Undercover police officers bought heroin, crack cocaine and fentanyl earlier this month “in and around” a parking lot on city-owned land near the United Center that City Hall has been trying to shut down.

“There were seven arrests with 17 targets,” police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi says. “Six of the seven arrested were convicted felons. Of the 17 targets, 13 were gang members.”

The police bought nearly 19 grams of heroin, nearly 34 grams of crack and nearly 6 grams of fentanyl during the week of Dec. 12 “in the vicinity or on the property of” Peoples Stadium Parking between 1700 and 1716 W. Madison, according to Guglielmi.

“We were getting complaints about drug activity,” Guglielmi says, adding that the case has been referred to other city agencies regarding the operation of the parking lot.

City Hall has been trying to shut down the lot since December 2014, when the Chicago Sun-Times reported that the fenced parking lot includes land owned by the city of Chicago and that Peoples didn’t have a lease with the city allowing it to park cars there.

Peoples — owned by the family of attorney Ronald Shudnow — has filed a lawsuit that’s blocked the city from shutting down the lot, and the company had continued to park cars on the city land, though an attorney for Peoples says that’s no longer being done.

“Since mid-November . . . Peoples Stadium Parking has no longer been operating on the city’s lots at 1700-16 Madison,” where two of the four lots are city-owned, according to attorney Stephen Novack. “As far as we know, those city lots are not being operated and are sitting vacant and unattended.”

Novack says: “The busts took place during non-work hours and, to the best of our knowledge, not on Peoples Stadium Parking’s lots nor the city’s lots. Only two of the 43 arrestees were employed (as car flaggers) by Peoples Stadium Parking, and they were not on duty at the time.”

Shudnow’s family has been operating parking lots around the United Center and the old Chicago Stadium for decades. They began using the city-owned property under a five-year deal reached in 1996 with the Daley administration to resolve a lawsuit over land for the United Center. The family kept using the property without a lease, saying it had a legal right under business licenses it has from City Hall.

The city has filed a counter-claim to Peoples’ lawsuit, seeking “fair-market rent,” and officials “are currently reviewing and evaluating the police reports to determine if the alleged drug-related activity meets the legal threshold to warrant a license revocation,” Law Department spokesman Bill McCaffrey says.

RELATED STORY: City moves to shut down parking lot near United Center

The last arrest on Labor Day in the Gresham District stemmed from a call just before 10 p.m. There was someone with a gun near 78th and Loomis — just blocks from where two people had been wounded in separate shootings that weekend.

The first two Chicago cops to arrive spoke with a man who said he’d been threatened when he tried to drive around a stalled car in the alley. He told them a guy jumped out of the car and informed him, “I’ll blow your m—–f—— a– up,” gesturing toward his waistband as if he had a gun, according to the police report.

The officers soon found the 39-year-old man who’d allegedly made the threats. Charging him with assault, they hauled him in.

The station had been relatively quiet that day. Gresham is usually one of the city’s busiest districts and Labor Day among the busiest times of the year. But this was just the sixth arrest in the South Side district  that day — not even half the number arrested on Labor Day a year earlier and less than a third compared with 2014, reflecting a citywide drop this year in arrests.

As Chicago grapples with a surge in killings and a mistrust of law enforcement stemming from police shootings, the number of arrests in the city has fallen by 28 percent versus last year, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis finds.

The number of arrests in Chicago this year is on target to be the city’s lowest since at least 2001, according to the Sun-Times analysis of city crime data, which also found:

• Through mid-December, police were on pace to make about 50,000 arrests citywide in 2016 — down from over 69,000 a year ago. The year’s current arrest total is less than half what it was in 2010, the year before Mayor Rahm Emanuel took office.

• The drop is steepest in areas such as Englewood and Austin where violence is common and police have long flooded “hot spots” and drug markets. But the decline isn’t limited to high-crime areas: Arrests are down by double digits in every district in the city.

• Arrests have fallen in every major crime category included in the city’s online database, from theft to aggravated battery with a handgun — the most common charge for a nonfatal shooting.

• Narcotics arrests plummeted by half — the most dramatic decrease for any type of crime. That’s partly because of a state law that took effect this summer decriminalizing possession of less than 10 grams of marijuana. Chicago cops this year will make about 4,200 arrests for misdemeanor pot possession — down from 20,000 five years ago.

Police Supt. Eddie Johnson says the figures reflect the department’s focus on addressing gun violence and improving community relations.

“We want to arrest the right people at the right times for the right reasons,” Johnson says. “But just indiscriminately stopping people? No. We cannot arrest our way out of this.”

The superintendent says the department is moving away from decades of “broken windows” policing — a strategy that emphasizes heavy enforcement of even low-level offenses to send a message that crime won’t be tolerated. While that led to lower crime rates, it also worsened tensions in some neighborhoods where people felt the police were heavy-handed.

“The time when broken windows theories came in — I think it was effective,” Johnson says. “But we have to focus on what’s really hurting Chicago right now, and that is the gun violence.

“Don’t get me wrong — we have not abandoned locking people up for quality-of-life issues. But low-level narcotics offenses — we can continue to do that, but would it affect the gun violence we’re seeing? I doubt that.”

He adds: “I’m not a fan of mass incarceration. But if you decide to pick up a gun, pull the trigger and shoot somebody, I don’t care what your rap is, you should go to jail for it.”

Even amid the overall drop in arrests, the police are busting more people for gun crimes, Johnson says. So far this year, Chicago cops have made nearly 3,900 seizures for illegal guns accompanied by arrests — the highest total since 2012, according to police officials.

Still, the number of arrests for all weapons offenses — including the most common, the illegal possession of a handgun — has dipped slightly, the Sun-Times analysis shows.

Johnson rejects the idea of the “Ferguson effect” — the theory that violence has risen because cops have been holding back amid protests over police shootings in Ferguson, Mo., and other cities. Yet he acknowledges that many police officers feel “vilified,” and others have been slowed down as they learn new legal requirements for documenting street stops.

“But I think the police officers in Chicago are working just as hard,” he says.

Deangelo Bester. | Workers Center for Racial Justice

The decline in arrests is welcomed by civil rights groups.

“Our perspective is: The fewer people in jail, the better it is for our communities,” says Deangelo Bester, executive director of the Workers Center for Racial Justice, which focuses on access to jobs.

Instead of responding to violence by locking up nonviolent offenders, city officials could divert funds from the police department and into neighborhood development, Bester says.

“Chicago is the most-policed city in the country,” he says. “Maybe it’s time to do something different.”

Natalie Howse. | Cook County Bar Association

Natalie Howse, president of the Cook County Bar Association, says the African-American lawyers group supports “policing that is more concerned with respect for the rule of law and individual rights, rather than the number of arrests.

“If the Chicago Police Department has placed greater focus on reducing the violent crime that plagues our city, and that new emphasis has temporarily resulted in fewer arrests of non-violent offenders, the CCBA welcomes that strategy so long as the cost is not allowing black communities to descend into lawlessness.”

Bester says it’s not yet clear whether the police department is changing its long-term strategy or whether officers are responding to criticism by slowing down. “It could be they’re throwing a little temper tantrum the only way they know how,” he says.

Some rank-and-file officers say cops aren’t being less aggressive as an act of protest but because they’re worried they’ll be caught on video making an honest mistake, then blasted for it.

“You’re being Monday-morning-quarterbacked for everything,” says one officer, speaking only on the condition of not being named.

Others say that’s not acceptable, arguing that body cameras and increased documentation will help police do their jobs.

“Those people are looking for an excuse,” says a veteran North Side supervisor, also speaking only on the condition of anonymity. “What they’re saying is that I liked it better when no one was recording when I trounced on someone’s head.”

In the 1980s, the FBI enlisted the help of an undercover mole to ensnare crooked Chicago politicians “dumb enough to listen to him,” according to one account.

Among those charged was then-Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Morgan Finley, accused of accepting $25,000 in bribes from the operative so a company could get a leg up on a government contract to collect parking-ticket fines.

Sentencing Finley in 1989 to 10 years in prison for racketeering and attempted extortion, a federal judge told him, “What an honor it was to hold your office, but you made it a monument” to “corruption.”

The lengthy sentence also took into account allegations Finley threatened an FBI agent while the trial was going on.

Despite going to prison, Finley’s government pension checks kept coming for decades, until his death in September at 91. Altogether, he collected nearly $2 million over the years, according to pension fund records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.

And the pension checks continue, though at a reduced rate, even after his death: His widow gets survivor’s benefits starting at around $5,500 a month, pension records show.

After Finley was charged in 1987, the longtime Bridgeport resident who was an ally of the first Mayor Daley didn’t seek reelection. He left office in late 1988.

Almost immediately, he began collecting two pensions. One was for his years in county government. The other covered his eight years in the Illinois Legislature — which Finley departed in the mid-1960s, according to allegations aired at his trial, after being suspected of trying to shake down a lobbyist in exchange for a vote, though he was never charged with that.

Both pensions were boosted by a “reciprocal” arrangement: Finley’s service with the county enhanced his legislative pension, and his service in the Legislature boosted his county pension.

Also, the county pension included several years of credits from the city of Chicago, for which Finley previously was an aldermanic aide and zoning board of appeals member.

The bulk of the almost $2 million in pension payouts came from taxpayers, who subsidize both pension funds. Finley contributed just $3,840 toward his legislative pension, which ended up paying him about $720,000, pension records show. And he put in as little as $65,000 toward his county retirement pay, which paid him more than $1.2 million.

In 2015 alone, Finley got just under $100,000 in pension payouts, records show.

The checks continued while he was in prison. He even managed his retirement from behind bars, at one point while in prison appealing to the General Assembly Retirement System for a higher percentage of his final legislative pay.

Under Illinois’ felony forfeiture law, which took effect in 1955, public officials in Illinois who are convicted of a felony related to their official duties aren’t allowed to collect pensions from the affected agency’s retirement plan.

According to the county pension fund, though, “Mr. Finley entered county service before the felony forfeiture provision was enacted, so it did not apply to him.”

Finley first worked for the county from 1946 until 1950 before holding office as the county’s circuit court clerk from 1974 until late 1988.

An appeals court ruling in an unrelated lawsuit, involving former DuPage County regional schools Supt. Harold Wright, took a different view from that of the county pension fund.

Wright started as a public school teacher in Illinois in 1953 and left the state a few years later, cashing out of the Teachers’ Retirement System of Illinois. He returned to Illinois as a teacher in 1962, later paying into the pension fund to restore his previous pension credits so he could collect retirement benefits.

Convicted in 1985 of embezzling from his agency, Wright’s pension was halted by TRS, based on the felony forfeiture rule. Wright sued, pointing to his pre-1955 start date. But an appeals court ruled against him, finding that Wright “reentered the system in 1962 pursuant to a new contract which included the felony forfeiture provision and . . . is not entitled to receive benefits from the system.”

Robert Healy. | Robert Herguth / Sun-Times

A former official who recently felt the sting of the forfeiture law was Robert Healy, former top administrator of the Lyons Township school treasurer’s office and onetime political ally of Finley. Healy was convicted in 2015 of stealing money from the agency, which manages hundreds of millions of dollars for west suburban school districts.

Healy began collecting a $5,618-a-month pension in 2014 through the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund, which stopped those payments in 2015 when he was sentenced to nine years in prison.

Workers are methodically dismantling the once-mighty Zion nuclear power plant. Just up the road in the far north suburb, a different kind of dismantling is taking place.

The small Lake County city of Zion — founded at the start of the last century as the new “City of God” and once a bustling little blue-collar bedroom community — is staggering. Crushed by the loss of half its property-tax base when the power plant was closed in 1998, it faces the foreseeable future as a nuclear waste dump.

It wasn’t supposed be this way.

“The understanding was that Zion would have a nuclear power plant on the lakefront and that it would be an eyesore but that there could be some economic development down the line,” Zion Mayor Al Hill says. “The understanding also was that, when they closed it, it would be gone. That’s not what happened.”

