Why Does the Chicago Police Department Tolerate Abusive Racists in Its Ranks?

I first encountered officer Raymond Piwnicki in the summer of 2001. At the time, the citywide demolition of high-rise public housing was gathering momentum in Chicago. Having recently regained control of the Chicago Housing Authority after a period of federal receivership, the administration of Mayor Richard M. Daley was making a concerted effort to replace its high-rise public housing developments with “mixed income communities.” Among its first actions was to disband the CHA police force, established a decade earlier by the housing authority in an effort to offset the Chicago Police Department’s neglect of its tenants. That, in turn, required beefing up the CPD’s Public Housing Section. While the public housing unit was ramping up, members of the Special Operations Section — an elite unit charged with rooting out, as Daley often put it, “gangs, drugs, and guns” — were deployed to public housing developments. Piwnicki was among them.

The heat in Chicago on July 9, 2001, was blistering. At the Stateway Gardens public housing development, it was the sort of midsummer day that draws tenants and their children outside in hopes of catching a breeze. As adviser to the resident leadership at Stateway, I worked out of an office on the ground floor of a high-rise on South State Street with a small team of residents known as the Neighborhood Conservation Corps. One of our projects — a collaboration with professor Craig Futterman and law students from the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic of the University of Chicago Law School — was to monitor police performance in an effort to improve police-community relations. That afternoon, we were meeting with Futterman and two of his students to discuss an incident that had occurred a few months earlier.

Kenya Richmond, one of my colleagues, had witnessed white officers in a police vehicle strike a young Black man they were pursuing outside our State Street office. Richmond attempted to document the incident. The officers responded by arresting him on false charges, destroying his notes, and subjecting him to racist invective. En route to the police station, they told him to stay out of their way — “Who the fuck do you think you are?” — and called him “a fucking monkey” and “a fucking nigger.” The officers involved in the incident were members of the Special Operations Section, or SOS. When they failed to appear in court, the judge dismissed the criminal charges against Richmond. We were meeting on July 9 to prepare a civil lawsuit.

Our meeting was interrupted by a commotion outside. When we emerged on State Street, we found a middle-aged Black man — his name proved to be Nevles Traylor — pinned under a police car. He was moaning in pain and distress. Within a few minutes, the two white SOS officers were surrounded by a curious and then increasingly angry crowd of roughly a hundred residents. The officers’ names, we later learned, were Raymond Piwnicki and Robert Smith.

We fanned out through the crowd and set to work documenting the incident. According to multiple witnesses, Traylor had been riding a bicycle across the grounds of the development. Piwnicki, who was driving the squad car, had deliberately struck his bike from behind, pinning him against a fence. Piwnicki had then jumped out of the vehicle and repeatedly struck Traylor in the head.

Among the witnesses were several Black officers from the public housing unit. I spoke with one who was as outraged by what she had witnessed as any of the residents. Another exchanged sharp words with Piwnicki, then used wire cutters to cut through the fence and extricate Traylor from under the police car.

An ambulance arrived and Traylor, having been handcuffed by the SOS officers, was taken to the hospital. As the ambulance drove off, a television news crew drove by, assessed the situation, then, apparently realizing they had missed the “when it bleeds, it leads” moment, drove on.

Traylor was charged with two counts of possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver, felonies that would require, if he was convicted, a mandatory minimum sentence of four years and would allow a maximum sentence of 15 years. Unable to make bond while awaiting trial, he remained in jail for four months.

The Mandel Legal Aid Clinic represented Traylor in his criminal case and later brought a federal civil rights suit against Piwnicki and Smith. In the criminal case, the officers testified that they had observed Traylor engage in a hand-to-hand drug transaction and had undertaken pursuit in the course of which he had fallen off his bicycle. They also claimed that they had found no money from the drug transaction on his person because he had flung it away during his flight. The defense demonstrated that it was physically impossible to see what the officers claimed to have seen from the location a block away where they placed themselves. (As a witness for Traylor, I testified on that point.) They argued that the officers struck Traylor with their vehicle to amuse themselves, then fabricated evidence and falsely arrested him to cover their abuse.

The judge found that Piwnicki and Smith arrested Traylor without probable cause, in violation of his constitutional rights, and dismissed all charges. The subsequent civil suit was settled in 2003.

