Chicago's New Era Of Transparency Looks Pretty Much Identical To Its Old Era Of Opacity

Mayor Rahm Emanuel ushered in a new age of law enforcement/city transparency recently by opening his mouth and saying words to that effect. This followed the city/law enforcement sitting on the recordings of a highly-controversial shooting by police officers for more than a year.

Maybe Chicago's government will be more open going forward. It certainly isn't applying this new transparency retroactively. The Better Government Association has just filed a lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department for refusing to turn over other recordings of fatal shootings by police officers, which would seem to be in direct opposition of the mayor's statements.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has said he supports a new policy requiring that videos of fatal shootings by Chicago police be publicly released relatively soon after the incidents.

But the Emanuel administration is stonewalling a Better Government Association request for footage from the past five years, so the BGA is suing the Chicago Police Department - again.

Under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act - the state law known as FOIA that guarantees public access to public records within no more than 10 business days - the BGA asked the police department for copies of records and videos of officer-involved fatal shootings since 2011.

Welcome to Sunshine Week: The Hangover. Sunshine Week -- the yearly, mostly-ironic celebration of government openness and transparency -- wrapped up at the end of last week. FOIA requests briefly spiked to carpet-bombing levels in celebration. Now, everyone gets to participate in the less fun aspects of FOIAing: waiting, appealing, waiting, waiting some more, and possibly lawyering up.

You'd think the Chicago PD would want to get a jump on its new, sunshiny outlook on life. It certainly owes at least that much to the city's taxpayers. Not only are taxpayers funding the police force, but they're also paying for their misdeeds. The Chicago PD -- one of the few government entities to have the audacity to run a domestic "black site" -- has racked up $662 million on lawsuit settlements in the last decade. The city's fucked pension plan system is ensuring that the next generation of Chicagoans -- and their neighboring Illinoians -- will be on the hook for thelast generation's bad cops as well.

As for the Better Government Association, this refusal to cooperate with public records requests is just the same old police force, operating under the same old mayor.

This marks the fourth lawsuit the BGA has filed since 2014 against the police department, which is overseen by the mayor and well known for violating FOIA by ignoring, delaying or wrongly denying records requests.

The Chicago PD claims there's "insufficient public interest" to compel it to produce recordings of fatal shootings by its officers -- of which there have been more than 70 since 2011. I guess it has a very different definition of "public interest," as there was certainly massive amounts of public interest in the last shooting video it released -- one that was captured on recording equipment likely tampered with by officers on the scene.

The mayor's office is no better. It's been fending off FOIA requests for emails contained on Rahm Emanuel's personal phone, as well as other emails related to a no-bid school contract that is currently the subject of a federal investgation. Emanuel talked big about a "new era of transparency." One wonders who it was meant to apply to.

This isn't just Chicago and its police force. It's New York and its police force. It's a majority of federal government agencies. The DOJ still has unanswered requests from 1993 lying around. FOIA reform is an annual project for legislators, and every year the efforts are dismantled by agencies deathly afraid of additional transparency or accountability.

For the most part, this is what using your right to information looks like: a well-lit hallway that suddenly funnels into a dark hole with a padlocked door at the end. What should be a worst case scenario -- a public records lawsuit -- is far too often seen as a perfectly acceptable alternative to actually, you know, following the law.

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