What happened is that no one can agree on where to put about 1,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel rods. So they will stay, sealed inside stainless steel canisters, encased in concrete and stacked in neat rows of 20-feet-tall cylinders on a concrete pad, all huddled together along some of Illinois’ most beautiful lakefront shoreline.

“We are,” Hill says, “a nuclear waste dump.”

It’s easy to ignore the plight of one small town. But nuclear plants in downstate Clinton and the Quad Cities, threatened with closing earlier this year, narrowly escaped the same fate. There are 11 nuclear reactors in six locations across Illinois and 99 operating across the nation. According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, there are 16 nuclear reactor sites nationwide that have been shut down and are being decommissioned — being taken apart, a lengthy process because nearly everything being dismantled is somewhat radioactive and requires special care in handling.

According to the most optimistic estimates, the radioactive waste now being stored in Zion will be there until at least the next decade, perhaps much longer. That’s left the city to try to lure new economic development with a nuclear-waste storage facility occupying its most valuable waterfront land.

If you think this is no big deal, talk to Sharon and Don Bourdeau, who, after running the Zion Antique Mall and Toy Mart for more than 20 years, just closed the store at the end of last month. Until then, it was an easy place to visit, as parking is never a problem these days in the heart of downtown Zion, which has nearly as many empty storefronts as it does working businesses.

“This place used to be booming,” says Don Bourdeau, 81.

Don and Sharon Bourdeau, who, for more than 20 years, owned the Zion Antique Mall. | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

He ticks off the names of long-gone factories in nearby Kenosha, Wis., and Waukegan.

“Nash. American Motors. American Steel and Wire. Johnson Motors. Johns Manville. That’s where people worked, and that’s when all these buildings went up,” he says, gesturing at the commercial buildings lining Sheridan Road.

The Bourdeaus, who put their impressive inventory of antiques on sale for half price before closing, hope to sell the building they’ve owned since 1994. They aren’t happy that the nuclear waste is being kept at the power-plant site less than a mile away.

“I think it’s just stupid to leave it there,” Sharon Bourdeau says. “Why would they put it next to the water supply for millions of people?”

Terry Boone is a landlord with 21 rental units in Zion. He doesn’t worry about the safety of the nuclear waste. It’s the perception that bothers him. When it comes to businesses thinking about locating in Zion or making real estate investments, “That’s definitely a negative,” Boone says.

As far back as 1982, the federal government began collecting a nuclear-waste fee, paid by electricity users through fees tacked on to their bills and earmarked to pay for disposal of the radioactive spent fuel rods. Starting in 1998, the U.S. Department of Energy was supposed to start picking up spent fuel rods and taking them for storage, according to Everett Redmond, senior director of fuel cycle and technology policy for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a power industry trade group.

But there was no ready storage option to hold them. So power companies were forced to store more and more of them at their own facilities and eventually successfully sued to recover costs for this storage.

It seemed like the problem might have been solved in 2008, when the Energy Department applied for a license to store the radioactive waste in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. But the Obama administration halted that plan in 2010, citing flaws with the location.

Congress has vacillated since then between trying to restart the Yucca proposal and backing interim storage options, including one in Texas. Redmond says industry leaders are hopeful the Trump administration will move more quickly on what to do about nuclear-waste storage nationally.

Redmond points out that all U.S. taxpayers, not just electricity rate-payers, are paying for nuclear-waste disposal thanks to the industry’s successful lawsuit against the Energy Department. As of last year, more than $5 billion has been paid out of that judgment fund, he says, with some estimates suggesting that number could climb to almost $30 billion before a storage solution is found.

A spokesman for Commonwealth Edison parent Exelon won’t comment, saying the matter of future waste storage in Zion is in the hands of the federal government. Exelon technically doesn’t own or control the waste, which is now in the hands of Zion Solutions, the company hired to dismantle the plant. Once the dismantling is complete, though, the facility — and the nuclear waste — will return to the control of Exelon until the federal government comes up with a solution.

A storefront sits vacant in the 2700 block of Sheridan Road in Zion. | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

David Kraft, director of the Nuclear Energy Information Service, an opponent of nuclear power, has been monitoring the situation in Zion. He says that, while the on-site waste storage there isn’t ideal, his organization doesn’t support an interim storage plan.

“The responsible position is to leave it there and only move it once,” he says — to a permanent storage location.

But Kraft acknowledges that’s probably decades away, given the time it’s likely to take to find and build a suitable permanent storage location.

Local governments, meanwhile, are still reeling from the loss of the $19.5 million a year in property taxes that ComEd paid while the plant was running. That’s fallen to $1.5 million a year since the plant closed, according to Hill, who’s been pushing for the federal government to compensate Zion for having the waste stored there. He says that would at least help city and school officials to lower property taxes, which have skyrocketed since the ComEd plant closed.

Those higher taxes and the fall in home values since the housing crisis of 2008 have turned Zion into a more transient community than it used to be.

“People can’t sell their houses because of the taxes,” Sharon Bourdeau says. “So they rent them.”

Zion has about 6,700 housing units, most of them modest single-family homes. But about two-thirds of them are now rental units, according to Hill.

“That’s not healthy,” the mayor says. “A healthy number for a community like ours would be about 20 percent.”

Zion Mayor Al Hill: “It’s not the low-income people that are the problem. It’s the landlords.” | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

Hill says that while many landlords maintain their rental properties, a growing number, having scooped up foreclosed properties at bargain basement prices, do not.

“It’s not the low-income people that are the problem,” he says. “It’s the landlords.”

A recent check of Zillow.com — a website that lists and tracks properties for sale— found 113 homes for sale by traditional listings in Zion, 31 in foreclosure and 102 in “pre-foreclosure,” in which the mortgage-holder is in default and foreclosure proceedings are imminent.

By contrast, neighboring Winthrop Harbor had 50 homes for sale, with five in foreclosure and 15 in pre-foreclosure.

Hill says the city is trying to crack down on landlords with a rental inspection program. He’s getting pushback, though, from landlords led by Boone, who sees the move as big-government intrusion and little more than a revenue grab. Boone has sued the city to stop the program and says more than 80 other landlords have joined his suit.

Boone says the problem isn’t landlords not wanting to keep up their properties but, rather, property taxes that swallow up profit margins.

“I have a very difficult time at the end of every month finding money available to reinvest,” he says.

Boone says the city should have planned for the closing of the power plan by doing more to hold down its expenses and should be doing more now to attract new businesses.

But Hill says, “We can’t bring new businesses in because our taxes are too high, and our taxes are too high because we can’t bring new businesses in.”

Ed Leech owns the Cake Box and Café, a popular bakery in Zion that was started by his father and grandfather in 1948. He says he’s still making money despite the decline the city still hasn’t recovered from since the closing of the ComEd plant 18 years ago.

Still, business is down even as property taxes are up.

“I can’t complain,” Leech says. “But my good days aren’t quite as good as the used to be. And my bad days are a little bit worse.”

Sitting at one of his café tables, working his way through a pile of paperwork, Leech is philosophical.

“Everything changes over time,” he says. “You can’t stand still. But we used to take a ton of doughnuts down to the ComEd plant.”

A storefront sits vacant in the 2700 block of Sheridan Road in Zion. | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

A storefront sits vacant in the 2600 block of Sheridan Road in Zion. | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

A storefront sits vacant in the 2700 block of Sheridan Road in Zion. | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

A storefront sits vacant in the 1000 block of 27th Street in Zion. | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

A vacant storefront in the 3200 block of Sheridan Road in Zion. | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

Twenty years ago, a 9-year-old girl from Cabrini-Green was abducted, sexually assaulted, poisoned and left for dead in a crime that dominated the news as much for the resilience of the young victim as for the raw brutality.

Initially known only as Girl X to protect her identity, she was left severely disabled, though she was still able to testify against her attacker, Patrick Sykes, a convicted sex offender who had been living at the Near North Side public housing complex.

A year after the Jan. 9, 1997, attack, Congress passed a law barring many sex offenders from living in public housing. The law applies to all of those who have to register where they live with the police for the rest of their lives — a requirement typically reserved for the most serious sex offenders, those known in Illinois as sexual predators.

The law put Chicago Housing Authority units off-limits to them. And they also were barred from living in privately owned apartments or houses where the rent is subsidized by taxpayers through Section 8 housing-assistance vouchers.

Two decades later, though, sexual predators are still living in public housing in Chicago, according to a Chicago Sun-Times investigation that found 20 sexual predators say they live in public housing despite the ban:

• Six have registered with the police as living at addresses that are buildings owned or operated by the CHA.

• Another 14 have registered their home addresses as apartments or homes where the rent is paid in full or part with a Section 8 voucher — taxpayer money that comes from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD.

• One of those 14 — who was convicted of assaulting a 9-year-old — reported he lives in a Section 8 apartment where, until recently, taxpayers covered 72 percent of the $1,050 monthly rent.

A sexual predator registered as living in this Chicago Housing Authority building at the Dearborn Homes on the South Side. | Kevin Tanaka / Sun-Times

The Sun-Times documented sexual predators living in subsidized housing by matching CHA property records to an Illinois State Police database that includes the names and exact addresses of all registered sex offenders in Illinois, along with photos and brief descriptions of their crimes.

Reporters also conducted interviews and site visits, confirming that sexual predators were indeed living at CHA addresses, though it’s unclear whether they were on CHA leases or were just staying there in violation of the rules.

The greatest number of all registered sex offenders in Chicago live on the South Side and the West Side, according to an analysis based on public records — areas with the heaviest concentrations of public housing subsidies.

Austin on the Far West Side has 96 sex offenders — the largest number in the city, records show. It also has 3,422 public housing units and vouchers.

West Englewood on the South Side has 1,096 public housing units and vouchers and 87 registered sex offenders.

The highest number of registered sex offenders per capita is in Washington Park on the South Side. It also has the highest ratio of public housing units.

Overall, roughly two-thirds of voucher-holders and public housing residents in Chicago live within 1,000 feet of a registered sex offender, records show.

The CHA has started four eviction proceedings in response to the Sun-Times’ findings that 20 sexual predators say they live in public housing.

“If and when CHA becomes aware of a violation of . . . HUD rules, we immediately begin an investigation that can lead to lease or housing assistance payment termination proceedings if warranted,” CHA spokeswoman Molly Sullivan says. “At this time, CHA is pursuing termination proceedings against two [Section 8] head of households and eviction proceedings against two public housing residents, as CHA has determined that they are in apparent violation of program guidelines.”

Sullivan wouldn’t identify those families by name or address, citing privacy rules. She also wouldn’t say whether any or all of the four households had sexual predators as tenants or guests or explain how the CHA came to its decisions.

The CHA hires a private company to conduct criminal background checks on prospective tenants over the age of 18 and also conducts follow-up checks on existing tenants every two years. Those checks are supposed to catch sexual predators.

That firm, Screening Reports, Inc., of Wood Dale — which has a three-year, $2.4 million contract with the CHA — declined to comment.

Sullivan wouldn’t say why the CHA was taking action in just four instances when the Sun-Times found 20 sexual predators saying they live in public housing.

The background checks apply only to people on the leases. So anyone not on the rolls — say, someone who’s staying with family or friends — could slip through.

The CHA doesn’t do with any regularity what the newspaper did — match the registered addresses of sex offenders, which are available online, against the addresses of its properties and Section 8 housing.

HUD’s inspector general identified this issue as a problem in a 2009 report in which it estimated between 2,000 and 3,000 families in subsidized housing across the country included sex offenders who shouldn’t be living in the units because they were subject to a lifetime registration with police.

In total, households with sexual predators received about $12.5 million a year nationwide in public housing subsidies, according to the inspector general.

In Chicago, the Section 8 units where the 14 predators report living receive a total of nearly $11,000 a month in taxpayer rent subsidies, records show — about $130,000 a year.

Most Section 8 tenants pay a portion of their rent beyond the subsidy. How much depends on their income. In one instance, $763 of the $1,050 monthly rent was covered by a Section 8 voucher until the end of November, when the CHA says the tenant voluntarily relinquished the subsidy.

A sexual predator registered with the police as living in this apartment building in Kelvyn Park on the Northwest Side. | Kevin Tanaka/Sun-Times

That came after the Sun-Times began inquiring about one of the people who, according to the Illinois State Police database, lives in the apartment: a sexual predator who molested a 9-year-old.