On the day of the incident, a complaint was filed on Traylor’s behalf with the Office of Professional Standards, which at that time was the agency within the police department that investigated police shootings and citizen complaints of excessive force. As chance would have it, the OPS office was less than a block away from the site of the incident. Yet the investigator made no effort to interview any of the scores of witnesses to the incident. Nor did he interview the accused officers. On the basis of an interview with Traylor, his medical records, and written statements from Piwnicki and Smith denying the allegations, he made a finding of “not sustained” “due to lack of evidence to either prove or disprove” the alleged misconduct. After the judge ruled in the criminal case that Piwnicki and Smith had violated Traylor’s constitutional rights, OPS saw no need to reopen its investigation.

Racism as Sport

In 2006, the SOS unit imploded in scandal. Not surprisingly, in view of the quality of the Traylor investigation, OPS played no role in exposing the criminal activity within the unit. Rather, investigations were initiated by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office and later pursued by the U.S. attorney, after it became apparent that SOS officers were consistently failing to appear to testify in drug cases.

The investigations exposed a robbery and home invasion ring within SOS: A group of officers had begun by shaking down drug dealers, then graduated to robbery, extortion, and kidnapping of anyone likely to have cash on hand.

Ultimately, 11 officers were convicted. Jerome Finnigan, the reputed ringleader (and one of the officers who abused Richmond), was given a 12-year sentence for crimes that included soliciting the murder of another SOS officer whom he believed would testify against him. And the city has paid out millions of dollars in settlements and awards in civil suits brought by victims of the rogue SOS officers.

The political fallout from the scandal was intense. Together with other high-profile police misconduct cases at the time, it generated a serious crisis for Daley, who responded by forcing the resignation of his police superintendent, disbanding the SOS unit, and replacing OPS with a new investigative agency: the Independent Police Review Authority.

The true mission of OPS — to protect officers from discipline while maintaining the illusion that there was a system in place to investigate misconduct complaints — was made clear when it was revealed that an extraordinary number of citizen complaints accused Finnigan and his co-conspirators of precisely the forms of criminal activity for which they were ultimately convicted, yet they had virtually never been disciplined.

Finnigan is near the top of the list of CPD officers with the most citizen complaints. Also high on that list is Piwnicki. The difference is that Finnigan went to prison for his transgressions, while Piwnicki remains on the force. His career was not affected by the SOS scandal, for most of the citizen complaints against him allege not corruption, but racist abuse — something which the accountability system, then and now, largely ignores.

That is not to say that Finnigan and his cohort of rogue SOS officers were not deeply racist. Their racism was apparent in their selection of victims: Black and brown residents of low-income neighborhoods rendered vulnerable and presumptively not credible due to the criminalization of their communities by the war on drugs — a war in which the SOS unit served as shock troops. And it was apparent in their fluency with racial invective such as they as inflicted on Richmond and many others. (I once heard an SOS officer, making a routine announcement about a traffic matter over the loudspeaker of his vehicle, address the residents of Stateway Gardens this way: “Listen, you hood rats.”)

Yet it was not their overt racism that brought down the SOS officers. Nor is that how their crimes are categorized. Their racism only made news as a coda to the scandal, when some nine years into Finnigan’s incarceration, a photograph became public in court documents that had been taken in a police station in 2003 or thereabouts. It shows Finnigan and Timothy McDermott, another member of SOS, holding rifles while kneeling over a Black man with antlers on his head and his tongue hanging out — their hunting trophy.

The photo provides a glimpse of something at once fundamental and elusive: the practice within the CPD of racism as sport. Officers so disposed have enjoyed license to toy with Black and brown Chicagoans. The performance of racial contempt is not incidental to some other purpose. It’s the point of the exercise, an end in itself, a perverse source of pleasure.

The U.S. Department of Justice report on its investigation of the CPD, undertaken in the wake of the police murder of Laquan McDonald, speaks to the failure of the department to identify and discipline patterns of racist behavior: “We have serious concerns about the prevalence of racially discriminatory conduct by some CPD officers and the degree to which that conduct is tolerated and, in some respects, caused by deficiencies in CPD’s systems of training, supervision and accountability.”

The report notes elsewhere that the sort of racist mindset reflected in the Finnigan hunting trophy photograph “has desensitized many officers from the humanity of the people of color they serve, setting the stage for the use of excessive force.”

In the years since the January 6 insurrection, the Chicago Police Department, like other law enforcement jurisdictions across the country, has been forced to acknowledge the problem of white supremacists in its ranks. It has, however, been slow to address the problem. Now the issue is receiving renewed public attention due to a Chicago Sun-Times series on the failure of CPD to terminate officers whose names appeared on Oath Keepers membership rolls made public by NPR in 2021.

