When you were in school taking final exams, could you get up whenever you wished, hang out in the washroom with your friends, trade answers, then go back to your desk and finish the test?
Your teachers wouldn’t allow it. But Mayor Little Big Man gets no such deference from his pupils.
About 3,000 of his Chicago patrol officers took the city’s promotional examination on Saturday at the Merchandise Mart in the hopes of making the rank of sergeant.
During the test, hundreds of them bolted for the washrooms at the same time, to gab and compare notes before returning to their seats. Daley’s bureaucrats, who didn’t have the brains to keep order, lost control.
The result was a complete fiasco, a ruined test and another example of how a mayor loses the respect of his police force.
“It was total chaos,” said Mike, a South Side patrol officer who graduated from a Big Ten university and was one of about two dozen officers who called me to complain Monday. “You had 500 people just getting up from their desks, going to the washroom, comparing notes, trading answers, coming back. It was horrible.”
Mike joined study groups. He took his vacation time to study for the test, like so many others. He spent his days in a library, his nights in a lecture hall.
Now he’s wondering if he wasted his time.
“The guys who were upset are the guys who needed this test to be on the legit,” Mike said. “Because there are political people who are going to be made (promoted). They know they’re going to be made. They’re somebody’s somebody. But I have no clout. I’m light. And they screwed it up. The city ruined it for me.”
Mike wasn’t the only one who called. There was Tom and Julie and Linda and Gene and others. Black cops and white cops and Hispanic cops and women cops. A multicultural complaint.
“It was a joke,” said Tom, a detective who also took the test. “I feel bad for a lot of the men and women who studied hard. It was like `Animal House’ in there–guys were trading. You could never do that in school.”
Several others admitted to lifting answers from friends.
“Everybody was doing it, what about me? Am I a sucker or something?” asked one cop. “They were all doing it. So I did it too.”
The officers estimated that about 500 or so bolted. The city had a lower official figure.
Daley’s people said about 200 officers got up without permission and walked en masse to the washrooms. According to city officials, more than 200 cops took only seven minutes at most to do their business in the washrooms.
Let’s use their numbers and see if they hold up. Two hundred nervous cops floating on pre-test pots of coffee would almost have to take longer than seven minutes to pass through a washroom.
For the sake of argument, let’s say they were full of beer at Comiskey Park, which is set up to accommodate such mass urgencies. It would still take longer than seven minutes. And at the ballpark, they’re just talking baseball, not general orders and crime scenes.
About 3,000 officers were competing for 500 sergeant spots. Eliminate 150 spots because Daley will promote those by the highly political and controversial “merit” system. That leaves 350 positions. Using the city’s best-case scenario, about 200 got a chance to cheat on a test that’s already lost its legitimacy.
Daley’s people argued that cheating was virtually impossible and the test results were not tainted. But of course, nobody’s sure.
“There was, for a period of time, people who were out of their seats,” said John Camper, the deputy mayoral press secretary. “But we’re satisfied that nothing wrong occurred.”
The current controversy between the mayor and his cops started with a broken promise.
In an Aug. 2, 1994, opinion piece published in the Chicago Sun-Times under his name, the mayor vowed to promote 500 sergeants from that 1994 test.
But instead of promoting the final 80 or so who remained from that list, he junked the list and started over. That inflamed the police union. Daley’s new plan, to promote 30 percent by applying subjective “merit,” has also bothered many cops.
But what really bothers them is that the mayor’s promotion and hiring policies keep changing direction, like a wind sock in a storm, depending on elections and who’s complaining.
“It would be patently unfair to the 500 hard-working police officers, who we eventually expect to promote from this list, including 66 minorities and 125 women, to throw out the results. The results stand. And the promotions are going forward,” Daley wrote.
“. . . I hope everyone will hold themselves to a standard of truthfulness and sincerity. The people of Chicago deserve no less.”
That’s what several thousand police families figure too.
