NBC Chicago has obtained email correspondence from top Emanuel aides which may present the mayor with some additional problems:
Top press aides Kelly Quinn and Adam Collins were also part of an e-mail chain on Feb. 10, 2015, which included an article by freelance reporter Jamie Kalven which first reported the autopsy results and wrote: “the account…given by police cannot be true.â€
McDonald family attorney Jeff Neslund warned the city in a letter to the Corporation Counsel’s office on March 6th of this year: “This case will undoubtedly bring a microscope of national attention to the shooting†and “the City’s pattern, practice and procedures.â€
The neverending chain of investigation, obfuscation, and obstruction could mean that some of the charges that should be forthcoming may never be filed for statute of limitations reasons.
Looking more into the background of Kalven, I found some interesting stuff.
“It was just about a year ago that a city whistleblower came to journalist Jamie Kalven and attorney Craig Futterman out of concern that Laquan McDonald’s shooting a few weeks earlier “wasn’t being vigorously investigated,†as Kalven recalls. The source told them “that there was a video and that it was horrific,†he said.”
Who would know about the video within that time-frame? Who would know that the event was not being “vigorously investigated”? Seems like it has to be someone within the Chicago PD or the IPRA.
Why did the whistleblower go to Kalven? I believe because he had previously refused to comply with a subpoena issued by the City for his notes from an article on police abuse that had given rise to a civil rights lawsuit against the City. Unfortunately, that suggests the whistleblower may not come forward.
To be continued . . .
Illinois FOIA law changed significantly about five years ago by expanding the scope and penalties. My impression is that government agencies did not appreciate these changes or ignored them.
After the civil rights complaint in my previous post settled, Kalven sought copies of some of the information that the civil-rights plaintiff was attempting to assemble for her case. Specifically, he wanted (1) the list of police officers with the most complaints (the so-called repeater lists), and (2) the documents related to completed investigations into allegations of misconduct against five officers. In 2014, the Illinois Appellate Court affirmed the trial court that these were not exempt from FOIA and had to be turned-over.
In December of 2014 after the whistleblower tip, Kalven publicly called for release of the McDonald videotape, at least on his website. I cannot tell how much it was distributed, but he claimed a bystander account from someone whose car was stopped by the drama gave a different account than the one distributed through the media.
Kalven peppers the story with his own background in winning an Appellate Court victory. However, he limits its impact:
“Last March, in Kalven v. Chicago, the Illinois Appellate Court held that documents bearing on allegations of police abuse are public information. Following the decision, the Emanuel administration adopted a new transparency policy that opened the police department to the people in historic ways. The Kalven decision is limited to closed police misconduct cases; it doesn’t cover ongoing investigations. Yet the public interest in the City’s investigation into a police shooting is far more intense at the time of the shooting than one or two years later when the case is closed and public attention has turned elsewhere.”
Unfortunately, Kalven is supporting the idea that the video did not need to be disclosed under existing law, so long as the investigation is not closed. He should have written that while the case did not directly deal with an open investigation, the principles in that decision apply and in any event, the Mayor’s transparency policy should not be bound by vagaries of law but by a commitment to the public interest.
It seems to me any cover-up began before the February e-mail, and that anybody doing research on the top centered on Kalven would feel legally justified to challenge the FOIA requests. Whether that was politically or ethically wise, would be another matter. With all of the focus on the video, I wonder if the original whistleblower and the eyewitness have been discovered.