In response to the Sun-Times series, Police Superintendent Larry Snelling, who assumed office in September, has said that the department will undertake “stringent” and “thorough” investigations of suspected “members of hate groups” and “will do everything we can to remove those members from our ranks.” A recently established citizens oversight panel — the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability — has adopted a policy banning officers from being active members of certain hate groups. And Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx has placed active CPD members affiliated with the Oath Keepers on the “no call list” of officers barred from testifying in Cook County criminal cases. 

Predictably, a dissenting voice has been that of John Catanzara, president of the Chicago chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police. While he agrees that “there’s things officers should be disqualified over,” he has characterized the proposed remedies as “a broad brush” and argued that officers should be judged by their actions rather than solely on the basis of their affiliations. 

He has a point. Whatever the merits of monitoring officers’ political affiliations and social media activity — both of which raise possible First Amendment issues — the department has failed to make use of the most powerful tool at its disposal for the purpose of identifying white supremacists on the force: pattern analysis of citizen complaints. Such analysis can reveal racist behavior that is in plain sight, and it can illuminate the systemic conditions that allow racists to operate with impunity as police officers. For both purposes, the 25-year career of Chicago police sergeant Piwnicki, who has no known affiliation with extremist organizations, is instructive.

The 2001 incident at Stateway Gardens occurred early in Piwnicki’s career. A complaint filed against him with the Independent Police Review Authority, or IPRA, more than a decade later illustrates a pattern repeated again and again throughout his career. The occasion was a backyard family barbecue in the Englewood neighborhood on May 5, 2012. The alleged victim was 37-year-old Kendall McClennon. As McClennon tells the story, he stepped out into the alley to relieve his bladder at about 7:15 p.m. Moments later, Piwnicki and two other officers — Brian McDevitt and Thomas Carey — burst into the yard with their guns drawn. Piwnicki did a takedown of McClennon, forced him down on a wooden deck, handcuffed his hands behind his back, and struck him repeatedly.

McClennon’s 39-year-old sister Cicely took out a camera to document what was happening. One of the officers seized the camera and cuffed her hands behind her back. McClennon, face down on the ground in handcuffs, asked the officers to leave his sister alone. Piwnicki responded by discharging his taser into McClennon’s body. When the taser malfunctioned, he reset it to “dry stun” — a mode in which it functions as a “pain compliance” tool without incapacitating the subject — and applied it to McClennon’s ear. Throughout the incident, McClennon alleges, Piwnicki directed racial invective at him and his family, at one point calling them “animals.”

Piwnicki tells a different story: While patrolling the neighborhood, he and his partners observed McClennon urinating in an alley. When McClennon saw the police car approach, he fled. The officers gave pursuit and entered McClennon’s cousin’s backyard. McClennon resisted arrest. When Piwnicki attempted to handcuff him, a struggle ensued, in the course of which McClennon’s nails cut Piwnicki’s wrist.

After Piwnicki tased him, McClennon no longer resisted. When they searched him, the officers found a dime bag of marijuana. They arrested him and charged him with aggravated battery of a police officer, resisting an officer, possession of cannabis, and urinating in the public way. The aggravated battery charge is a Class 2 felony carrying a three- to seven-year sentence.

That evening, Cicely filed her formal complaint. Two years later, on May 29, 2014, IPRA issued the results of its investigation. The investigator, Alice Chico, determined that the allegations of excessive force against Piwnicki were “unfounded.” That is, she found that the alleged misconduct did not occur. Chico’s analysis focused on the accounts given by McClennon’s sister and his cousin who was the host of the barbecue. (Contacted on the night of May 5, 2012, at a hospital where he was being assessed for injuries, McClennon declined to be interviewed by IPRA.) In her interview, Cicely stated that when her brother was handcuffed on the ground, Piwnicki punched him five times in the face, kicked him once in the abdomen, and tased him. She also stated that Piwnicki smelled of alcohol and that officers took her digital camera but did not inventory it or return it.

The cousin was inside the house when the police entered the backyard. When she went to her back door, she found that three of her guests, including McClennon, were handcuffed. She says she saw Piwnicki strike McClennon once on the left side of his face. They struggled, and Piwnicki tased him. She also stated that as Piwnicki escorted McClennon out of the yard, he slammed him against the back gate.

Chico wrote that the two witnesses “gave conflicting accounts of the incident,” that there was no evidence McClennon had suffered any injuries, and that Piwnicki was within department policies when he tased McClennon, “who was an assailant.” She also noted that Piwnicki passed a Breathalyzer test and that Cicely’s camera was, in fact, inventoried.