A woman at that address who identified herself as the sex offender’s mother said her son uses the address for mail but doesn’t live there, usually staying in homeless shelters.

Another one of the addresses associated with the 14 sexual predators had its Section 8 voucher terminated several months ago, Sullivan says, declining to divulge the reason.

The Sun-Times investigation also found that more than 200 registered sex offenders — including those not designated as predators — say they live in privately owned buildings in Chicago that also include at least one Section 8 tenant elsewhere in the building.

The CHA screens tenants for credit and criminal histories and inspects private apartments for code violations before a Section 8 resident can move in. But the agency does little to warn tenants of any registered sex offenders living in the same building or nearby.

Some housing advocates say more discretion should be given to housing agencies to accept applicants, that not all sex offenders pose the same risk of reoffending — yet many are lumped together in the public housing ban, whether they were caught urinating out in the open or assaulting a child.

Housing rules should consider “past behavior and mitigating circumstances, not just criminal records,” says Deborah Thrope, staff attorney for the National Housing Law Project.

Housing restrictions can have unintended consequences, according to Human Rights Watch — such as forcing sex offenders into homelessness, depriving them of a fundamental human right and also making it difficult to monitor their whereabouts.

RELATED LINK: Click here to see where sex offenders live in Chicago.

Joseph Shuldiner, who ran the CHA when Girl X was attacked and now oversees a housing authority in suburban New York City, says, “We should start with the presumption they should be barred, but they should be allowed to make a case.”

“The real issue is whether the person remains a threat to their neighbors,” Shuldiner says.

HUD’s inspector general is planning another audit to determine how well public housing agencies around the country are complying with the sex-offender ban.

A HUD spokesman says the agency has been in contact with the CHA about the Sun-Times’ findings. The first step is to confirm the numbers “and, if it’s true,” find out “why it occurred,” spokesman Jereon Brown says.

“If we find there’s a loophole and we can close it . . . it’s something we’ll definitely take a look at.”

Contributing: Darnell Little, Data Reporting Lab

RELATED LINK: Click here to check the Illinois State Police sex offender registry.

Three more high-level Noble Network of Charter Schools staffers have been disciplined for their roles in using student data improperly obtained from the Chicago Public Schools to send out recruitment mailers — including one who was promoted to a higher-paying job within weeks of the reprimand, documents obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.

A total of seven Noble employees now have been disciplined over the postcards that were sent, using CPS’ internal list of students citywide, to recruit for Noble’s 18 Chicago campuses.

Estee Kelly, principal of Gary Comer College Preparatory High School. | YouTube

Trent Epley,  principal of Gary Comer College Prep Middle School. | Gary Comer website

Among those included in the newly revealed batch of punishments were two school principals. Estee Kelly heads Gary Comer College Preparatory High School, 7131 S. South Chicago Ave., making $123,000 a year, and Trent Epley, makes $120,000 overseeing the Comer middle school campus, 1010 E. 72nd St., according to data the privately operated, government-funded charter network released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

The punishments consisted of a “formal letter of reprimand” placed in each of their personnel files on Oct. 28, after Noble said it concluded an internal investigation of how it obtained private student data used last fall to mail recruitment postcards to middle-schoolers.

That’s the same reprimand that was meted out to four other Noble workers whom the charter chain named in December, including its director of student matriculation.

Noble’s president Eric Thomas has called the letters of reprimand “a serious action in our organization” and says, “We took immediate steps to tighten our enrollment process and ensure we were compliant with CPS policies.”

Noble representatives wouldn’t specify what each of the disciplined employees did, though the Sun-Times previously has reported that an executive assistant who got the list in July forwarded it to the principals within minutes of sending it from her own personal email to her Noble account.

The CPS employee accused of slipping the children’s names, home addresses, school and grade level to an executive assistant at Noble has been fired, according to a Chicago schools spokesman who would not identify her.

No one from Noble was suspended or lost pay.

Trey Thompson was promoted and given a $7,000 pay raise about six weeks after being reprimanded. | LinkedIn

One of the Noble employees who was disciplined — Trey Thompson, who was an enrollment analyst when the postcards went out in September — was promoted in December to the post of enrollment operations manager, records show. His new job came about six weeks after he was reprimanded, the records show, and included a $7,000 pay raise that boosted his salary to $75,000 a year.

In an online profile, Thompson, a former Noble classroom teacher, says his job is to “develop analysis and predictive models to guide student recruitment strategy at the Noble Charter Schools.”

None of the disciplined Noble employees responded to messages seeking comment.

The glossy mailers went out to more than 28,000 students, according to Noble, which tailored the cards and the schools listed on each one by geography.

“There is still time! Enroll your child in one of the strongest performing middle schools in Chicago! Gary Comer College Prep” read one of the full-color postcards. “Limited seats are available for grades 6-8th at Gary Comer.”

The arrival of the mailed recruitment pitches in late September caused a furor among some parents who were angry about the breach of children’s privacy and prompted concerns that the privately managed charter operator was trying to undermine enrollment at CPS schools as the Chicago Teachers Union was threatening to strike in mid-October.

CPS allots money to each of its schools based on the official count of students that’s taken on the 20th day of classes — which this school year fell on Oct. 3. With the total number of students citywide projected to plunge by five digits and per-pupil funding cut versus a year earlier, schools faced the prospect of losing funding and teachers if they didn’t have as many kids as possible in class on the count day.

The unusual inclusion of the children’s names and current schools on the mailers also led some parents to worry that the confidential data must have come from CPS.

CPS officials said that wasn’t the case, that they didn’t authorize the release or sale of children’s names or addresses.

Noble officials initially said the charter operator had paid an outside company to do a bulk mailing to households in certain neighborhoods, with kids of a certain age as part of routine marketing efforts. But its own internal probe later revealed an improper breach.

After parents complained, CPS’ inspector general launched an investigation that is continuing.

Three of the other staffers disciplined by the charter chain had exchanged emails about getting the postcards out. Noble’s matriculation director Simone Santiago signed off on paying at least $13,000 for them. Dean of operations Bradley Johnson received a copy of the student list. And student recruitment officer Jonathan Chaparro handled the details of the mailings.

With Mayor Richard M. Daley’s City Hall tenure coming to a close in 2011, longtime Daley aide and political operative Richard Monocchio needed a job.

Monocchio — Daley’s last city buildings commissioner — landed one thanks to Elzie Higginbottom, a wealthy businessman who’s been one of the key campaign backers for Daley, former Gov. Pat Quinn, Hillary Clinton and numerous other politicians.

Higginbottom — who was chairman of the board of the Housing Authority of Cook County — had a long relationship with Monocchio.

Monocchio had helped run government agencies that oversee housing developments run by Higginbottom’s East Lake Management & Development Corp., one of the largest managers of public housing in Chicago. And East Lake’s president is the mother of Monocchio’s children.

Higginbottom and the rest of the board hired Monocchio as the $150,000-a-year executive director of the housing authority, which oversees government-subsidized housing in the suburbs.

Months after Monocchio took over the authority’s operations, Higginbottom resigned from the board after another of his companies, Burling Builders, got a contract from a nonprofit agency the authority created.

Higginbottom left after hearing from Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle.

“It became clear to me in my first term that Mr. Higginbottom was in a position where there could have been a conflict in his position as board chairman and his company doing business with the authority,” Preckwinkle says. “I expressed my concerns to him, and he resigned.”

Higginbottom couldn’t get business from the housing authority for one year after he left, under the agency’s revolving-door policy.

Now, Higginbottom is cashing in on another deal involving the government agency he formerly headed. Under a $17.8 million contract with the county agency, Burling is renovating subsidized apartment complexes in Arlington Heights and Skokie — a deal Higginbottom’s company says will give it a profit of about $700,000.

Higginbottom is one of a small group of businessmen in Chicago who develop and manage subsidized housing.

“If you do affordable housing, you have to go to those agencies,” Higginbottom says. “That’s where the money is.”

“A lot of times in affordable housing, you see the same players,” says Polly Kuehl, a housing authority board member who says she didn’t know Higginbottom owns Burling.

Monocchio and his staff oversaw the bidding process and recommended the authority’s board hire Higginbottom’s company. He says he had to because Burling was the low bidder, offering the lowest price to do the work.

“There was no discretion at all,” Monocchio says.

He didn’t tell the housing authority’s board, though, that he has two teenage sons with one of Higginbottom’s top executives, Eileen Rhodes, who is president of East Lake.

“That has had nothing to do with the decisions I make,” Monocchio says.

He says he never discussed the Burling project with Rhodes, who began working for Higginbottom nearly 20 years ago, when she and Monocchio were living together. They no longer do.

“We don’t have shop talk,” Monocchio says of Rhodes, describing their current relationship this way: “I pick up the kids. We co-parent.”

Richard Monocchio, executive director of the Housing Authority of Cook County. | Rich Hein~Sun-Times file photo

The housing authority requires its employees to disclose whether family or household members have any financial interest in a contract with the county agency.

Monocchio and Rhodes never married.

They and Higginbottom say Rhodes has no involvement with Burling and had nothing to do with the authority hiring the construction company.

“I don’t know what Burling Builders does,” Higginbottom says. “I don’t run Burling Builders. I own stock in it.”

According to the company’s filings with the Illinois secretary of state’s office, Higginbottom is the president of Burling, and he owns 90 percent of the company.

John Girzadas, Burling’s executive vice president, says he runs Burling’s day-to-day operations but keeps Higginbottom apprised of contracts and bids.

Some housing board members say they knew Monocchio had a relationship with Rhodes. Others say they didn’t or didn’t know they had children.

“Should he have disclosed it? Probably,” says Saul Klibanow, one of the six board members who approved the contract with Higginbottom’s company in July 2015 at Monocchio’s recommendation.

Hipolito “Paul” Roldan, who replaced Higginbottom as chairman of the authority’s board, says this is something the board probably will discuss now that he’s aware of the relationship. But Roldan says the contract was awarded “in an open, competitive process.”

Preckwinkle says she knew about Monocchio and Rhodes’ relationship.

“It didn’t matter to me,” says Preckwinkle, who has gotten more than $45,000 in campaign contributions from Higginbottom and his companies since 1999, according to Illinois State Board of Elections records. “They’re not married, and they haven’t been together for 10 years.”

Preckwinkle says Monocchio is “a really decent guy.”

The Armond King Apartments in Skokie — one of the subsidized apartment complexes Burling Builders is renovating for the Cook County Housing Authority.| Tim Boyle / Sun-Times

Higginbottom’s construction company is one of several clout-heavy businesses the authority hired for the rehabilitation of more than 200 apartments for senior citizens and disabled people in Arlington Heights and Skokie — a $28 million project being paid for by local, state and federal tax money and private financing.

The architect is Globetrotters Engineering Corp. headed by Niranjan Shah, a prolific campaign fund-raiser for Rod Blagojevich who was appointed by the now-imprisoned former governor as chairman of the University of Illinois board of trustees. Shah, his company and employees have contributed to Preckwinkle’s political campaigns, including $2,500 last year, state records show.

The Albert Goedke House in Arlington Heights — one of the subsidized apartment complexes Burling Builders is working on. | Tim Boyle / Sun-Times

A small amount of the legal work on the project was done by Daley’s nephew, Ald. Patrick Daley Thompson (11th), and his law firm until Monocchio replaced them with the firm Reyes Kurson. That law firm is headed by Victor Reyes, a former top Daley aide who ran the Hispanic Democratic Organization, a patronage army that worked to get Daley and his political allies re-elected. As Daley’s director of intergovernmental affairs, Reyes helped Monocchio land two of his high-ranking city jobs, sources say.

Reyes, whose law firm stands to be paid more than $200,000, calls Monocchio a “high-integrity individual” who’s “beyond reproach.”

Higginbottom, Monocchio and Rhodes began crossing paths in the 1990s at the Chicago Housing Authority following its takeover by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as a result of widespread problems at the city agency.

Eileen Rhodes, president of Elzie Higginbottom’s East Lake Management & Development Corp.

