THE BROTHERHOOD’S LAST STAND
LATE IN THE EVENING OF JULY 23, JOHN CATANZARA, the president of Lodge 7 of the Fraternal Order of Police, which represents the Chicago Police Department’s rank and file, went to Grant Park. He was there, he told reporters, in support of his officers who had been injured the week before in a demonstration in front of the park’s statue of Christopher Columbus when protesters set off fireworks and threw plastic bottles filled with ice. Maskless and wearing a white windbreaker with red and green stripes and the word “Italia” across the chest, he was willing to argue with anybody: reporters, bikers, beer drinkers, a protester dressed as a vagina. He believed the statue, which city workers were about to take down on the mayor’s orders, was a symbol of America’s heritage, particularly the contributions of Italian Americans like himself, and it deserved to stay. (“This explains it all!” one protester cried. “You’re an Italian, man?”)
“You know what?” Catanzara told a reporter from ABC-7. “The mayor’s a liar. She said it wasn’t gonna come down. Fifty-two police officers got hurt at that statue defending it after she said it wasn’t coming down, and now she wants to basically spit in their face and take the statue down. It’s disgusting. … The mob cannot rule this city. The politicians are supposed to rule this city, and they’re cowards.”
Catanzara, 52, is a big man, 6-foot-3 and 290 pounds, most of it muscle. His light brown buzzcut is starting to gray at the temples. Even out of uniform, he is unquestionably a cop. He speaks in an officer’s staccato cadence with a pronounced Chicago accent. He stood in front of Columbus with his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans, chest thrust forward, daring anyone to challenge him. In the wake of the protests, he had written a letter to President Donald Trump, which he’d also posted to the FOP’s Facebook page, requesting federal assistance.
“Our members were just supposed to take aggravated battery after aggravated battery, as victims, as a condition of employment?” he asked me a few weeks later when I met with him in his office. “Hell no will that ever be a condition of employment that we have to accept for members.”
The Tribune had reported that 14 officers were hospitalized, one with a broken eye socket, along with an unknown number of protesters, including 18-year-old Miracle Boyd, whose front teeth were knocked out when a police officer punched her in the face. Twelve arrests were made. The police finally dispersed the crowd of approximately 1,000 by using pepper spray. Mayor Lori Lightfoot later said that the removal of the Columbus statue in Grant Park, as well as the one in Arrigo Park in Little Italy, was temporary, done in the interest of keeping both the police and the protesters, as well as the vigilantes trying to pull it down, safe.
The mayor wasn’t in the park that early morning the statue came down. Neither was the police superintendent. As the leader of the largest of the city’s four police unions, representing 12,000 active-duty officers, Catanzara presented himself as a figure of authority. When he took office as FOP president in May, he promised to be more visible than hispredecessors had been. “My name and my reputation will make for good copy,” he wrote in his inaugural president’s report in the FOP’s monthly newsletter. “You have someone who is not afraid to push back.”
As far as Catanzara is concerned, there’s plenty to push back against. In the wake of the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, there has been widespread demand throughout the country for both police reform, including increased accountability for officers, and outright defunding of police departments. Here in Chicago, Lightfoot has already pledged not to defund the police; in August, she cowrote a report from the United States Conference of Mayors concluding that cities should start spending more on social services instead. But reform is another thing, and the FOP is seen as one of the biggest obstacles. It fought vigorously against a federal consent decree, enacted after a Department of Justice investigation into police practices in Chicago in the wake of the shooting of Laquan McDonald, that sets forth a long list of changes the CPD is required to institute by 2024.
In keeping with other large police departments, its contracts with the city have, since 1981, contained a section that offers extraordinary protections for officers facing internal investigations, including the right to amend their statements and a requirement that all civilians making complaints file affidavits beforehand, taking away their anonymity. These protections favor officers to such a degree that of nearly 250,000 allegations of police misconduct since 1988, just 7 percent have resulted in any kind of discipline. FOP members consider appearances before the Civilian Office of Police Accountability nothing more than an annoyance. “The culture here is if you get in trouble, if there’s an administrative inquiry, you can lie and do whatever you can to get out of it because the penalty for lying will never be greater than the trouble you’re in,” former Chicago police superintendent Jody Weis told DNAinfo.
The FOP’s most recent contract expired more than three years ago, that the union’s only counteroffer would be financial.
