For five years, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and other city officials hewed to the same script, maintaining to the public that Chicago has enough cops.

And the mayor and police brass proclaimed that they were working with the community to fight problems that lead to crime.

But out of the spotlight, the Emanuel administration told federal officials that the Chicago Police Department needed hundreds of additional officers and that community-based policing has been withering in Chicago for years — and that’s been a factor in the rise in violent crime battering the city.

In applications for grants from the Justice Department the past two years, city officials portrayed the Chicago Police Department as dangerously understaffed — even as Emanuel and police brass publicly dismissed calls to hire more cops until just a few weeks ago.

“The high number of unfilled sworn [police] positions, coupled with an unacceptably high rate of firearms-related violent crime in Chicago, continues to pose a significant public safety concern for our residents, the local economy and for the millions of tourists and visitors coming to Chicago each year,” reads a City Hall grant application submitted in July.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department awarded the city $3.1 million to pay for 25 police officers — the most allowed under the grant program. The city has gotten grants to fund police hiring every year that Emanuel has been in office, as it regularly did under his predecessor, Richard M. Daley.

During the 2015 campaign, mayoral challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia promised to expand the police ranks, saying he would pay for that by cutting the $100 million a year the police were spending on overtime. Emanuel ridiculed that idea.

Three months later, city officials told the Justice Department they wanted to hire 469 additional police officers but didn’t have the money. They reiterated that in another application this summer.

“Tragically, in particular Chicago communities and neighborhoods, public violence is ‘normal,’ and proximity to firearms-related incidents is an everyday fact of life,” city officials wrote in the July application.

Since taking office in 2011, Emanuel has said the police department remains committed to community policing — known here by the acronym CAPS, for Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy. First adopted in Chicago in the 1990s, the approach is based on residents and police sharing information and working together to solve problems that lead to crime.

From the superintendent to each beat officer, “Everybody practices community policing,” the mayor said during his 2015 campaign.

Yet, in that year’s city budget, the mayor had closed the CAPS office and cut funding for community policing staff to $2.7 million, down from $9 million in 2000 and $4 million when he came to City Hall, budget records show.

And in a grant application that summer — three months after Emanuel needed a runoff to win another term — city officials highlighted a different approach to policing. The “Gang Violence Reduction Strategy” focused on “suppression” in high-crime hot spots, they wrote. As evidence of its success, they pointed to a drop in citywide crime statistics.

A year later, crime was surging, with Chicago headed toward a year with more than 600 murders for the first time in more than a decade.

In July, city officials acknowledged to the Justice Department that the police department has drifted from community policing. No longer touting crime “suppression,” they wrote that years of “hot spot” policing had caused friction with some members of the community.

“While this model has been successful in preventing and reducing crime,” the application says, it also “led to some erosion of police officers’ understanding of the vital role community-based crime prevention strategies contribute to long-term, sustainable reductions in crime.”

It spelled out how little training officers receive once they leave the academy. Each year, police officers are given eight hours of training in the use of force — and none for conflict de-escalation, racial or ethnic bias, gender bias, sexual orientation bias or engagement with the community.

In his 2017 budget proposal, Emanuel wants to expand crisis-intervention training, create a community relations division in the police department and add 970 officers. Mayoral aides said the hiring costs would be covered by cutting police overtime.

Aldermen say the hiring is past due.

“Most of us are just trying to make sure it’s going to happen,” says Ald. Roderick Sawyer (6th), chairman of the Chicago City Council’s Black Caucus. “A few of us have been proposing this for years now.”

Shortly before 11 p.m. on Oct. 23, 2006, Tom Wood, a Maywood Police Department K-9 officer, responded to one last call before the end of his shift — a problem of some sort by a storefront parking lot.

Turned out to be nothing, so Wood headed off. A colleague working that night figured he was going home.

Instead, Wood drove to Sixth and Erie, an area known for gang and drug problems in the long-troubled west suburb. Sitting in his marked SUV with his police dog Daro in the back, Wood ran the license plate of a Pontiac that was parked on the darkened residential street. And, for reasons still not clear, he called the girlfriend of a reputed Maywood gang member.

Within minutes, Wood, 37, was dead — shot repeatedly by someone who approached from the street and might have been talking to him through his partially opened window before opening fire.

The shooter bolted, and an intense investigation followed.

A full decade has now passed since Wood’s murder. No one has been arrested, and the police appear no closer than they ever were to catching the killer.

There were 48 cops nationwide who were “feloniously” killed in the line of duty in 2006, according to the FBI. Just three of those killings remain unsolved, those of: a deputy sheriff in Sacramento County, Calif., who was shot during a traffic stop; an officer in Puerto Rico struck by gunfire amid a gang shootout; and Wood.

Early on, an entire task force of investigators, many of them from outside the suburb, focused on making an arrest, until they hit a brick wall. Today, Maywood — which, with about 24,000 residents, has 54 full-time sworn officers and is facing difficult times financially — has one detective assigned part-time to the Wood case.

Police Chief Valdimir Talley says there will be a renewed push to solve the case in 2017 — with the expected completion of a re-examination of the evidence that’s been gathered, the prospect of enhanced DNA testing and the possibility of two TV crime shows featuring the case and, Talley hopes, stirring up new tips to solve Wood’s murder.

“I owe it to the family,” Talley says, as well as fellow cops and the community “to bring closure. I’m definitely committed to getting this resolved.”

Officer Tom Wood. | Maywood Police Department

The slain officer’s widow, Helene Wood, says she’s hopeful but not optimistic the case will be solved any time soon. That’s in large part because, she says, the initial probe ended in shambles: “They don’t really have anything. What are they going to do with nothing?”

The police made plenty of mistakes:

• Bursting into the wrong house without a warrant.

• Allowing an initial suspect to wander the crime scene.

• Storing evidence in Maywood’s flood-prone police station, which ended up getting some of the evidence wet.

• Tearing down wanted posters because of a mistaken notion that a reward had dried up.

• Failing to interview some of the people Wood had seen or called in the days leading up to his murder.

And there were sometimes strong differences of opinion among investigators — in particular between Maywood cops and others on the task force — over suspects, including the reputed Maywood gang member whose girlfriend Wood had called.

Early on, some people questioned whether there might have been someone in law enforcement involved in Wood’s death. Over the years, a number of dirty cops were on the rolls of Maywood’s force —including one officer caught in 2010 stealing money from suspects during a sting. But the possibility of a cop being involved ultimately was deemed not credible.

In recent years, Helene Wood says it appeared that little work was being done on the case.

“The system failed us,” she says. “Maywood was the system.”

A makeshift memorial on Oct. 25, 2006, marks where Maywood police Officer Thomas Wood was gunned down. | Sun-Times files

An FBI spokesman says his agency is ready to help police in Maywood if requested. The FBI continues to have a standing reward of up to $10,000 for information leading to an arrest. And a $100,000 reward is still being offered by U.S. Bank, which has a branch in Maywood.

Maywood’s chief at the time of Wood’s murder, Elvia Williams, now runs the police department in Richton Park. She says of Wood’s death: “I think about it daily.”

“I don’t really know who did it,” Williams says.

But she says she thinks Wood probably knew his killer because he apparently rolled down his window to talk to that person. Then again, she says, Wood “knew lots of people.”

Still, Williams says she’s “optimistic that it’s going to be” solved.

“I’m betting it’s going to be in the next couple of years,” she says.

Randy Brown, the Maywood detective still working the case, says “2017 will be a new push,” and “we’re going to start re-interviewing people” among other things.

Last weekend, about 50 officers, family members and friends of Wood gathered at the murder scene to mark the 10-year anniversary of his death, to remember him and celebrate his life. They lit candles, offered prayers and released balloons into the sky.

That happened against a backdrop of police in Chicago and around the country having come under intense scrutiny for wrongful shootings, racial insensitivity and other misconduct.

Talley referred to the current mood in brief remarks at the vigil, saying, “In light of what’s going on in the country with police officers, this is a time that we need to stand pat, continue to hold our heads up.”

He says Wood was one of the good cops dedicated to “protect and serve” who unfortunately illustrated the dangers of the job.

Wood and his wife were raising five kids. One of their teenage children is now considering a career in law enforcement, Helene Wood says.

“As much as it scares me, I can’t hold him back from happiness and his future,” she says.

Working a midnight shift on Jan. 18, 2015, Denis Lawlor was showing a new colleague around the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago’s sprawling Stickney wastewater-treatment plant.

They were both cops — Lawlor for several years with the police department run by the government agency, which handles flood- and sewage-control for much of the Chicago region, and the colleague only recently hired.

For nearly an hour, Lawlor provided an eye-popping assessment of how things supposedly work at the district — which was all recorded after his radio handset either malfunctioned or was accidentally keyed and his remarks were somehow broadcast over an Illinois State Police radio frequency.

Among his comments, according to an audio copy:

• “Everyone here is sleeping,” Lawlor told the rookie. “The engineers, everyone that’s here on midnights, they’re all f—— sleeping somewhere, too.”

• Referring to clout hiring, Lawlor said, “Just assume everyone here is here on a phone call . . . everybody.”

• Lawlor used the “n” word, calling a black colleague a “stupid Alabama field n—–” and joking that “white guys” should call Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which was the following day, “James Earl Ray Day,” in reference to the civil rights leader’s killer.

• Lawlor used the “c” word to refer to female colleagues.

• And he discussed “the apartment” — a secret back room where he said district employees would hide out, watch TV, sleep on a couch, play cards and drink beer, stored in a refrigerator there. He’s heard telling the rookie he was welcome to grab a beer whenever: “Help yourself,” but “don’t f—— take the last one.”

Lawlor’s remarks weren’t just offensive, according to the state police, who said they also briefly tied up a critical radio frequency used by troopers, who were put at risk without that open line of communication with dispatchers.

The probationary officer Lawlor was speaking to was fired.

And, in February 2015, the water reclamation district suspended Lawlor — who’d been paid more than $100,000, including overtime, in 2014— without pay as it moved to fire him.

Lawlor has been fighting ever since to hold onto his job and, as a result, remains on the agency’s staff nearly two years after the recording, though he isn’t being paid.

Now, the reclamation district’s civil service board is expected to meet Wednesday and could rule then on Lawlor’s case, according to an agency spokeswoman.

Among the arguments Lawlor’s lawyers are making to keep his job, they say nobody can prove he ever drank or slept on the job. They say he did neither.

They also argue that, despite the water reclamation district’s allegations, the recorded conversation didn’t violate the agency’s anti-harassment and anti-discrimination policies.

“It was street vernacular,” one of Lawlor’s lawyers, Daniel Austin, said at a September civil service board hearing. “It was a private conversation . . . a union discussion.”

Austin told the board that Lawlor, who previously had been a Chicago cop, was trying “to figure out the new employee in a style that he knew from the Chicago police force.”

According to a transcript of that hearing, James Murray, a water reclamation district attorney, told the board Lawlor previously tried to explain away his remarks by saying “it was all a training exercise, and he was just trying to gauge what type of police officer the probationary officer . . . would be,” even though Lawlor “was not assigned by anybody to train him.”

Lawlor was fired from the Chicago Police Department in 1997 over an out-of-town incident in which he shot his gun while off-duty, apparently while drinking, and then “attempted to conceal his involvement” in the incident, city records show.

But his firing by the police department wasn’t found in a background check when the water reclamation district hired him in 2011.

Before the recording, Lawlor had been rated by the district as “highly effective,” according to agency personnel records, which said his performance “sets an example for others to follow.”

The government agency has about 2,000 employees, including more than 60 police officers.

Twenty-six years ago, Officer John F. Tolley Jr. injured his back searching the front seat of a car that he and his partner had pulled over in connection with a suspected battery.

Tolley eventually landed on the disability rolls after undergoing spinal fusion surgery that kept him from returning to the Chicago Police Department.

To supplement his police disability checks and to support his wife and four sons, Tolley started his own business designing and selling glass ornaments. He worked as a Santa Claus at the Marshall Field’s State Street store. And he became a teacher for Easter Seals, working with autistic children.

Last December, police pension officials began reviewing his case as part of a broader effort to determine whether cops on disability are physically able to return to work in “limited-duty” jobs, so more officers could be available to work the streets.