Rhodes, 50, grew up near the CHA’s since-demolished Cabrini-Green public housing project on the North Side, had a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and was studying for a master’s degree at the University of Chicago when she landed a job with the CHA in April 1995.

Six months later, Monocchio, now 55, left a job with HUD in Washington, D.C., to return to Chicago as a special assistant to Joseph Shuldiner, who’d been appointed by HUD to run the CHA.

Under Shuldiner, Higginbottom says East Lake began managing CHA properties including Rockwell Gardens on the Near West Side, which later was demolished. It was replaced with smaller apartment buildings that were built by Burling and are still managed by East Lake for the CHA.

Monocchio says he and Rhodes began dating in 1996. She left the CHA a year later. She says she was in graduate school at the time and needed an internship, so she went to work for a nonprofit company. By the end of that year, the couple had purchased a condo in Little Italy, property records show.

After finishing the internship, Rhodes says she called Higginbottom for a job and went to work for East Lake.

Monocchio left the CHA in 1998, taking a job as chief of staff to Chicago Aviation Commissioner Mary Rose Loney, a job sources say was arranged by Daley’s inner circle, including Reyes, to monitor Loney, whose efforts to reform airport purchasing rules upset many insiders.

Monocchio later was named first deputy to Housing Commissioner Jack Markowski, whose agency helped fund housing developments for East Lake, approving $2 million in housing tax credits for the redevelopment of Rockwell Gardens, city records show.

During Monocchio’s time at City Hall, Rhodes gave birth to the couple’s two sons, and they moved to a new condo on the West Side. According to Monocchio, they split up in 2006. Records show he transferred his ownership stake in their condo to her in May 2008.

In December 2008, Daley appointed Monocchio as Chicago’s buildings commissioner.

When Mayor Rahm Emanuel succeeded Daley in May 2011, Monocchio found himself out of a job that had paid him $162,228 a year.

Rhodes says she knew Monocchio was looking for work but didn’t lobby Higginbottom to hire him at the housing authority.

Monocchio says Higginbottom “knew my work. I was one of the people recommended to the board, probably by him.

“Whenever I go into a place, I have a reputation of making it run better,” says Monocchio, whose current salary is $156,060. “When you look at my resume, it’s not a stretch to be hired by the county housing authority.”

Monocchio started at the county agency in July 2011.

Ten months later, Higginbottom stepped down after two decades amid questions about Burling having been awarded a $3.2 million deal from the nonprofit agency created by the county housing authority as general contractor for a public housing development in Summit. Higginbottom was on the board of the nonprofit as well as chairing the housing authority.

Higginbottom denies leaving because of the conflict-of-interest questions, saying he wanted to spend time with his children.

The Chicago Public Schools’ facilities chief — one of schools CEO Forrest Claypool’s hires from the city agency he formerly headed — has resigned from his $165,000 post amid residency questions.

Jason R. Kierna, 30, has headed Claypool’s lead testing and mitigation efforts in schools, and also has been involved in the ongoing move to privatize the management of all school buildings.

Kierna, who gave notice Wednesday, did not return messages seeking comment. His last day on the job will be Friday, Feb. 3.

Since February 2015, he and his wife have owned a home in La Grange Park. He was allowed to live there, rather than in the city, at his previous job, with the Chicago Transit Authority, where he also worked for Claypool. But he was supposed to move to the city within six months of being hired by CPS in January 2016, under the school system’s residency requirement.

His current driver’s license and car registration and his wife’s driver’s license show two North Side addresses where they formerly lived. His wife’s current car registration shows the La Grange Park address. That’s also the address where the couple’s property-tax bill is mailed.

Kierna pays $800 a month for an apartment on the Far Northwest Side, according to a lease and copies of rent checks provided by a CPS spokeswoman, though his family has remained in La Grange Park.

The Chicago Board of Education at times has approved “special needs” waivers of the residency rule, but Kierna didn’t apply for one.

In August 2015, it gave a two-year waiver to Ronald DeNard, Claypool’s $225,000-a-year senior vice president of finance, who owns a home in Flossmoor. That came over the objection of Inspector General Nicholas Schuler, who said the residency waiver might raise concerns “of preferential treatment for favored insiders.”

“As it has done in the past, the Board of Education can grant a waiver for a limited period of time to allow a candidate from outside Chicago to begin working for the district,“ a district spokesman said at the time.

According to CPS’ residency policy: “The question of an employee’s residence is principally one of where employee intends to live and have his or her one true, permanent home or domicile to which an employee intends to return following an absence. In disputed cases, the burden of proof rests with the employee.”

The policy says determining residency “shall consider, but not be limited to, the following factors: voter registration, place of filing tax returns, property ownership, driver’s license and car registration.”

CPS has recently toughened its policy for students found to have falsified home addresses to gain an advantage in selective-school admission, banning them for life from all test-in schools.

In December, Schuler’s office put out a report detailing cases of students booted out of schools and staffers fired and tagged with a “do not hire” designation that will prevent them from returning to work for CPS.

One case targeted a Highland Park family who rented a studio apartment in Rogers Park so their two kids could go to Northside College Prep. Another involved a Berwyn family whose daughter attended the popular Andrew Jackson Elementary School — and said they were renting an apartment in  in a Chicago building belonging to a family member in time for their son to apply to selective high schools. All of these children were removed from CPS schools and both families hit with five-digit tuition bills. CPS also sent word of the Berwyn parents’ residency issue to their employer, the City Colleges of Chicago, which, like the public schools system, requires workers to live in the city.

John Hosey Jr. was driving in Homan Square on Chicago’s West Side on Aug. 8 when he was shot and killed.

Officers nearby heard the gunshots, at least five of them, coming from the area of Grenshaw and Central Park. They found Hosey unresponsive in a vacant lot in the 3500 block of West Grenshaw, about a half mile west of where he’d been shot. He’d been driving, and his car continued on for about 400 feet before crashing.

The 28-year-old Hosey was a member of the Traveling Vice Lord street gang, authorities say, with more than a dozen drug-related arrests. He was one of 780 people murdered in Chicago last year, which made it the most violent year the city has seen since the mid-1990s.

But nowhere did the violence hit home the way it did in the Chicago Police Department’s Beat No. 1133, where Hosey, whose death remains unsolved, was killed.

Sixteen murders. Forty-five nonfatal shootings that left 55 people wounded. Three cops shot and wounded. And three people killed by the police.

That added up to more instances of gun violence in Beat 1133 in 2016 than in any other of the 303 beats the police department divides the city into, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis of police data has found.

The runners-up: Beat 1533 in Austin, with 12 murders and 44 nonfatal shootings; and Beat 1522, west of there and also in Austin, with 11 murders and 43 nonfatal shootings.

The area encompasses about one-half-square mile. It’s bounded by Jackson Boulevard, Roosevelt Road, Homan Avenue and Springfield Avenue.

A cross bearing the name and photo of John Hosey Jr., one of the 16 people killed in Beat 1133 last year, was carried down Michigan Avenue in a march organized by the Rev. Michael Pfleger at the end of 2016. | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

Community leaders have been working to help make this a safer area. Still, the violence was far worse in 2016 than in previous years, the analysis shows. In fact, the 16 murders last year were more than Beat 1133 had seen in the previous five years combined.

Since 2000, the beat had not seen more than eight murders in a year, police records show.

So far, three of last year’s killings have resulted in arrests.

The 45 nonfatal shootings were, by far, the most in a single year since 2000 — and more than twice as many as in 2015.

Arrests have been made in four cases, according to police records.

The police — now feeling pressure not only from the community and City Hall but also the White House, with President Donald Trump using Chicago as an example last week of the “carnage” on the nation’s streets — say they are expanding their use of ShotSpotter technology, which alerts the department to shootings, to the West Side 11th District that includes Beat 1133.

The department would not make the district commander, Kenneth Johnson, available for an interview.

But police spokesman Frank Giancamilli said, “CPD is in the process of investing in expanding ShotSpotter technology throughout the 11th District for full-district coverage to help . . . respond to shooting incidents faster.”

Giancamilli also said the department is “adding additional 27 ‘pod’ cameras in targeted areas to enhance the resources available in solving cases.”

He called the rise in violence the city has been seeing and which has continued this year “unquestionably unacceptable” and blamed it in part on the easy availability of illegal guns.

“This rise in violence, including that in the 11th District, is a direct result of the vast number of illegal firearms in circulation in Chicago and lack of accountability for gun offenders who carry them to inflict harm in our communities,” Giancamilli said.

Citywide last year, the department confiscated more than 8,300 illegal guns.

The Sun-Times analysis found that, as the number of shootings and killings went up, the number of arrests for crimes related to heroin — long a scourge on the West Side — took a nosedive in 2016, according to police records. Beat 1133 saw 125 arrests last year for heroin-related offenses, mostly for possession. The previous year, it had 291, with 329 arrests in 2014.

Giancamilli said the drop in heroin arrests is a result of police steering drug users toward treatment, rather than arresting them. About 30 people so far have agreed to enter treatment.

“We have begun implementing programs to divert low-risk, nonviolent drug offenders into treatment programs instead of arrest and incarceration, allowing our officers to help focus our enforcement efforts and limited criminal justice resources on those with the greatest propensity to commit violence in our communities,” Giancamilli said.

In recent years, the Eisenhower Expressway, which runs through Beat 1133, has become known as “The Heroin Highway” because of how accessible it makes the drug to both city and suburban customers.

In 2015, state or federal drug charges were brought against 42 people for their alleged roles in supplying and distributing heroin around West Grenshaw and Independence. Investigators included a photo in a federal criminal complaint that depicts a line of people waiting to get their hands on heroin in the 3700 block of West Grenshaw.

The drop in arrests for heroin hasn’t been limited to 1133. In each police beat surrounding Beat 1133, heroin arrests also were down, records show — anywhere from 15 percent to 70 percent in 2016 compared to the previous year.

The Sun-Times reported last month that overall arrests across the city were down 28 percent in 2016 compared to the year before.

Ald. Michael Scott, Jr. (24th). | Sun-Times files

Ald. Michael Scott’s 24th Ward covers most of Beat 1133. Scott said that, while the heroin trade drives some of the violence in the area, a lack of community resources — such as job-training programs — also plays a role.

“The resources that would ordinarily be in any other community are not here in the 24th Ward,” Scott said. “The young men and women would much rather have job training to provide for their families. I’m sure they’d rather pick up a trade than pick up a gun.”

Bringing in a new commercial development to the intersection of Roosevelt and Kostner — not far from Homan Square — is part of Scott’s plan to boost economic activity in the area and, he hopes, help to curb the violence.

“I’ve been a resident here all my life, and I’ve never been afforded the opportunity to walk up and down the street, around restaurants and small businesses where the community feels whole,” Scott said. “That’s what we’re working towards in my administration.”

Scott said the police department also needs to overcome the strong sense of distrust many feel toward cops. Even before the Justice Department came out earlier this month with a report criticizing police practices, Scott and others have said officers appeared to be more hesitant to make arrests because of heightened scrutiny since the release of the Laquan McDonald police shooting video.

“We have, I think, still a lot of animosity that has been built up against the police, and there’s a long way to go to repair that trust,” Scott said.

In November, the police fatally shot 37-year-old Cleotha Mitchell at Harrison and Central Park after officers said they saw him shoot two other people, killing one of them.

Seven months before that, police shot and killed 16-year-old Pierre Loury. The teenager’s family has filed a federal lawsuit over his death, saying he was in a car that was pulled over by officers in the 3400 block of West Grenshaw, got out and ran and was shot by a pursuing officer as he began to climb a fence to get away.

Speaking after the release of the Justice Department report, Loury’s great-aunt, Arewa Karen Winters, said the family wanted video of the shooting released but that it was withheld because Loury was a minor.

“You couldn’t see what happened, but there was some suspicious things that we saw with our own eyes and we wanted the community to see what we saw,” Winters said. “We want to know why in a matter of 10 minutes there were over 100 white officers in that alley where the scene happened.”

The city’s Independent Police Review says records related to Loury’s shooting are being withheld because of his age and would be released only by court order.

