Chicago City Wire

One of the fallouts of having hundreds of illegal immigrants housed in police stations around the city is that the police are exposed to illnesses carried by possibly unvaccinated individuals with inadequate, or no, health care, and to their trash. It’s hypocritical, said one former Fraternal of Police Lodge 7 official, for the city to go nuclear over one potential health care crisis and ignore another.

"The city went crazy during COVID to force cops into getting the vaccine or at least declare their status, all on the claim of public health,” Martin Preib, former FOP Second Vice President, told Chicago City Wire. “But now they think nothing of stuffing the districts with migrants whose infection, health, and vaccine status are unknown.”

“It’s an unsafe situation for cops and another sign of the deep antipathy Chicago’s ruling party and its media lapdogs hold towards its police officers,” he added.

Chicago Police Department

The FOP has recourse; it could advise its members to avoid exposure, as it did three years ago in the face of another health threat, until the city finds more permanent housing for the migrants. In July 2020, the Lodge wrote a letter of protest to the Labor Relations Division within the Department over a temporary training facility on the Far South Side, an abandoned high school containing lead, asbestos, inadequate ventilation, and floors with exposed nails.

“The Lodge intends to advise all Police Officers of those abnormally dangerous conditions which is an immediate threat to their health and safety and rights and Section 20 of the Illinois Public Labor Relations Act,” an FOP field representative wrote in the July 21 letter. “The section states that ‘quitting of labor by an employee or employees in good faith because of abnormally dangerous conditions of work in the place of employment should not deemed to be a strike.’”

The letter went on to say that individual police officers would make it their call whether to report for instruction in the building.

FOP President John Catanzara did not respond to an inquiry into whether the Lodge would advise its members to avoid the stations until the threat of exposure passes.

In a double whammy for the cops, they are facing an investigation into an accusation that some of them have engaged in sexual misconduct with a migrant. The investigating board, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) - the target of a 2019 FOP lawsuit - said the charges came from an unnamed city employee, but confirmed this week to Chicago City Wire they have yet to identify a victim of the alleged crime.

In a YouTube video, Catanzara, said that the allegations are untrue, and in part blamed a recent change in the law requiring those filing complaints against the police to sign an affidavit attesting to their truthfulness.

"Who knows where this complaint even originated from," Catanzara said. "But to think there are not police-hating groups that would go to any length to start this type of nonsense because they know the media will pick it up because it is such a sensationalized story, your head is in the sand."

Finally, the police took yet another hit when the media hyped the story, Preib said. 

“Nearly every media outlet jumped on the story in both coverage and social media blasts,” Preib wrote in a recent commentary. “Clearly, every detail of the allegations and investigation by COPA would be pored over by Chicago’s legion of self-described ‘investigative reporters.’ Over the course of the next few days, however, the ‘investigative’ aspect of the case proved somewhat lacking, culminating in a bizarre press conference in which the new head of COPA, Andrea Kersten, revealed her agency was having troubling finding any victims.”