Four Chicago Cops Were Responsible For 200 Internal Affairs Complaints in a Five Year Period

A Freedom
of Information request by the Chicago Tribune has yielded
a list of officers who collected at least 11 complaints each
between 2001 and 2006, when a scandal over how corrupt the Special
Operations Sections (SOS) of the Chicago Police Department (CPD)
broke. The Tribune
reports:

Four Chicago police officers from a unit at the center of one of
the worst misconduct scandals in department history amassed 200
complaints in the years leading up to revelations that they were
repeatedly abusing and robbing citizens, according to City of
Chicago documents made available this week to the Tribune.

The officers included former cops Jerome Finnigan and Keith
Herrera of the now-defunct Special Operations Sections. They racked
up 105 complaints against them to Internal Affairs from 2001
through 2006 – the period during which the officers took part in
robberies, illegal traffic stops and illegal searches of the homes
of suspected drug dealers and other citizens.

Finnigan was sentenced
to 12 years in jail in 2011 for plotting to kill another cop, while
in 2012 Herrera was
sentenced to two months for participating in three robberies
with SOS. Before being convicted, but after being charged, Herrera
insisted he and the other “special ops” members of the CPD were
just doing their job, which he says was described as getting guns
and drugs off the street “at any
cost.”

Craig Futterman, a professor at the University of Chicago’s law
school who was involved in the litigation that spurred the creation
of the list,  says it’s evidence that the CPD could’ve clued
itself in to the corruption at SOS before 2006. Futterman also
insists not every cop on the list (which includes only cops who
have had at least 11 complaints in five years filed against them)
was a “bad cop.”

Since 2004 Chicago has spent an average of
$1 million a week settling and otherwise handling lawsuits
against the CPD.