On March 14, three police officers were shot during a drug investigation in the 3700 block of West Polk. Officers shot and killed the man, 29-year-old Lamar Harris, identified as a member of the Traveling Vice Lords from Forest Park with seven felony convictions and 43 arrests on his record.

Last year, the private, not-for-profit Uhlich Children’s Advantage Network built and moved into the sprawling Nichols Center at 3605 W. Fillmore — in the heart of Beat 1133 — in an effort to help fight the violence and improve the community. The 145-year-old organization offers counseling, mentoring, violence intervention and other services, primarily to those 12 to 24 years old. The organization, which relies on grants and donations, says it’s now working with 110 local residents.

Most of those getting mentoring are brought in through community outreach, according to Norman Livingston Kerr, a UCAN’s official in violence prevention services. Kerr said about 90 percent of those his organization works with have experienced post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of exposure to violence.

“It plays a role because they really don’t know that they’re experiencing PTSD,” Kerr said. “They know something has happened — but they don’t know how it affects them.

“It’s not something you have to live with forever,” he said. “Our vision is youth who’ve suffered trauma can become our future leaders. We strongly believe that it can be addressed, and it can be turned around.”

About one of every four Chicago Public Schools teachers missed more than 10 days of school a year, most them at schools serving kids in high-poverty, heavily minority parts of the city — students experts say are most affected by high teacher absenteeism.

That’s according to a Chicago Sun-Times analysis of data from the Illinois State Board of Education, which, for the first time, is keeping tabs on teacher absences, in addition to school days missed by students, as part of the yearly “school report cards” it issues each fall.

CPS teachers get 10 to 12 sick days a year, depending on years of service, plus three personal days. Any full-time teacher who used more than than 10 of those days or was out for a short-term disability such as maternity leave was counted.

Besides the impact extended teacher absences can have on students, replacing them with substitutes  costs the cash-strapped city school system tens of millions of dollars a year.

The worst attendance for a high school was at Douglass Academy High School, a school that draws from the surrounding community in Austin, where only 17.6 percent of teachers missed no more than 10 school days in a year.

The worst attendance for lower-grade teachers, and second-worst among all CPS schools overall, was at Parker Elementary Community Academy in Englewood, where just 19.4 percent of teachers had no more than 10 absences.

Another 59 schools had more than half of their teachers calling in sick.

Just seven of the 61 Chicago schools with the highest teacher absenteeism —  50 percent or worse — didn’t serve a population where at least eight of every 10 children come from families living below the poverty level.

All but four of those schools serve populations where at least nine of every 10 kids are African American or Hispanic.

And at 26 of those schools, at least one in 10 children is homeless.

Statewide, a little under one in four teachers — 23.7 percent — missed more than 10 days of school, only slightly better than CPS’ average of 27.5.

The State Board of Education didn’t count classes that teachers missed while attending training, grade- or department-level planning or field trips as absences.

Its teacher absenteeism figures are a few years behind the rest of the school data it released Oct. 31. It took them from the U.S Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which looked at the 2013-14 school year.

The state agency included the data — the most recent available — because of the “critical importance of consistent teacher attendance to students’ educational outcomes,” spokeswoman Jackie Matthews said.

Raegen Miller, a researcher who’s studied the links between teacher absence and student achievement, said Illinois also should consider adding teacher absenteeism to the metrics used for school accountability under the new federal Every Student Succeeds Act.

“One of the values about having the measure out there is that people will start asking questions,” said Miller, of the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, who in 2012 published a research paper titled “Teacher Absence as a Leading Indicator of Student Achievement.”

“Teachers are the most important school-based influence on student achievement,” he said. “If that’s the case, we ought to pay lots of attention to their presence or absence from classrooms or schools. And we just don’t pay that much attention to it.”

He said the impact of teacher absences on students often depends on the class. In physics or high-level math classes, for instance, “It’s very difficult to find substitutes that know the material in such a way that they can keep the ball rolling.”

The data don’t differentiate between single-day emergencies and longer-term or planned absences — another factor to consider, Miller said. With the latter, “You have a better chance of having the most talented substitutes on the case and also building out the necessary plan and information so that instruction can sort of go on at the intended pace.”

And when resources are scarce — as is the case with Chicago’s schools — excess absences also mean setting aside money for substitute teachers that could be put to better use, he said.

CPS — which consistently relies on borrowing and one-time fixes in the face of its budget problems — spent $39.7 million on substitute teachers in the 2013-14 school year, records show, though CPS spokesman Michael Passman said that money also paid for substitutes to cover classes while teachers took part in professional development or in grade- or school-wide curriculum planning.

“There’s going to be some absences because of the nature of human beings needing them,” Miller said. “There are legitimate reasons to miss work. Sometimes, the employer themselves are responsible for the absences.

“If you have a leader in one school that’s able to rally the professional culture among the teachers in a way that another leader isn’t, you might be able to detect that in the absence patterns, irresponsive of the student poverty rate.”

Jackson Potter. | Sun-Times files

Chicago Teachers Union official Jackson Potter said that CPS has created conditions in schools that take a toll on teachers, with many of the poorest schools bearing the brunt of budget cuts. The link between teacher absenteeism and poverty is “not surprising,” Potter said, given “the stress levels for both students and educators in a building where there’s high poverty.” At schools in wealthier areas, fund-raising can help ease things, Potter said, but not at schools in high-poverty areas.

“So what it ends up doing is it puts an increased burden on existing staff, which is increasingly bearing the brunt of the budget cuts of having to take on more paperwork, bigger class sizes, having less social emotional interventions available,” he said. “So people do get worn down. They do get sick.”

Days off on top of a long summer hiatus and regular winter and spring breaks are necessary, Potter said, because of the energy that teaching well requires.

“It wears you out,” he said. “You are on stage performing for six hours straight every day. You need to grab the attention of children. And they have to walk out of the room learning something. That’s a huge amount of pressure.”

Potter said another factor is that CPS banned the use of personal days off on training days. And a 2012 end to banking unused time — to be paid out at retirement — might have had an unintended consequence, he said, because that move “limited the need to use before you lose those [personal] days. So a lot of people are incentivized to to ‘use them before you lose them.’ ”

Passman said that, since 2014, CPS has “issued guidance to principals to help ensure teachers are a consistent and stable presence in the classroom. We know that our students are more likely to succeed when they have a committed teacher leading class on a daily basis.”

Principals can spell out guidelines in a school handbook and require written verification of sick days “if there is reasonable concern of sick day misuse.” They also can require advance requests for non-emergency leave to make sure a school is properly staffed. Violators can be subject to discipline, including losing pay for missed days.

CPS “has begun carefully monitoring district-wide absenteeism trends to help research and address teacher attendance,” he said but did not specify how.

At some schools, teacher absenteeism isn’t an issue at all. The data counts 19 entities — some of them are individual schools, some are networks of charter or contract schools not broken out by campus — where not even one teacher used more than 10 paid days off. Fifteen of them served mostly low-income students.

Contributing: Data Reporting Lab editor Darnell Little

Nine years ago, legislators agreed to give lucrative tax breaks for movies, TV shows and commercials made in Illinois.

And to help ensure whether minorities and women get a piece of the booming action that so far has led to tax breaks totaling more than $330 million, they said the state agency that handles those tax breaks “must” give them yearly reports on their hiring.

But the agency that runs the Illinois Film Office routinely has violated that part of the law, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation has found.

The Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity has failed to produce any reports showing whether companies owned by minorities and women have been hired for the 1,410 productions that have been granted tax breaks for spending more than $500 million on Illinois vendors that cover the gamut from caterers to hardware stores to security companies.

And legislators have gotten only spotty information from the state agency on the number of women and minorities who’ve landed behind-the-scene jobs with the productions that have secured more tax breaks by paying $634 million to Illinois workers — from actors on the hit TV show “Chicago Fire” to extras working on a blockbuster movie like “Transformers 3.”

GRAPHIC: TV SHOWS THAT GOT THE MOST IN ILLINOIS FILM TAX CREDITS

For the first three years of the law, the Commerce Department didn’t give legislators a single report showing whether the film tax credits had created jobs and business for minorities and women. Then, the agency started sending reports on the number of jobs production companies planned to give minorities and women — but didn’t tell legislators how many actually ended up getting hired.

Now, the state is giving legislators reports that show the number of jobs filled by Illinois residents, but it’s often years after the movie, TV show or commercial has been aired and the company has gotten its tax breaks. And the state agency doesn’t identify the productions that employed those people.

The data also don’t reveal how long any of those jobs lasted — a day, a week or a month — or whether they were entry-level or management positions, though the law requires such reporting.

For instance, a quarterly report that legislators got last fall shows minorities got 31 percent of the 2,626 crew jobs held by Illinois residents. But it notes that many of those jobs were filled by the same people hired for multiple productions. That makes it impossible to determine exactly how many minorities and women were hired.

Former Sen. Rickey Hendon: “I think they would be embarrassed by the numbers.” | AP

“Why won’t they show you the numbers? I think they would be embarrassed by the numbers,” says former state Sen. Rickey “Hollywood” Hendon, D-Chicago, who sponsored the Illinois Film Production Services Tax Credit Act of 2008.

“I know the numbers on the vendors aren’t good,” Hendon says. “Bringing the film industry back to Chicago should have helped people of all colors. I felt if we’re going to bring an economic boom to Chicago, we should make sure the jobs trickle down to minorities and women.”

The Illinois Film Office boasts that this is the only state with a film tax-credit program that requires companies to make a “best-faith effort” to hire a diversified workforce behind the cameras and to hire vendors owned by women and minorities. There’s no specific requirement that a particular number of minority employees or companies be hired.

State officials won’t say whether they’ve ever rejected an application for film tax credits for any reason.

Former Rep. Ken Dunkin: “Why the state of Illinois isn’t reporting this is perplexing to me. It’s negligence.” | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

“You can’t get the tax credit unless you verify that you’re spending money with black folks, Hispanic folks and women — it’s that straightforward,” says former state Rep. Ken Dunkin, D-Chicago, who sponsored the tax-credit law in the Illinois House.

“Who are you spending your money with? Is it the same clique of white men?” Dunkin says. “Why the state of Illinois isn’t reporting this is perplexing to me. It’s negligence — and them not doing what the hell they are supposed to be doing.”

Under governors Rod Blagojevich and Pat Quinn, Commerce Department staffers never collected data to show whether production companies do business with companies owned by minorities or women, according to an Illinois auditor general’s report in April 2015, three months after Gov. Bruce Rauner took office.

The state still isn’t collecting the data, though Rauner’s administration says it plans to give legislators a better picture on women and minorities working on productions that get the tax credits.

“We started implementing a corrective action plan in September that will ensure more accurate reporting of the growing and diverse film industry in our state,” says Illinois Film Office spokeswoman Jacquelyn Reineke. “The diversity standard we employ sets Illinois’ film program apart from the rest of the country, and we continue to look for new ways to reach out and utilize the talents of minority vendors.”

A few states, including Wisconsin and Michigan, have stopped offering film tax credits. Illinois is one of 34 states that give tax breaks to lure companies that produce TV shows, movies and commercials. The program began under Blagojevich in 2004, as the state was losing TV and film work to other states and Canada.

GRAPHIC: MOVIES THAT GOT THE MOST IN ILLINOIS FILM TAX CREDITS

Illinois gives production companies a 30 percent tax credit on goods and services bought from vendors in the state — anything from the cost of parking on the street to the hotels where people are put up to studio space at Cinespace Chicago Film Studios — along with salaries paid to Illinois residents, up to $100,000.

They can get an extra 15 percent credit by hiring people from neighborhoods with high unemployment.

A production company has to hire an accounting firm to certify the expenses, but there’s no indication state officials independently verify the expenses.

Production companies have two years to submit their final paperwork for a tax credit. Most end up selling the credits to brokers or companies that can use them to cut their Illinois taxes.

“The remarkable thing about these tax subsidies is they rely upon information from the people who received the tax break or the people who are giving it,” Michael Thom, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, author of a study last summer questioning the economic impact of tax breaks for the film industry. “There’s never any audit.”

