Two high-ranking employees of the agency charged with investigating Chicago Police misconduct were abruptly fired Friday, just days after one of them complained to the inspector general about bias against police.
Matt Haynam, a $163,068-a-year deputy chief administrator for the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, said he was summoned to a virtual meeting with COPA Chief Andrea Kersten and general counsel Robin Murphy and told he was out, effective immediately. He said no reason was given.
Within 90 minutes, COPA employees showed up at Haynam’s house to retrieve his city car and seize his city-issued computer and phone, he said.
Shortly before being fired, Haynam said he got a text message from COPA’s $117,792-a-year supervising investigator Garrett Schaaf, who had also been summarily dismissed. Schaaf declined comment.
Haynam, 44, said he has no doubt why he was let go.
“I recently made a complaint to the [inspector general] directly and was let go today effective immediately and given no justification. I’m being fired because she [Kersten] is retaliating,” Haynam told the Sun-Times.
“There’s not a performance issue or an issue with my skill level or technical ability, nor was I told there was,” he said. “I’ve worked there for seven years and been promoted four times. Yet after I make a complaint against Andrea, I’m fired without explanation? I haven’t talked to her in over a month other than for her to fire me today.”
Haynam portrayed COPA as an agency in crisis and “at a standstill.”
“I could probably give you 20 people at COPA who would tell you the same thing,” he said. “We have employees inside with spread sheets tracking bias. We have quality managers who have met with Andrea and said, `We have a real problem here.’ Is there an issue? Yes. Enough people have been blowing the whistle that someone external to COPA has to either clear what’s going on and say investigations are sound or they’re not.”
Haynam noted that Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling has complained that COPA’s investigations are “outcome-based” and unfair to accused officers. “I think that’s true … I personally would not trust the process. I don’t think it’s fair in all cases,” Haynam said.
Ephraim Eaddy, COPA’s first deputy chief administrator, declined to comment on personnel matters.
But Eaddy pushed back on claims of an “anti-police bias” within COPA. He noted that just 14% of investigations closed last year resulted in sustained misconduct findings.
Civilian police oversight has long been a “polarizing” issue in Chicago and beyond, he said. “We remain committed to the work and our responsibility to receive complaints [and] investigate those complaints, to receive compliments of officers,” Eaddy said. “And our obligation is to the city of Chicago at large, and we are still committed to that and have been committed since COPA launched in 2017.”
In mid-July, the Community Commission on Public Safety and Accountability voted unanimously to ask Inspector General Deborah Witzburg to probe COPA investigations under Kersten.
Commission president Anthony Driver said the referral was based on “information from multiple knowledgable sources that raised serious concerns” about the “quality and integrity of COPA’s disciplinary recommendations and retaliation against COPA employees who have raised concerns about COPA’s investigations and recommendations.”
Enter former COPA chief Sharon Fairley, who hired and promoted Kersten and defends her integrity to this day.
Hours after the police oversight committee vote, Fairley filed a Freedom of Information request asking for, among other things, all email communications between any current or former COPA employees and Driver and more than seven months of email communications between Driver and Snelling.
At the time, Fairley flatly denied doing Kersten’s bidding by seeking information that could either clear Kersten or intimidate current and former employees who have accused her of anti-police bias.
Now a University of Chicago law professor, Fairley said she requested the information as part of her academic research on the effectiveness of civilian police oversight.
“My request is not in any way to imply that I think there’s anything nefarious going on between anybody,” she said then. “Neutrality is really important when it comes to civilian oversight. It’s really important that COPA not be seen as favoring one side or the other. That’s all I’m trying to understand.
“I’m not trying to accuse anybody,” Fairly said. “I’m not working for anybody. I’m not working on anybody’s behalf. I’m really only trying to study civilian oversight and how it’s working in Chicago, which is something that I’ve been doing for five years.”
Driver said it was “ridiculous” for anyone to suggest he was “doing this to be in bed with Larry Snelling.”
Snelling has repeatedly slammed Kersten’s handling of the investigation into the deadly police shootout involving Dexter Reed, who was killed in a hail of bullets in March after wounding a tactical officer.
Snelling’s beef initially centered around COPA’s decision to publicly release a letter from Kersten asking the superintendent to relieve the officers involved in the shooting of their policing powers. In the letter, Kersten questioned whether the officers had lied about the reason for the traffic stop that led to the gunfight.
The feud boiled over at a Chicago Police Board meeting in April, when Snelling criticized Kersten’s account of the shooting as “misleading at best.”
“I’ve made no statements about it because I don’t want to poison the well when it comes to this shooting,” Snelling said, adding that COPA “doesn’t exist to create a bias.” Any possible impropriety, Snelling warned, “jeopardizes the integrity of that investigation.
Earlier this month, the Fraternal Order of Police filed a lawsuit accusing Kersten and her top aides of leading dubious investigations and imposing unfairly harsh discipline on officers.
FOP President John Catanzara claimed Kersten “has taken that agency to a far-left ideology that is way beyond their mission statement.”
“They’re in charge of police accountability in theory, but they’re not accountable to anybody,” Catanzara said. “They made false claims, false reports, erroneous findings. It goes on and on and on.”
“We want the court to send a signal to her, to her No. 2, No. 3 and the other investigators working for COPA that our members are not there to be basically pinatas and punching bags,” he said. “They don’t get to just make stuff up to appease squeaky wheels in this city under the guise of police accountability when it’s nothing but some far left-wing agenda that she’s been placed in charge of.”