Before they could hold a hearing on Tolley, he emailed the police pension fund, agreeing to come back to the police department and give up the tax-free disability payments he’d been getting since 1994 — more than $890,000 altogether.

John F. Tolley Jr., a Chicago police officer who returned to duty this year after 21 years on disability. | Tolley & Sons

Today, Tolley, 51, makes $95,000 a year working in the department’s “court section.” It’s one of many administrative jobs that have been filled by dozens of injured cops whose disability payments were cut off by the Chicago Police Pension Board after the board’s doctor determined the officers were able to handle some tasks for a department that’s short several hundred cops and facing the city’s deadliest year in more than a decade, according to records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times. Tolley declined to comment.

Besides giving the police department badly needed officers, the moves are saving the pension plan — which is primarily funded by taxpayers, along with officers’ contributions — millions of dollars. The officers are once again are contributing to the cash-strapped pension fund, which no longer has to cover their disability payments.

“They are certainly terminating benefits more than they used to because the department now has jobs for these people,” says Thomas Pleines, an attorney who represents disabled officers. “While they can’t do full duty, they can answer the phones and do some light duty.”

For years, Chicago cops who were injured on duty weren’t allowed to return to work until they could walk without assistance, safely fire a gun and physically manage arresting a resisting suspect — rules that kept many officers on disability leave for decades, where they’d typically get 75 percent of their police salary, tax-free.

Over the past few years, though, the department has eased those rules so officers could hold desk jobs in offices, such as police headquarters, where they aren’t likely to have to arrest anyone.

Officer Michael Lappe. | Sun-Times files

As a result, there’s been a 20 percent drop since 2012 in the number of cops collecting disability pay from the Policemen’s Annuity and Benefit Fund of Chicago, the underfunded pension plan that also covers disability payments for injured officers who’ve been unable to go back to work for more than a year.

“It’s long overdue,” says Officer Michael Lappe, a pension board member who has pushed to get disabled officers back on the job. “If I can help facilitate an officer getting back to work, so be it.”

Lappe nearly died in the late 1980s, when he was shot in the throat while on duty. He never went on disability leave, returning to work in a light-duty job. He continues to walk with a limp as a result of the shooting.

The sharp decrease in officers collecting disability pay comes four years after a Chicago Sun-Times investigation found the pension fund was spending about $18 million a year on disability payments to 347 cops, including three dozen injured while off duty. Some of them had moved on to other jobs — including Charles Siedlecki, who became a lawyer and a big-game hunter while he on disability leave for nearly 20 years because his doctors said he couldn’t safely fire a weapon.

In response, Mayor Rahm Emanuel promised to crack down on cops who were abusing the disability system, promising to find more limited-duty jobs for injured officers.

Today, pension fund records show, there are 274 officers getting disability pay, including 39 who were injured off duty. The payments total about $15.8 million a year — about $2.2 million less than in 2012.

Since January 2015, pension records show, 115 officers have been removed from disability — including 50 who returned to work, 53 who retired after their disability pay was terminated and four who died.

“It is our ethical and contractual obligation to provide continued employment opportunities to officers injured in the line of duty,” police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi says. “Depending on their job function, they may or may not have to be retrained on policies and procedures, and they have to maintain their firearms certification and training requirements.”

Officer Timothy P. O’Brien, whose father has a long-running business relationship with Illinois House Speaker House Michael J. Madigan, D-Chicago, had his disability payments terminated last November, about six years after injuring his left shoulder tackling a suspect in the Loop.

The pension board decided, on a 5-to-3 vote, that O’Brien isn’t completely disabled and might be eligible for a limited-duty job if he passed a firearms test.

Lappe advised O’Brien to apply for reinstatement. But he hasn’t done so.

Instead, O’Brien is now suing the pension board, arguing that the board had found him to be fully disabled the previous year when he failed the firearms test — a test he says his doctor has advised him never to take again because he might further injure his shoulder.

In September, Cook County Judge David Atkins rejected O’Brien’s case. “Although [O’Brien] could have retaken the exam in in 2015, he declined to do so, thus raising the possibility that he could have passed had he attempted it,” the judge wrote in his ruling. “At worst, it is unclear whether O’Brien was in fact disabled in 2015 . . .”

O’Brien, 39, is now asking the Illinois Appellate Court to overturn the pension board’s decision to cut off his disability payments. He has collected more than $290,000 in disability pay since 2010. He acknowledged to the pension board that he has been working other jobs, including a part-time position in California as a greeter for the San Diego Padres baseball team.

His father Terrence W. O’Brien’s company does real estate appraisals that Madigan’s law firm has used when seeking property-tax cuts for commercial property owners.

O’Brien told the pension board his father accompanied him to meet with a doctor who concluded two years ago that O’Brien isn’t able to return to the police department.

Officer Lynda Reid had been off work for 22 years when the pension board called her in for a hearing in January 2015 to determine whether she could return to work. She said she was worried about the lingering pain she felt in her legs since she fell down a flight of stairs trying to arrest a battery suspect in Rogers Park.

“I’m concerned with the fact that I haven’t done this work in 22 years,” Reid told the board, according to a transcript. “I would imagine having to be retrained. My concern also is with my weapon, not being able to protect it properly should the need arise, whether to protect myself or anyone else that I may be working with. . . . I have a lot of pain in both my legs. I can’t make sudden moves, whether it’s to bend down or turn.”

Despite Reid’s concerns, the pension board cut off her disability payments, which had totaled more than $820,000, and she returned to work last year in the police department’s information services division. Reid, 57, is paid $93,240 a year.

Like Tolley, Officer Lionel Dones also voluntarily returned to work. Dones came back in July after 22 years on disability leave for a back injury suffered when his squad car was hit by a car in Lincoln Park. He had collected more than $675,000 in disability pay.

“There’s a lot of people fighting” to stay on disability, Dones says. “I didn’t think I needed to fight anything.”

Dones, 61, says he had to go back to the police academy, mainly to learn computer skills.

“I’m working at headquarters,” he says. “I’m very happy with the position . . . The only part that is a little bit difficult is the technology. Everything is on computers. Everybody has a password.”

Dones says he doesn’t know how long he’ll stay on the job. He’s eligible to retire with full benefits in January, though he could stay on until December 2017, when he will turn 63 — the mandatory retirement age for a Chicago cop.

Denis Lawlor, a Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago cop whose crude, racially charged rant was somehow picked up by his police radio and broadcast over a recorded frequency, was fired Wednesday — a year and a half after the agency first moved to get rid of him.

“Lawlor’s gross misconduct of sleeping and drinking on the job and encouraging another to do the same and direct racial and gender slurs at fellow employees warrant discharge,” the agency’s three-member civil service board said in a written decision it released at a meeting Wednesday.

These were among Lawlor’s comments, according to an audio recording of the Jan. 18, 2015, rant that occurred while he was working a midnight shift for the flood- and sewage-control agency:

• “Everyone here is sleeping,” Lawlor told a newly hired cop he was showing around the Stickney wastewater-treatment plant. “The engineers, everyone that’s here on midnights, they’re all f—— sleeping somewhere, too.”

• Referring to clout hiring, Lawlor said, “Just assume everyone here is here on a phone call . . . everybody.”

• Lawlor used the “n” word, calling a black colleague a “stupid Alabama field n—–” and joking that “white guys” should call Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which was the following day, “James Earl Ray Day,” in reference to the civil rights leader’s assassin.

• Lawlor used the “c” word to refer to female colleagues.

• He also talked about what he called “the apartment” — a secret back room where he said district employees would hide, watch TV, sleep, play cards and drink beer that was kept in a refrigerator there. He’s heard telling the rookie he was welcome to grab a beer whenever, but “don’t f—— take the last one.”

     Earlier coverage: THE WATCHDOGS: Despite damning audio, cop fights to keep his job

After the recording came to light, the rookie was fired by the taxpayer-funded agency, and several other employees were disciplined.

Lawlor was suspended without pay and recommended for firing but fought the move. Between salary and overtime, he’d been paid more than $100,000 in 2014, records show.

The civil service board’s ruling Wednesday came after a number of hearings earlier in the year.

Lawlor wasn’t at the board’s meeting Wednesday. It’s unclear whether he will ask the board to reconsider or, as he’s also allowed to do, appeal to the Cook County circuit court.

David St. Pierre, the reclamation district’s executive director, said he suspects this will be the end of the case. St. Pierre said of Lawlor’s conduct, “That type of behavior is not tolerated here.”

Lawlor’s attorneys had argued that his comments weren’t cause for firing, calling them “street vernacular,” “a private conversation” and “a union discussion.”

CSB Case No. 15-03 Denis Lawlor by The Watchdogs on Scribd

A suspended Harvey police officer is among at least 8,171 Cook County property owners who wrongly received tax breaks over the past decade on homes they didn’t live in — costing more than $24 million, a burden other taxpayers had to make up.

Lemuel Askew — a Harvey cop for 30 years who’s awaiting trial on charges he bought stolen tools and other goods — is among the owners of 34,804 homes who got property-tax breaks they weren’t eligible for, records examined by the Chicago Sun-Times show.

Askew got homeowner exemptions on seven homes, the records show. Under Illinois law, those tax breaks — which knocks $7,000 off a home’s assessed value — are only for a single, owner-occupied residence.

Ninety-five percent of the property owners who got tax breaks they weren’t entitled to got the homeowner exemption, according to records from Cook County Assessor Joseph Berrios’s office. That’s the most common type of tax break for owner-occupied homes in Illinois. It’s also one that the assessor’s office automatically renews every year.

About 5 percent improperly got property-tax breaks intended to cut real estate taxes for senior citizens, veterans, disabled people and longtime occupants. All of these tax breaks require property owners to file paperwork every year to show they still qualify.

Many of the homes that improperly received these tax breaks meant for people who live in their homes are instead rented out, the Sun-Times found — in some cases to tenants whose rent was covered by taxpayers through Section 8 federal housing vouchers for the poor.

Askew has been slapped with liens for taxes, penalties and interest totaling $122,413 on seven homes on which he received homestead exemptions for as long as seven years.

Others shaved as much as $6,100 off their yearly tax bill for a single property by getting what Berrios’ office calls “erroneous exemptions.”

“Do we ever prosecute people for this? In most cases, no,” says Tim Monahan, Berrios’ deputy assessor for erroneous exemptions.

The exceptions usually are for property owners who got tax exemptions on multiple homes, Monahan says.

“When you get into the multiples, we do turn it over to the state’s attorney,” he says. “In most cases where it’s a multiple, they’re actively trying to game the system.”

The assessor’s office says there are currently 130 properties under investigation regarding tax exemptions.

Monahan oversees an 11-person unit that Berrios created in 2013 to crack down on property owners who cheat the system by collecting tax breaks on multiple homes. Altogether, the assessor’s office has sought to recover $35.9 million — including taxes, penalties and interest — from property owners. So far, it has collected $19.3 million.

All of the taxes recovered are turned over to local governments, primarily school districts. Berrios uses the penalties to pay for his erroneous exemptions unit.

For Askew and others, Berrios has placed liens on their properties, trying to ensure he can collect the back taxes, penalties and interest when a property is sold. Berrios has filed 610 liens in an effort to collect $4.1 million in taxes, penalties and interest.

Cook County Assessor Joseph Berrios filed a $23,550 lien in June on this home on West 137th Place in Riverdale to recover taxes, penalties and interest from Robert E. Hall. According to the assessor’s office, Hall wrongly received a homeowner exemption on the property between 2009 and 2014 even though he wasn’t living there. | Cook County assessor’s office

Five months ago, Berrios filed liens totaling $111,986 on seven south suburban homes owned by Robert E. Hall, a management consultant from Lincoln Park. Records show Hall received 48 illegal homeowner’s exemptions between 2009 and 2014 on homes he leases to tenants in Dolton, Hazel Crest and Riverdale.

“I had no clue this happened,” Hall says. “I paid my taxes. Then, last winter, I got these letters.”

Berrios’ office wrote to him, saying Hall needed to repay the tax breaks he’d received from homeowner’s exemptions, plus penalties and interest.

Hall says he couldn’t afford to pay. So the assessor put a lien on each of the seven homes.

Hall says he never submitted an application to the assessor’s office to obtain the tax exemptions on the seven homes, which he bought for $989,000 in 2008 from Mack Industries, a real estate company in Tinley Park. According to Hall, the assessor’s office had approved the homeowner exemptions before he bought the properties and continued granting them for years.

