Trump Accidentally Got It Right: Chicago Top Cop Has Failed City

CHICAGO — On Monday, President Donald Trump sharply criticized Chicago Police Supt. Eddie Johnson for all the wrong reasons, but he accidentally got one thing right.

“He’s not doing his job,” Trump said about the top cop during his speech at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference. Johnson said he boycotted Trump's speech because the president’s values don’t match with those held by most Chicagoans, including himself.

Trump spoke out of spite, slandered the city and blamed Johnson for not magically fixing Chicago’s shooting problem. The thing is: Johnson’s job isn’t just to reduce the gun violence that plagues our city. He said so himself when he took the top cop job, telling Chicagoans his job description boiled down to one word: “Trust.”

"Trust between the police and the people we serve. Trust between the rank-and-file and the command staff. Trust between police and elected officials and community leaders. And trust among police officers, who both must watch each other's back and hold each other to high standards," Johnson said. "I am absolutely, absolutely confident we can meet this challenge."

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But in the wee hours of Oct. 17, Johnson wasn’t doing his job. Two officers found him slumped behind the wheel of his police vehicle in Bridgeport. They woke him up. He drove home.

Hours later, Johnson, through a police department spokesman, offered a narrative to explain what allegedly happened: Johnson had dismissed his department-appointed driver known as the superintendent’s “caretaker” that night and went to have dinner with friends. The spokesman told reporters Johnson pulled over to the side of the road after feeling ill on his way home. Officers who came upon him didn’t notice “any signs of impairment.” Johnson blamed his condition on a medical mix-up — he didn’t take new medication prescribed by his cardiologist.

It’s a narrative that evoked empathy for a very likable guy who has publicly served as the police department’s leader while battling health issues. In 2017, Johnson fainted at a news conference. One of his kidneys had started to fail. Johnson's son donated a kidney to save the top cop from needing dialysis for the rest of his life. The whole city rooted for him.

The morning after police found Johnson slumped over in his police vehicle, the superintendent ordered the police department’s Internal Affairs division, run by his hand-picked deputy chief Karen Konow, to investigate the incident “to avoid the appearance of impropriety and to just have total transparency.”

Johnson also defended officers for not giving him a breathalyzer test to determine if he was driving under the influence.

“Someone asleep in a car doesn’t mean they’re impaired,” he said.

Many people were skeptical. But I believed him, trusted him even.

What Johnson didn’t count on was that Mayor Lori Lightfoot would throw him under the bus. After meeting with Johnson privately, Lightfoot told reporters a key detail that the superintendent didn’t share publicly: He had a “couple of drinks” that night.

The mayor has declined to comment on her talk with Johnson. She handed the investigation over to Inspector General Joe Ferguson, whose probe will likely decide the top cop’s fate. But the stakes are much higher than that. Chicagoans’ fractured trust in the police department that Johnson was tapped to help heal hangs in the balance.

The investigation into Johnson’s snooze in the driver's seat isn’t about whether he had too much to drink or if beat cops gave him a pass. It centers on that one word the superintendent said defined his job: Trust.

In Johnson’s case, there’s police video that doesn’t match the initial narrative offered by police headquarters, two sources who viewed body cam footage told Patch.

The video shows Johnson’s police vehicle was running and at a stop sign at 34th and Aberdeen, contrary to initial reports he had pulled over after feeling ill, the sources told Patch.

The bodycam video, which one source described as about “a minute of footage,” shows Johnson appeared startled when the officers approached. The video shows Johnson only rolled down the window a “crack” and didn’t introduce himself or engage with the officers, sources said.

Sources said a police supervisor briefly spoke to Johnson before the superintendent drove away from the scene. That sergeant’s bodycam was not activated, the source said.

“The video shows there was no investigation into whether Johnson was impaired, no attempt to assist him or even check to see if he was healthy enough to drive,” said one source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “Johnson didn’t do what a superintendent should do. He just got the hell out of there.”

In doing so, Johnson jammed up his employees.

Police sources said the two officers who found Johnson slumped over the wheel of his car at 34th and Aberdeen in Bridgeport were “two-year guys” who didn’t immediately recognize him as their boss and turned over the traffic stop to a supervisor. They’ll face questions about why the superintendent wasn’t asked to get out of his vehicle, submit to a sobriety test or get examined by paramedics to determine if he was OK to drive.

Police brass in the 9th District, where Johnson’s wife, Lt. Nakia Fenner, once worked, got mixed up in the mess, too. What officers wrote and supervisors signed off on in the incident report, which was sealed from public view the moment Johnson ordered up an investigation, will be scrutinized to determine if any cops huddled to “get their story straight” before putting details on paper.

That saying — "get your story straight" — is code among officers that signals "an expectation to fall in line with the narrative of an event, even if it differs from what you actually saw," according to an officer who told me about the practice in 2013 and asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation.

There’s a provision in the Chicago police code that deals with this type of thing. It’s called Rule 14: making a false statement, written or oral.

In police departments across the country there’s a saying about cops who get caught telling fibs, “If you lie, you die.” For generations in Chicago, though, that hasn’t been the case thanks to a broken system for investigating police misconduct that protected officers from getting fired for lying.

City leaders promised that reforms would change that in post-Laquan McDonald Chicago. Johnson has been portrayed as the fair-minded leader charged with overseeing those reforms. Things seemed to be changing for the better. In September, four cops accused of lying about the night white police officer Jason Van Dyke shot and killed McDonald, a black teenager, were fired for violating Rule 14.

Johnson’s actions raise a much bigger question: Can Chicagoans really trust the police — and in this case its top cop — to tell the truth and hold each other accountable?

Johnson has refused to answer questions from reporters — including how many dinner drinks he considers a “couple” — saying that doing so would taint the ongoing investigation.

That’s an oft-used excuse used to keep details of misconduct allegations secret (like the Laquan McDonald murder video, for instance) and contributes to the public’s mistrust in the police department.

Johnson’s self-imposed silence only protects himself and stands as an affront to the city’s efforts to restore the public’s faith in a police department well-practiced in the art of covering up misconduct.

Even Fraternal Order of Police leaders say Johnson, who started his career as a beat cop, has lost the confidence of rank-and-file officers.

Chicagoans deserve more than investigation.

We deserve to see the police reports and body cam video for ourselves.

We deserve to get answers from Johnson, a political appointee, under oath.

Who was he having dinner with? How many drinks did he have? Why was he driving a police vehicle after drinking? Is there anything else that he’s not telling us?

It’s time for Johnson to do his job.

Tell us the truth.

It’s a matter of trust.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting and Emmy-nominated producer, was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN. He was a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots."
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