“Based on the totality of the circumstances surrounding this incident,” she concluded, “there is no evidence to establish that the incident occurred as alleged.” In light of her finding of “unfounded,” she did not find it necessary to obtain reports from Piwnicki and the other officers on the scene.

The 2001-02 investigation of the Traylor complaint by OPS and the 2012-14 investigation of the McClennon complaint by IPRA share two characteristics that make findings of “not sustained” and “unfounded” all but inevitable.

First, the investigator’s assessment of credibility is heavily weighted toward the police: The credibility of officers is assumed, while that of complainants and witnesses is sharply questioned. In neither instance does the investigator find it necessary to interview the accused officers; a written statement suffices. In the case of community members, by contrast, any inaccuracies or inconsistencies, no matter how marginal to the alleged misconduct, are seized upon to impeach credibility.

Second, the investigators do not consider the officer’s disciplinary history in assessing the allegations in the particular case. This is not an oversight. The collective bargaining agreement between the police union and the city in force at the time effectively barred the agency from employing even the most rudimentary pattern analysis — e.g., reviewing a past history of complaints alleging similar misconduct — as an investigatory tool. In negotiations with the union, Chicago, like a number of other cities, had over the years made concessions with respect to discipline in lieu of increasing compensation and benefits. As a consequence, an accused officer’s disciplinary history could only be considered at the point at which the investigator, having sustained the complaint, was determining what discipline to recommend, and only past “sustained” complaints could be considered for this purpose.

At the time of the 2012 incident, McClennon, a man in his late 30s, had no criminal record. Piwnicki, by contrast, had accumulated a total of 87 complaints over his 14-year career, putting him close to the top of the list of active officers with the most complaints. In McClennon’s criminal trial, the defense demonstrated that in 42 instances, the complaints allege the same pattern of misconduct by Piwnicki: Approaching people of color, they argued, he subjected them to physical and verbal violence. When they challenged his behavior, he imposed false charges. Each of these elements of abuse — excessive force, racial verbal abuse, and false arrest — figured in the McClennon complaint. Yet those patterns were not considered by the investigator. She assessed the complaint in isolation and concluded that there was no way to determine whether the alleged abuse had occurred.

In 2014, in Kalven v. City of Chicago, a case in which I was plaintiff, the Illinois Appellate Court ruled that completed police misconduct investigations are public information under the Freedom of Information Act. Prior to that, the disciplinary histories of officers and underlying investigative files known as complaint registers, or CRs, were hidden from the public behind a heavily defended wall of official secrecy. Occasionally, CRs were produced in discovery in civil rights lawsuits, but under protective orders that barred the parties from sharing them with the public.

The victims of abusive policing practices had no doubt about the realities, and, despite the long odds, some brought formal complaints, but because the investigations of those complaints were kept from the public, it was impossible to document the nature and extent of the phenomenon.

According to CPD records, Piwnicki currently has 99 complaints, putting him in the 99.9th percentile of officers with the most complaints.

In the wake of the Kalven decision, that changed. The Invisible Institute created the Citizens Police Data Project, a public database that currently contains information about 250,000 investigations of allegations of misconduct and the disciplinary histories of 34,000 officers.

According to CPD records, Piwnicki currently has 99 complaints, putting him in the 99.9th percentile of officers with the most complaints.

Contacted through the Chicago Police Department, Piwnicki declined to be interviewed or provide comment.

It also should be noted that there is a large ghost phenomenon of individuals who believe they have been abused by the police but do not file a formal complaint. Studies by the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics based on national survey data indicate a ratio of roughly one complaint for every eight people who believe they were subjected to excessive force by the police. There is reason to believe that ratio is conservative, at least with respect to populations most affected by unconstitutional policing.

Although these aggregate numbers are stunning, they do not fully reveal the realities. To grasp the racist nature of the abuse and the institutional failure to identify and discipline it, it is necessary to examine the CR investigations themselves. This is not only a matter of capturing concrete narrative detail; it is also necessary because of the manner in which CRs are categorized. When, as is often the case, a complainant makes multiple allegations of abuse, the CR is coded according to the investigator’s judgment as to the most serious of the allegations. As a result, allegations of racist behavior tend to disappear from an officer’s disciplinary profile, for excessive force will generally trump and thereby bury allegations of racist verbal abuse. But the difference between beating someone up and beating someone up while spewing racist invective is essential. Indeed, in another context, these would be elements used in identifying a hate crime.