James McClelland, Mack Industries’ owner, says he didn’t know anything about the exemptions the assessor’s office granted on the homes he sold to Hall. County records show Mack received tax bills for 146 properties this year, including 56 properties that got a homeowner exemption.

The assessor’s office wouldn’t talk about the properties owned by Hall or Mack Industries.

Cook County homeowners used to have to apply every year for the homeowner’s exemption — which 75 percent of the county’s residential homeowners get. They had to mail back a card they’d get from the assessor’s office.

But some people who didn’t do that complained that they never got the card.

Berrios’ predecessor, James Houlihan, eliminated the annual application, saying that would cut the expense associated with his staff having to process the applications for the county’s 1.3 million residential properties.

Berrios has no plans to reinstate the yearly application process for homestead exemptions “because it would not be even close to cost-efficient,” agency spokesman Thomas Shaer says. “It would not prevent fraud among those who knowingly receive the [exemption] when not eligible for it; they would simply sign the postcard.”

Among those who’ve wrongly gotten the exemptions, according to county records:

• George Sebu, who says he never applied for the homeowner’s exemption on the seven homes he leases to Section 8 tenants in Markham. But the assessor “kept giving it to me,” he says. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”

Sebu has been hit with tax liens by Berrios for a total of $91,206 on the seven homes. He says he was able to repay the taxes on eight other homes that had also received exemptions he wasn’t entitled to.

“I’ve paid about $35,000 so far,” says Sebu, who lives in Tinley Park. “I can’t afford to pay them any more, so I let them put the liens on them. They want $14,000, $15,000 a property. The property isn’t worth it. Maybe it’s not worth it to pay.”

• Johnny “Goo” Herndon, a reputed member of the Gangster Disciples who’s in jail awaiting trial on charges that he ran a heroin ring in West Garfield Park. Herndon owes nearly $35,638 in back taxes for homeowner exemptions and other tax breaks he’s gotten on eight homes in Chicago and Markham between 2008 and 2014, records show.

According to federal prosecutors, Herndon used profits from the heroin ring to buy and rehabilitate homes and apartment buildings that he has often leased to Section 8 voucher tenants. Though he’s in jail, Herndon is collecting $34,000 a year in rent from the Chicago Housing Authority for four properties. None of those received erroneous exemptions.

Berrios hasn’t placed liens against any of Herndon’s properties. Herndon’s wife is challenging the move to collect the back taxes, penalties and interest for 50 exemptions. Herndon’s lawyer declined to comment.

• Vincent Lawless, a construction company owner from Lemont. He owns six residential properties on Chicago’s Southwest Side and in Schaumburg that had liens placed against them by Berrios earlier this year to collect $52,097 in back taxes, penalties and interest from 41 exemptions.

Lawless says he has paid off the liens, including an apartment building with a Section 8 tenant in West Lawn.

“That was quite a hurt there,” Lawless says. “It’s a lot of money. They went back seven years. I thought they went too far. I was upset with Berrios.

“I owned these properties for 20 years,” he says. “They were on the properties when we bought them, and I guess they never took them off. The tax bills were going to the bank, and I never saw them.”

• Lindell Wallace, who lives in Plano. He was hit with liens in March as Berrios moved to collect $118,986 in taxes, penalties and interest on 11 homes in Calumet City, Chicago, Harvey, Markham, Riverdale and Sauk Village with a total of 82 erroneous exemptions.

Wallace has two Section 8 tenants. It’s unclear, though, whether any of them live in these homes because the Cook County Housing Authority won’t provide the addresses of subsidized tenants, only the names of the landlords. Wallace couldn’t be reached.

• Verity Investments LLC/Luxe Property Managers, which owed $703,357 in taxes, penalties and interest for 707 improper exemptions on 141 properties in Chicago and the suburbs, according to assessor’s records. The assessor’s office says the company has paid what it owed. Luxe president Brad Suster couldn’t be reached.

Lemuel Askew.

• And Askew, the Harvey cop, who has owned the seven homes in the south suburb for several years. They were among the assets he declared when he filed for bankruptcy in 2012. Two years later, Askew was indicted for possession of stolen power tools and an iPod, along with items for his dog. He has been suspended from the police department while awaiting trial.

Berrios placed liens against Askew’s homes in October 2015 seeking $122,411 for 44 erroneous exemptions. Askew’s attorney declined to comment.

Contributing: Jacqueline Campbell, Data Reporting Lab editor Darnell Little

“God Forgives, Outlaws Don’t.”

That’s the menacing motto of the Outlaws motorcycle club, formed in the Chicago area in 1935, now with chapters and thousands of members around the world.

But in an exclusive interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, a former Outlaws leader says the group isn’t nearly as fearsome or dominant as it used to be in Illinois.

“The times have changed,” says Peter “Big Pete” James, 62, who lives in the west suburbs. “Somehow, there’s no testosterone out there.”

James hung up his Outlaws vest — black leather with a skull and crossed pistons patch — last year amid an internal dispute with other local leaders and his own ongoing fight with cancer.

Contrary to the biker rumor mill, James isn’t returning to the fray, he told the Sun-Times. His wide-ranging interview was unusual because so-called “1-percenter” bikers generally are loath to talk publicly about their business.

Watching from the sidelines, James says that maybe the biggest indication his old club is slipping involves the rise of the rival Hells Angels motorcycle club, which he believes is poised to overtake the Outlaws as the big-dog biker group in the Chicago area — an unthinkable development not long ago.

He predicts — but insists he isn’t advocating — renewed conflict between the two groups resulting from the shifting dynamic.

An attorney for the Outlaws responds only, “There wouldn’t be any comment at this time.” The Hells Angels didn’t respond to inquiries.

Back in the 1990s, the Outlaws and Hells Angels — both which have weathered intense federal prosecutions and allegations they’re nothing more than gangs on wheels involved in drug dealing and mayhem — were locked in “war” in Chicago, as the Hells Angels made a foray into the region, the Outlaws’ long-established turf.

After a series of bombings, shootings and stabbings, the rival clubs formed a fragile truce. The Hells Angels, formed in 1948 in California, gave up their attempt to put a clubhouse within the Chicago city limits and, instead, planted a flag in Harvey, remaining there today.

“Big” Pete James. | Provided photo

Since then, the Outlaws have maintained a stronghold in Chicago, with a South Side clubhouse at 25th and Rockwell and a North Side clubhouse on Division Street. It also has several other chapters in northern Illinois.

As regional vice president, James had domain over all of them and also was president of the North Siders. In all, he says there were maybe 100 hard-core members in northern Illinois.

But James says smart moves by the Hells Angels — plus waves of prosecutions, poor leadership by some current Outlaws and changing times and attitudes — have changed things.

For one, James says local Outlaws are less willing to take orders from the top.

“It used to be the boss’ word was law,” he says. “He says, ‘Ride off the cliff,’ and guys would ride off a cliff. The quality of the members has gone down.”

Fear of prison has also had an impact on some local club leaders, according to James, who’s critical of his old group for not being “entrepreneurial.”

Unlike the Outlaws, Hells Angels members are Internet-savvy, with the group’s local Facebook page accumulating more than 29,000 “likes” and the club selling T-shirts and other merchandise on its website.

The Hells Angels also have made money by holding parties at its Harvey clubhouse and at bars in the Chicago area, according to James, who says the club welcomes “civilians” and members of smaller biker clubs to their parties.

“The Outlaws are losing out on the party money,” he says, along with the chance to market themselves and gain supporters.

Chicago-area law enforcement officials periodically have cracked down on both clubs. They say they’ve been preoccupied with other groups in recent years — especially the African-American gang factions behind Chicago’s staggering 50 percent rise in murders this year.

It was more than a decade ago when federal authorities charged Melvin Chancey, the former president of the Chicago-area Hells Angels, with racketeering and drug trafficking.

Melvin Chancey, then 29 and president of the Chicago chapter of the Hells Angels in 1998 in Harvey. | Sun-Times files

The last major Chicago law-enforcement crackdown of the Outlaws was more than five years ago. Chicago Outlaws member Mark Polchan was convicted of orchestrating a 2003 bombing outside C & S Coin Operated Amusements, a video-poker business in Berwyn that reputed mob boss Michael “The Large Guy” Sarno wanted to destroy to protect his own gambling interests. The pipe bomb blew out windows and damaged the building.

Polchan, who also was accused of fencing stolen jewelry for the mob at his Cicero pawnshop, was sentenced in 2011 to 60 years in federal prison.

James describes Polchan as his one-time “confidant” and says, “I love him.”

He says he has continued to receive occasional visits from federal agents looking for information on the biker world that he says he’s unwilling to give. “I try to be polite, to a point,” he says.

He figures his former club isn’t engaged in criminal activity at the same level as in the old days. Drug dealing, he says, worries graying members who don’t want to face a prison stretch lasting decades.

Even if things seem more low-key, though, “It doesn’t mean there’s not violence,” James says. “It’s just not as flagrant.”

But there have been reports of Outlaws roughing up members of weaker Hispanic biker clubs in the Chicago area since James left. The apparent aim: to force them to ally more closely with the Outlaws, which has long enjoyed a “support system” from other clubs.

James says there’s nothing wrong with building alliances, but it’s stupid to enlist “Neanderthal” methods, adding, “They’re not thinking it through.”

James says that when he was in charge, he created a confederation of dozens of biker clubs, part of an effort “to change the stereotype.”

He says the TV show “Sons of Anarchy,” which aired on FX from 2008 to 2014, popularized but also caused headaches for “1-percenter” biker clubs — so-called for representing the 1 percent of bikers supposedly involved in crime.

“I watched the show,” he says, laughing. “It was like an Outfit guy watching ‘The Sopranos.’ Kind of a joke.”

Fans of the show about a criminal biker group in California formed their own clubs and made pilgrimages to the Outlaws clubhouse on Division Street to ask James to “sanction” them. James says he refused to avoid giving the feds a reason to charge him with racketeering.

He says those newbies might dress the part and ride around on Harleys but don’t share 1-percenters’ “toughness.”

Jay Dobyns got a firsthand look at the 1-percenter lifestyle when he infiltrated the Hells Angels in Arizona as an undercover ATF agent in the early 2000s.

“These guys are not book smart but have their Ph.Ds in violence and intimidation,” says Dobyns, now retired and living in Arizona. “I think the term ‘brotherhood’ is very easily thrown around in today’s society. We hear it and use it a lot. They take it to a life-and-death level. When I was with the club, there were guys who would have stepped in front of a bullet for me. Now, they want to put a bullet in me.”

Dobyns says he crossed paths with Chancey — “one of the true believers that the elimination of the enemy was a critical part of the mission, the survival of their own club. In that area, the enemy was the Outlaws.”

The continued animosity between the Hells Angels and Outlaws makes James’ recent friendship with George Christie an unlikely one. Christie is a former high-ranking Hells Angels leader who left the group in 2011 and was “excommunicated.”

Christie and James both have appeared on CNN to offer their expertise on biker life and both wrote books on the subject — James’ memoir is expected to be released next year.

James says the main reason he wrote the book was to show how far things have slipped in what he regards as a once-noble brotherhood and to spur change in leadership and attitudes among the Outlaws in Illinois.

“It used to be guys banded together who believed in something, and they had fun,” James says. “There’s no brotherhood left in the Outlaws any more.”

Peter “Big Pete” James. | Provided photo

He says the Outlaws in Chicago have a choice to make as their rival grows and encroaches.

“The choice is fight or flight,” he says. “They know the Angels will push them out of town. Who’s going to light the match?”

James says he won’t be on the front lines if that happens. Last year, he had his “God Forgives, Outlaws Don’t” tattoo covered up with a new design.

“I’m borderline ashamed already to say I was once one,” he says.

“Big” Pete James’ motorcycle. | Provided photo

He was a twenty-something wannabe developer, the son of immigrants from India, and he dreamed of building a $900 million hotel and convention complex near O’Hare Airport.

He assembled a team of political heavyweights, including Illinois House Speaker Michael J. Madigan, and traveled to China to get investors.

Now, the land sits empty, and Anshoo Sethi awaits sentencing, possibly this week, after pleading guilty to wire fraud.

