Mayor Richard Daley on Monday announced the resignation of Tisa Morris as head of the Police Department’s Office of Professional Standards and the formation of a special committee, whose members include a vocal critic of police abuse, to help find a successor.
Setting up a committee to select a new chief could be the first step toward establishing an independent citizen review panel that ultimately would replace the office, which is responsible for investigating wrongdoing by officers, City Hall sources said.
Morris, a former assistant state’s attorney who has headed the office for two years, is leaving for personal reasons, Daley said. But one city official, speaking on condition of anonymity, described Morris’ resignation as “a mutual agreement that she should probably move on.”
“It wasn’t that she did anything wrong,” the official said. “It was she didn’t do enough to undue the things that were wrong.”
Morris was unavailable for comment.
The Office of Professional Standards has been a lightning rod for critics who contend the Police Department fails to take timely action and mete out appropriate discipline to officers guilty of brutality and other wrongdoing. The subject is particularly sensitive in minority communities.
“All the great strides we have been making, reducing crime and everything else–if people have the perception that OPS is not fair, open and honest with them, then you lose the fight against crime,” Daley said. “People then feel they don’t have an avenue to complain, and if they do complain they are not being heard.”
Daley, who is expected to seek a sixth term in February, said the department has “stepped up efforts to recruit people of all backgrounds so [it] better reflects the city,” and he ticked off a list of actions that police officials have taken to help ensure appropriate behavior by officers.
But the mayor himself brought up one of the department’s most notorious examples of abuse, the alleged torture of suspects under former Cmdr. Jon Burge, who was fired in 1991.
“No matter how awful the crime, no suspect should be subject to abuse, especially the kind of abuse that occurred decades ago in the Calumet Police District,” Daley said.
Special prosecutors in July delivered a long-awaited report that concluded Burge for two decades used electric shocks and other brutal methods to coerce dozens of confessions. Daley was Cook County state’s attorney during part of that period, something that is expected to be an issue in the 2007 mayoral race.
Speaking at a City Hall news conference, Daley announced that the city will hire a national search firm to produce a list of candidates to head the Office of Professional Standards.
The special panel then will sift through the contenders and present Daley with its top choice.
The committee will be headed by retired police Supt. Terry Hillard. Its members will include Rita Fry, former Cook County public defender; civil rights activist Rev. Michael Pfleger of St. Sabina Catholic Church; and Andre Grant, an attorney who has sued the police more than a dozen times.
In his highest profile case, Grant represented the family of a boy who was wrongfully charged with the 1998 murder of 11-year-old Ryan Harris.
Standing next to Daley, Grant said he was “kind of shocked” to be asked to serve because of his adversarial relationship with the city. The Office of Professional Standards “is broke,” he said, “but it is a great thing to attempt to fix it.”
“I think OPS has done a terrible job,” Grant said in a brief interview after the news conference. “I have always encouraged my clients not to file a complaint with OPS. They are not going to do a doggone thing.”
Grant, who is black, was asked if Daley might be using the committee to curry favor with African-Americans at election time.
“I will not allow myself to be used,” he said. “I am not going to agree with something I don’t agree with. But I know if you want to make a difference, you can stand on the outside and yell or you can sit at the table where the policies are being made.”
Nevertheless, if the final selection for the standards office chief is a poor one in his view, “I will yell as loud as I can,” Grant said.
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gwashburn@tribune.com
