Today, Lefkow ruled that the City has one week to get a stay of her ruling from the federal appeals court.

At issue is whether the names of all Chicago Police officers who had ten or more citizen complaints filed against them between 2001 and 2006 will be released to the public. Author Jamie Kalven filed a petition in March to intervene in a civil rights lawsuit in which the list of officers' names, along with other documents, had been produced. Kalven is best known for his "Kicking the Pigeon" and other writings about Chicago's public housing projects.

The plaintiff in the civil rights suit is Diane Bond, a Stateway Gardens resident, who alleged extreme brutality by a group of officers and who was represented by University of Chicago Law School clinical professor Craig Futterman. Kalven is represented by the civil rights law firm of Loevy and Loevy.

Judge Lefkow found that since police officers are public officials "entrusted with the extraordinary authority to arrest and detain persons against their will," the public interest in this information outweighs the City's arguments for confidentiality. "With so much at stake, defendants simply cannot be permitted to operate in secrecy," she said.

"There is no longer any question that Commander Jon Burge and officers under him tortured African-American suspects to coerce confessions during the period 1973 to 1991," said Kalven's petition. "Mayor Daley has described them as 'a shameful episode in our history.' ...The question now being intensely debated is whether the underlying systemic conditions that allowed Burge and his men to operate with impunity for nearly two decades remain in place."

The timing of the City's legal maneuvering is critical. On July 19, the City Council is scheduled to consider an ordinance sponsored by Mayor Daley which will allegedly reform the police department's Office of Professional Standards (OPS), the primary body charged with investigating police misconduct. Assuming the City does not appeal Lefkow's decision, the information alleging extensive police brutality would be unsealed just three days before the Council's vote.

"Our study of the Chicago Police Department's own data showed that its disciplinary and supervisory systems are broken," said Craig Futterman, the University of Chicago's Mandel Legal Aid Clinic professor who represented Diane Bond in the lawsuit in which the documents were produced. "If we're serious about fixing these systems, as opposed to public relations maneuvers, we need to understand the nature of the problem. Unsealing the CPD data is a critical first step toward a real solution."

"As the City Council prepares to debate changes to OPS, lawyers for the City spend taxpayers' money to keep key police misconduct data secret," said Jon Loevy, one of the attorneys fighting to unseal the files. "On the one hand, the City plays lip service to the need to be more transparent, but with the other hand, their lawyers fight with everything they have to make sure that the documents bearing on how OPS really does its job are sealed from public view."

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