He’s admitted his role in what federal authorities call a scheme to use fraudulent documents to raise $160 million from Chinese investors willing to bankroll his project in exchange for permanent United States residency under the U.S. government’s much-maligned EB-5 visa program. The program grants residency to foreigners who invest in economic development projects.

Hoping to avoid prison, Sethi, 33, has offered to help federal agents investigate his clout-heavy advisers. But they’re not interested, according to a court filing from Sethi’s lawyer, former federal prosecutor Patrick Collins. Prosecutors have “even told the probation officer that, as far as follow-up with specific politicians involved in the project, the FBI ‘did not and would not’ be interviewing them,” Collins wrote in a court filing Nov. 16.

But the feds say in court papers that Sethi should be sent to prison for at least six years, saying he “has not seriously cooperated . . .and failed to provide any particularly credible information” regarding misconduct by others.

Sethi has leveled an explosive accusation — that officials at the Illinois Finance Authority demanded $1 million when he sought funding through the state agency. Authority officials told investigators the money was to cover administrative costs.

While the feds say Sethi “was indisputably the CEO of this fraudulent operation,” Collins doesn’t see it that way.

“Anshoo’s role in this offense was not that of a criminal mastermind but rather an ambitious young man who was hopelessly outplayed by unscrupulous third-party consultants and advisers, some of whom even admitted to the government . . . that they purposely lied to or misled Anshoo,” Collins wrote.

“Anshoo was referred by the high-profile players to a number of seasoned advisers and lobbyists who soon found themselves on the project’s payroll as consultants,” he wrote. “Anshoo was no match for these players . . . Anshoo did not even have the sophistication to know that he was being played.”

Sethi’s dream came crashing down in February 2013, when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil case accusing him of overstating the project’s progress to the Chinese investors.

A year later, Sethi was criminally charged, a federal grand jury finding that his hotel project was a scheme to defraud those investors.

What’s not in dispute: Sethi and his family did own the land. His lobbyists got City Hall to sign off on the project as they pushed city and state officials to help fund the hotels and convention center. And Sethi was involved in talks with companies to run the hotels.

Looking east towards the empty lot at 8201 W. Higgins Rd. near O’Hare Airport where Anshoo Sethi wanted to put hotels and a convention center. | Tim Boyle / Sun-Times

The son of a wealthy pharmacist, Sethi was a licensed pharmacy technician in 2003 when his family were partners in a $10 million deal to buy a 122-room hotel on 2.8 acres at 8201 W. Higgins Rd., next to a Hooters along the Kennedy Expressway.

A few years later, Sethi decided to knock down the hotel and replace it with three hotels and a convention center.

Attorney James Banks. | Sun-Times files

He hired one of Chicago’s most politically connected zoning attorneys, James Banks, who got approval for the project from the City Council Zoning Committee which was then headed by his uncle, Ald. William Banks, a powerful member of the Cook County Democratic Party. The alderman — who later ended up working for Sethi — abstained from the January 2009 vote.

Four months later, Sethi hired Madigan’s law firm, Madigan & Getzendanner, to seek a reduction in the property taxes by appealing the value put on the hotel and the land by the Cook County assessor’s office and the Cook County Board of Review, agencies controlled by Madigan’s fellow Democrats. Over the next four years, Madigan’s firm saved Sethi and his family more than $645,000 in taxes as the family ended up tearing down the hotel to make way for the project.

Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan last week in Springfield. | AP

Madigan partner Vincent Getzendanner says the firm dumped Sethi when the feds began investigating.

“We learned through a newspaper article that the Securities and Exchange Commission had brought serious charges against Mr. Sethi for certain alleged fraudulent activities in connection with the attempted development of the new hotels on site,” Getzendanner says. “When we were unable to contact Mr. Sethi to discuss these allegations, on Feb. 14, 2013, we advised him by email and certified mail we would be terminating all further work.”

Rajinder Bedi in 2002. | Sun-Times files

After hiring Madigan’s firm, Sethi landed a meeting in the summer of 2009 with the Illinois Finance Authority, seeking financing. The agency helps developers raise money by issuing tax-free bonds for economic development deals.

The meeting was arranged by Dan Shomon — a lobbyist who had run President Barack Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign — at the request of Rajinder Bedi, who held state jobs under Govs. Rod Blagojevich and Pat Quinn. Under a grant of immunity from prosecution, Bedi testified about Blagojevich’s attempt to sell an appointment to fill Obama’s former Senate seat. Bedi says he doesn’t recall his involvement with Sethi.

Albert Grace Jr., cofounder of Loop Capital Markets.

After meeting with the authority and its chairman, William A. Brandt Jr., a businessman and major fund-raiser for the Democratic National Committee, Sethi hired Loop Capital Markets, an investment bank founded by Albert Grace Jr.

Sethi also hired attorney Michael McClain, a Madigan loyalist who’s one of the top lobbyists in the state capital. A former state legislator, McClain once served as Madigan’s assistant majority leader.

Sethi and his father, Ravinder Sethi, formed a company that got approval from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in June 2011 to participate in the EB-5 program. The program has come under criticism from two U.S. senators who say it should be reformed or eliminated amid allegations of fraud, abuse and concerns over the foreigners who got visas.

Sethi’s EB-5 application included letters of recommendation from two Illinois congressmen, Dan Lipinski and Jerry Costello.

Lobbyist Michael McClain. | Illinois Secretary of State photo

It also included a letter McClain got from the Illinois Department of Employment Security certifying Sethi’s project was in an area of high unemployment. To do that, he linked several census tracts stretching from the Northwest Side to Maywood to show a high enough overall jobless rate so Sethi’s investors only had to invest $500,000, instead of the standard $1 million, to get a visa.

Former Ald. William Banks. | Sun-Times files

In a private-offering statement to investors in December 2011, Sethi said his team included William Banks, the retired alderman, as the project’s attorney; Grace, to handle bond deals; and Carolyn Grisko, a campaign manager for Mayor Richard M. Daley, to handle marketing.

That same offering statement said Sethi had 15 years of experience in real estate — though, at the time, he was only 28 years old.

Sethi’s offering also included the claims that would prove his undoing with the feds, including agreements with hotels that hadn’t been finalized and claims that Sethi’s team had secured $339 million in grants, tax credits and government bonds — money his team was still trying to secure when the SEC shut the project down.

With the offering and a letter from the governor, Sethi went to China, where he hired brokers to find investors. He raised about $145 million from 290 Chinese investors. Each also paid an administrative fee of $41,500 that went to the brokers.

Sethi’s team continued talking with the state finance authority about borrowing money. Sometime in August 2012, authority officials asked for a $1 million fee before they would commit to the project, a demand state officials later said was designed to cover the agency’s costs, according to court records.

City officials were still discussing tax breaks for the project when FBI agents interviewed Sethi on Feb. 6, 2013, at the South Loop townhouse where he lives with his parents.

William Brandt Jr., former chairman of the Illinois Finance Authority.

Two days later, the SEC filed the civil case against Sethi. And a grand jury began investigating, issuing subpoenas to the Illinois Finance Authority and its executive director, Christopher Meister. Last January, Brandt, who is no longer the authority’s chairman, testified before the grand jury, records show.

Neither Brandt nor Meister could be reached for comment.

Sethi settled the SEC case in March 2014, agreeing to pay a $1 million fine, sell the land and refund the money he collected from foreign investors, including the administrative fees that went to the Chinese brokers who lined up investors.

Five months later, Sethi was indicted for fraud. In January, he pleaded guilty.

In asking U.S. District Judge John Z. Lee to keep Sethi out of prison, Sethi’s lawyer says in court papers “there has likely been very little actual loss suffered by the investors.”

Sethi has refunded $145 million to the Chinese investors, as well as some of the administrative fees, Collins says. And Sethi has filed suit in Cook County to recover the rest of the fees he paid the Chinese brokers.

The feds say the investors have lost about $10 million, some of which Sethi spent, including $15,000 for an astrologer in India, $110,000 for his girlfriend’s cosmetic surgery business, and about $200,000 for his credit card debt.

Sethi’s family no longer owns the hotel property. Friedman Properties bought it out of bankruptcy for $6.75 million — money that was used to settle the Sethi family’s debts.

Faced with a surge in killings and a breakdown of trust in law enforcement, the Chicago Police Department is sending its least experienced cops to neighborhoods that see the most violence.

The six police districts with the highest total of murders and shootings this year have the most rookie officers, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis of police deployment data found.

Those districts — all of them on the South Side or the West Side — also have some of the least experienced supervisors, on average.

At the same time, officers assigned to four lowest-crime districts in the city — downtown, on the North Side or the Northwest Side — have, on average, the most years with the police department.

And the gaps in experience have grown wider since Mayor Rahm Emanuel took office in 2011.

“When these guys get out of the academy, this is where they’re sending them,” says Ald. David Moore (17th), whose South Side ward includes parts of the high-crime Gresham and Englewood Districts. “And as soon as those cops get tenured, they’re ready to get out of here.”

Moore and others say that situation — the result of deployment strategies and a union contract that gives experienced cops a say in where they work — leads to higher turnover, limiting officers’ ability to get to know the communities they’re serving.

Ald. Raymond Lopez (15th). | Sun-Times files

“This is something I’ve brought up with the superintendent, asking him to put a hold on transfers out, to stop the bleeding of experience,” says Ald. Raymond Lopez (15th), whose ward includes a swath of Englewood, which has experienced some of the worst gun violence. “With some of the rookies, there’s a certain percentage of them that come to these districts as a proving ground to earn their mettle as a police officer. And that’s fine. But there’s more than one way to defuse a situation, and seasoned officers know that.”

But Ald. Nick Sposato (36th), whose Northwest Side ward doesn’t see as much violent crime, argues there are advantages to sending cops straight from the academy to tough neighborhoods.

“Do you want a guy who’s 50 years old and 30 pounds overweight, or the young guy who’s built like a brick house?” Sposato says. “If a 25-year-old kid goes to the [slowest districts] right out of the academy, he’s not going to learn as much.”

That debate over police deployment has taken on heightened importance during the wave of violence this year that has resulted in more than 700 killings and about 3,300 shootings overall.

The disparities in officers’ experience levels can be dangerous for the police and the neighborhoods they serve, Moore says.

Ald. David Moore (17th). | Sun-Times files

“What happened was the rookies weren’t learning community engagement — they were just learning to maintain order,” the alderman says. “You’ve got to have a good number of well-seasoned officers around them who have been a part of community engagement. Otherwise, [young officers] may be quick to react to a negative situation rather than de-escalate.”

In July, officers in South Shore fired at Paul O’Neal as he took off in a Jaguar they said was stolen and again during a subsequent chase on foot that ended with the 18-year-old shot to death. Police Supt. Eddie Johnson said it appeared that three officers who fired shots did not follow proper procedures and stripped them of their police powers while the Independent Police Review Authority investigates the shooting. All had been with the department less than four years.

The Sun-Times analysis found that:

• In five of the six districts with the most killings and nonfatal shootings this year — Gresham and Englewood on the South Side and Ogden, Harrison and Austin on the West Side — officers have been with the department, on average, for about a decade. In the other hardest-hit district, Deering on the South Side, the average time on the job is 14 years — the same as the citywide average.

• In the low-crime Central, Jefferson Park, Near North and Lincoln districts, it’s 18 to 20 years.

• Thirty-two to 38 percent of the officers assigned to Gresham, Englewood, Ogden, Harrison and Austin have been with the department for three years or less. They include 78 rookies — in their first year on the job.

• Jefferson Park, in sharp contrast, has no rookies. Just 4 percent of the officers assigned to the Northwest Side district — a total of nine cops — have three or fewer years of experience.

The disparity has widened since Emanuel took office in 2011. Police in the Gresham, Englewood, Harrison, Ogden and Austin districts are less experienced, on average, than the cops assigned there five years ago. In the Harrison District, for example, officers average about nine years and eight months of experience — a year less than in 2011.

Emanuel has said he’ll hire more officers and improve training — initiatives included in his 2017 budget, which the Chicago City Council approved in November.

The mayor’s plans aren’t likely to shift more experienced cops to high-crime districts, though. That’s because the city’s police contract ensures that veteran officers get a greater say in where they’re assigned. And many decide they’d rather work in a slower-paced environment or closer to home.

