Community organizers and some members of Chicago’s Black Press are still urging Mayor Brandon Johnson and the police department to fire officers connected to far-right extremist groups more than a year after some officers were found to have ties to groups like the Oath Keepers.
The active police officers reported to be on the membership list for the Oath Keepers are Sgt. Michael Nowacki, Detective Anthony Keany and Officers Phillip Singto, Alberto Retamozo, Matthew Bracken, Bienvenido Acevedo, Dennis Mack, Alexander Kim and John Nicezyporuk.
“I think the Oath Keepers definitely need to be fired from the department. There is no space, no room in the City Council, or anywhere in society, where we promote [and] encourage Oath Keepers to be serving in the Chicago Police Department. So call them for their immediate firing” said Joi Imobhio, policy strategist for the social justice nonprofit, Impact for Equity. Imobhio spoke at a rally calling for cuts to the police department’s 2025 budget outside City Hall on Nov. 15.
Removing those already-named officers from the Chicago Police Department (CPD) will be an impossible task, according to Anthony Driver, president of the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability (CCPSA).
In 2023, CCPSA proposed an amendment to the police department’s policy, expanding the prohibition of CPD officers from joining “criminal organizations” “to include groups that practice or support terrorism and groups that practice or support illegal discrimination and prejudice.” The amended policy went into effect in January 2024.
But Driver said the rule doesn’t apply to old findings. Meaning, the nine CPD officers who were found to have been involved in such groups in the past cannot be terminated because the investigation is closed and cannot be reopened.
The investigation was based on findings from before 2024.
If new complaints and findings arise, new investigations will take place that could lead to the termination of officers, according to Driver.
“People are like, ‘Oh, my God, you passed this thing and it didn’t do a damn thing.’ And it’s like, yeah, because [if] they were accused in [in the past] and we passed this for 2024, you can’t retroactively apply what we passed today to something that was done in [in the past],” Driver said.
Although the public’s criticism about the amended policy is frustrating for Driver, he said he doesn’t want to give Chicagoans “false hope” about firing those officers.
“I believe in being honest with the public. It’s very easy for me to take talking points and say, ‘We need to fire the Oath Keepers, get them off the [police] department right now,’ and people will feel good about me and my leadership, but I will be lying to them,” Driver said. That’s not going to happen. The investigation was closed, and we don’t currently have a legal mechanism to reopen that.”
According to Inspector General Deborah Witzburg, Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling is the one with authority to fire the officers after following the proper procedures.
Snelling also has the power to sign off on internal investigations done by CPD.
“The head of any City department, including the police department, has decision-making authority on whether to pursue firing an employee of that department,” Witzburg told The TRiiBE on Nov. 21, a day after this story was originally published.
However, some members of Chicago’s Black press recently sent a letter to Mayor Brandon Johnson urging him to keep his campaign promise to fire police officers associated with the hate groups.
Based on the Inspector General’s July advisory, the Johnson administration did not accept recommendations nor commit to “any specific action at all” regarding how it plans to handle issues of officers in extremist groups.
The TRiiBE reached out to the Mayor’s Office for a statement addressing the calls to fire the officers, but his office hasn’t responded.
Despite Driver stating that the investigation into the nine officers cannot be reopened, Ald. Chris Taliaferro (29th Ward) told The TRiiBE he would like to see the Mayor’s Office take heed of the Inspector General’s recommendations to reopen the investigation into the officers. Taliaferro is the chairperson of the City Council’s Committee on Police and Fire, and a former Chicago police sergeant.
University of Chicago law professor Craig Futterman also said that firing police officers, especially those employed by CPD, is difficult due to the state labor laws and their union protections. He’s also the director of the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project.
“The process of bringing a disciplinary action [or] firing an officer in Chicago is a really complicated legal morass that’s governed by a whole set of different things, from some laws, the collective bargaining agreements, and then also policies, then within the city,” Futterman said.
While to his knowledge there is no formal law that would prevent the reopening of a case that has been reopened and closed again, he said it doesn’t make reopening a closed case an easy task within the various policies and laws at play.
“Given all the overlapping and complicated policies and procedures in the different agencies, there may be something that then says, ‘Oh, we can only [reopen these cases] in X, Y and Z circumstance,'” he said. “So practically, I think it’s not an easy thing to do, but legally, I’m not aware of a barrier.”
Driver added that he doesn’t support any extremist members within CPD, but the officers are protected by their union. On the social media platform Bluesky, Driver posted that it’s disheartening that “no public official is or was willing to tell the truth about what we’re facing here.”