Illinois has doled out more than $330 million in tax credits to 1,410 productions that spent more than $1.1 billion in the state since 2008, state records show. The largest credit — $11.5 million — went to the company that produced the sci-fi film “Divergent.” The smallest — $4,817 — went to Northfield’s Towers Productions for a TV pilot called “Earth Uncensored.”

Spike Lee. | File photo

Filmmaker Spike Lee’s company, Da Chi-Lite Joint, Inc., got a $3.4 million tax credit last August for “Chi-Raq,” the movie about Chicago gang violence that drew the ire of Mayor Rahm Emanuel when it was filmed here in 2015. Lee sold the credits last October to Apple.

Lee reported spending $10.9 million in Illinois during 28 days of filming. State officials refused to release records showing expenses Lee claimed to get the credit. They say a production company’s financial information can’t be disclosed under the law — a position upheld last summer by Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan.

Lee’s application estimated his movie would cost $19 million and minorities and women would get 33 percent of the jobs on his production crew, 50 percent of those in his production office, 75 percent of the acting jobs and 95 percent of those for extras. State officials won’t say whether he met those goals.

Lee spent several days at St. Sabina Church on the South Side. He filmed a scene inside the church, held a casting call there and used the church property to feed the cast and crew, according to the pastor, the Rev. Michael Pfleger.

“They did give a donation to the church for when they were filming here,” Pfleger says, declining to say how much money the church received.

Illinois film officials won’t say whether Lee’s film tax credits included a location fee for St. Sabina. Lee didn’t respond to emails.

Illinois officials haven’t always refused to release records showing expenses claimed to get the film tax credit. In 2015, the Commerce Department provided the Sun-Times with documents from 10 shows, including the “Chicago Fire” pilot and “Transformers 4.”

The expenses included leasing Cinespace studios, a West Side facility that has gotten state grants and tax breaks worth $21 million; hotel rooms, including more than $400,000 spent by “Transformers 4” at Trump International Hotel & Tower; and thousands of dollars in groceries and restaurant meals, including fast food. It’s unclear how much of that was spent with companies owned by minorities or women.

None of the records identified the race or gender of the Illinois residents hired as actors, extras, office workers and crew members.

The state says it released the records on “Chicago Fire” because NBC Universal hadn’t asked that those remain confidential.

Dunkin says he can’t explain why legislators allowed the commerce agency to skip the minority-reporting requirements that minority legislators demanded when they approved the tax-credit program, which runs until 2021.

“It’s embarrassing for me not to be able to answer that question,” says Dunkin, who lost a re-election bid last year. “Shame on us. I, along with other members, went to sleep on that. I’ll take the hit on that. We should have caught them and stayed on them . . . Our concern was the spend and getting black folk involved.”

Contributing: Jacqueline Campbell

RELATED STORY: WATCHDOGS: More tax money for Chicago’s booming TV, movie studio

Rodrigo Osorio’s odyssey through the U.S. Immigration Court in Chicago began when he bought a used pickup truck with tinted windows.

A Villa Park cop pulled Osorio over in the Ford F-150 in March 2011 because the windows were too dark. The police found he had pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor DUI charge in another DuPage County suburb.

By early May, Osorio — who has lived and worked in this country as an undocumented immigrant — was placed in “removal” proceedings. That presented him with the prospect of having to return to a homeland he hasn’t seen since he sneaked across the border from his native Mexico in 1995, when he was 17.

But for nearly six years Osorio has fought to stay in this country, arguing that deporting him would cause extreme hardship for his three U.S.-born teenage sons.

Last month, a judge gave him another reprieve, setting his next Immigration Court hearing for January 2018.

“This country is very beautiful,” Osorio says, speaking Spanish. “I came only to work, to support my family, not to harm anybody.”

President Donald Trump has said his administration will focus on “deporting illegal aliens with violent criminal records.” That was also a stated priority of past administrations. Over the past decade, the government has routinely deported immigrants who had been convicted of — or even accused of — violent crimes, drug offenses or crimes involving “moral turpitude,” such as fraud.

Yet most of the deportation cases that pass through Immigration Court don’t involve violent criminals. In fact, only 12 percent of all deportation cases opened in Chicago and nationwide from 2010 to 2016 involved criminal charges of any kind, according to TRAC, a research center at Syracuse University that collects such data.

Instead, the nation’s Immigration Courts — which operate apart from the federal court system — are clogged with nonviolent offenders like Osorio, whose most serious offenses in this country have been misdemeanor traffic violations, and with people who haven’t been charged with anything but immigration violations.

Deporting more people, as Trump has vowed to do, would put an added strain on immigration courts in Chicago and elsewhere that already are faced with record backlogs.

Judge Richard Posner, an outspoken federal appeals court judge in Chicago, blasted the U.S. Immigration Court in a ruling in December as “the least competent federal agency.” Posner also blamed the court’s shortcomings in part on “crushing workloads.”

In a system notorious for years-long delays, the Immigration Court branch on Van Buren Street in downtown Chicago is one of the nation’s worst, data from TRAC shows. In the past 10 years, the number of pending Immigration Court cases nationwide has tripled. In Chicago, that figure has increased nearly fivefold — from fewer than 4,900 cases in 2007 to more than 23,000 as of August.

Chicago’s Immigration Court has the second-longest wait times in the country — an average of 966 days, on average, far exceeding the national average of 678 days. And the time that cases here have been pending has gotten longer every year since 2010, when the average was 381 days.

Chicago’s court serves Illinois and other Midwestern states. Mexicans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans and Honduras account for 71 percent of the cases pending here, though people from 161 other countries also are represented.

Immigration attorney Brian Seyfried.

Immigration authorities are “trying to do everything they can to deport people, but they’re so overwhelmed, it’s impossible,” says Brian Seyfried, a Chicago immigration attorney. “There are some cases, even if you’re trying to speed them up, they take a year — even if they’re not charged with a crime.”

On a recent day, the waiting areas outside the courtrooms are filled with families, including restless children squirming in the few available seats. More people stand in the hallways, waiting to be called.

Each of the five judges is expected to hear at least 26 cases that day. Judge Kathryn DeAngelis has 61, including 18 in the afternoon involving people seeking to have removal orders cancelled.

“We’re just very, very busy right now,” DeAngelis says.

Among those on her case call of preliminary or procedural hearings: a man from Nigeria, a couple from India, a former student from Kazakhstan who had overstayed an exchange visa and a man from Mexico who’d been in the United States for two decades but was locked up after a traffic offense. Each is given a new date for a longer, individual hearing — next year.

Immigration attorney Moises Hernandez.

“That is actually not bad — I have some dates for 2019 and 2020 already,” lawyer Moises Hernandez says outside court. “This is not the court’s fault. Congress mandates all sorts of things they don’t provide funding for. The judges try to do the best they can.”

About 2,200 hearings already have been scheduled in the Chicago court for 2018, federal records show. About 10,000 more are on the docket for 2019, and 400 already are set for 2020.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Justice Department, which administers the Immigration Court, says the budget for judges and court staff “did not keep pace” with the amount spent on immigration enforcement, causing the backlog.

Retired Immigration Court Judge Eliza Klein: “I think there’s been a real breakdown over time with the judges’ ability to recollect what happened.”

Retired Immigration Court Judge Eliza Klein says that when she first took the bench in 1994, cases typically lasted months, not years.

Between 2013 and 2015, the number of judges in the Chicago court dropped from nine to six. With new hires, it’s now up to 10.

At the same time the number of judges was falling, waves of people were coming to the United States to flee violence in Central America. Many of those seeking asylum weren’t represented by attorneys in Immigration Court. They have the right to hire lawyers — but, unlike in the criminal court system, they’re not guaranteed that representation. So immigration judges often give them extra time to try to come up with the money to hire a lawyer or to try to find pro bono counsel.

As cases have stretched longer and longer, “I think there’s been a real breakdown over time with the judges’ ability to recollect what happened,” Klein says. “The pressures of the docket have eroded their confidence in the system — especially judges who’ve been there a long time.”

In a Chicago immigration courtroom, Judge Virginia Perez-Guzman hears from a series of women with children, all facing removal orders but seeking asylum.

One of the women says she and her four children fled Honduras after gangs threatened to burn down her business if she didn’t pay them. Another says her husband was abducted, dismembered and burned in Mexico in November 2015.

When Veronica Manuel-Francisco is called forward, Judge Perez-Guzman tries to find someone to interpret her Mayan language, Konjubal. Manuel-Francisco fled Guatemala with her daughter last year, arriving at Hidalgo, Texas, in June. They’re now staying in Champaign instead of a detention facility while her case is sorted out.

On a speakerphone, the judge calls the dial-up service Interpretalk in search of an interpreter who knows Konjubal — a language with only about 80,000 native speakers. Several minutes pass before one is found and the proceedings continue.

Even with the interpreter, Manuel-Francisco struggles to understand the legal terminology and process without the help of an attorney, which she says she can’t afford. The judge says she’ll put her in touch with legal aid groups but cautions, “They can’t help just everybody.”

Manuel-Francisco asks whether she’ll be granted asylum. Perez-Guzman says first she must apply for it. “So it will not be granted to me right now?” Manuel-Francisco asks.

“No, ma’am.”

The judge tells her she has to let the court know if she changes address: If she misses a notice about a court date and doesn’t appear, the judge will have to order her and her daughter removed from the country.

“So you’re ordering me removed?” Manuel-Francisco asks through the interpreter.

No, the judge says, not at this time. And she explains again that Manuel-Francisco will have to apply for asylum — in English.

Manuel-Francisco indicates that she understands.

Despite Trump’s vow to boot out undocumented criminals, attorney Rosalba Pina says, “It’s not that easy. There is such a thing as due process.”

Pina represents Osorio, the Mexico native who was pulled over for driving the truck with tinted windows in March 2011.

Attorney Rosalba Pina is representing Rodrigo Osorio. | Maria Cardona / Sun-Times

In a court filing last year, Pina said Osorio, now 40, “entered the United States without inspection on or around May 1995.”

He left his hometown of San Lucas Tulcingo in the state of Puebla because “my family was poor” and friends had told him there were jobs in the Midwest.

He’s worked as a busboy, dishwasher, cook and golf-course landscaper in the Chicago suburbs, Michigan and Indiana, where he is now a full-time welder making about $500 a week — far more than the minimum wage of $4.41 a day in his hometown in Mexico.

Osorio “has maintained gainful employment since his arrival in the United States and has always taken care of his children,” Pina wrote.

Pina also has argued that Osorio’s record does not include any “crimes involving moral turpitude.”

He was arrested in Addison in 2009 after the police found him changing a flat tire and discovered he had a blood-alcohol level around .18 percent. He told officers he’d had seven Modelo beers.

He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor driving under the influence charge and was sentenced to community service and probation. He completed his sentence, according to court records.

That case didn’t cause problems for him with immigration authorities until his 2011 arrest in Villa Park.

“As the truck passed me I noticed there was dark window tint on the drivers side window,” the arrest report from the Villa Park cop says. “I made a u-turn and stopped the truck.”

The officer said he “asked Osorio if he had ever been arrested for DUI or any other criminal offense and he advised that he had not.” Osorio didn’t answer when asked “why he was lying,” according to the report.

Instead of a valid driver’s license, Osorio showed the officer a Mexican passport.

Suspecting it was fake, the officer took the passport to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s offices in Oakbrook Terrace, where an agent said it “appeared to be legitimate” and found Osorio in a Mexican database of birth records.

But Osorio was arrested and then turned over to federal authorities at the DuPage County sheriff’s office in Wheaton after missing a court date for the tinted-window citation. Records show a notice of the court date was “returned to sender.” Osorio says he did not know he was scheduled to appear.

Rodrigo Osorio (in cap) with his sons (from left) Eric, Marcos and Ismael. | Mick Dumke / Sun-Times

Osorio’s case to stay in the country might hinge on Pina’s ability to demonstrate that his departure would cause “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” to three U.S. citizens — his sons. The oldest is 16, and one of Osorio’s 15-year-old twins has been diagnosed with an intellectual disability, Pina wrote.