Ald. Nicholas Sposato (36th). | Sun-Times files

“The worst thing that could happen to the police or fire department is to have the management just send people where they don’t want to go,” says Sposato, a former firefighter. “You force a guy, and he may say, ‘Screw this, I’m not going to risk my life and career.’ ”

The current police contract with rank-and-file officers expires in June.

In negotiating a new contract, Sposato says the city might want to consider offering incentives to veteran officers who are willing to serve in high-crime communities. Moore says aldermen need to be part of the negotiations to ensure that veteran police are sent where they’re needed most.

But the police department maintains that it’s helpful to staff troubled areas with new cops.

“Younger officers who graduate are sent to busier areas so they can gain job experience and field training while assisting with community policing and patrol efforts,” chief department spokesman Anthony Guglielmi says.

But these young cops have fewer veterans to turn to for training. Supervisors in the Gresham, Englewood and Harrison districts are, on average, the least experienced in the city. Those with the rank of sergeant or higher in those districts average less than 19 years with the department. In comparison, supervisory officers in Jefferson Park have an average of 24 years.

Over the past five years, the Gresham, Ogden, Harrison and Austin districts all have had a net loss of field-training officers — the ones who provide on-the-job mentoring to young cops.

Emanuel has promised to add 92 field-training officers over the next two years.

Peter Moskos. | John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore cop who’s now an assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, says there’s nothing inherently wrong with having young officers work in high-crime districts.

“There is something about learning quickly in busy districts,” Moskos says. “But you are likely to burn out and not give a damn.”

He says Chicago and other cities could do more, though, to encourage veteran officers to stay in high-crime districts.

“They could incentivize those ‘bad’ districts,” Moskos says. “Maybe they could put the best equipment there. Maybe they could offer more days off.”

He points to New York City, which, under former police Commissioner William Bratton, began phasing out its “Operation Impact” program, which sent rookies into high-crime “impact zones” in favor of a more traditional field-training model pairing young cops with veterans.

Moskos says what’s important is to have a strong field-training program for young officers assigned to high-crime areas and to avoid any “stat pressure” — a push to bolster statistics — that might encourage young officers to unnecessarily write tickets or make needless stops that worsen the relationship between cops and the communities they serve.

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The bitter divorce between the once-powerful United Neighborhood Organization and the vast, government-funded charter-school network it created has been settled — at a cost to taxpayers of $4.5 million, according to records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.

The sticking point in the long-running dispute between UNO and the UNO Charter School Network, known as UCSN, had been what would happen to four school buildings the Hispanic community organization built with $83 million in state funding pushed through Springfield by Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago.

Under the deal to finalize the split, UNO turned over ownership of the four properties to the charter-school network, which operates six schools in those buildings.

The $4.5 million breaks down like this: UCSN pays $2.5 million in management fees UNO said it was owed for running the schools, plus a $2 million “settlement payment” to the community group, records show.

The private, not-for-profit charter network operates 15 campuses across the city. The schools depend almost entirely on taxpayer financing through the Chicago Board of Education for their yearly budget of nearly $100 million.

In a joint statement, UNO and UCSN officials said the deal was “in the best interest of the students and families of the UNO Charter School Network and its surrounding communities.” The agreement includes a three-year “non-disparagement” clause, with UNO and UCSN officials agreeing not to discuss the deal beyond their statement.

UNO founded the charter-school chain in 1998, and it grew rapidly with the aid of powerful allies, including Madigan, who sponsored a 2009 law setting aside $98 million in state grant money for UNO to build schools.

For years, the organization and its charter network both operated under the leadership of Juan Rangel, UNO’s clout-heavy chief executive officer, and had common board members. The charter group paid UNO millions of dollars a year to manage the schools and also paid rent for the buildings.

Rangel resigned under pressure from his $275,000-a-year job after the Sun-Times reported in 2013 that UNO insiders profited from the state grant. The two organizations formed separate boards, and the new charter board moved to cut ties with UNO, dropping the lucrative management deal that was the community group’s main source of cash.

Last year, UNO’s new leaders said the group was “on the brink of insolvency” and that the four state-funded school buildings might end up sold in bankruptcy, putting thousands of children out of their classrooms.

The buildings house Roberto Clemente charter in Galewood, the Soccer Academy elementary and high schools in Gage Park and three schools at the Veterans Memorial Campus in Archer Heights.

“With more than 4,000 students currently enrolled in these six schools, the sale ensures that the buildings will remain as schools and not be sold for other purposes,” UNO and UCSN officials said in their statement.

UNO began more than 30 years ago on the Southeast Side. It became a force in politics, with Rangel forging alliances with powerful government figures and moving the group into the lucrative field of privately run, publicly funded charter schools.

Beyond the state funding, the schools UNO built have gotten hundreds of millions of dollars in operating funds through the Chicago Public Schools system.

Dignitaries would flock to ribbon-cuttings for the gleaming new schools. During Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s first run for mayor, Rangel co-chaired his campaign.

But politicians distanced themselves from Rangel and UNO, and state officials withheld the final $15 million of their $98 million grant after the Sun-Times reported UNO had paid millions out of the state funding to construction companies owned by brothers of Rangel’s top deputy, Miguel d’Escoto.

That led to a June 2014 civil settlement in which the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accused UNO of defrauding bond investors by “making materially misleading statements” about the construction contracts. Rangel later agreed to pay a $10,000 fine.

Until the scandal, the finances of UNO and the charter schools were intertwined. Under the new settlement, the community group no longer is responsible for repaying more than $70 million borrowed by the charter schools, and UCSN released UNO from responsibility for $31 million it had lent the organization.

While operating the schools, which serve largely Hispanic students in low-income neighborhoods, UNO spent lavishly, the Sun-Times reported in March. It charged more than $60,000 for restaurants on Rangel’s American Express “business platinum” card in one year and spent more than $60,000 a year  on travel in 2010 and 2011. Records show Rangel flew out of town 31 times in four years at the group’s expense.

In an unusually public and blunt airing of a grievance, the Chicago Public Schools’ inspector general blasted CPS officials for impeding his investigation into “possible ethics violations” by the school system’s top lawyer.

Inspector General Nicholas Schuler began the investigation last summer, after the Chicago Sun-Times reported that the Chicago Board of Education had hired a law firm where schools CEO Forrest Claypool and his general counsel, Ronald Marmer, formerly worked.

Appearing at Wednesday’s school board meeting, Schuler said that CPS officials have refused his requests for information, citing attorney-client privilege.

“The board’s assertion of the privilege is preventing my office from accessing relevant documents and interviewing attorneys that likely have information relevant to the investigation,” Schuler said. “Unless the OIG is granted the access it needs, a critical undermining of the public trust will result.”

Schuler said he believes his office has the right to the information it’s been denied by the Claypool administration.

“The assertion of the attorney-client privilege by the board against the OIG is not only contrary to the OIG’s express right in the Illinois school code to have, and I quote, ‘access to all information and personnel necessary to perform the duties of the office,’ but it’s also contrary to past board practice,” Schuler said.

Frank Clark, the Board of Ed president, responded by suggesting to Schuler that the discussion be continued behind closed doors.

Schuler agreed, noting that his office’s investigation is ongoing. But Schuler said he was first “making these remarks in public because this is an area of significant public concern, and I believe the public should know why the investigation is stalled.”

After a closed session meeting of about half an hour, Schuler would only say that the matter remained unresolved.

Claypool, running out of CPS after that meeting, wouldn’t say whether privilege would be waived, saying, “That’s a board issue.”

Later Wednesday, Claypool issued a statement downplaying the dispute and defending Marmer.

“This is simply a disagreement among lawyers as to the meaning of a board policy, but there is no question that the general counsel did not benefit financially from pursuing a civil rights lawsuit for Chicago’s children, nor did he select the firm that wrote the lawsuit,” Claypool said. “When it comes to the civil rights of Chicago’s students, it’s ludicrous to think that we wouldn’t rely on the insight and guidance of Ron Marmer, one of the country’s top litigators.”

While Claypool had only a brief tenure at Jenner & Block LLP about 35 years ago, Marmer is in the midst of receiving a $1 million severance package from the firm, which he left in 2013. His yearly payments of $200,000 are to end in 2018.

On July 27, acting in closed session, the Board of Education voted to pay as much as $250,000 to Jenner & Block for preparing a never-filed lawsuit against the state for increased funding.

Under CPS’ code of ethics, school officials can’t supervise the work of a contractor “with whom the employee has a business relationship” — defined as a transaction worth at least $2,500 to the employee in a calendar year.

When first asked about the deal with Jenner & Block, Claypool said Marmer had “recused himself” from being involved.

But in October the Sun-Times reported that Marmer oversaw the work of Jenner & Block, citing internal emails showing Marmer reviewed draft legal complaints sent to him from his former firm and sent revisions to Jenner & Block’s lawyers.

Claypool aides later made public a legal opinion from another outside firm, which concluded that Marmer did nothing wrong. That opinion was written for CPS by J. Timothy Eaton of Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP. Like Marmer, Eaton has been a contributor to Claypool’s political campaigns.

Chicago Public Schools CEO Forrest Claypool (left) with CPS general counsel Ronald Marmer at a Chicago Board of Education meeting in January. | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

CPS has declined to release communications from earlier this year between Marmer and the school system’s in-house ethics adviser, Andra Gomberg.

On Wednesday, Schuler did not say which lawyers CPS was keeping his office from interviewing.

After plans to file the lawsuit against the state were dropped, Jenner & Block was paid at CPS’ standard rate for outside counsel — $295 an hour, for a total of more than $182,000. An earlier, original version of the deal would have paid Jenner & Block at its normal, much steeper rates in the event that CPS sued the state and succeeded in getting increased funding from Springfield.

Marmer, who worked for Jenner & Block for 30 years, started as CPS’ general counsel in October 2015. Claypool wanted him, and the school board agreed, with two board members voting against the hire.

Claypool got his first job out of law school at Jenner & Block in 1982, according to state records. Marmer was working there at the time, and he since has contributed $24,000 to Claypool’s campaigns, including his unsuccessful run for Cook County assessor in 2010.

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Two Chicago cops who were caught on video beating an ex-con at a late-night restaurant on the Northwest Side in 2006 have resigned a week before they faced the prospect of being fired.

Officers Jason Orsa and Brian Murphy resigned from the Chicago Police Department as of Dec. 1, according to department spokesman Frank Giancamilli.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration, responding to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Chicago Sun-Times, released security surveillance videos in August of the March 24, 2006, assault at the Taco Burrito King restaurant at Harlem Avenue and Higgins Road.

The videos show Murphy, then 24, jumping up from his table with his gun drawn on Obed DeLeon and ramming DeLeon into a wall.

Orsa, then 26, joins Murphy and Murphy’s friend Matthew Walsh, a Marine, in repeatedly punching and kicking DeLeon, then 22, according to the videos and court records.

A third off-duty cop who was eating with them, Daniel McNamara, then 28, appears to be trying to keep others in the restaurant away from the altercation.

McNamara — whose father also was a cop, as is his brother — got an 18-month suspension because the city was unable to prove he punched or kicked DeLeon, according to an August ruling by the Illinois Appellate Court. McNamara has served that suspension.

In 2009, the city’s Independent Police Review Authority concluded its investigation, and in 2010, then-police Supt. Jody Weis moved to fire Orsa and Murphy, the Sun-Times has reported.

The following year, the Chicago Police Board agreed with Weis and fired the pair.

But they went to court, and, in 2012, Cook County Circuit Judge Kathleen Pantle overturned the board’s decision, saying, “The videotape and other evidence clearly support Murphy and Orsa and their witnesses’ recollection of events.”

Pantle also criticized the police department for taking so long to investigate, saying the delay made it harder to contact witnesses who might have supported the officers’ claims that DeLeon had threatened them.

In sworn testimony supported by two restaurant patrons, DeLeon said he never threatened the cops but just walked in complaining that someone had left a car blocking the entrance to the restaurant’s parking lot.

Last month, the Illinois Appellate Court reversed Pantle’s decision.

“Our careful and close review of the video leaves us puzzled by the circuit court’s rejection of the board’s . . . true and correct findings,” Justice Michael B. Hyman wrote. “We cannot ignore an even more troubling aspect of this case — the inherently improbable character of the officers’ defense, which largely relied on stirring prejudices by suggesting that DeLeon’s conduct was gang-related.”

