Chicago police review agency also under scrutiny in the wake of police superintendent's firing

The story continues to unfold in Chicago following the release of police video that showed Officer Jason Van Dyke shooting and killing 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. Yesterday, Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy was fired, a development that only intensified allegations of corruption and a cover-up reaching from police to prosecutors to the mayor’s office itself.

One facet of the system facing allegations is the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA), the civilian group tasked with investigating all police shootings and reported episodes of misconduct. In July 2015, a former supervisor with the agency came forward to make allegations of broad corruption and misconduct in its handling of officer-involved shootings. According to The Daily Beast:

If the allegations made by Lorenzo Davis are true, then the authority charged with investigating the Chicago Police Department for police shootings and claims of misconduct since 2007 can no longer be trusted.

Davis, a former supervisor at the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) who previously had a 23-year career with the Chicago Police Department, tells The Daily Beast that he was fired after refusing to obey orders to reverse his findings that police were not justified in shooting suspects six times in the past eight years. In three of those incidents, the suspects died.

“Bad shootings,” Davis says in police parlance for unjustified officer-involved shootings.

IPRA boss Scott Ando was responsible for the orders to reverse the findings, Davis said, adding that when Davis refused to whitewash the incidents, Ando fired him. Davis, despite his decades in law enforcement, was accused by Ando of having an “anti-police bias,” he said.

The IPRA failed to sustain multiple disciplinary complaints against Van Dyke prior to the shooting, and McCarthy noted that Van Dyke should not have been on the beat given the history of complains. The IPRA also determined that the Chicago police had not erased or tampered with security video from a local Burger King, even after the 86 minutes bracketing the shooting were found to be missing. 

It gets worse.