Going with their dad to Mexico, where they have never been, would force them “to abandon everything and everyone they know.

“They have acculturated to life in this country,” Pina wrote, noting that they are in high school with “friends in this country who share their same culture and language.”

Osorio isn’t scheduled to appear in Immigration Court again until Jan. 25, 2018.

Rodrigo Osorio holds a prayer card with an image of San Toribio Romo, the patron saint of undocumented Mexican immigrants. | Maria Cardona / Sun-Times

After his hearing in January, Osorio walked out with his lawyer and his sons, who wore dress shirts and ties for the occasion.

A devout Catholic, Osorio says he’s carried a prayer card with the image of San Toribio Romo — considered the patron saint of undocumented Mexican immigrants — since he left his hometown.

“For now, I’m happy because I still have hope of staying with my children,” he says. “We trust in God that I can stay here.”

Graphic: Length of cases in Chicago immigration court, deportation cases by charge

The number of street stops by the Chicago Police Department has plummeted by 85 percent in a year, but African-Americans continued to account for the vast majority of those detained and frisked, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation has found.

That’s the case even though African-Americans were no more likely to be found with weapons or drugs than people of other racial backgrounds, the Sun-Times found by analyzing data on stops collected by the department for the first time in 2016.

The police reported stopping thousands of people because they fit the description of a criminal suspect, were found near the scene of a crime, or acted in a manner deemed “indicative” of drug dealing.

In most cases, officers checked a box on their reports for “other” to explain the justification for the stop. The department hasn’t released records to show whether further details were provided.

“It’s kind of a double-edged sword,” says Ald. Roderick Sawyer (6th), chairman of the Chicago City Council’s Black Caucus. He says many of his South Side constituents would like the police to be more aggressive in searching for guns.

But Sawyer says he’s concerned the police continue to stop people without a “reasonable suspicion” of a crime, which is required for an investigatory stop to be constitutional.

“Were the reasons legitimate?” the alderman says. “Or is it still ‘walking while black?’ ”

Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi says the department tries to safeguard rights as it protects the public: “Good policing and civil rights are not mutually exclusive.”

Guglielmi notes that “most of CPD’s investigatory stops occurred in high-crime areas, primarily on the South and West Sides, precisely in the districts driving violence.”

The police for years were supposed to fill out “contact cards” after every investigatory street stop. But they often failed to include such basic information as the justification for the stop or offered reasons that weren’t constitutional, the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois found in a 2015 report.

Starting last year, under an agreement between the department and the ACLU, officers were required to complete more detailed forms showing the reason for the stop, the time and location, and the race, age and gender of the person.

Data the police department culled from the stop forms through Dec. 4 of last year show:

• Police made 85,302 street stops through the first 11 months of 2016 — putting them on pace for 92,411 by year’s end. That’s 85 percent fewer than 2015, when they made more than 601,700 stops.

• The race of those stopped hasn’t changed. A 2015 analysis by the ACLU found that 72 percent of those stopped by police between May and August 2014 were black. According to the 2016 police data, 71 percent of those stopped were African-American, 19 percent were Hispanic, 9 percent white and 1 percent Asian.

• African-Americans and Hispanics were more likely to be frisked. Pat-downs were done during 30 percent of the stops involving Hispanics, 29 percent involving African-Americans, 26 percent involving Asians and 22 percent involving whites.

• Yet weapons were found on African-Americans and Hispanics as infrequently as on everyone else — in just 2 percent of stops. Drugs or other “contraband” were recovered in 4 percent of the stops for each group.

• Under the ACLU agreement, cops are required to check one or more boxes on their street-stop forms to indicate the reason for the stop. But the most common reason given in 2016 — checked on 59 percent of the forms — was “other.” Officers are then supposed to write a more detailed explanation, but the data released to the Sun-Times doesn’t show that.

• The next most common explanations given were that the person: “fit the description” of an offender provided by a witness (13 percent), was near the scene of a crime (13 percent), was targeted as part of “gang/narcotic-related enforcement” (12 percent), was suspected of participating in a drug deal (8 percent) or fit the description of an offender from a flash message (7 percent).

• The average age of those stopped was 33. That’s older than the typical age of perpetrators and victims of violent crime in Chicago. According to a recent study by the University of Chicago Crime Lab, about half of all homicide victims and suspects in Chicago last year were in their 20s. Roughly a fifth were in their 30s.

The release of the data comes as the department’s practices — including its documentation of stops and frisks — are at the center of a politicized national debate. President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to “send in the feds” to quell Chicago’s violence. And Trump vowed during his campaign to increase stop-and-frisk policing in cities like Chicago.

He’d find support from some Chicago cops who say the number of street stops plunged because the new forms take too long to fill out. In interviews, they say the police have responded by making fewer street stops, and that’s one reason the number of gun crimes has risen in the past year or so.

“The program wasn’t implemented with a lot of forethought,” says one veteran officer who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Are some people using it as an excuse? Yes. There’s going to be a long learning curve. But the sad part is that these new officers who are coming on, they’re seeing that we’re not doing a lot. They’re kind of frustrated.”

The Justice Department report on the police department, released in the waning days of the Obama administration, noted that officers were poorly prepared to use the new forms. But it also said detailed documentation of street stops “has been in place for many years in other large-city police departments.” And it included numerous stories from Chicagoans who felt they were stopped, searched and subjected to background checks based on how they looked or where they lived.

The report noted that crime continued to fall in New York City even after its police department curtailed its aggressive stop-and-frisk practices following a court ruling that they were unconstitutional.

Karen Sheley, director of the police practices project for the ACLU of Illinois, rejects the notion that the new requirements in Chicago — and the drop in stops that followed — led to a surge in crime. Sheley says police were making too many stops in the years before the agreement, including 250,000 in the summer of 2014.

“The high number of stops was really untenable and had to go down,” she says.

As part of the agreement, former federal magistrate Judge Arlander Keys was tapped to issue reports on its progress. His first report is expected in the next few weeks.

The police took a key step forward when they began collecting more data on stops, says Ald. Jason Ervin (28th). His West Side ward includes the 4200 block of West Madison, where cops recorded 665 stops in the first 11 months of 2016 — more than on any other block citywide. Seven of the 10 blocks with the most stops are on the West Side.

“I’ve got a lot of shootings, a lot of homicides, a lot of narcotic sales, so I would hope I have a lot of police activity,” Ervin says. “As long as they’re doing it in a manner consistent with the U.S. Constitution, residents and officials will back them.”

Last May 27, Supt. Eddie Johnson mobilized thousands of extra officers to try to prevent violence over the Memorial Day weekend. Police recorded 420 stops that day — the highest daily total all year.

Police made two of those stops after seeing two black men near Madison and Pulaski hand off something in exchange for cash. The officers suspected a drug deal on a block known for them.

According to their arrest report, the cops detained the suspected buyer and patted him down, recovering a small amount of marijuana. But the stop database doesn’t mention any drugs were seized.

The other man took off. Six hours later, the police caught him in the same spot and reported finding a bag with $20 worth of pot in his front pocket. But records of the stop don’t mention police frisking the second man or recovering the marijuana.

Both men were charged with misdemeanor marijuana possession. Both cases were thrown out of court.

In 2012, the Chicago Police Department installed ShotSpotter gunfire sensors in the high-crime Englewood District on the South Side and Harrison District on the West Side.

But the city has only recently moved to take full advantage of the crime-fighting technology, variations of which have long been the stuff of TV shows and movies.

It wasn’t until last fall that the department began to integrate officers’ mobile computer terminals with the ShotSpotter system. Before that, Chicago cops had to wait for ShotSpotter alerts to come over their police radios.

And it was only last month that the department, ramping up its use of the sensors to direct officers to shootings, announced it would distribute ShotSpotter-equipped cell phones to officers.

Contrast that to South Bend, Indiana. The much smaller city — seen as a model for using the technology to its fullest — began using the sensors a year after Chicago did.

But, from the start, South Bend equipped officers with technology that allowed them to monitor the gunfire alerts on their in-car computers and their cell phones. They could listen to the recorded shots, which sometimes lets them know that more than one gun is being fired, and zoom in on the exact address on a Google map.

“We have saved time, manpower and money,” says South Bend Police Chief Scott Ruszkowski, who says he was a big fan of giving officers immediate access to ShotSpotter data on their computers and phones. “In 30 seconds or less, we get the alert. What we had before was that shots were fired, and a lot of times we didn’t even know. No one called.”

Earlier this month, the South Bend Police Department used ShotSpotter to investigate seven shootings within five blocks. No one was hit, but one vehicle’s rear window was shot out. In each case, officers arrived within minutes and collected ballistic evidence to see whether the shootings were linked.

That can be important, according to Ruszkowski, who says, “We treat each scene like someone was shot.”

SST Inc., a Newark, California, company formerly called ShotSpotter, installs the audio sensors that triangulate the location of gunfire. Cities lease the equipment from the company, whose analysts in California verify that the sounds are actually gunfire before alerting the police.

The Chicago Police Department initially began using ShotSpotter in 2003 but gave up on it because it was producing false leads.

Then-Supt. Garry McCarthy announcing the installation of ShotSpotter gunshot-detection technology in Englewood in October 2012. | Sun-Times

In 2012, after major improvements, then-Supt. Garry McCarthy had the sensors installed in the Englewood and Harrison districts as part of a pilot program. From 2014 through March 2016, the sensors alerted police to 1,600 gunshots in those districts.

Last month, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Supt. Eddie Johnson, touting an expansion of the program, held a news conference to show off a new control room in the Englewood District where ShotSpotter alerts are displayed on a big screen and surveillance-camera footage is shown on another screen. Analysts from the police department and the University of Chicago sort through that information and social media to decide the best places to deploy officers to prevent violent crime. A similar room opened this month in the Harrison District.

The department’s 150 SpotSpotter-equipped cell phones are part of the recent upgrade.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel, seen handing a bottle of water to Supt. Eddie Johnson after Johnson fell ill during a news conference last month to announce the expanded use of ShotSpotter. | Fran Spielman / Sun-Times

ShotSpotter sensors now cover all of the Englewood and Harrison districts — about 13.5 square miles. And the department has expanded the coverage area of its surveillance cameras, called “Police Observation Devices,” by about 25 percent. The first-year cost of expanding the ShotSpotter coverage will be about $940,000, officials say.

South Bend, about 100 miles southeast of Chicago, has a population of about 100,000 — about the size of some of Chicago’s 22 police districts. But it’s one of the cities — along with Denver — that have taken greater advantage of ShotSpotter than Chicago has up to now, according to federal law enforcement sources.

South Bend pays ShotSpotter about $150,000 for sensors that cover a three-square-mile area in the city’s highest-crime neighborhoods — southwest of the University of Notre Dame and west of downtown. ShotSpotter guarantees the sensors can pinpoint a shot within 25 meters, but Ruszkowski says they’re usually even more accurate.

South Bend police Chief Scott Ruszkowski says ShotSpotter has been more accurate at pinpointing gunfire than its manufacturer claims. | Frank Main / Sun-Times

South Bend Police Department policy requires officers to get out of their cars, with backup, after they get to a scene where there was a ShotSpotter alert. They’re asked to search for shell casings that can be used to link different shootings. And they’re trained to enter those casings into a ballistic scanner at police headquarters. The scanner is connected to a U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives system — the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network — that’s used to compare gun evidence from different crime scenes.

The officers also are required to knock on doors of homes in the areas of the ShotSpotter alerts — and place a flyer on every doorknob at every home where they don’t get a response.

“A gunfire incident was reported in your neighborhood on [blank] at [blank] AM/PM,” it reads, and it asks anyone with information about the shooting to call a number at the police department or leave an anonymous tip. It also offers assistance in breaking away from street gangs.

The idea is to let people know the police care about shootings in their neighborhoods and enlist their help in solving gun crimes, says Ruszkowski, a white police chief who grew up in a predominantly African-American area of South Bend and whose father and grandfather were also South Bend cops.