He continued, “If those officers were fired right now, they’d have standing to sue and taxpayers would be forking over lots of money in damages and they’d get their jobs back with backpay. We’ve looked at this frontwards and backwards. We don’t have a way to do this currently. That’s the truth.”
White supremacist groups in the police force “ain’t nothing new”
The calls to fire Chicago police officers with ties to far-right hate groups have become more urgent since the 2024 election of former president Donald Trump, whose inauguration for a second term in office is scheduled for Jan. 20. During his campaign, Trump has unabashedly used harmful and racist rhetoric and has vowed to give full immunity from prosecution to police officers.
Trump has notably been attached to hate groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who stormed the U.S. Capitol in January 2021 in an attempt to “stop the steal” of the election after Trump’s loss to President Joe Biden in 2020.
“Now the Oath Keepers have one of their own in the White House,” said Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25th Ward) during a rally outside of City Hall ahead of the CPD budget hearing on Nov 15. “That’s what’s happening. And what we need is people to stand up.”
Sigcho-Lopez is looking for his peers in the Chicago City Council to demand answers from CPD on why such bad actors are still employed.
“We need a City Council that could, today, come and ask questions: ‘How is it possible that we have Oath Keepers and Proud Boys in the Chicago Police Department to this day?'” Sigcho-Lopez said.
Modern-day policing evolved from slave patrols. During the postbellum Reconstruction Era, slave patrols enforced systemically racist laws and Black Codes that were created to limit the rights of formerly enslaved people.
Jasmine Smith, an activist with the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (CAARPR), spoke about the historical relevance of having members of far-right extremist groups inside police departments and said the Johnson administration needs to take immediate action.
“There’s been generations of this: members of the KKK being in these [police] forces. They know this. This ain’t nothing new,” Smith said. “Take action now if you really want to serve your community for public safety. That’s not public safety, having people who can care two cents about our lives [inside the Chicago Police Department].”
During the CPD budget hearing on Nov. 15, CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling said that the department can only deal with misconduct within their purview.
“Oftentimes we look at groups and we look at affiliations, and we judge people based on those affiliations, and we sometimes have to be careful,” Snelling said. “I’ve heard people call Black Lives Matter a hate group. Are we going to start looking at those affiliations? What we need to look at is behavior. What are these individuals doing that we as a department can address?”
Some officials are thinking up possible solutions
Joseph Williams, a 7th district police council member, was adamant about his belief: people with ties to hate groups should not be employed in public government positions.
“Folks who represent hate groups should not be allowed to work in any city department, not just the police department. That’s our education system. That’s City Hall,” Williams said. “Because they can’t do the job fully if they’re not trying to serve all people. “
Williams said the issue of extremist members in the CPD has been a major concern for the police district councilors, who have ranked it as a top issue that the department should be examining. Some of the police district councilors have submitted proposals to the CCPSA board.
“One of the proposals, when we’re talking solely about this issue, it says, ‘transfer the investigation of officers with ties to hate groups to COPA [the Civilian Office of Police Accountability],’” Williams said.
Williams worries that officers with extremist ties within CPD will undermine his work, as a police district councilor, of strengthening relationships between officers and the community. He also worries about other harms the officers may commit while still employed.
“Now I’m curious to the point that now these officers haven’t been held accountable, and now that they’ve stayed on the force, how many more interactions have these officers had with Black and brown folks in the communities that they are working in?” he said.
Driver said the commission received the proposal to transfer the investigation duties to COPA last week, stating that it’s something they are looking into.
Gatewood said he is currently co-leading an effort with the Office of Equity and Racial Justice to create a task force that specifically looks into extremists within city departments.
“We started that work pretty instantly because we are committed to working with every agency across the city. This is not just about the Chicago Police Department, but what if this is a culture in other [city departments], right? So we need to do our due diligence to work through that,” Gatewood said. He did not elaborate on where things stand currently with the task force but said that more information would be shared when possible.
Ald. Taliaferro said he thinks that creating a new task force is pointless.
“We have a task force that is essentially called the CCPSA. That’s their responsibility,” Taliaferro said. “To form another task force would essentially be redundant. These are people that are elected by the public and appointed to a position of governing and creating policy for the Chicago Police Department.”
Driver said the new task force should include various groups including CCPSA, COPA, community members, as well as plaintiffs from the consent decree to do deeper investigations that the BIA may not do.
A partnership is important to establishing transparency, according to Gatewood. “It also helps with community relations, right? And I think that part is important because if we get to a place where you can do a deeper investigation to really have a better understanding of where people are aligned and what that means for the safety of the folks on the streets of Chicago, that’s ultimately where we all want to get,” he added.
