FOP Steps Up to the Phone

Someone (allegedly) called the FOP Wednesday and got this response:

• I called FOP today and I was asked, "How was I harmed?" The woman on the phone said that Dean is waiting for a call from Office of Legal Affairs. What a joke! More proof that Dean is in-bed with the Dept.

So from this, we can deduce that your private life can be dragged through the mud, your reputation besmirched, your career dead-ended or worse, and then, after the horse is out of the barn, the FOP step in and protect you from harm.

Um, what? We certainly hope this isn't true.

This was the Tribune on Wednesday:

• Chicago police officers' emails discussing the Laquan McDonald shooting can't be kept secret even though they were transmitted privately, a state official has decreed in what open-records advocates say is a solid step toward transparency on an issue that has roiled Illinois and reached as high as Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.
  
  The binding opinion last week by Democratic Attorney General Lisa Madigan follows quickly on a May Cook County Circuit Court ruling that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's emails about separate issues aren't automatically exempt from disclosure even though sent on private devices.

That's because Rahm was (allegedly) conducting government business on private devices. So was Hillary. That's a no-no. But back to the subject, what e-mails? Who said there was e-mail? What evidence is there that any e-mails were composed, sent, received at all from this scene? Are there affidavits verifying any of these speculations?

If the investigators want to grab all Department generated e-mail, have at it. It's a government site with government addresses saved on a Department server. As far as we're concerned, it's government property. Same thing with in-car camera videos, same thing with body cameras, same thing with GPS - it's government property and the government is entitled to know where and what their property is doing. So is the taxpayer. We came to terms with that long ago. So did the Courts.

This is nothing more than an attempt by CNN among others to locate a "conspiracy" based on no evidence. Fishing.

But a private device? Well, you better have a bit more than "It was on the scene." If we tried this, in Court or in an investigative capacity, we'd have been fired years ago.

We've seen a whole bunch of debate going on the comment sections:

• It's evidence

Evidence of what? If that's your argument, what's to stop the police from confiscating every cell phone on a scene and inventorying it until such time as it can be unlocked and "evidence" downloaded? We'll bet those pesky cameras everyone is pointing at us will show a lot more "evidence" than we get talking to the "no snitching" members of the "community." The clearance rate might actually go up ten or twenty percent. But it's still fishing.

• Leave it in your locker

A department locker is government property and they're entitled to search it at any time without reason, cause or a warrant. Look it up. There's tons of precedent. And everyone signed a form when you were given a locker in your Unit

• They're going to get it anyway

Really? You're going to roll over? Even if you don't have anything substantive on the phone, you're just going to surrender your Rights to some asshole boss demanding your phone? What next, DNA sampling of all officers - after all, you might do something evil in the future, right?

Everyone has their limit, and sorry, but this one is ours. We lost our phone, we left it at home, we don't own one, prove it was on scene, etc. We've got a dozen explanations ready to go. If we contacted a lawyer, priest, doctor or spouse, we're pretty sure that all of that is privileged. How can anyone be sure it stays that way?

What is the ACLU's opinion? We can't even speak to or touch a citizen on the streets without jumping through hoops and documenting it, but Lisa Madigan can create policy out of thin air, based on laws written twenty or thirty years ago and the Department is going to try to stick this on the working copper? Let's see the ACLU attorneys argue for the police for once.

The FOP and PBPA should stop reading the Obama playbook and start leading from the front - this is a serious issue and deserves serious attention and action.