Chicago Police Board: Remove Requirement That Police Complaints Must Be Truthful

Lori Lightfoot thinks that requiring complainants to swear to tell the truth is too burdensome.

Chicago Police Board: Remove Requirement That Police Complaints Must Be Truthful

Chicago – Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s civilian Police Board President, Lori Lightfoot, is pushing hard to make a major change to the Chicago police union’s contract. She wants to remove the requirement that complainants sign a statement which attests that they are telling the truth.

Currently, all people who file a complaint against Chicago police officers are required to sign a sworn affidavit that attests that their complaint is truthful, to the best of their knowledge. By swearing to tell the truth, the complainants could be prosecuted if it was determined that they intentionally fabricated false claims against a police officer. Civilian Police Board President Lori Lightfoot thinks that requiring people to swear to tell the truth is too burdensome of a requirement, and “that’s gotta change.”

Lightfoot believes that requiring that people swear to tell the truth is “a very big issue that stands in the way of legitimacy related to the investigation of citizens’ complaints.”

During a city council meeting on Wednesday, Lightfoot said, “When you have middle- to upper-middle-class black folks who are doctors, teachers, lawyers, professionals coming and talking about not being able to walk down their street, not being able to drive in a car in their neighborhood without getting stopped, and treated disrespectfully or feeling like they are under siege in their neighborhood, that’s a problem.”

These professionals allegedly believe that signing a form is too intimidating for them to actually make a complaint. Lightfoot suggests that “professionals” would never lie anyway, so there’s no reason for them to sign that they are telling the truth. Of course, the rules don’t just apply to professionals, they also apply to drug dealers and gangbangers with a bone to pick.

At the center of the issue here is the relatively low number of formal complaints against the heroes of Chicago PD. After all, according to the news media all cops must be violent racists who don’t care about civil rights, so it’s hard to believe that only a small number of Chicago PD’s 12,000 officers receive a formal complaint each year. Lori Lightfoot believes that the complaint filing system itself must be broken, and the answer is anonymous complaints against officers.

Even if it’s determined that an anonymous complaint about an officer cannot be proven, that complaint stays on the officer’s record. A large number of anonymous complaints generated by just one person against an officer could be detrimental to the officer’s career.

Do you think that when people make a statement, they should need to attest that they are telling the truth? Let us know in the article comments here or on our Facebook page.