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Chicago FOP Open Letter to Superintendent: Resign

CHICAGO – The Chicago Fraternal Order of Police is calling on Police Supt. Jody Weis to resign.

In a letter posted Monday on the group’s website, Richard L. Aguilar, financial secretary, wrote, “Please take a cue from our mayor. Resign.”

The call follows a Weis-penned Chicago Sun-Times letter to the editor defending his tenure as chief cop, and ahead of a planned police protest of his leadership.

The union took issue with Weis’ contention on a news program that union leadership might be out of touch with membership “as demonstrated by the lack of representation among minority or women within their top ranks.” Aguilar disputed that claim. He also wrote: “(Y)ou have either been intentionally untruthful in your comments to me and the FOP membership or you have naively made promises that you could not live up to. Either way, this is not leadership . . .”

An Open Letter to Superintendent Weis

Today, I awoke to see a news story on WGN-TV where you spoke about how you have attempted to work with the Fraternal Order of Police and how the Fraternal Order of Police has failed to work with you. You went so far as to suggest that we, as leaders of the FOP are out of touch with our membership. Neither of these statements to the media could be further from the truth.

Police Officer William Cozzi now sits in a federal prison after he pled guilty in federal court. You said, on more than one occasion, that you did not have any personal involvement in having Officer Cozzi investigated even after he had served his recommended discipline; a full two-year suspension. We now know that this was not the case. You had direct involvement in referring this to federal authorities.

As a newly appointed Field Representative in April 2008, I was looking forward to having an opportunity to meet with you and your staff. My thinking was that being fresh from the street I might be to able relate some of the feelings from the people actually working the beat cars to upper management. At that first meeting you mentioned that one of the things that needed change was the FTO program. I advised you that this was an issue that I was interested in as I had been an FTO for twenty-plus years. Your response was that I would personally be involved in any discussions regarding proposed changes to the FTO program.

This never happened. There wasn’t any meeting ever conducted with me or anyone from the FOP offices. You conducted several Town Hall meetings early in your appointment. At these meetings you stated that the Department had to change its mentality and get rid of the “bean counter” approach to deciding the productivity of officers. Recently, the Chief of Patrol had District Commanders indentify the “Ten Worst” in each district. Either your command staff is out of touch with your proposed policies or you failed to institute the changes you promised.