When Chicago’s top cop spoke to the media after a Border Patrol agent shot a woman last month on the city’s Southwest Side, he addressed a growing political firestorm over the department’s role in the incident.
Supt. Larry Snelling’s right-hand man, Patrol Chief Jon Hein, was facing a flood of criticism — from ex-cops, internet trolls and members of his own department — after radio transmissions showed his officers were ordered not to respond to the Oct. 4 shooting scene, as an angry crowd gathered to protest and confront federal law enforcement.
Snelling defended Hein, saying reports that Chicago police were told to stand down were “absolutely not true.” Dozens of complaints were filed against Hein over his response to the incident, but all but one has been closed out.
Police officials are citing that one complaint to block the public release of videos tied to the shooting, which drew international headlines and stoked the political divide surrounding the Trump administration’s immigration blitz of the Chicago area.
The police department says releasing the body camera and drone footage would hinder the ongoing investigation of the complaint against Hein. A spokesperson won’t comment.
‘Convoy’ crash leads to shooting
Marimar Martinez and Anthony Ian Santos Ruiz were among the drivers in a “convoy” of vehicles that tailed federal agents from Oak Lawn to Brighton Park on the morning of Oct. 4, federal prosecutors say.
When the agents neared Pershing Road and Kedzie Avenue, they were boxed in by the caravan, according to court records. That’s when the vehicles driven by Ruiz and Martinez collided with a federal vehicle.
As agents jumped out, Martinez allegedly drove toward one of them, court records show. A Border Patrol agent fired roughly five times toward Martinez’s vehicle — and Martinez continued driving north on Kedzie after being shot.
Martinez now faces a federal assault charge and was released pending trial, along with Ruiz.
Federal authorities and Chicago police closed down Kedzie between Pershing and 40th Street after the shooting. And as the morning turned to afternoon, tensions rose.
A questionable call
The Brighton Park incident was the first major clash placing the Chicago Police Department between federal agents and protesters, many of whom came out of their houses to denounce the Trump administration’s deportation campaign.
According to police radio traffic and notes from a dispatcher that afternoon, Hein ordered police to hand over the scene to federal agents.
After officers left the scene, a federal agent called 911 to report a growing and agitated crowd. The lieutenant giving orders told responding officers to wait a couple blocks back, and then ordered officers not to respond, “per the chief of patrol.”
An officer at the scene helping out with a traffic crash report mentioned a crowd but said she was fine with her team there.
“If she needs help we absolutely help our own, alright?” the lieutenant told the dispatcher. And later: “Get them the information they need and get them the hell out of there.”
The dispatcher checked with the lieutenant “just to confirm. …They were being surrounded by that large crowd and they were requesting the police, we’re not sending? I’m waving off all the cars heading to 39th Place and Kedzie?” she asked.
“Again, those are the orders we’re being given,” the lieutenant said.
The move prompted condemnation among conservatives on social media, including a scathing post by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The Chicago Fraternal Order of Police responded by issuing a no-confidence vote in Hein and calling for him to be stripped of his policing powers.
Hein’s order to clear the scene was ultimately countermanded, and Chicago police officers in patrol uniforms wearing name tags and star numbers on their vests responded to take over security.
They relieved officials from at least three federal agencies who wore camouflage coveralls, face coverings and sunglasses, ballistic helmets and vests. Most of the federal agents didn’t have any unique identifiers, like name tags or badge numbers, on their uniforms.
They retreated behind the Chicago police, who formed a line between them and the crowd. Chicago police faced the demonstrators as they formed the line.
Starting around 2:15 p.m. the federal agents used tear gas multiple times over the next hour. At one point, agents deployed gas to move a crowd back on Kedzie as they arrested someone, sending Chicago police officers running upwind to avoid the smoke.
The agents ultimately fired tear-gas canisters and other riot-control munitions into the neighborhood as they got into unmarked SUVs and pickup trucks and left. More than two dozen Chicago police officers were injured by the gas throughout the day.
The afternoon became emblematic of the federal response to demonstrators and neighborhood residents shouting, blowing whistles and at times throwing objects in protest.
Protesters and some journalists sued the feds over their uses of force on protesters at an ICE facility in Broadview and elsewhere in Chicago. Gregory Bovino, CBP’s chief of patrol, said in a deposition played at a Wednesday court hearing that all the use of force by agents had been “more than exemplary.”
A flood of complaints
Hein was the subject of more than 30 internal complaints stemming from the response to the shooting in early October.
Most of the complaints have been administratively closed. Some of them called for Hein to quit, be fired or even be charged with a crime. Others cited viral social media posts and appear to originate far from Chicago.
“Dereliction of duty. Chief of Patrol Jon Hein ordered officers not to assist fellow law enforcement who were under attack,” one person wrote in an anonymous complaint to Chicago’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability, the city’s police watchdog agency.
Some of the submissions bordered on threatening. “The rest of the country wants their heads on pikes. They will be hunted if society truly degrades to a state of lawlessness,” one complaint said.
COPA released those documents to the Chicago Sun-Times and the Illinois Answers Project in response to requests made under Illinois’ public records law.
But the oversight agency won’t provide a separate report detailing the investigation that the police department is citing to block the release of the body-camera and drone footage taken after the shooting.
On Oct. 16, COPA said the police department had asked for the document to be withheld because Hein hadn’t been informed of the accusations. That was long after Snelling had publicly defended Hein during the news conference on Oct. 6, two days after the shooting.
After the Sun-Times and Illinois Answers Project challenged the decision with the Illinois attorney general’s office, seeking to pry the records loose, COPA now has provided a different explanation for keeping the document private, saying its release would impede an ongoing investigation.
COPA has used that same reasoning to withhold videos the agency has collected in connection with another investigation over accusations that protesters were shoved by police officers and tear gassed by federal agents following the shooting.
Sources have said police didn’t use force that day and also didn’t suffer any injuries at the hands of protesters.
Customs and Border Protection, the federal agency that includes the Border Patrol, has denied a request for 10 body-camera videos, saying such a disclosure could interfere with an investigation, constitute an invasion of privacy and “reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of any individual.”
‘My partner in crime’
Hein’s stature rose over the summer when Snelling dramatically scaled back the role of First Deputy Supt. Yolanda Talley before she retired Oct. 15. Snelling has not named a replacement.
In addition to controlling the department’s roughly 8,000 rank-and-file officers, Hein now oversees street deputies — high-ranking supervisors who manage operations across multiple police districts.
Snelling has promised a thorough review of the department’s response to the Brighton Park shooting scene, but the agency so far hasn’t released that report or other records related to the review.
The investigation into Hein’s actions following the shooting doesn’t seem to have affected his relationship with his boss.
“If I were to turn my back on this man because of political BS — and, yes, political BS and people’s political beliefs — I would be a coward,” Snelling has said. “It’s not going to happen. That’s my partner in crime. I will go to war with this man.”
Contributing: Jon Seidel
Tom Schuba is a Sun-Times reporter. Peter Nickeas reports for the Illinois Answers Project.