The video doesn’t have sound. The police officers and Walsh said DeLeon yelled “cobra love,” a reference to the Spanish Cobras street gang, and said he was a “cop killer” ready to “cap someone,” according to court records.

Orsa, whose father was a cop, and Murphy were stripped of their police powers in August, though they remained on the city payroll.

Their resignations came a week before the Chicago Police Board’s monthly meeting, at which the board could have moved to fire them again.

Contributing: Tim Novak and Chris Fusco

A former police officer for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago who was recorded using a racial slur is suing to overturn his termination.

Denis Lawlor, fired in November, argues that a conversation he had was illegally recorded, so it can’t be used against him, according to a lawsuit filed Friday in Cook County circuit court against the water reclamation district.

Lawlor’s 58-minute conversation with a newly hired police officer occurred as he worked a midnight shift on Jan. 18, 2015, at the sewage-treatment agency’s Stickney wastewater-treatment plant, the Chicago Sun-Times has reported. It was broadcast on an Illinois State Police radio channel, and a recording of that was made in which Lawlor used racial and gender slurs and talked about drinking and sleeping on the job.

The conversation was overheard by the dispatcher on duty that morning and a state police sergeant, both who tried to contact Lawlor during the conversation, according to the suit.

The conversation was recorded by Illinois State Police and given to the district, which moved to fire Lawlor in March 2015.

Even if Mayor Rahm Emanuel manages to add nearly 1,000 cops in the next couple years, his promised surge of new hires would barely make up for the decline in the Chicago Police Department’s ranks on his watch.

There were 6,244 rank-and-file police officers working the city’s 22 police districts as of Oct. 19, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show. That’s down more than 800 from the 7,047 beat cops shortly after Emanuel took office in 2011.

A decade ago, overall police department staffing totaled more than 14,000, according to police pension fund documents. At the start of 2011, the year Emanuel won his first term, the department had 12,737 members. Now, that figure has fallen below 12,000.

Early in Emanuel’s first term, a batch of newly hired officers increased the number of rank-and-file cops in districts, particularly in some of the city’s more violence-prone neighborhoods.

But waves of retirements have washed away those gains, leaving the number of officers working in the districts — who account for the bulk of the department’s payroll — far below the total five years ago.

The department brought on 409 recruits in the first nine months of this year. Over the same period, though, 547 people retired, records show.

The decline in manpower has cast a spotlight on the long-running debate over how the department should deploy its troops. For years, the Emanuel administration has fought a legal battle against the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois and West Side activists, who have sued to increase police deployment in high-crime areas. They argue that the workload for officers in higher-crime areas still is far greater than in some parts of the city they say are relatively overstaffed.

Police dispatch times appear to back up that argument. The figures vary widely across the city, records show, with the department needing far more time on average to dispatch officers to high-priority crimes in more-violent districts than elsewhere.

“The city continues to have longer wait times for police in minority communities,” says Karen Sheley, director of police practices for the ACLU. “Nobody should get worse service because they live in a predominantly black or brown police district.”

Citywide, dispatch times to so-called Priority 1 and Priority 2 calls — the incidents that require the most urgent response from officers — have averaged about 4 minutes 30 seconds over the past three years, according to a Sun-Times analysis of data from by the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications.

But how quickly officers are dispatched still depends greatly on where you live, the analysis shows. All of the districts with the quickest dispatch times are on the North Side, while most of the longest waits are on the South Side, in higher-crime areas.

So far this year, it has taken an average of 6 minutes and 20 seconds to dispatch officers to major crime scenes in the 8th police district, on the South Side. In contrast, the wait in the 20th District, on the North Side, was less than three minutes, on average, during the same period.

A couple of the police districts that had some of the shortest dispatch times a few years ago have seen sharp increases. The districts that have seen the biggest increases in dispatch times this year include the 1st District, which covers parts of downtown and the near South Side, and the 8th District on the Southwest Side, now ranked last in the city.

Since 2011, the number of police officers in the 1st District has dropped from 296 to 259, while the 8th District has 332 beat cops now, compared to 377 five years ago.

As city officials prepare to hire more cops to help deal with the sharp increase in murders and other violent crimes this year, Supt. Eddie Johnson has promised an analysis to determine where those new officers should be assigned.

The criteria for where the new hires will be assigned will include “calls for service, crime data, district activity levels, density and geography,” police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi says, “to ensure equity across the city.”

Police redeployment has been one of the third rails of Chicago politics for decades. Elected officials representing even the most tranquil parts of the city never want to lose officers, for fear that violent crime might spread to their wards. Even in the police districts with lowest rates of violence, City Council members say they have seen increases in property crimes due to the thinning of the police force and have lobbied for more help.

Ald. Nicholas Sposato (38th) says Johnson has begun delivering on a promise to bring 32 more officers to the Northwest Side’s 16th District. Sposato and other aldermen had expressed concern to the top cop about the rise this year in property crime in one of the safest parts of Chicago.

“I was thrilled,” Sposato says. “He told us he wants to keep the safe places safe.”

But the ACLU and many aldermen say the most violent districts need a greater share of cops than they have.

“We don’t just need more officers,” the ACLU’s Sheley says. “We need officers with similar workloads across the city.”

A spokesman for the Emanuel administration’s Law Department declined to comment on the ongoing lawsuit over police deployment.

Ald. Roderick Sawyer (6th) says more officers need to be stationed closer to where the most violent crime is.

“Some areas just don’t need as many officers,” says Sawyer, chairman of the council’s Black Caucus. “Solving property crime is important, but let’s be honest. We need to redeploy officers in those areas where there’s real activity — the robbing, killing, drug dealing.”

In addition to the disparities in dispatch times by district, the ACLU points to another key statistic that indicates high-crime areas are understaffed. There are big gaps from district to district in the number of calls for which no officer is available to respond.

As with dispatch times, the North Side fares far better on this than the South Side. The 20th District had only 10 calls for which no officer was free to respond in the first nine months of this year. At the other end of the spectrum was the 3rd District on the South Side, which had 352 such situations through September.

Former Mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration fought efforts to release documents showing where officers were assigned, arguing that could compromise safety. Initially, there was also resistance from Emanuel’s first police superintendent, Garry McCarthy.

“You know, the military doesn’t tell the Taliban how many people they have and where they are,” McCarthy told aldermen in 2011. “If we are going to adequately preform our jobs, there are some things that we really need to keep to ourselves — the size of different units, where the cops are, things like that. It could compromise public safety.”

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s office issued an opinion, though, that the state’s Freedom of Information Act didn’t exempt the city from releasing district-by-district  deployment figures.

The numbers released in 2012 showed Emanuel had fallen far short of his campaign promise to add 1,000 officers to patrol the streets.

At first, the number of beat officers in the city’s police district rose, from 6,542 in April 2011 — a month before Emanuel was sworn in — to more than 7,000 by that September. The new hires were focused largely on high-crime areas.

But within two years, by the fall of 2013, that figures had dropped below 6,400 rank-and-file cops in patrol districts.

As of Oct. 19, there were fewer beat officers working in the districts than when Emanuel took office.

While the numbers of cops plummeted, McCarthy and Emanuel said they didn’t need more money for more officers.

This year, with the number of killings and shooting surging, the mayor did an about-face and said he would aim to increase the size of the department significantly.

The two-year hiring plan promises to add 500 police officers, 200 detectives, 112 sergeants, 92 field training officers and 50 lieutenants — for a total increase of 970 positions.

It won’t be easy to meet that goal because the already-brisk pace of retirements is rising. In October, the Sun-Times reported 274 officers declared their intention to retire by June 30, driven by an expiring offer of free health care for cops who are 55 years old.

Police officials say they are gearing up to overcome that. Starting next year, they say, nearly 100 police recruits a month will be trained.

Contributing: Data Reporting Lab editor Darnell Little

Chicago Police Officer John Poulos was cleared of the fatal shooting of an unarmed burglary suspect in 2013, and he is under investigation in the fatal shooting last month of an unarmed teenager in West Englewood.  Police investigators now want to know why the department never closed a 2004 internal affairs investigation that could have cost Poulos his badge more than a decade ago.

Police Supt. Eddie Johnson has ordered an audit to determine why the 2004 investigation of Poulos’ possible ownership interest in a bar, a violation of department policy, has never been closed.

Owning or working at an establishment that sells alcohol is a firing offense, but Poulos went on disability shortly after the department’s Internal Affairs Division began looking at his ownership of a bar in 2004. The investigation apparently went dormant because Poulos stayed off the job for another seven years, according to department sources.

The still-open case was discovered when the department began investigation Poulos’ fatal shooting in November of 19-year-old Kajuan Raye, CPD spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said.

RELATED STORY: Sister wants feds to review fatal shooting by off-duty cop, May 1, 2016

“Following last month’s police involved shooting, CPD began its customary review of the sergeant’s personnel history, including the 2004 Internal Affairs investigation into the sergeant’s ownership of an establishment that sells alcohol,” Guglielmi said in a statement. “This investigation was never concluded under prior police administrations and there are incomplete details and unanswered questions about that case.”

Chicago police Sgt. John Poulos. | Better Government Association

The investigation apparently didn’t restart when Poulos returned to active duty with the department in 2011, and didn’t raise any red flags when he was investigated in 2013 for shooting Rickey Roselle, a burglary suspect Poulos confronted after leaving Gamekeepers, an Old Town bar he said at the time was owned by his family.

It is not clear what the department can do if it determines that Poulos did have a stake in the bar in 2004, or if and when he divested himself from the business.

Spyridon Poulos is listed as the president of the corporation that owns Gamekeepers, a business that has existed since 1974. The bar’s website says it opened in 1984.

IPRA cleared Poulos of wrongdoing in the shooting, and the veteran officer was made sergeant a year later, a merit promotion awarded by his then-commander, Kevin Navarro, who’s now Johnson’s top deputy. Merit promotions are awarded by superior officers and aren’t based on an officer’s performance on civil service exams.

Officer John Poulos was stripped of his police powers last month, after he fatally shot Kajuan Raye in the back, after he said the teen twice pointed a gun at him during a foot chase in West Englewood.

When a candidate is nominated for a merit promotion, the department’s Human Resources division reviews their disciplinary history but looks only for “sustained” complaints as far back as five years.

The department has budgeted for a new computer system to track disciplinary actions and complaints, which will go online next year, Guglielmi said.

“In 2017, CPD will begin implementing case management and early intervention systems that will keep track of officers’ personnel activity and help prevent instances like this in the future,” Guglielmi said.

According to Independent Police Review Authority records, the city agency that investigates police shootings and misconduct allegations, Poulos had eaten at the bar and left carrying his brother’s gun, when he saw Rozelle inside a vacant building near the bar. Poulos said his brother carried a gun for his work as a private investigator and asked his brother to take the weapon home when he left the bar.

Poulos said he saw Rozelle burglarizing a vacant apartment next door to the bar, scuffled with Rozelle, and shot him twice when he appeared to be reaching for a gun. Police found no gun on Rozelle’s body but did note that he was wearing a metallic wristwatch.

Poulos was stripped of his police powers last month after he fatally shot Raye in the back. He said the teenager twice pointed a gun at him during a foot chase in West Englewood.

The first-ever gala fund-raiser for the Chicago City Council’s Latino Caucus not-for-profit foundation was, by all accounts, a classy event.

With Mayor Rahm Emanuel as honorary chairman, the foundation raised more than $208,000 at the black-tie evening at the Field Museum in November 2015.

But the costs to put on the event were so high it netted less than $58,000, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.

The “direct costs” for organizing the gala exceeded $150,000, eating up 72 percent of all the money that was collected, according to the Chicago City Council Latino Caucus Foundation’s draft 2015 tax return.

All 11 Hispanic aldermen are board members of the foundation, formed in 2012 “to provide scholarships to Latino students who wish to attend college but cannot afford it.”

When I asked for the tax records the group is required to file and to disclose publicly, one of the aldermen said Friday the 2015 federal tax return was “being reviewed by members and should be filed shortly.”

A copy of the draft tax return obtained by the Sun-Times breaks down the huge expenses that the foundation incurred for the 2015 gala like this:

• Nearly $22,000 to hold the event in the main hall of the Field Museum in the shadow of Sue, the Tyrannosaurus rex.

• More than $17,500 for food and beverages.