Here is a sampling of complaints against Piwnicki and the outcomes of investigations of those complaints. Although none of these complaints were sustained by investigators, the pattern they form is powerful evidence.

August 13, 2000
A Black pregnant woman alleged she was stopped at gunpoint by an unidentified partner of Piwnicki, who forced her to get on the ground. She was handcuffed and placed in the back of a squad car, where she got into a verbal argument with Piwnicki, who slapped her face. Piwnicki’s partner said, “We don’t like black pregnant women,” and made other derogatory statements of a racist and sexist nature.
Not sustained. (CR 266694)

August 13, 2000
A Black man alleged Piwnicki and officer Louis Gade approached him in an unmarked police car in an alley and told him to come to the car. When he ignored the officer’s request, Piwnicki sprayed him in the face with pepper spray. Gade then hit him in the face with a flashlight. He fell to the ground. Piwnicki and Gade repeatedly kicked him. He was handcuffed and taken to the station. The officers refused his request for medical treatment.
Not sustained. (CR 265117)

October 26, 2000
A Black man alleged that he was walking to a restaurant when he was stopped by Piwnicki and other officers. Piwnicki searched under his car and claimed to find narcotics. He was arrested, handcuffed, and put in a squad car. While cuffed in the car, Piwnicki punched and slapped him in the face and punched him in the stomach.
Not sustained. (CR 267343)

November 27, 2000
A Latino man alleged that he was walking down the street when Piwnicki and two other officers stopped him and searched him for drugs. Piwnicki slapped him in the face, one of Piwnicki’s partners elbowed him and also slapped him in the face, and the third partner called him a “fucking Puerto Rican.” A bystander witnessed the incident and reported it to the OPS.
Not sustained. (CR 267496)

March 8, 2002
A Black man alleged that he was walking with his cousin, sister, and girlfriend when they were approached by a police car. Piwnicki and Robert Smith exited the car with their guns drawn. Smith pushed him against a wall, handcuffed him, and put him in the squad car, where Piwnicki punched him in the face. The officers accused the man of being involved in a car accident that caused damage to a police vehicle. When he denied the allegations, one of the officers said, “This one is going on you.” When he asked why he was being falsely charged, one of the officers said to him, “Shut up you black bitch. You are a waste of sperm, nigger.”
Not sustained. (CR 279202)

March 23, 2002
A 13-year-old Black girl alleged that she was playing with her brother and cousins when she threw a stick in the street as Piwnicki and Smith were driving by. The officers exited their car. Piwnicki approached her, pushed her face with his hand, grabbed her arm, and pulled it behind her back. He threatened to “smack the shit out of her” and called her and the other children “cocksuckers.”
Not sustained. (CR 279250)

June 2, 2002
A Latino man alleged that he was driving with his wife, father, and brother when he was stopped by Piwnicki and Smith. Piwnicki told him to “put his fucking hands up,” grabbed him, yanked him out of his car, and handcuffed him. When he asked what was going on, Piwnicki told him “to shut the fuck up” and smacked him on the back of his head. When he attempted to read Piwnicki’s badge, Piwnicki told him not to look at him. Piwnicki also told the man’s wife to “shut the fuck up” and ordered her away from the car. The complainant, who was not arrested, identified the license plate of the car driven by Piwnicki.
Not sustained. (CR 281125)

August 13, 2002
A Black woman alleged that she was standing inside the gate of her apartment building when Piwnicki approached and asked her where she lived. She replied, “I live here where I am standing.” “You better tell me, bitch,” he said and threatened to throw her to the ground and arrest her for trespassing. She countered that he could not do that because she was not trespassing. He grabbed her by the arm, called her a “cunt,” threatened to put marijuana on her, and handcuffed her. “You had to get fucking smart on me,” he said. “Now you are going to jail.” When she asked why he put the handcuffs on so tight, Piwnicki said, “Shut up you cunt nigger bitch,” and slapped her face. Piwnicki then put her in his squad car. “Why did you put your hands on me?” she asked. Piwnicki stopped the car, grabbed her hair, and struck her repeatedly in the face. Later, at the police station, when she asked to speak to a sergeant, Piwnicki grabbed her by the neck, threw her down on a bench, and said, “Shut up you fucking cunt.” Piwnicki falsely charged the woman with drinking on the public way. Witnesses unrelated to the woman corroborated her allegations of physical and verbal abuse. The victim received medical treatment for her injuries. The investigator sustained the allegations against Piwnicki. During the command channel review — the process by which supervisors review a complete complaint investigation into allegations against an officer under their command — Piwnicki’s supervisors objected to the findings, and the findings were overturned.
Sustained finding overturned. (CR 283229)

