Chicago City Council: Too Little, Too Late

Despite vote not to pay out to family of Dexter Reed, the 50-member Chicago City Council remains one of the most corrupt and dangerous political entities in the nation…

Well, the Chicago City Council finally stood up to protecting the police who are protecting the public.

The council rejected a $1.25 million settlement to the family of Dexter Reed, who was killed after he pulled out a gun on a traffic stop and shot a cop.

The council’s decision to reject the settlement offer is a welcome move from a body that is otherwise wholly in the pocket of the anti-police movement, with a few notable exceptions.

But, despite the decision, the police and the public shouldn’t get too excited.

The rejection of the settlement is in no way a sign that the council is moving toward a path of actual governance. That is a long, difficult road beyond the skill, talent, and motive of the current cabal calling the shots at the city council. The political landscape around the country has changed, and the reflexive settlement to criminals by the city council risks garnering too much negative attention in a case where lethal force by the police was not only justified, but absolutely necessary.

After all, the city council and the city legal team already scandalously bowed to a settlement for the attorney representing Dexter Reed’s family, Andrew Stroth. In an earlier case, the city paid out $750,000 to a man who was thrown to the ground by a Chicago cop after the man spit in the mouth of the cop.

No one in the city council defended this cop or condemned such an outrageous payout.

In yet another case, the Fraternal Order of Police, the union that represents cops, sent a letter to Stroth in 2018 threatening a defamation lawsuit against him for claims the attorney made that police had shot and killed a youth on the West Side that summer.

“The Cook County Medical Examiner ruled the death a suicide based upon the autopsy and physical evidence,” the FOP attorneys wrote to Stroth.

Got that? The FOP responded to Stroth’s outlandish claims, not any city council member nor anyone from the media.

In 2018, Stroth had his law license suspended, according to records from the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission (ARDC).

Stroth was suspended for thirty days after “the hearing board found that [Stroth] failed to act with reasonable diligence in representing his client, provided improper financial assistance to the client, knowingly made false statements of material fact in connection with a disciplinary matter and engaged in dishonest conduct,” according to ARDC records.

Here’s a question for the city council: How much momentum did the money of Stroth’s earlier settlement provide for his current lawsuit against the police? By now, the massive amounts the city attorneys recommend paying out in police lawsuits, even when they do not believe the police are culpable, has created a host of law firms specializing in the thriving trade of police lawsuits. This bustling trade undermines the central claim of the city attorneys when they crawl out from under their legal rocks and appear before the finance committee, arguing it is cheaper to settle than to go to trial. Each settlement only encourages the industry.

And here’s a question for the city law department that recommended the settlement. Wouldn’t it have been a great opportunity to attack the industry of suing the police by letting Stroth march into a courtroom, any courtroom, and put on a case demanding money for a guy who shot the police unprovoked? Even the most corrupt and incompetent judges in Cook County would have a tough time giving a green light to these arguments. Let’s see the minions at Chicago’s dying newspapers spin those claims in their “journalism.” Their attempts to do so would only intensify the growing antipathy the public holds against the media.

If the city council were to ever stand for anything beyond grift and corruption, such questions would be the beginning of a larger move to save the city, a city that Alderman Raymond Lopez admitted in a recent tweet was on the border of collapse.

“City Hall is beyond crisis: it’s bordering on political collapse under the weight of Johnson administration loyalty litmus tests & political narcissism—all while @GovPritzker & @ILAttyGeneral watch our municipal corporation twist in the wind and do nothing to stop it,” Lopez tweeted.

Does this mean Lopez and his city council allies are going to do something meaningful to end the police lawsuit industry, a central factor in the city’s demise?

No, if the city elders were serious about defending the cops who are defending the public, they would have not merely rejected the settlement but inquired into the workings of the city’s corporation counsel, the attorneys who handle such cases, and asked how and why they arrived at the decision to settle to begin with.

How, one of the endlessly self-promoting aldermen might ask, can you throw the police under the bus so completely? Why are you establishing a legal strategy to encourage violence against cops and to make cops intimidated from defending themselves?

But there are compelling, troubling reasons why the city council gaggle would not ask such questions. To do so would open up a legal Pandora’s box, casting doubt on their refusal to do any due diligence in a host of other settlements going back decades, cases equally as offensive and unjustified as the one posited for the family of Dexter Reed.

Here it would be revealed that the city council has moved almost fully into the camp of the anti-police movement, a city council that paved the way for the most radical and corrupt prosecutor’s office under Kimberly Foxx and then let her run roughshod over the city’s criminal justice system with nary a word.

There are now dozens of current and retired cops facing lawsuits generated by Foxx’s alliance with the police lawsuit industry. Will the council stand up to settlements on these cases? If the past is prologue, don’t bet on it.

One might ask why no one, not one member of the fifty-member chorus of speechmakers and tweeters who comprise the council, has taken any serious action to address the decision by former top prosecutor Foxx to drop charges against three Spanish Cobra gang members whose execution of a Chicago police officer was recorded on tape. Nor is there any record of any alderman asking, let alone demanding, the new, supposedly reform-minded prosecutor, Eileen O’Neill Burke, why she hasn’t reinstated charges against these men.

Even the treasured race card, the most notorious play of the morally bankrupt council, won’t figure in this police murder case. The murdered officer was African American.

The Chicago City Council, like the Chicago media, is lost in the daily seismic shifts taking shape in the new federal administration, all of these shifts reflecting Americans’ disgust with political bodies like the city council. In the coming months, a palpable measure will likely emerge. On the one hand, one will show those cities and states embracing the new political philosophy sweeping the country with balanced budgets, safe streets, schools that graduate citizens instead of protesters, and courts that are swayed by evidence, not ideologue media zombies.

On the other hand, cities like Chicago, unable to abandon the corrupt strategies upon which they built their political life, will be left in the dust of their own corruption.

It figures to be a bloody, expensive mess.