Frankly, we’re embarrassed.

On March 14 we published a post about “Sunshine Week” without being aware of the fact that on March 13 the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate published an article about the Park Ridge City Council’s making a mockery of sunshine in government (”Four months after he was placed on leave, Park Ridge police officer’s employment officially ends,” March 13).

According to the H-A article, the City paid $12,800 to REM Management to conduct an internal investigation of what appears to have been the Park Ridge Police Department’s handling of the Jason Leavitt incident back in 2006 and its aftermath. You may recall that Leavitt, while off duty, apprehended a Park Ridge teen and allegedly punched him out while the teen was handcuffed in the back of a squad car. That led to a federal civil rights suit that cost the City a $185,000 settlement and an additional $175,600 in legal fees to get to that settlement.

That incident also may have precipitated the 2010 FBI seizure of Police Department records and computers, and it also was a factor in the City’s commissioning of the $75,000+ Ekl Report, the results of which were published by the City in 2008 and which we wrote about in our 09.17.2008 post. 

Although Police Chief Frank Kaminski was not on the City payroll until June 2009, he was responsible for pursuing Leavitt’s termination before the City’s Board of Fire and Police Commissioners until he mysteriously withdrew those charges, presumably in return for Leavitt’s agreement to retire effective February 21, 2018.

But if you look on the City’s website for any evidence of how this deal played out before that Board or before the Council, you’ll find little more than a Board decision – in the minutes of its Special Meeting of November 16, 2017 – to continue the public hearing on Leavitt’s termination; and the Board decision – in the minutes of that Board’s January 11, 2018 meeting – to approve Kaminski’s dismissal of Leavitt’s disciplinary hearing for reasons allegedly contained in Kaminski’s memorandum dated December 4, 2017.

Would you like to see a copy of Kaminski’s December 4, 2017 memo? So would we.

Would you like to see a copy of the contract that likely memorialized the deal Kaminski cut with Leavitt to take retirement in exchange for Kaminski’s dropping of the termination proceeding? So would we.

Would you like to see a copy of the REM report? So would we.

But we can’t find them anywhere on the City’s website.

And when the H-A made a FOIA request for the full REM report, the City denied it.

Why? According to the H-A article:

“[T]he release of the information weighs more heavily toward the harm it demonstrably would create to the reputation of the city, the public confidence in the department, and the morale and efficient operation of the police department.”

Can you say “Cover up”?

After decades of translating the double-talk alibis provided by public officials to justify their secretive misdeeds, what the City’s statement probably means is that: (a) those PRPD officials who handled the whole Leavitt matter (including Kaminski, once he inherited it in June 2009) botched it; (b) they don’t want the taxpayers to know how and how badly they botched it; so (c) they cut a secret deal with Leavitt; and (d) they are now trying to bury all the problematic evidence with some secrecy alibi trumped up by the anti-H.I.T.A. city attorneys, probably relying once again on the Illinois Personnel Records Review Act (the “PRRA”) that, by its express terms, applies only to the FOIA-bility of personnel records by third parties other than the City, the owner of the records.

You can read a more detailed description of Ancel Glink’s misinterpretation/misapplication of the PRRA in our posts of 05.27.2016 and 07.26.2017.

What are those allegedly pro-H.I.T.A. folks around The Horseshoe at City Hall doing about it?

As best as we can tell, nothing.

“Nothing” seems like a billboard-sized message that they are more concerned about giving political cover to Chief K and his department than they are about telling the truth to the taxpayers who pay for Chief K and that department – and who paid $12,800 for that REM report.

Although we don’t agree with the anonymous commentator to our previous post who suggested that what the City is doing with the Leavitt matter is a “Chicago-style Laquan McDonald cover-up,” we do believe what the Council is doing – intentionally or negligently – sure looks, sounds and smells like a cover-up…and for purely political reasons.

A decade ago this coming May 21, we published a post titled “Sanitized For Your Deception” in which we criticized the spin and deception applied by City Hall to the goings on there, both in The Spokeman and in the meeting minutes. But that practice slowly disappeared under the leadership of Mayor Dave Schmidt. Suddenly minutes were accurate (probably because meetings started being videotaped) and The Spokesman’s more creative writing mysteriously started hewing to the facts rather than some City Hall politician’s fiction.

As we see with the REM report and the related information about Chief K’s withdrawal of Leavitt’s termination complaint, however, City Hall isn’t just sanitizing matters for the public’s deception: It’s hiding them altogether.

That should be unacceptable for any Park Ridge public official who talks the H.I.T.A. talk, and even for those who don’t. And it should be unacceptable for the taxpayers for whom those public officials are supposed to work.

But only if our elected officials grow spines and stop covering up for high-priced bureaucratic misconduct and subterfuge.

To read or post comments, click on title.