Investigator Says He Was Pressured to Justify Chicago Police Shootings

An investigator with seven years on Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority — who previously served 23 years as a cop, detective and commander — was fired because he refused to reverse his conclusions into several police shootings of civilians, reports WBEZ after a review of agency records.

Lorenzo Davis, 65, a retired Chicago police commander, received exemplary performance evaluations throughout his tenure at the city agency dedicated to investigating police brutality and shootings, according to records reviewed by WBEZ. After earning a master’s degree in criminal justice, Davis was promoted to lead a team of five investigators.

In recent years, however, Davis declined to submit to pressure from the chief administrator of the IPRA, Scott M. Ando, to reverse his findings on several police shootings. And he says that cost him his job.

“They told me to change it,” Davis said in an interview with ABC Chicago. “Change it. And if I did not change it, I was insubordinate and I would be disciplined.”

Reports WBEZ:

Davis’s termination came less than two weeks after top IPRA officials, evaluating Davis’s job performance, accused him of “a clear bias against the police” and called him “the only supervisor at IPRA who resists making requested changes as directed by management in order to reflect the correct finding with respect to OIS,” as officer-involved shootings are known in the agency.

Since its 2007 creation, IPRA has investigated nearly 400 civilian shootings by police and found one to be unjustified.

The performance evaluation covered 19 months and concluded that Davis “displays a complete lack of objectivity combined with a clear bias against the police in spite of his own lengthy police career.” ...

Davis says he helped investigate more than a dozen shootings by police at the agency. He says his superiors had no objections when his team recommended exonerating officers. The objections came, he says, after each finding that a shooting was unjustified. He says there were six of those cases.

“They have shot people dead when they did not have to shoot,” Davis said about those officers. “They were not in reasonable fear for their lives. The evidence shows that the officer knew, or should have known, that the person who they shot was not armed or did not pose a threat to them or could have been apprehended by means short of deadly force.”

Davis, who’s also a licensed attorney, says he believes the U.S. Justice Department needs to investigate the Independent Police Review Authority. The IPRA declined to comment, saying this is a “personnel matter.”

» read the full story by WBEZ reporter Chip Mitchell