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Attorneys for Chicago’s police superintendent have taken legal action to ask a Cook County judge to reverse a recent Chicago Police Board ruling that cleared a controversial police officer of wrongdoing — the first time in the consent-decree era that the city and its police boss have made such a request.
County court records show the complaint for administrative review was submitted on behalf of Chicago police Superintendent Larry Snelling in late November amid an ongoing fight over the way serious police misconduct cases are ultimately adjudicated.
The board voted in October to find Officer James Hunt not guilty of all the administrative charges brought against him in late 2022, charges that stemmed from a chaotic arrest scene in the River North neighborhood during the civil unrest and looting in May 2020 after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Hunt was accused of violating nine different Chicago Police Department rules during the arrest of a woman who struck a police officer with her car as she tried to drive away from a violent scene near Kinzie and Dearborn streets. After he saw the collision, Hunt ran over to the vehicle and broke the rear driver’s side window with his baton, records show.
The driver was soon arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, but prosecutors later dropped the case.
The board’s decision to acquit Hunt was nearly unanimous. In its October ruling, board members said that attorneys for the city weren’t even close to proving Hunt’s guilt, though they said the officer’s behavior at the time of the arrest was not ideal.
“(Hunt) acted in the best way he saw fit within the limited amount of time he had to ensure everyone’s safety in the context of a chaotic and violent scene,” the board wrote in its decision.
“While the Board finds the Superintendent has not met his burden of proving the charges, (Hunt’s) conduct was not exemplary,” the board added. “The scene was chaotic, an officer was struck by a car, and (Hunt’s) safety concerns were justifiable, but more effort to communicate with (the driver) and understand the situation was called for. The Board urges (Hunt) to bear more closely in mind when responding to future challenging situations that a person’s encounter with the police can be a very frightening experience and, under such circumstances, the risk of misunderstanding is great.”
The board — whose new president, Kyle Cooper, presided over his first meeting in December — unanimously acquitted Hunt in eight of the nine charges against him.
In the lone disputed charge, police board Vice President Paula Wolff and board member Aja Carr-Favors said that Hunt was “rash, disrespectful, (and) unjustified” when he broke the car’s window with his baton. Wolff and Carr-Favors said Hunt should face a suspension, but they stopped short of recommending he be fired.
CPD records show Hunt joined the department in 2013. He was the subject of at least two other internal investigations in recent years, too. The Independent Police Review Authority cleared him in the fatal 2014 shooting of a 17-year-old boy in the Chatham neighborhood. Four years after that, Hunt was captured on cellphone video telling two men, “I kill mother-------.”
Hunt is currently assigned to CPD’s District Reinstatement Section, according to a department spokesperson.
The administrative review lawsuit was filed on Snelling’s behalf weeks after the board’s decision was announced, Cook County court records show.
The complaint argues that the board’s decision to clear Hunt of wrongdoing was “against the manifest weight of the evidence, arbitrary, unreasonable, capricious, unrelated to the requirements of service, and contrary to law and sound public opinion.”
County court records show the last CPD superintendent to make such an appeal was Garry McCarthy in 2015.
Spokespeople for the CPD and city’s Law Department declined to comment on the pending litigation. The first hearing in the case is scheduled for March, court records show.
James McKay, Hunt’s attorney, blasted the renewed attempt to fire the officer and pointed to the complaining witness’ failure to identify Hunt during his police board evidentiary hearing.
“She testified that the person who violated her rights looked completely different than Officer James Hunt,” McKay said. “This was a case of mistaken identity. James Hunt didn’t do anything wrong.”
The police board noted that during Hunt’s evidentiary hearing the driver of the vehicle “testified she did not recognize him and had never seen him before.”
McKay was specific in criticizing “the lawyers at City Hall that are doing this,” and he questioned whether Snelling was even aware of the complaint being filed.
“There is no factual basis for these lawyers for the superintendent to do this, and I would call on Larry Snelling to pick up the phone and call his lawyers and tell them to stop this (expletive),” he added.
Police board decisions can be appealed in the Circuit Court of Cook County, and it’s common for officers to do just that after the board issues disciplinary measures against them. It’s much rarer, though, for the CPD superintendent to appeal a board decision and argue for a heftier punishment.
The complaint against Hunt comes at a precarious time for the future of the city’s police discipline apparatus.
Contract negotiations between the city and Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7 concluded last year. And while the agreement’s economic package was approved by the City Council, another provision has generated much more pushback.
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The arbitrator who oversaw the negotiations, Edwin Benn, ruled last year that CPD officers accused of serious misconduct have the right to have their cases decided by a third party instead of the Chicago Police Board. The FOP then tried to remove nearly two dozen pending disciplinary cases from the police board’s docket, though that effort was denied.
The contract was split into two votes. The first, which covered the economic package that provided a nearly 20% raise to officers over four years, was unanimously approved. The second vote, to approve the disciplinary arbitration award, was denied and the tentative contract agreement was sent back to the bargaining table.
But in a new ruling made public Thursday, Benn doubled down. FOP members, he said, have an unequivocal right to disciplinary arbitration and any court challenge by the city is doomed to fail.
“From my view of this matter, the City’s chances of prevailing in that litigation will be a very steep hill to climb that will be a very challenging legal proceeding for the City (indeed, a course of action with no possibility of prevailing),” Benn wrote.
“The Rule of Law mandates arbitration as required by the Final Award; the parties should work in collaboration to overcome the remaining differences and in the end, because the law requires arbitration, if issues remain that can’t be resolved, then the proper avenue for attempting to correct differences is to make efforts to change the law.”
In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office said, “Again, we disagree with the arbitrator’s ruling against public accountability and transparency in the most severe cases of police misconduct. We remain firm in our commitment to improving community safety for both the people of Chicago and law enforcement.”