Probe Of Chicago Top Cop Shouldn't End With His Early Retirement

CHICAGO — Chicago Police Supt. Eddie Johnson casually let reporters in on a little secret Monday during a break at City Hall budget hearings.

“I’ve been toying with [retirement] for some time,” Johnson said.

Rest assured, Chicago’s top cop said, his retirement talk doesn’t have anything to do with the ongoing investigation into what happened the night beat cops found Johnson slumped over behind the wheel of his police vehicle, car still running at a stop sign.

Johnson said it occurred to him that it might be time to retire during the Bears game in London.

“That’s the first vacation like that that I’ve had since I became superintendent,” he said. “And I looked at my family. It made me realize how much of a sacrifice you make for your family when you take on positions like this. … That London trip really made me realize — especially for them — how much I’ve given to the city and how much I’ve taken away from them.”

Johnson isn’t worried about the IG investigation or the fact that he’d miss out on a pension sweetener if he held on to the $260,000 gig until April. He even said so, twice.

“It doesn’t matter to me. It really doesn’t,” Johnson said.

Chicago’s police superintendent loves his family so much that he’s willing to give up a big, fat pension to spend time with them.

Well, isn’t that heartwarming story?

But it does make a cynical guy wonder if it’s true.

After all, Johnson didn’t talk about retiring to spend more time with the family after he collapsed at a news conference in 2017. He didn’t mention riding off into the sunset after his son donated a kidney to spare him from a lifetime of dialysis.

It’s only now that Inspector General Joe Ferguson is investigating why the superintendent was driving after having a “couple drinks,” if the cops who found him cut him a break and whether there was a cover-up to protect their boss that Johnson started talking about creating a “different chapter” in his life.

Maybe you think that finding out if Johnson was driving under the influence or just resting his eyes at a stop sign isn’t a big deal in a city plagued by violence.

Maybe it doesn’t even matter to you if Johnson retires with the cloud of scandal hanging over his head.

That’s fine by me. Johnson’s stop-sign scandal isn’t about Johnson.

It’s about the promise he made after taking the top cop job to build "trust between the police and the people we serve. Trust between the rank-and-file and the command staff. Trust between police and elected officials and community leaders. And trust among police officers, who both must watch each other's back and hold each other to high standards.”

It's about whether Chicagoans should believe that the police department is ready for reform. And what’s at stake is the public trust in Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s pledge to reform a corrupt culture that gives officers an incentive to lie to cover for each other with near impunity.

Ultimately, whether Johnson sticks around to prove he didn’t rely on rank-and-file cops to give him a pass is up to him. Everyone should have the right to step down whenever they want. The problem is that too often a cop’s resignation is a police misconduct investigation killer. Without an employee to punish, there often isn’t much of an incentive for City Hall to push for the truth.

This case is different.

University of Chicago law professor Craig Futterman, who has studied Chicago police misconduct for nearly 20 years, said “fundamental issues of trust and the abuse of trust” are reason enough for the investigation to continue regardless of Johnson’s employment status.

“The same underlying systems and conditions that allowed Jason Van Dyke to do what he did, allowed Jerry Finnegan and his crew to do what they did and allowed Jon Burge and his crew back then do what they did, still exist. And we still haven’t fundamentally addressed the reflexive machinery of denial that operates every time an officer is accused of doing something wrong or using force,” Futterman said.

“What’s underlying here is you have the same system for covering up the big, small and everything in between. That’s the problem. Did that same system potentially come to [Johnson’s] aid? It may have. Again, I don’t know enough about what happened, yet. But it wouldn’t surprise me.”

Johnson stuck to a proven script that has effectively kept details of police misconduct allegations secret for generations. He called on his hand-picked deputy chief of internal affairs to launch an investigation into his late-night drive home, effectively ensuring that details of the incident wouldn’t be released to the public. He has refused to answer questions saying that doing so might taint the investigation. Now, he’s hinting that he might retire before the public finds out what happens.

Lightfoot has refused to talk about the investigation. She even defended Johnson as a public servant who made tremendous sacrifices, but I hope that doesn’t cloud her judgement. She campaigned on promises to reform the police department and the culture of corruption in City Hall by “bringing accountability, oversight and transparency to city government.”

Futterman, a levelheaded guy who knows how the police department works, says he might have too much sympathy for Johnson, but that shouldn't overshadow the greater public policy issue at hand.

“If this investigation could raise fundamental issues of trust and abuse of trust,” he said, “then the investigation should still go forward.”

Chicagoans with trust issues deserve to know the truth.

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."

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