• $3,000 for entertainment.

• More than $108,000 for “other direct expenses” that weren’t itemized but that the group’s chairman, Ald. George Cardenas (12th), said Tuesday included hiring a fund-raiser and a public relations firm.

“My vision was that the foundation has to do something out of the norm,” Cardenas said of the swanky inaugural gala. “Yes, the expenses were very high. It was a huge risk.”

Cardenas said people pledged nearly $300,000, but much of that was never actually contributed.

Though the group was incorporated as a not-for-profit foundation nearly five years ago, it was registered with the Illinois attorney general’s as a charitable organization, as required, only on Sept. 30 — days after I initially asked for its financial reports.

The attorney general’s office said Tuesday the group’s latest financial report also was due in September and that it’s informed the foundation it’s late but still hasn’t received it.

The foundation held its 2016 fund-raiser Sept. 30, drawing a who’s-who of people with stakes in decisions made by City Hall.

It listed ridesharing giant Uber and its rival Lyft, both of which have fought City Council efforts to enact stricter regulations of their industry, as supporters of the event, as well as the two bidders vying for the lucrative new concessions deal at Midway Airport and two of the financial firms that do underwriting in Chicago of government bonds.

Among other big-business donors to this year’s gala were Walgreens, ComEd, Southwest Airlines, the Chicago Cubs and Walmart.

“The Chicago City Council Latino Caucus Foundation raised more than $400,000 for Latino students at its second annual gala,” according to a news release it sent out. “The foundation nearly doubled what it raised last year.”

But it might be a while before the public can find out how much actually was cleared at the most recent gala, minus expenses, because the foundation’s 2016 tax returns aren’t due until next year.

This year’s event was held at a union hall instead of the pricier Field Museum. So maybe there will be more left over for the college students the fund-raiser is meant to help.

“The first year is the hardest,” Cardenas said. “We’ve done a lot of good work. I don’t want to discourage anybody from the wonderful vision we have.”

So far, the foundation hasn’t handed out any scholarships. Cardenas said the first scholarships will be awarded early next year and also said the University of Illinois-Chicago has donated four four-year scholarships to the foundation.

A panel of “education and admissions professionals” are to choose who gets the scholarships from the foundation.

Most of Chicago’s food trucks have never faced the same type of surprise health inspections that restaurants often face, an analysis of city data by the Chicago Sun-Times and ABC7 Chicago’s I-Team has found.

Though food trucks have been operating in Chicago for years and are increasingly popular, records show the Chicago Department of Public Health hasn’t subjected many of them to even a single unannounced visit — the kind of inspection that experts say are the most likely to detect potential food-safety problems.

Late last month, City Hall’s inspector general, Joseph Ferguson, issued a report that found the health department doesn’t inspect many restaurants as frequently as state law requires.

Food trucks — which the review by Ferguson’s office didn’t include — are even less likely than brick-and-mortar restaurants to get surprise visits from city inspectors, the Sun-Times and ABC7 found.

These “canvass inspections” — in which inspectors show up without warning while food is being served — account for more than half of health department visits to restaurants.

But they make up only about 10 percent of health inspections of the food trucks licensed to cook onboard in Chicago.

As a result, city records show, many food trucks face inspection only when they are first licensed, when their licenses are up for renewal or if they turn up at festivals. And those license inspections aren’t surprise visits. They are arranged with the owners in advance and don’t take place while food is being served.

The city’s health commissioner, Dr. Julie Morita, says there’s no reason for the public to be concerned.

Dr. Julie Morita, the city’s health commissioner. | Michael Maher/ABC7 Chicago

“We are confident in the food trucks right now,” Morita says. “Because of limited resources, we have to work diligently on prioritizing which food establishments get inspected more regularly.”

Ferguson found that the city would need many more inspectors to do all the checks that the law requires.

Asked about Sun-Times/ABC7 findings, Ferguson said, “To the extent you’re finding that not enough inspections are being done, that’s consistent with what we found with food establishments generally. The city is not meeting its own regulatory standards.”

State law dictates that all food establishments, including food trucks, have to be inspected more frequently if they are deemed to be at higher risk of having problems that could affect consumers.

Morita notes that many food trucks are categorized as “Risk 3,” the lowest level, so they don’t have to be inspected as often.

Yet even for food trucks that are considered “Risk 2” — that is, of medium concern — the health department often has conducted only license inspections and no canvass visits, the Sun-Times and ABC7 found.

Presented with that finding, health department spokesman Brian Richardson said changes will be made and will come quickly.

“To ensure additional safety, our inspection team will launch canvass inspections of Risk Level 2 food trucks beginning next month,” Richardson said, “with the goal of conducting at least one canvass inspection for each food truck within a two-year time frame.”

That would be far more often than city inspectors have been getting to them.

Risk 1 establishments — those deemed to be at the highest risk of food-safety problems — are supposed to be inspected twice a year. Those categorized as Risk 2 are due for inspection annually.

But the state has given the city of Chicago a waiver to do inspections only every other year for Risk 2 establishments, and the city also is allowed to count license inspections toward that goal.

Of the 34 Risk 1 or 2 food trucks that have been licensed by the city for at least two years, 20 have never been subjected to a canvass inspection, the Sun-Times/ABC7 analysis found.

Food truck owners say their cleanliness does get scrutinized, though, because they also face health inspections in suburbs where they do business. Gabriel Wiesen, president of the Illinois Food Truck Owners Association, says his Beaver Donuts truck has faced inspections this year in Evanston, Schaumburg, Naperville, Highland Park and other communities, in addition to Chicago.

“I would argue that food trucks are a very safe medium because we are inspected so often by multiple health departments in different municipalities and counties,” Wiesen says.

Chicago city records show Beaver Coffee & Donuts has been the subject of one canvass inspection since it went into business more than three years ago, which it passed.

City officials also act on complaints, and Beaver failed one such inspection, in June. Inspectors reported that, while preparing orders for customers, a Beaver employee also was observed handling cash, touching the truck’s door handles and grabbing a water hose on the ground “multiple times.” The truck was forced to shut down because of that “critical violation” and for not having running water, records show.

Another truck, The Slide Ride, went into business more than 3-1/2 years ago and hasn’t faced a surprise food inspection yet.

But, acting on a complaint that eating there had made someone sick, city inspectors visited The Slide Ride in October 2015 and shut down the truck, citing it for storing eight pounds of hamburgers at 85.6 degrees. Smaller quantities of bacon and cheese also were being stored at temperatures far above the legal threshold for storage of 40 degrees.

“I had two chicken sliders and one burger slider on Oct. 21 for lunch,” the complainant reported on Oct. 22, 2015. “That evening, I had dinner at home, and no one else was sick, so the Slide Ride is the only place I could have got it, and it was what was still coming up at 2 a.m. Sick all last night, missed work today and still sick as of 7 p.m. tonight . . . Have not been that sick in over 20 years.”

ABC7 recorded an employee of The Slide Ride touching food with bare hands while the truck was operating. That was one of five trucks whose employees were recorded by ABC7 using bare hands to touch food in downtown Chicago in recent weeks.

Wiesen, the food truck association president, said inspectors have told him that touching food with bare hands isn’t always against the rules.

But Richardson, the health department spokesman, said gloves, tongs, deli paper or other barriers must be used to handle food.

“You are not permitted to touch ready-to-eat foods with bare hands,” Richardson said. “If those violations are occurring, we encourage residents to report to 311.”

The Slide Ride’s owner declined to comment on the failed inspection or the employee seen touching food bare-handed, saying she has decided to no longer operate her truck due to recent, stepped-up enforcement of the city’s 2012 food truck ordinance.

Food trucks parked on Clark Street between Monroe Street and Adams Street at lunch hour. | Rich Hein/Sun-Times

That ordinance was proposed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and approved by the City Council in October 2012. Before then, cooking wasn’t allowed on food trucks, even though it already was in many other cities. Instead, food trucks here could serve only prepackaged items.

The same ordinance allowing food to be prepared on the trucks also established “mobile food vehicle stands” across the city and set a limit of no more than two hours at a time for food trucks to operate from the same spot.

But a Sun-Times/ABC7 investigation in August found that the two-hour rule was routinely flouted and rarely enforced. After those reports, Emanuel ordered a crackdown, and dozens of food trucks have been cited for violations since then.

On Wednesday, Ald. Proco Joe Moreno (1st) proposed an ordinance that would relax those restrictions, letting food trucks operate in the same place for six hours. The mayor said he hasn’t taken a position on the proposal.

Food truck owners lost a court fight last week to throw out another city restriction, which bars them from doing business within 200 feet of restaurants, with a Cook County judge ruling against them Dec. 5.

Owners say other cities don’t regulate food trucks so heavily and that it’s difficult for their businesses to survive.

In Los Angeles County — renowned for its vast array of food trucks — officials found in 2014 that about 40 percent of food trucks and carts hadn’t been inspected in the previous three years. This past May, the Los Angeles Times reported that food trucks there were three times more likely to fail inspections and to be forced to close than regular restaurants.

Contributing: Data Reporting Lab editor Darnell Little, Ann Pistone and Jason Knowles of ABC7 Chicago.

Chicago’s busiest TV and film studio is getting another hand from the government: a property-tax cut that will shift an estimated $4 million burden onto other taxpayers over the next dozen years, according to a Chicago Sun-Times analysis.

That’s on top of more than $17 million in grants that Cinespace Chicago Film Studios — home to “Chicago Fire,” “Empire,” and other hit TV shows and movies — has gotten from the state of Illinois.

Cinespace fought for the property-tax break for more than three years. The company argued it needed lower taxes so it could afford to expand its stages, which are built on polluted land on the West Side it bought from Ryerson Steel with the help of state grants awarded by former Gov. Pat Quinn’s administration.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the Chicago City Council approved Cinespace in October 2013 for one of 10 such tax breaks City Hall has granted since January 2006 to companies that set up shop on polluted property, known as “brownfields.”

But Cook County Assessor Joseph Berrios’s staff rejected the deal in October 2015. The holdup was that Ryerson’s finance director Mark Degnen had helped arranged the purchase of the 49-acre site, done in three transactions, to Cinespace and subsequently became the studio’s chief financial officer. Citing Degnen’s dual roles — working first for the seller and then for the buyer — the assessor’s staff questioned whether the sale was an “arm’s-length transaction.” A county ordinance would bar Ryerson from benefiting from a tax break given to clean up the mess the company left behind.

Cinespace fought on, arguing that Degnen had no ownership stake in Ryerson and wasn’t responsible for polluting the land. It won over Berrios, who convinced the Cook County Board to change the ordinance last April so Cinespace could get the tax break as long as it proved Degnen hadn’t been an owner of Ryerson but only an employee.

Cook County Assessor Joseph Berrios. | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

Berrios then approved the so-called Class C tax break on Nov. 11.

Cinespace will begin seeing a drop in its tax bills next summer. Exactly how much the studio will save can’t be determined until Cook County officials finish preparing those tax bills early next year, but the savings will be significant, likely much more than the $3.5 million in savings originally predicted by City Hall.

Cinespace paid $638,370 in property taxes this year. Had the tax break been in place, its bill would have been about $263,000 — about a 60 percent reduction.

Whatever tax savings Cinespace sees will have to be made up by others, that burden spread among all the rest of property owners in Chicago and Cook County.

Under the Class C incentive, Cinespace won’t have to pay the higher taxes that businesses usually pay but instead will be taxed just like a home in Cook County. It will pay taxes on 10 percent of its property’s assessed value, as set by county officials, while other commercial property owners pay taxes on 25 percent of their assessments.

That 60 percent cut in assessed value on the studio’s buildings will last for 10 years, then drop to 40 percent in the 11th year and 20 percent in the 12th and final year of the tax break. Then, Cinespace would resume being taxed like a typical commercial property.

Overall, Cinespace will likely pay $4 million less in property tax because of the tax break, the Sun-Times analysis found.

“When Cinespace came to Chicago in 2011, this property housed a defunct steel plant,” studio spokesman Eric Herman says. “The owners had shut down operations, cut more than 1,500 jobs and had no plans to invest. Cinespace purchased the campus — warts and all — and rehabbed it to build an economic catalyst.

Alex Pissios in 2009. | Sun-Times files

“This action will help Cinespace continue its mission of bringing 7,500 film-related jobs and $3 billion in spending to Illinois and providing an economic engine for North Lawndale.”