May 10, 2003
The complaint alleged that three Latino men and two Latina women were parking their car when the drivers in two vehicles behind them honked their horns. After parking the car, one of the men was approached by Piwnicki, who was in plainclothes. “What the fuck,” he said. “Why are you rolling your eyes?” The man replied he didn’t know Piwnicki. “Shut the fuck up, wetback,” said Piwnicki. The man told Piwnicki to leave them alone. Officer Jennifer Chapin Mayoski, who was also in plainclothes, approached and said, “You don’t know who you are fucking with,” and drew her gun. When the complainant started to write down the license plates of the police cars, Mayoski told Piwnicki they should go. As Piwnicki was leaving the scene, he punched the man in the face, breaking his glasses. A second Latino male in the car corroborated the allegations of the first. He also reported that as Piwnicki was leaving, he punched him in the jaw and said, “You ain’t going to do nothing! Fuck you, you spics, you wetbacks.” The two female passengers corroborated the versions given by the two men and further noted that both Piwnicki and Mayoski called them “fucking Mexicans” and “stupid Mexicans.”
Not sustained. (CR 289333)

October 5, 2003
According to the complaint, two Black men were approached by Piwnicki and officer Keith Rigan after one of them was in an altercation with a third party. They alleged that Piwnicki and Rigan asked the third party if they were having a problem with these “niggers and animals.” The officers then punched one of the men in the neck, knocked him to the ground, picked him up, and kneed him in the groin several times. The other man alleged that he was punched, knocked to the ground, and kicked. Both men received medical treatment for their physical injuries.
unfounded. (CR 292855)

June 17, 2007
A Black woman alleged that Piwnicki and officers Russell Willingham and Anthony Martin ordered her and two companions to get out of their parked car and pick up litter around the vehicle. In the course of the interaction, the officers called them “morons,” “ignorant,” and “nigger.”
No affidavit. (CR 1006665)(No action was taken because the complainant did not execute the required affidavit.)

June 17, 2007
A half hour after the incident above — a Black woman alleged that Piwnicki said to her, “Pick up this fucking trash from the ground, this is what niggas do, you fucking moron.”
No affidavit. (CR 1006666)

February 20, 2011
A Black man alleged that he was standing on the street giving his mother a hug when Piwnicki and officer Daniel Sullivan drove up in an unmarked squad car. Piwnicki ordered the man over to the car, saying, “Get over here, you fat greasy nigger.” When the victim responded “wow” and failed to head toward their car, Piwnicki and Sullivan exited their car, chased the man, and knocked a bottle of juice out of his hands. He was criminally charged.
Not sustained. (CR 1043517)

May 18, 2011
According to the complaint, a Puerto Rican woman was driving through an alley en route to a medical appointment when she was stopped by Piwnicki. When she acknowledged that she was cutting through the alley, Piwnicki told her that she was breaking the law. “You people should go back to Mexico,” he said. “Because of people like you, this City is messed up.” The complainant then exited the alley, parked her car, and returned to the area to request Piwnicki’s name and badge number. Piwnicki responded by handcuffing her tightly. He put her in the back of his squad car and berated her: “You people only understand beatings.” When she informed him the handcuffs were too tight, he responded, “I don’t care what the fuck they are.” He also threatened her with the loss of her job as a special education teacher, saying he was going to contact Chicago Public Schools and inform them of her arrest. She was eventually released from Piwnicki’s custody and received medical treatment for the slight fracture she sustained to her wrist from the handcuffs Piwnicki placed on her too tightly.
Not sustained; unfounded. (CR 1045507)

Notwithstanding the long odds of achieving redress, the complainants, all of them Black or brown — and presumably unacquainted with each other — independently filed strikingly similar complaints against Piwnicki alleging excessive force coupled with racist and sexist verbal abuse. The pattern that emerges has probative value, despite the fact that it cannot be determined, in the absence of further investigation, whether the allegations in any given case are true. In a high-functioning accountability system, that pattern would have been discerned early in Piwnicki’s career and prompted appropriate interventions. In a system committed to removing white supremacists from the force, analysis of that pattern would be a priority. In the system we currently have, it has been willfully ignored.

