How disappointed are you that former Mayor Rahm Emanuel won't be testifying about the Chicago Police Department's notorious "code of silence" in federal court? At least not during a civil trial that starts Monday, stemming from cops bursting into the wrong home in 2018 and driving a woman, her four children and half-naked grandmother outside at gunpoint?
Yeah, me neither.
God bless Rahm — his tenure looks better every day. Emanuel didn't give away big chunks of city infrastructure in spectacularly disastrous deals that cost Chicago billions, like his mentor, Rich Daley. Nor did he flounder around in endless paroxysms of maddening, can't-anyone-work-this-crazy-contraption confusion, like his two successors. He should take his eyes off the White House and settle for the consolation prize of being mayor of Chicago, again. All is forgiven.
But spilling the beans on the CPD code of silence in a speech in 2015 doesn't make him privy to some big state secret. Any cop stuck on the stand could say the same thing, in theory.
Heck, they could subpoena me. I'd tell 'em. A week after Emanuel revealed the cop “tendency to ignore, deny or, in some cases, cover up the bad actions of a colleague,” I tapped Craig B. Futterman, a law professor at the University of Chicago, a national expert in police ethics and the guy whose legal clinic got a tip about the existence of dashcam video showing Jason Van Dyke pumping 16 shots into Laquan McDonald.
Futterman didn't mince words.
"Chicago is the capital of the code of silence," he said. "If you break with that code, you get crushed."
Cops will claim they must have each other's backs because no one else will. Thin blue line, yadda yadda, cue the heroic music. You have to count on your partner in that dark alley; your life depends on it. If the public only understood how incredibly difficult being a police officer is, they'd overlook any innocent, in-the-heat-of-the-moment mistake, or years of unchecked sadistic and racist abuse.
The results speak for themselves. Chicago police shoot more citizens than almost any other department in the U.S., some years grabbing the No. 1 spot, and payouts for wrongful death lawsuits are staggering in a city circling the financial drain: $1.11 billion from 2008 to 2024, according to the Chicago Reporter, with another $300 million piled on in 2025.
Not only are they expensive, but bad apples make police work harder — solving crimes takes the cooperation of neighborhood residents, who tend to become skittish and quiet if their only experience with police is being abused by them.
I have to admit my bias here. Forty years of trying to pry anything out the department yap has taught me: The CPD doesn't just have a code of silence about misdeeds. It has a code of silence about everything.
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