The Illinois Supreme Court is set to hear arguments Thursday on whether disciplinary hearings for Chicago police officers accused of serious misconduct must remain open to the public.
It marks the latest, and possibly final, chapter in the yearslong legal battle between the city and its largest cop union that has ground Chicago’s police oversight system to a halt.
There are currently over two dozen officers with pending charges before the Chicago Police Board who have chosen to take their cases to arbitration, leaving them in limbo as they await the court’s ruling.
“This delay serves no one,” Kyle Cooper, the police board president, said last month. “It leaves serious disciplinary charges unresolved and imposes significant costs on taxpayers.”
Over the past three years, the case has wound its way from the bargaining table to City Council and now all levels of state court.
It began in Summer 2023, when an arbitrator overseeing the police union’s collective bargaining negotiations found state law allowed members the right to “final and binding arbitration,” like other public sector employees.
City Council voted the decision down twice, handing the issue over to the courts.
In March 2024, a Cook County judge ruled officers could bypass the police board and have their cases heard by an arbitrator, but that hearings could not be held in private. Neither the city nor the Fraternal Order of Police was pleased, prompting a swift appeal.
Last August, a panel of appellate judges upheld the lower court’s ruling, finding that moving hearings behind closed doors would violate public policy, which favors “police accountability and transparency.” The three-judge panel sided with the union by ruling that officers who face firing must still be paid while their cases are pending.
Still, the police union appealed. In a brief to the state Supreme Court, union attorneys argued the appellate panel had ignored established state law that allows for private arbitration and instead drafted its own rules based on its “own policy preferences.”
The city responded that moving hearings behind closed doors would break with a decades-old practice and would represent a serious step back in the department’s reform efforts.
“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,” the city wrote in a brief. “Public hearings build trust and cooperation between CPD and the people it serves”
Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, whose office filed a lawsuit that spurred a federal consent decree mandating sweeping Chicago police reforms, echoed this warning.
“Excluding the public from hearings in serious police disciplinary matters would undermine both the Consent Decree’s reforms and public confidence in CPD,” Raoul wrote to the court.
Regardless of the higher court’s ruling, the police board is asking officers not to seek arbitration.
Once a decision is released, the city and police union will still have to work to establish an arbitration process, contributing to further delays. But the board is “ready and able to hear disciplinary cases now,” according to Cooper.
“Officers should not have to spend years with serious charges hanging over them,” he said last month.
“Alleged victims should not have to wait years for resolution. And Chicago residents should not have to wait years to learn whether serious allegations against a public servant have been proven.”
But only four of the 31 officers currently facing charges have elected to have their cases heard by the police board.
The remaining 27 officers have chosen to take their cases to arbitration. Seven of those officers are accused of using deadly force.
That group includes Officer Eric Stillman, the cop who fatally shot 13-year-old Adam Toledo during a foot chase into an alley in Little Village in March 2021.
Oral arguments are set to begin at 9 a.m. Thursday and will be streamed on the Illinois Supreme Court’s website.