CHICAGO — The agency charged with investigating misconduct by Chicago police officers has recommended firing an officer for, primarily, posting a photo on Facebook of former Mayor Lori Lightfoot in “blackface” when the image actually showed her in clown makeup. up showed. Unpleasant reports released Friday.
After nearly five years of investigation, the agency sent its termination recommendation to the Chicago Police Department. Larry Snelling in April. He rejected COPA’s recommendation, calling the termination recommendation “egregious” and noting that the image did not show Lightfoot, who is black, in blackface. It showed her in clown makeup.
COPA accepted Snelling’s counter recommendation of a ten-day suspension.
Just six weeks ago, two former high-ranking investigators at COPA filed blistering lawsuits claiming they were fired for speaking out about anti-police bias tainting its investigations.
The investigation began days after Lightfoot, who was chairing a city council meeting, was heard on a hot microphone referring to the police union president as a “clown.” Lightfoot acknowledged that she was sorry for “saying it out loud” during the July 24, 2019 meeting.
Four days later, Chicago police officer Andres Barrezueta posted a photo of Lightfoot to a private Facebook group called “City Workers Past and Present.”
The image “shows Lightfoot’s head with a red clown nose, white eyebrows, a white mouth and bright red lips on top of her face, while the head [sic] placed atop the torso of a man dressed in a tuxedo standing outside the entrance to the mayor’s office at Chicago City Hall,” COPA Chief Administrator Andrea Kersten and now-departed Deputy Chief Administrator Matthew Haynam wrote in their dismissal recommendation.
Haynam is one of several former COPA employees suing the agency.
Someone who said he received a screenshot of the image from a “friend” sent it to the city’s inspector general. Investigators there searched an employee database and discovered that Barrezueta was a city police officer. His Facebook post and profile photo contained no suggestion that he was a cop.
When someone commented on the clown image and asked if Barrezueta was trying to portray Lightfoot in blackface, he replied that his intention was “humor.”
“She called my rep a clown so I made her a clown,” he wrote.
In response to COPA’s termination recommendation, Snelling called the conclusion that a photo of Lightfoot in clown makeup constitutes blackface “questionable.”
“In this case, Officer Barrezueta did not change or darken Mayor Lightfoot’s skin color. He used a photo of her head with her natural skin color and added the clown features,” Snelling’s response said.
COPA first questioned Barrezueta about the clown photo in September 2020, more than a year after he posted it and seven months after he closed his Facebook account. The agency’s investigation then dragged on for years until it interviewed Barrezueta again in January.
This time, the researchers focused on a different image that they independently unearthed while searching through Barezueta’s old messages.
The second image, about which COPA never received a complaint, was posted on the city workers’ page before the Lightfoot clown photo. According to COPA, the image “shows former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel wearing a leotard with a rainbow-colored, phallic object protruding from the center of his forehead with the caption: ‘FEAR ME, I AM A UNICORN.'”
According to COPA, Barrezueta told investigators that the image of Emmanuel was “about unicorns and not an attempt to insult Emmanuel by using homophobic imagery.”
However, COPA researchers found that the image of Emmanuel, who graduated from ballet school and studied at a dance center, was “homophobic and derogatory.” The agency called the Lightfoot clown image “racially offensive” and the Emmanuel image “gender biased.”
Twenty days after investigators re-interviewed Barrezueta in January, the agency released its findings and recommendations to Snelling.
Kersten and Haynam concluded that COPA had “serious concerns” about Barrazueta and recommended his “separation from the CPD,” citing the need for police officers to build trust with the community and not act with bias toward “historically marginalized individuals.” .
Snelling labeled the COPA investigation as “not thorough” and noted that despite it taking years to investigate a seemingly simple case, investigators did not even speak to the person who filed the initial complaint.
“We have no explanation from the accuser as to why she was offended by former Mayor Lightfoot’s photo or whether she knew or even assumed the person who posted the photo was a Chicago police officer,” Snelling wrote.
And, Snelling noted, COPA never received a complaint about Emmanuel’s image, but included it in the investigation after “searching Officer Barrezueta’s old messages.”
Snelling compared COPA’s dismissal recommendation to suspensions received by officers accused of apparently more egregious social media posts that included direct, disparaging comments, which Barrezueta’s posts did not.
The top cop responded with a recommended 10-day suspension for Barrazueta, which COPA ultimately accepted.
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