Beyond Impunity

The systemic conditions that have allowed Piwnicki to operate with virtual impunity throughout his career despite these multiple accusations are further illuminated by the rare instances in which complaints against him have been sustained. There are seven such cases:

July 15, 2000
A Black female CPD sergeant filed a complaint alleging that Piwnicki and two other officers were insubordinate, inattentive to duty, and disobeyed a direct order. Piwnicki received a reprimand.
(CR 2000-0263967)

May 6, 2005
A CPD lieutenant initiated a complaint against a CPD police officer for engaging in a bar fight while off duty, in the course of which he was accused of injuring a Black man and calling him a “fucking nigger.” The altercation resulted in the officer’s arrest by the Lake Geneva Police Department. Piwnicki, who was not present at the scene of the incident, subsequently bailed the officer out. Found to have violated a rule requiring that CPD officers file a report when a member of the department is under investigation by a law enforcement agency other than the CPD, Piwnicki received a reprimand.
(CR 297735)

September 29, 2005
A Black husband and wife were at the county courthouse to attend a court date for a relative. The wife alleged that while she was attempting to step into the elevator, Piwnicki (who was wearing a shirt that covered his uniform) slammed his hand across her chest and moved her away to create space for his partner to step onto the elevator. When the woman’s husband verbally confronted Piwnicki, he responded, “Shut the fuck up you coon … You fucking cluck.” Piwnicki then pushed the woman and started swinging at her husband. Piwnicki and the husband attempted to strike each other. During the encounter, Piwnicki grabbed the husband by the neck and called him a “nigger.” Cook County deputy sheriffs separated the husband from Piwnicki and held him against the wall. Even after the husband was physically restrained by deputy sheriffs, Piwnicki continued to attack him saying, “I’ll see you in court you fuckin coon, and I’m going to see to it that you will pay.” In addition to the wife and husband reporting these events, several deputy sheriffs corroborated the portions of the incident they witnessed. Piwnicki followed through with his threat and falsely charged the husband with making threats to an officer. The criminal charges were ultimately dismissed. The allegations made by the couple were sustained, and Piwnicki was suspended for 20 days.
(CR 308792)

October 12, 2005
Piwnicki had a verbal and physical altercation with a Black male CPD officer. He was in the process of arresting two Black women, when the officer, who was in plainclothes, approached him and asked to see his identification. Piwnicki refused. “I don’t know who the fuck you are,” he is alleged to have said to the officer, who proved to be Sgt. Ronald Watts. (It would later be established that Watts was the leader of a criminal enterprise that preyed on residents of the public housing development where the confrontation between the two officers occurred.) Piwnicki and Watts grabbed at each other. “I know how you motherfuckers roll,” Watts is alleged to have said. “You’re not on the plantation anymore.” The Internal Affairs Division found that the two officers engaged in an unjustified altercation. Each was suspended for 10 days.
(CR 309085)

July 10, 2006
A Black female CPD officer filed a complaint on behalf of her son. She alleged that her son was sitting in his yard when Piwnicki approached him. He told him, “Come here, you fucking Negro,” then slapped him in the face repeatedly and placed an empty alcohol bottle that was laying on the street in his back pocket. When the man removed the bottle from his pocket and threw it on the ground, Piwnicki kicked him in his groin area and repeatedly called him “nigger.” Piwnicki falsely arrested the complainant for drinking on the public way. The man’s mother observed the incident and heard Piwnicki call her son a “nigger.” The investigator sustained the allegation that Piwnicki verbally abused the man, finding there was “sufficient evidence to support the allegation that PO Piwnicki used profane and derogatory language toward the victim.” Piwnicki received a reprimand.
(CR 306868)

June 10, 2010
A Black woman was sitting on the porch of her home with several neighbors. From his squad car on the street, Piwnicki is alleged to have addressed them as “motherfuckers” and ordered them off the porch. “Well, sir, I live here,” she responded. Piwnicki is then alleged to have threatened “to lock her black ass up.” A male neighbor approached the porch and encountered Piwnicki, who is alleged to have said, “You gonna run, nigger?” “No,” he replied, “why would I run if I haven’t done anything?” Piwnicki got out of his vehicle, grabbed the man, and handcuffed and arrested him. As he left, Piwnicki told the woman on the porch, “When I come back, I’m locking your black ass up, too.” The woman called her landlord, a CPD officer, who advised her to call a sergeant to file a complaint. When the sergeant arrived, he refused to take her complaint. Piwnicki received a 10-day suspension, and a complaint against the sergeant was also sustained.
(CR 1037059)

March 15, 2019
Piwnicki failed to serve notice on the person named in an order of protection. The individual who had secured the order filed a complaint against Piwnicki for failure to provide service. The complaint was sustained, and he was given a reprimand.
(CR 2019-0003252)

Putting aside the last of these complaints, the other six sustained complaints against Piwnicki share a common feature: All involve other law enforcement personnel as antagonist, complainant, or witness. Under those circumstances, the disciplinary system responded. What it has proved unwilling to address are the scores of complaints alleging racist abuse by Piwnicki filed by Black and brown Chicagoans without any connection to law enforcement.