Cinespace is a family-owned business headed by former real estate developer Alex Pissios. It began buying the Ryerson Steel property in 2011, aiming to build what the company calls the biggest movie studio east of Los Angeles.

Pissios’ company spent $12.25 million to buy the former steel factory buildings, which are spread over several blocks, and convert them to production facilities for TV shows and movies.

Between 2009 and 2010, Cinespace got four state grants totaling $17.3 million to renovate the Ryerson property. Quinn’s administration handed it a fifth grant, for another $10 million, just hours before he left office last year.

But Gov. Bruce Rauner forced the studio to return the money after the Sun-Times reported that the state gave Cinespace the money to buy additional land that apparently wasn’t for sale.

Before Cinespace set up operations in Chicago with the help of loans from Belmont Bank & Trust, headed by attorney James Banks, a longtime member of the Illinois Tollway board, and former state Sen. James DeLeo, D-Chicago, Chicago Studio City had been the state’s busiest TV and movie production site. Also located on the West Side, Chicago Studio City has never received a state grant. It’s suing the state in federal court, saying the Quinn administration “conspired with Cinespace Chicago to direct Chicago-oriented producers to Cinespace Chicago and implement an illegal boycott of Chicago Studio City” that cost it millions of dollars and has it “in danger of going out of business.”

Cinespace spent more than $620,000 cleaning up the toxic property at 2621 W. 15th Pl., including removing asbestos and taking steps to keep remaining contamination from spreading, according to documents the studio filed with Berrios. Cinespace and Ryerson both received letters from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency certifying that “no further remediation” of the polluted land was necessary.

Besides movie and film companies, Cinespace also has other tenants — including DePaul University’s film school, talent agencies and beermaker Lagunitas Brewery Company — from which it collects more than $1.6 million in rent each year, records show.

Lagunitas paid $1.5 million in rent this past year. DePaul pays more than $43,000 a year leasing offices and studio space for its film students.

Cinespace won’t say, though, how much money it gets from TV and movie production companies “under short-term, renewable agreements which are considered highly proprietary and not easily shared,” according to a property appraisal provided to the assessor. “These use agreements are for the facilities and provide the users with the raw stage space to construct their sets and stage their productions and also provide office/administrative space and other amenities (such as dressing areas and parking) as needed.”

From a scene on “Chicago Fire.” | NBC

Those television and movie companies receive state tax credits of as much as 30 percent for leasing space from Cinespace for their productions here. But the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity has refused to release records detailing the production expenses used to claim those tax credits, saying “the disclosure would cause immediate financial harm as well as impact future business negotiations” for NBCUniversal Media, the production company for “Chicago Fire” and other series produced in Chicago by Dick Wolf. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan upheld the state’s decision last month, saying the law doesn’t require that salaries and expenses that production companies claim for tax credits be made public.

Cinespace provided Berrios with an appraisal that estimates its property is worth $11.9 million. That’s slightly less than what the company paid to buy the 49-acre site — and far less than the amount of money the studio received in grants from the state.

Cinespace’s buildings are “in fair to poor overall condition,” the appraisal says. “As a result of being used as a steel facility for most of its life, all of the subject’s warehouse space, including the west plant which was partially built-out as a brewery in 2013, displayed significant amounts of wear and tear throughout (i.e. heavy cracking along the concrete floors; heavy rusting of steel columns/beams and metal-panel walls; significant roof leaks throughout; significantly deteriorated masonry walls.”

Calling food trucks a pivotal part of Chicago’s “culinary scene,” Illinois Restaurant Association President Sam Toia on Monday threw his formidable support behind a plan to allow Chicago food trucks to park and stay longer in one legal space — perhaps up to six hours.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported last week that Ald. Proco Joe Moreno (1st) had proposed allowing Chicago food trucks to set up shop in one location for six hours. That’s triple the current limit of two hours.

Moreno argued then that a legislative solution is the only alternative now that food truck owners have have lost their court fight to overturn the city’s restrictive food truck ordinance.

The alderman said he was somewhat flexible on the six hours. But he argued that food truck owners who take “40 minutes to set up and 40 minutes to tear down” need longer than two hours to stay in one place if they are to survive and thrive in Chicago.

On Monday, Toia said he was prepared to support a longer, stay-in-one-place rule to keep food trucks in Chicago.

Sam Toia, president of the Illinois Restaurant Association, is willing to look at increasing the amount of time food trucks can set up in one place in Chicago. | Sun-Times file photo

“The hours should be raised. Two hours is definitely too short of a time, too quick of a turnover time. Restauranteurs understand that you’ve got to set up and break down any time you’re opening and closing a restaurant or food truck,” said Toia, former owner of Leona’s Restaurants.

“Chicago is the culinary capital of the United States and food trucks are part of our great culinary scene here. We have to figure out how we can work to help them stay longer in the designated zones.”

Toia said the only question is how long the new, stay-in-one-legal-place limit should be.

“I want to make sure that all the food trucks feel that it should be six hours. Should it be four? Should it be six? I’m not sure yet. I want to communicate with everybody and make sure that everyone in the food truck community feels comfortable with the [new] hours being proposed. We’ll definitely get to the table and work something out with everybody,” he said.

The Circuit Court suit decided in the city’s favor also took aim at the requirement that food trucks stay 200 feet away from stationary restaurants and have GPS devices on board so City Hall can track their movements.

When it comes to brokering a legislative solution, Toia was adamant about retaining the 200-foot bubble that protects brick-and-mortar restaurants.

But he was open to the possibility of designating additional food truck stands across the city in conjunction with the local alderman and chambers of commerce.

Ald. Proco Joe Moreno — a liberal Democrat — joined forces with the right-wing Illinois Policy Institute to promote the interests of Chicago’s food trucks. | Sun-Times file photo

“There should be probably more stands in our food desert areas. We should definitely have more stands around city colleges and maybe more stands by Loyola [University] on the North Side,” Toia said.

“We have a fair amount of food stands downtown. But I would like to also make sure these food trucks are getting out to our 77 communities. There’s a lot of areas that could definitely be very profitable for food trucks to go into, too. We have a quite a few stands right now in the downtown area. But I’m always willing to communicate” and negotiate.

The two-hour rule was put into place in 2012 as part of the landmark ordinance that finally allowed for cooking aboard food trucks in Chicago.

But for the past four years, the two-hour rule was widely flouted with impunity, a joint investigation by the Sun-Times and the ABC7 Chicago I-Team found last summer.

Virtually every weekday, trucks stayed for six hours or longer in the same spots, but the city’s Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection rarely cited anybody for violating the ordinance.

Many food trucks owners said they had no choice but to break the rule or else they would go out of business.

Emanuel ordered increased enforcement after the reports from the Sun-Times and ABC7, and dozens of violations were handed out to food trucks earlier this year. Some truck operators said they began keeping close watch on how long they remained in the same spot, to avoid hefty fines.

Laura Pekarik, owner of Cupcakes for Courage, lost the lawsuit she filed four years ago to overturn the city’s food truck restrictions. She has a store in Elmhurst and two food trucks, one of which is licensed to operate in Chicago. She has said she will appeal the decision. | Mitch Dudek/Sun-Times

The issue has made for strange bedfellows in Chicago politics, as Moreno — a liberal Democrat known as “the hipster alderman” — joined forces with the right-wing Illinois Policy Institute on behalf of the food trucks.

The institute recently launched blistering attacks on Emanuel, including a cartoon depicting the ballet-loving mayor in a pink tutu alongside an inspector ticketing food trucks.

The group also started an online “save Chicago food trucks’ petition drive, alleging, “Rahm’s crackdown could force the city’s food trucks out of business.”

The institute has received funding from family foundation of Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner and the right-wing Charles Koch Institute, records show.

The Illinois Food Truck Owners Association has praised Moreno’s six-hour rule as a “positive first step towards treating food truck owners properly instead of as second-class citizens.”

Soon after the 2012 ordinance went into effect, food truck owners sued the city to challenge another longstanding rule prohibiting them from operating within 200 feet of a brick-and-mortar restaurant.

The plaintiff in the suit — Laura Pekarik, represented for free by a conservative, anti-regulation legal group from Virginia — lost in Cook County Circuit Court on Dec. 5 but promised to appeal.

Contributing: Dan Mihalopoulos

Three officials with the Noble Network of Charter Schools signed off on using an improperly obtained list of Chicago Public School students’ names, addresses, current schools and grade levels to send recruitment postcards to the homes of at least 28,000 CPS kids, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.

The list, leaked by a CPS employee, was passed along to Noble officials by Delia Arreola, an executive assistant for the privately run, publicly funded charter operator, according to records obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.

Arreola, who forwarded it within Noble, has received a “formal letter of reprimand,” according to Noble.

Simone Santiago, Noble Network of Charter Schools.

Eric Thomas, the president of the charter network, said three other Noble employees who approved using the CPS list to recruit students also were reprimanded: Simone Santiago, a $105,000-a-year director of student matriculation, Jonathan Chaparro, who makes $70,000 a year as its student recruitment officer, and Bradley Johnson, a $62,500-a-year dean of operations.

No one was suspended or lost any pay, Thomas said.

“The discipline meetings were conducted by me personally with each employee,” Thomas said. “They included formal letters of reprimand, which are a serious action in our organization, and we do not take them lightly.”

None of the disciplined Noble employees returned messages seeking comment.

According to Noble, Santiago signed off on paying for the postcards that, based on the list, went out in September to children enrolled in CPS. Johnson got a copy, and so did Chaparro, who requested it while overseeing production of the full-color mailers, which cost Noble at least $13,000.

Noble emails show the charter network staffers were in a hurry to get the mailers out to at least 28,500 students enrolled in CPS schools using the list slipped to them by a CPS staffer who was later fired for doing that.

“Timing is critical given the start of the school year so if there’s a way to rush this, that’d be great,” Chaparro wrote in August to a sales representative at Staples handling the printing order, offering to pay more for a quick turnaround.

He wrote again in September, during CPS’ first week of classes, saying he wanted to send the mailer out again, “as it has been pretty successful.”

The list had been passed along through Arreola, an assistant at Gary Comer College Prep High School on the South Side, who forwarded it in July from her personal email account to her Noble email and then to several superiors. She had apparently been sent the list by a CPS employee Chicago school officials have said was fired on Nov. 23 but have refused to identify.

“Hello!! Happy early xmas!!!” Arreola wrote to the principal and vice principal of her school. “I have the list of rising 8th graders for the fall and wanted to send it your way so we can hit the ground running on recruitment for next year’s freshman class. Enjoy!!”

She also wrote to the principals of Comer’s high school and middle school grades: “Hey guys!! I have the rising 6th graders for trent (best of luck) and our list of rising 8th graders. The list has to be sorted by grade level. enjoy!!”

In September, CPS parents complained to the Sun-Times that their children had received postcards at home inviting them to consider enrolling at Noble’s 18 schools.

The postcards arrived ahead of the October date when CPS does a student count that determines each school’s already-tight funding and around the time the Chicago Teachers Union announced a possible strike date that would have affected CPS but not charter schools.

The inclusion of each child’s current CPS school made parents suspicious that the school system had released their kids’ information.

Spokesman Michael Passman said CPS didn’t approve of the release of student data — which CPS Inspector General Nicholas Schuler is investigating.

Noble initially said it never saw students’ names but hired a bulk-mailing service to send the mailers to homes in certain areas with kids of a certain age. But its own review revealed the student data was improperly passed along.

Eric Thomas, Noble Network of Charter Schools.

“The involved Noble employees viewed the source file as containing publicly available directory information,” Thomas wrote to CPS on Oct. 28 — the day the staffers were disciplined.

On Nov. 17, after CPS mailed a letter to approximately 30,000 addresses informing parents of the data breach, Thomas wrote to Noble’s “Pals and Chiefs” that “it was wrong for CPS to give us the list but also for Noble to receive it and to use it to mail informational postcards.”

Noble agreed to pay $18,634 in mailing costs for the CPS apology letters.

Jeff Jenkins, a CPS parent who contacted the inspector general, said he’s disappointed Noble employees weren’t punished more harshly.

“They get a serious letter of reprimand?” Jenkins said. “That’s not going to discourage anybody.”