In 2010, we wrote about the stench that disgraced ex-Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge attached to law enforcement in this city. Tactics to coerce confessions, said victims of Burge and his rogue crew of detectives, ranged from pointing loaded guns at them and holding plastic bags over their heads to bludgeoning them with a flashlight and applying electric shocks to their genitals.
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There’s another former police detective just as culpable for lastingly tarnishing the Chicago Police Department’s reputation and honor.
Reynaldo Guevara.
Burge’s name is synonymous with heinous behavior by police, but Guevara’s should be, too. His alleged misconduct stretched from the 1980s to the early 2000s, and included accusations of framing people for murder, coercing confessions, manipulating witnesses and fabricating evidence. Guevara’s actions have led to 39 exonerations.
The Tribune recently reported on one of Guevara’s victims, Marilyn Mulero, who is suing Guevara, former Chicago Detective Ernest Halvorsen and the city in federal court after her murder conviction was overturned last year.
Now 52, Mulero was 23 when she was sentenced to death on charges that she and another woman helped lure two gang members to a park on the West Side where the men were fatally shot in what was claimed to be retaliation for an earlier gang killing. During questioning from Guevara and Halvorsen, Mulero was denied sleep, not allowed to speak to an attorney, and threatened with the loss of her children, the Tribune reported. She signed a statement confessing to one of the murders and later received the death penalty. The sentence was later overturned and she was given life in prison without parole.
She would spend a total of 28 years behind bars until Gov. J.B. Pritzker commuted her sentence in 2020. Later, prosecutors sought and obtained an overturning of the conviction. While Mulero was in jail, her two toddler-age sons grew up, and she now has four grandchildren.
And Guevara? He retired in 2005 and collects a yearly pension of some $80,000 from the city. He has never been charged and has repeatedly pleaded the Fifth when confronted with allegations made against him by his victims.
The damage wrought by Guevara, Halvorsen, Burge and other rogue cops reaches far beyond the lives derailed by their actions. Since 2010, City Hall has paid more than $26 million for outside counsel to deal with civil rights lawsuits involving Guevara. More suits have been filed in recent months. At the time of Burge’s death in 2018, Chicago and Cook County had paid out $100 million in settlements and legal fees linked to the former police commander’s actions.
All of this should weigh heavily into the calculus Mayor Brandon Johnson uses to select the city’s next police superintendent. Rogue behavior by cops remains a potential peril that the department must remedy if it’s going to regain the trust of communities it serves, particularly in predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods on the South and West sides.
The fallout from cops who lie, brutalize and torture lasts for years, decades even. It wallops city coffers, but it also mars Chicago’s reputation, and creates a vicious cycle of mistrust that dissuades citizens from cooperating with police. When that happens, violent crimes don’t get solved, lawlessness thrives , and mistrust for law enforcement grows.
Johnson has three finalists for Chicago’s top cop to choose from: Larry Snelling and Angel Novalez, both top Chicago police officials, and Shon Barnes, the police chief in Madison, Wisconsin.
The person Johnson picks will inherit a broad array of paramount tasks. Understaffing at both the officer and detective levels hampers the department’s effectiveness. The new superintendent also will have to balance tackling violent crime with Johnson’s emphasis on root causes and non-law-enforcement approaches, such as violence prevention and street outreach. And the new superintendent must do a much better job than his predecessor at keeping pace with implementation of the consent decree, the 2019 court order that blueprints how the city should reform its Police Department.
But just as important will be to create a culture within the department that prevents the likes of Burge or Guevara emerging again.
That task shouldn’t be seen by the new superintendent as an aspiration. It should be seen as a mandate.
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