After three years of negotiations, lawsuits and appeals, the Illinois Supreme Court this week will hear arguments from attorneys for the city of Chicago and the Fraternal Order of Police in a case that will determine the future of serious misconduct cases involving Chicago Police Department officers and the public’s right of access.
The crux of the dispute is whether officers accused of severe wrongdoing may have their disciplinary cases heard and decided by a third-party arbitrator — as is the case for other municipal employees represented by labor unions — instead of the Chicago Police Board, which has been the city’s practice since 1961.
Arguments are scheduled for Thursday in Springfield. A decision from the state’s high court could come before the end of the year, though it’s not yet clear how or when a new officer discipline system could be implemented.
What’s more, as the search for CPD’s next superintendent continues, the future leader of the department will be faced with hundreds of individual decisions in officer disciplinary cases that have stalled in the last three years.
In recent months, police accountability advocates have invoked the 2014 shooting of Laquan McDonald and other notorious CPD scandals, warning that the city could backslide into an era of unchecked police abuses if the hearings are allowed to carry on behind closed doors.
“Secrecy breeds impunity for police officers,” attorneys for a coalition of police reform groups wrote in a June amicus brief submitted to the Illinois Supreme Court. “CPD’s closed door practices that prompted the Consent Decree allowed abusive police officers to believe that they were above the law and free to target the most vulnerable among us for repeated abuse.”
Allowing serious misconduct cases to be settled in arbitration “would undo nearly a decade of work to prevent police misconduct and would shield that abuse from the accountability processes established to address the long history of harm done to Chicago communities,” the coalition contended.
Also at issue is whether or not officers who face termination from CPD should be paid while their cases are adjudicated.
As the delay has languished, scores of accused police officers and alleged victims of misconduct have been forced to wait.
“Officers should not have to spend years with serious charges hanging over them. Alleged victims should not have to wait years for resolution,” Chicago Police Board President Kyle Cooper said last month. “And Chicago residents should not have to wait years to learn whether serious allegations against a public servant have been proven. This delay serves no one.”
Since fall 2023, the city’s longtime process for adjudicating those cases has been largely paused as the legal fight between the city and FOP, the union representing rank-and-file police officers, wound its way through the state judiciary.
In briefs submitted to the court, attorneys for the FOP have argued that the city is seeking to “create a brand-new public policy that would require the City, its employees, and their labor unions to open their grievance arbitration proceedings to public attendance for the first time in history.”
More Top Picks Best Modular Synthesizers
Attorneys for the city, meanwhile, say the union’s effort to remove those hearings from public view flies in the face of CPD’s ongoing reform efforts and would undermine confidence in the city’s Police Department.
“Transparency, when the most serious police misconduct is on the line, has been crucial in Chicago, where the policing landscape is extraordinarily complex and many residents harbor mistrust towards police,” city attorneys wrote. “Public hearings build trust and cooperation between CPD and the people it serves.”
Attorneys for the union countered that “these are political arguments about what those groups believe that the public policy of the State of Illinois should be, not statements of what the State’s well-defined public policy actually is.”
Claims from the city and its supporters were little more than “emotional appeals and attempts to recast this lawsuit as a fight to stamp out police misconduct, (when) at its heart this case is about workers’ rights,” FOP attorneys contend.
Craig Futterman, a clinical professor of law at the University of Chicago and one of the attorneys representing the coalition of community groups, noted how the Illinois Supreme Court in 2020 rejected a similar argument from the FOP when the union attempted to have misconduct records destroyed after five years.
“The Illinois Supreme Court said, ‘No, no, no, no, no, that violates fundamental public policy of the state and any collective bargaining agreement that is contrary to public policy is void and unenforceable,” Futterman told the Tribune.
The impasse dates back to summer 2023, when the City Council bifurcated the new collective bargaining agreement with the FOP. In negotiations before the contract was approved, an arbitrator ruled that CPD officers, as public sector employees in a collective bargaining unit, may have their most serious disciplinary cases heard and decided in private by a third party.
Before the court fight was launched, Edwin Benn, the arbitrator who oversaw 2023 contract negotiations between the city and FOP, warned the City Council that any attempt to undermine his award to the union would be futile.
“Please don’t throw away potentially large sums of taxpayer money that could be used better elsewhere than on a legal fight you cannot win,” Benn said in 2024.
The city later appealed in Cook County Circuit Court, and, in March 2024, Judge Michael T. Mullen sought to find middle ground, ruling that CPD officers may have those cases heard and decided by a third party, but those proceedings must be held in public.
The FOP then appealed, but in August 2025 a panel of Illinois Appellate Court judges concurred with Mullen. However, the appellate judges also ruled partly in favor of the FOP and ordered that officers who face firing can still be paid while their cases move forward.
As the lawsuit appeal process has played out, officers have retained the option to have their cases heard and decided by the Police Board. So far, just four of the 31 CPD officers currently facing charges have opted for a board hearing.
In the meantime, work has continued for investigators with the Civilian Office of Police Accountability and CPD’s bureau of internal affairs despite no clear adjudication method.
A Tribune review of police misconduct data found that, since September 2023, COPA has sustained findings of misconduct in more than 650 investigations. Of those, 22 related to police shootings.
Meanwhile, the bureau of internal affairs has sustained findings of misconduct in another 463 inquiries, records show.
CPD has moved to fire 26 police officers since September 2023, though most of those cases have remained on hold amid the legal dispute between the city and FOP.
More Top Picks Super Glue
Amid the slowdown, however, individual members of the Police Board have settled dozens of disputes between the COPA and CPD’s office of legal affairs when the two sides disagree on the findings of an investigation or the penalty sought.
Former police Superintendent Larry Snelling, who retired in July, had said he favored keeping the proceedings open and accessible.
“If we need accountability, if we have officers amongst us who are not here faithfully, then we need to do what we have to do to ensure that we maintain a reputation of our hardworking officers who are out there every day doing the work faithfully,” Snelling said in late 2025.
“Ensuring the community knows how complaints and misconduct are handled and what the process is can help strengthen public confidence and (address) the concerns that the investigation is handled in the best way possible and is transparent,” Snelling said.