Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling at the police headquarters, Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2023.
Pat Nabong / Chicago Sun-Times
Chicago Police Department leaders said Thursday they have decided not to punish any officers whose names appeared on the leaked membership list of the Oath Keepers, an anti-government extremist group that played a key role in the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
“The investigation is closed and the allegations were not sustained,” a spokeswoman for the CPD said in a statement, declining to provide any documents from the internal probe.
The brief statement stood in stark contrast to Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling’s zero-tolerance vow to the City Council in October, after WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times revealed the misconduct records of the cops with ties to the Oath Keepers.
In a joint investigation, “Extremism in the Ranks,” WBEZ, the Sun-Times and the Organized Crime and Corruption Project found 27 current and former Chicago police officers whose names appeared in leaked membership records for the Oath Keepers. Nine remained on active duty, some with troubling disciplinary histories, according to public records.
Days after those stories, Snelling told elected officials there would be “thorough investigations” into the officers and promised to “remove those members from our ranks.”
Snelling also told Council members, “It serves the Chicago Police Department in no way, in no way good, to have members amongst our department who are filled with bias, or members of hate groups.”
The top cop’s comments echoed the campaign promises last year of his boss — first-term Mayor Brandon Johnson, who promised to fire officers with clear ties to extremist groups.
The city of Chicago’s inspector general, Deborah Witzburg, had called on Johnson to keep his promise. On Thursday, Witzburg told WBEZ she would review all the work that the Chicago Police’s Bureau of Internal Affairs has done in the cases of the individual officers who appeared on the Oath Keepers membership rolls.
“If we find an investigation to be deficient in any way which materially affects the outcome, we will recommend that the investigation be re-opened,” Witzburg said.
Witzburg has slammed the police department’s previous investigations into officers linked to the Oath Keepers and two other extremist groups — the Proud Boys and Three Percenters — and she pushed the Bureau of Internal Affairs to reopen three separate cases.
Witzburg has argued that existing Chicago Police rules already would allow Johnson to follow through on his campaign promise. She pointed to longstanding, broad rules that prohibit cops from discrediting the department and undermining its goals.
But previous efforts to discipline Chicago cops accused of having extremist ties have faltered, records show.
An investigation was launched after National Public Radio reported in November 2021 that a group of Chicago cops was found on the leaked membership roster for the Oath Keepers.
Internal investigators didn’t obtain that list, and a stark warning from the Anti-Defamation League was apparently overlooked. As the investigation was playing out, in August 2022, the ADL wrote an email to the police department’s second-ranking official and provided the names of as many as eight Chicago police officers on the leaked Oathkeepers rolls.
But the probe — which targeted just three officers — wasn’t expanded, and it was closed without discipline against anybody.
Internal Affairs also has come under heavy fire for its treatment of Officer Robert Bakker, who lied to investigators about his close ties to the neofascist Proud Boys, another group involved in the 2021 Capitol riot. Bakker ultimately entered into a mediation agreement and was suspended for 120 days, drawing criticism from alderpersons and activists who called for his dismissal.
The “Extremism in the Ranks” investigation also found other law enforcement agencies in Illinois have shied away from disciplining officers whose names appeared on the Oath Keepers list, including Illinois State Police trooper and a member of campus police force at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
The nine active-duty Chicago officers who appeared on the Oath Keepers data rolls are: Sgt. Michael Nowacki, Detective Anthony Keany and Officers Phillip Singto, Alberto Retamozo, Matthew Bracken, Bienvenido Acevedo, Dennis Mack, Alexander Kim and John Nicezyporuk.
Unlike many other extremist groups, the Oath Keepers’ membership rules bar anyone advocating “discrimination, violence or hatred toward any person based upon their race, nationality, creed, or color.” But some of the Chicago officers who appeared on the group’s membership list have faced accusations by members of the public of racist policing.
Nowacki got a three-day suspension in 2007 after he replied to Englewood community activist Deborah Payne’s email request for charitable donations by telling her, “I have no desire to help inner city poor people.” Payne called for Nowacki to be fired after learning of his Oath Keepers’ ties.
Nicezyporuk was accused by Black men of using racial slurs during traffic stops on two occasions but denied it and was not disciplined. In one case, Nicezyporuk’s accuser said the incident on the West Side in 2014 left him “scared to be around white people like that …. Especially white cops.”
Dan Mihalopoulos is an investigative reporter on WBEZ’s Government & Politics Team. Tom Schuba is a criminal justice editor for the Sun-Times.