Years before there was the Invisible Institute suing Chicago’s police department in hopes of cleaning it up, there was Citizens Alert, doing the same thing. And by years, I mean decades. In 1970, three years after it was founded to monitor the police, Citizens Alert filed a suit charging the city with racial discrimination in the hiring of recruits.
Mary Powers died Saturday at Evanston Hospital at the age of 93. She’d been ill a short time, and she’d remained active in Citizens Alert until the organization finally folded last year, its papers being moved to the Jane Addams College of Social Work at UIC. In its heyday it was about all there was in the way of a police watchdog in Chicago.
Actually, the FOP leader thought the bill didn’t go far enough. Why limit it to “official” misconduct? he wondered. That just gave those judges and juries a loophole. Write it to protect all misconduct across the board!
