Rejected Chicago police applicants are losing most appeals to get back on hiring list

A former Peoples Gas worker said he applied to become a Chicago cop because he wanted Black people to see someone like them working for the Chicago Police Department and “wanted to help create a safer life” for them.

But his application was rejected because he'd been arrested 10 times — for reasons including an accusation that he'd punched his girlfriend in the face.

None of his arrests led to a conviction. He later got them expunged. Still, his appeal to be restored to the department’s eligibility list was denied. He sued the Chicago Police Board, the oversight agency that handles such appeals.

“I still feel I did not get a fair chance in Chicago,” says the 37-year-old man, who agreed to an interview on the condition he not be named.

In May, the Harvey Police Department hired him, state records show.

Between 2021 and this fall, the nine-person Chicago Police Board has ruled on 98 appeals from people whose applications to join the police department were denied because of arrests, poor work histories or other problems in their backgrounds.

Only 18 of those appeals were successful.

That means the board restored 18% of applicants to the Chicago Police Department's hiring eligibility list.

In contrast, in 2008, when the Chicago Sun-Times reviewed decisions by the city's Human Resources Board, the agency that formerly decided such appeals, more than one-third of the people who appealed were successful between 2005 and 2007.

Many of the winning appeals came from candidates with family ties in the police department and letters of recommendation from Chicago City Council members and other influential people.

In 2018, the Sun-Times again looked at the Human Resources Board’s decisions and found that the number of successful appeals from rejected police applicants had fallen to 13%.

The following year, a city ordinance moved the power to decide those appeals from the Human Resources Board to the police board, which also decides disciplinary action for cops accused of serious wrongdoing.

Brad Woods, former personnel director for the police department, says he isn’t surprised the police board is now rejecting more appeals.

“They are aware of what may happen down the line with people like this,” Woods says.

In the past, the mayor picked the police board’s members. Last year, the new Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability began nominating candidates for the board, among them Kyle Cooper, its president.

Before taking on that role, Cooper was a hearing officer who scrutinized appeals and recommended to the the board whether prospective officers should be put on the hiring list. The board has the final say. There’s no objective standard for making those tough decisions, Cooper says.

Anyone appealing needs to present evidence to show the city’s Office of Public Safety Administration erroneously removed them from the eligibility list.

Cooper says hearing officers and board members need to take a “holistic” view of rejected applicants, including whether they’ve directly addressed their past troubles.

“We look to see whether there’s contrition," he says. "We look to see whether there’s honesty."

Cooper says the board has been “extremely reluctant” to offer a second chance to applicants with a history of violence.

Other cases leave more room for leniency, he says, such as appeals hinging on the use of marijuana, now legal in Illinois and many other states.

As a hearing officer, Cooper made recommendations on 13 appeals from rejected police applicants. He restored only four of those people to the hiring eligibility list, records show.

In one case, Cooper found that an applicant who admitted taking pants, gloves and deicing salt from his employer should be restored to the eligibility list because of his candor.

The police board accepted Cooper’s recommendation.

"These actions suggest that [the] applicant is the type of candidate the department should be seeking,” he wrote.

Others Cooper recommend be restored to eligibility included a candidate who sold marijuana; a person saddled with excessive debt; someone with a poor work record; and another person who'd had numerous run-ins with police and had "difficulty dealing with certain situations" as a youth but "matured and learned to deescalate."

Cooper says he’s confident in the process and encouraged that the number of appeals has grown each year since the board took over.

“The standard is tough,” he says. “But I think that it is operating correctly in the way that it is doing a good job of filtering out individuals who would not be good police officers for a variety of reasons.”

Of the 18 people whose eligibility to become a cop has been restored by the police board since 2021, the one who faced perhaps the most serious accusations was a woman accused in a complaint filed with the police department of punching another woman in the face, hitting her car and threatening her with a gun.

The hearing officer in her case recommended returning the woman to the hiring list, noting that she wasn't arrested or even questioned by a police officer.

“While it is probable that applicant is not being entirely forthcoming about her history with [the alleged victim], there has been no additional evidence presented to counter [the] applicant’s assertion that she never struck, chased or flashed a gun,” hearing officer Mamie Alexander wrote in June.

Alexander noted that the applicant’s brother was a Chicago firefighter who died in the line of duty and that the applicant said "she was determined to live out both of their dreams of protecting the city’s residents.”

Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago Law School professor, says the city has to strike a balance between filtering out bad candidates and creating red lines that could systematically exclude certain groups.

Futterman says the fact that fewer applicants are being restored to the hiring list could be an indication the police board “is more carefully screening and vetting the candidates.

“That’s especially important given the extraordinary powers that police officers have — the power to take people’s freedom, the power to use force, the power even to kill in the name of public safety,” he says. “It is critically important that we, as a city … carefully screen out and prevent people from becoming officers who are violent, who are dishonest and who may be likely to abuse their powers to hurt people.”