police.”

I took that to mean: “If you lie, you’re done” is the word, at least as far as they're concerned.

I wonder if I'm right about that.

At the same time, I wonder whether an even stronger message would be sent if the police board were to fire some cops for lies that get told during everyday encounters with regular folks.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting and Emmy-nominated producer, was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN. * He was a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary "16 Shots."