Despite the massive public record describing Piwnicki’s racism, the only change in his status within the CPD over the course of his career is that he was promoted to detective in 2013 and then to sergeant in late 2017. The latter promotion came more than two years after the political upheaval precipitated by release of the video of the police murder of McDonald and a year after the release of the Department of Justice’s report on its investigation of the CPD in which it expressed “serious concerns” about patterns of racially discriminatory conduct by CPD officers and found that “the impact of CPD’s pattern or practice of unreasonable force falls heaviest on predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods.”

Since his promotions, Piwnicki has had relatively few CRs. An obvious reason for this is that the nature of the job is different. There is less direct contact with community members. At the same time, as a sergeant, he remains in a position to do harm. It is a widely shared belief among those working to advance police reform that sergeants as first-line supervisors are the key to changing institutional culture. By the same token, Piwnicki’s promotion to sergeant puts him in the position to perpetuate the ugly racist subculture within the department that he has embodied throughout his career.

Piwnicki’s promotion to sergeant puts him in the position to perpetuate the ugly racist subculture within the department that he has embodied throughout his career.

Just as the Office of Professional Standards was replaced by the Independent Police Review Authority in the wake of a police scandal, the IPRA was replaced in 2017 by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability in the wake of the police murder of McDonald. Over time, the quality of COPA’s investigations of misconduct complaints has significantly improved, but it remains constrained by the police union contract from doing the sort of pattern analysis necessary to effectively curb the immense damage to public trust caused by officers such as Piwnicki.

Although those constraints have been relaxed somewhat, they continue to hobble effective pattern analysis. Under the most recent version of the union contract, negotiated last year, COPA and the Bureau of Internal Affairs may consider complaints up to seven years old alleging excessive force, racial verbal abuse, and criminal conduct for the purpose of assessing credibility. They may only consider other categories of complaints if they are sustained. And under no circumstances can they consider complaints that have been determined to be “not founded.”

Fraternal Order of Police president Catanzara’s argument that officers should be judged by their actions is impeached by his union’s long history of using collective bargaining to block such accountability. Applied to Piwnicki, the seven-year look back would not even begin to reveal his career-long pattern of behavior that results in complaints of racial abuse by Black and brown Chicagoans.

If the administration of Mayor Brandon Johnson is serious about addressing racism within CPD ranks, it will go beyond investigating officers affiliated with extremist groups and will prioritize vigorous pattern analysis of citizen complaints, while taking steps to remove the constraints imposed on such analysis by the police union contract. Unless and until it does, the career of Piwnicki will stand as the cautionary tale: An officer who, for over a quarter century, has been allowed to openly act out his racial hostilities by an oversight system that has only seen fit to discipline him when his abusive behavior spills over onto others in law enforcement.

Toward the end of his tenure, I asked Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson what he had learned since assuming leadership of the department. A Black officer who had not sought the position, he had been appointed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel in the aftermath of the McDonald revelations.

Johnson replied that he had been surprised above all by the intensity of the racism within the department — an unexpected observation from a Black officer who had risen through the ranks — and he expressed the hope that the problem would be resolved over time by the retirement of certain older officers.

Piwnicki refutes that hope. As he approaches the end of his career, his complaint history is a teaching. To the extent that the department has allowed him to abuse people of color with impunity while promoting him first to detective and then to sergeant, his career stands as a model for others disposed to engage in racial abuse within their job descriptions as Chicago police officers.

In response to inquiries from The Intercept, the Chicago Police Department provided the following statement:

The Chicago Police Department’s members are held to the highest standard and expected to conduct themselves with the utmost professionalism both on and off duty. Per CPD policy, all members are prohibited from engaging in any illegal discrimination against an individual or group on the basis of any protected class under federal, state and local law.

We have also been working to implement a strengthened policy prohibiting members from participating, supporting and associating with criminal and bias-based organizations. We are updating this policy in close collaboration with the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability (CCPSA), which recently voted to approve the revised policy. 

Allegations of Department members violating CPD policy are thoroughly investigated. During the course of these investigations, members are afforded due process. Members found in violation will be held accountable based on the findings of these investigations.