By Neal Pollack
“Oh, it’s nice to see you guys out here,” Seifer recalls telling him.
Seifer grew up in Lincoln Park trusting the police. She has an uncle and a sister on the force, and she took the initial exam to become an officer last year. In her job as a social worker for Chicago Commons she often works closely with the police, inviting them to play basketball with kids in the neighborhood. As a community-policing volunteer, she’s invited officers over to her house for barbecue. When John Richardson was named commander of the 15th District, she and Alderman Percy Giles gave him a tour of trouble spots in the area.
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Seifer told Lukas that the officer who’d sprayed her had been wearing a white shirt with black stripes on the shoulder. He had a “thick black mustache, dark eyes, dark eyebrows.” He was white, about five feet eight inches tall, and he weighed between 160 and 170 pounds. “He wasn’t overweight,” Seifer said. The other officers with him were all white; one was a woman.
“The director of OPS has the unilateral power to nix any findings by a police investigator,” says Chris Geovanis, a member of the group Neighbors Against Police Brutality. “And that’s if you’re lucky enough to get an investigator who has the time and the inclination to take your complaint seriously. Then on those rare occasions you get something out of OPS, you’ve got the superintendent’s office’s ability to can anything it wants. There is no system of police accountability in this city. It absolutely doesn’t exist”
Seifer didn’t understand. The man who sprayed her was wearing a helmet–he would have been hard to identify–and if the officer she picked out wasn’t on duty, why didn’t they tell her that months ago? She had appeared at the press conference with a swollen face. She’d taken photographs the day after the incident showing evidence of spray residue on her screen door. Why hadn’t the department asked to see her photos, and why hadn’t they come to her house to interview her neighbors? Didn’t they have any other way of finding out who was on her block that night?