“I’m sensitive to the community’s concerns,” Ruszkowski says. “The worst mistake is to have cars circling the ShotSpotter area, and no one gets out to investigate. We are occupants of the neighborhood, not occupiers of the neighborhood.”

Ruszkowski says he doesn’t saturate a neighborhood with cops — stopping cars and frisking residents — after getting a ShotSpotter alert. He equates that to casting a net for tuna — and ending up catching dolphins instead.

“We need the community on our side, not against us,” he says.

Ruszkowski says his officers have arrested shooters and have located victims after rushing to shooting scenes thanks to ShotSpotter. Usually, the officers get ShotSpotter alerts long before they’re notified about 911 calls reporting shots fired. Sometimes, people don’t call the police at all when they hear gunfire.

Ruszkowski says St. Joseph County, Indiana, prosecutors are working on several criminal cases in which shootings were linked by ballistic tests on shell casings and projectiles found at the scenes of ShotSpotter alerts.

“We have entered over 3,000 pieces of evidence,” he says. “The overwhelming majority is from the ShotSpotter. We have connected casings, we have connected projectiles to a variety of incidents.”

Ruszkowski says some key violent-crime numbers in South Bend dropped between 2015 and 2016, which he attributes in part to the technology. The Indiana city had 17 murders in 2015 and 14 in 2016. There were 85 people shot in 2015 and 81 in 2016.

He says citizen complaints went down, too, and calls for service were up.

In Chicago, murders and nonfatal shootings soared in 2016 compared with recent years, reaching levels not scene in two decades. And they’ve continued to escalate in 2017. So far, Chicago cops, who as a group historically have been slow to embrace new technology, seem to support the idea of having almost real-time ShotSpotter alerts about shootings — for their own safety as well as to confirm where shots were actually fired.

“It saves us a lot of time,” says Capt. Steven Sesso of the Harrison District.

ShotSpotter alerts have led officers to homes where they have recovered guns, according to Sesso, who says cops recently found a shooting victim and recovered the bullet evidence nearby because of an alert in his district.

A police spokesman points to an incident in late November in the Englewood District as an example of how the system works. A sergeant received a ShotSpotter cell-phone notification of gunfire in the 6800 block of South Wood. A dispatcher relayed additional information that the shots came from a back yard.

Officers entered the yard and saw a fight. One of the men tried to conceal a handgun and ran. The man was arrested, charged with illegal gun possession and reckless discharge of a firearm.

An example of a ShotSpotter report of gunfire with an aerial view. | SST, Inc.

RELATED STORIES:

Chicago police to expand use of ShotSpotter gunshot sensors, Sept. 7, 2016

THE WATCHDOGS: The most violent police beat in Chicago, Jan. 29, 2017

State Sen. Don Harmon, D-Oak Park, is one of the most powerful people in Springfield, talked about as a possible future president of the Illinois Senate.

He’s also a partner in a Chicago law firm that’s been paid more than $9 million in the past five years for doing legal work for state agencies, government workers’ pension funds and local governments whose citizens he represents in the Senate, a Chicago Sun-Times examination has found.

That covers work done for more than 20 government bodies, including the city of Chicago, Cook County, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District and the agency that owns McCormick Place and Navy Pier.

The firm — Burke Burns & Pinelli — has done work for agencies whose budgets Harmon votes on, including the Illinois Department of Transportation, and government pension funds regulated by Harmon and his fellow legislators, as well as the village of Rosemont, one of the suburbs he represents in the Illinois Senate, according to records and interviews.

His firm also worked on applications for millions of dollars in five state grants that went to Cinespace Chicago Film Studios — where TV shows including “Chicago P.D.” and “Chicago Fire” are shot. The state money included a $10 million grant that Gov. Bruce Rauner ordered the West Side studio to repay in 2015 after the Sun-Times reported that the money was supposed to buy property for an expansion, but the land owners said they weren’t going to sell.

Harmon says he derives no “financial benefit from state or state-affiliated work done by the firm.”

The west suburban legislator also says he doesn’t handle the legal work that his firm gets from the government agencies, including the pension funds, he helps oversee nor from any local government he represents as a legislator. Other lawyers at the firm handle that work, he says.

Mary Patricia Burns, the majority owner of the law firm, didn’t respond to a call and emails seeking comment.

According to Harmon, the law firm “periodically has represented the state or state agencies since its founding in 1992.”

Harmon — who once worked as deputy legal counsel to Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago — was elected to the state Senate in 2002. At the time, he was a lawyer with the firm Mayer Brown LLP, where he “practiced corporate banking and municipal law,” according to the online biography on his law firm’s website. In 2005, he joined his current firm, where he is one of seven partners but says he “has no ownership interest.”

As president pro tempore of the Illinois Senate, Harmon is among the top leaders of the legislative chamber, whose members are part-time and typically also hold other jobs. Harmon’s yearly pay as a state senator is $78,163.

He says his law firm salary is less than that but won’t say how much he makes.

Asked whether he gets any additional compensation beside salary, Harmon would say only that his total pay from Burke Burns & Pinelli is less than the governor’s $177,412-a-year salary — the cap on his pay under Illinois ethics law because his firm gets state business.

The legislative inspector general has the authority to determine whether state senators and representatives are complying with those rules. That’s a post that’s been vacant for more than two years.

The front page of the March 24, 2015, Sun-Times reporting Gov. Bruce Rauner ordered Cinsepace Chicago Film Studios to give back $10 million.

Among the biggest government clients of Harmon’s firm over the past five years has been IDOT, which maintains the state’s expressways and other state roads. The state transportation agency paid Burke Burns & Pinelli about $2.2 million from 2012 through 2016, billing records show.

Richard Kabaker, deputy chief counsel for the state agency, says it has had Harmon’s firm handle condemnation cases for at least a decade. Records show the firm has been involved in numerous state road projects in the Chicago area.

Kabaker says the law firms that IDOT employs get reappointed “if they’re doing a good job,” and Harmon’s firm does “a good job for us.”

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s office represents IDOT and other state agencies and hires private law firms to represent them as needed, though Kabaker says, with IDOT, those hires are a joint decision.

Ann Spillane, a top aide to Lisa Madigan, says her boss doesn’t get involved in choosing which law firms get state work and that Harmon’s firm has been handling condemnations for state government for years before Madigan took office in 2003. Spillane says the office’s staff attorneys recommended keeping the firm because it was “doing a good job.”

Illinois State Board of Elections records show the firm, its partners and their families and Harmon’s campaign fund have contributed a total of more than $380,000 since the mid-1990s to political funds run by or affiliated with the two Madigans.

Spillane says the attorney general’s campaign fund doesn’t “solicit from people who contract with our office, and we try not to take” contributions from them.

Of the approximately $70,000 Lisa Madigan’s campaign fund has accepted from Harmon, his firm and fellow lawyers, all but $10,000 came before she took office as attorney general, records show.

The Illinois State Toll Highway Authority, which oversees the tollway system, has paid Burke Burns & Pinelli more than $665,000 since 2012 for legal work in two areas, state records show: borrowing done through the issuance of bonds and property condemnations.

The law firm’s pension work includes handling general legal services for two of the biggest pension funds for city of Chicago retirees: the Firemen’s Annuity and Benefit Fund of Chicago, which handles pensions for city firefighters, and the Municipal Employees’ Annuity and Benefit Fund, which covers city retirees.

Burke Burns & Pinelli has been paid a total of about $2.1 million over the past five years by those two retirement funds.

Among the law firm’s duties for both pension funds is keeping their officials apprised of state “legislative matters,” records show.

Addressing the state’s massively underfunded government pension funds is up to the Legislature and the governor. Harmon voted last year to override a Rauner veto and set new funding levels for the firefighters’ retirement fund and for the pension plan for retired Chicago cops. Among the potential revenue sources: money from a Chicago casino, if one gets approved by the Legislature.

Harmon says he avoids voting on legislation directly affecting his firm’s clients.

Asked why Harmon voted on the pension bill, a spokeswoman says: “Senate records indicate no pension funds supported or opposed” the bill. “In the event that clients of the firm do initiate, support or oppose legislation, Senator Harmon discloses the conflict to the Senate and abstains from voting when appropriate or votes in the public’s best interest.”

Much of his firm’s government work involves agencies borrowing money through the issuance of bonds. The firm was paid more than $300,000 to handle bond work for Rosemont. A village spokesman says Rosemont’s financial consultant picked Burke Burns & Pinelli for the job.

The firm also has done bond work involving the Illinois Housing Development Authority, the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority and the city of Chicago, among other government bodies, records show.

Harmon says he limits his work as an attorney to private clients. He declined to identify any of them.

But he says he never worked for his client’s firm Cinespace, the clout-heavy studio that’s gotten millions of dollars in state grants.

State Sen. Tim Bivins didn’t get the audit he wanted of five state grants to Cinespace Chicago Film Studios.

Two years ago, state Sen. Tim Bivins, R-Dixon, introduced legislation demanding an independent audit of five state grants totaling $27.3 million that former Gov. Pat Quinn’s administration gave to Cinespace.

Bivins sought the review by the Illinois auditor general’s office after the Sun-Times reported that owners of land that Cinespace said it planned to buy with the last of those grants — for $10 million, awarded after Quinn lost his reelection bid to Rauner — hadn’t listed their properties for sale and weren’t going to sell them.

“It was something that was suspicious,” Bivins says. “It was something that should have been audited. It just seemed like nobody wanted to look at it.”

The Legislature never voted on Bivins’ push for an audit of the grants, including the $10 million grant, which Cinespace repaid the state in response to a demand from Rauner prompted by the Sun-Times’ reports. Bivins’ legislation quietly died earlier this year after being sent to a Senate committee on which Harmon is vice-chairman.

Cinespace’s Alex Pissios. | Provided photo

“I have no recollection of that particular resolution,” Harmon says.

The other four state grants his firm helped land for Cinespace were used to buy and convert the former Ryerson Steel plant on the West Side into the TV and movie studio, which opened in 2011.

Cinespace is family-owned, run by former real estate developer Alex Pissios. Touted as the largest studio east of Los Angeles, Cinespace deposited its state grants into Belmont Bank & Trust, whose clout-heavy board of directors includes attorney James Banks, a longtime member of the tollway board, and former state Sen. James DeLeo, D-Chicago, a Quinn ally.

Kyle Cullerton, a son of state Senate President John Cullerton, D-Chicago, is on the advisory board of a not-for-profit “film and media incubator” on the studio’s property. Cinespace says it has funded the incubator, called Stage 18, though a spokesman for the Senate president says the son isn’t paid.

Cinespace says it has funded the incubator, called Stage 18, though  spokesmen for Cinespace and the Senate president say the son isn’t paid.

Eric Herman, a spokesman for Cinespace, says Burke Burns & Pinelli was hired in 2010 “because they have a great reputation.”

Illinois Senate President John Cullerton, D-Chicago, left, and, Sen. Don Harmon, D-Oak Park, last March in Springfield. | AP file photo

If their morning coffee didn’t already have them wide awake, Metra BNSF riders were given a brief jolt of adrenaline when doors in one car on a packed express train between Naperville and the Loop suddenly opened last month.

No one was hurt, and the doors quickly closed on their own.

But it was the second time in recent years there’s been a problem with open doors on the BNSF line, which stretches between Aurora and Chicago’s Union Station and is Metra’s busiest route and one of its most delay-prone. In 2013, a train heading from the city to the west suburbs ran roughly 10 minutes with a door open, apparently because of an ice build-up, according to news reports at the time.

This time, the doors sprung open with people in the vestibule and the train going around 34 miles an hour as it geared up leaving the Naperville station towards its top speed of around 70 mph.

“It was a problem with what’s called the door relay, which is a component in the electrical circuit that controls the doors,” according to Metra spokesman Michael Gillis, who said a piece was “worn.”

Metra said workers “determined the cause of the electrical glitch to be an intermittent failure of one of the parts of the electrical circuit that controls the train doors. This failure is extremely rare and was fixed immediately. We take this incident very seriously and sincerely apologize to our customers who may have been frightened by this incident.”

Told what happened, Joseph Szabo, a onetime Metra conductor who was chief of the Federal Railroad Administration under President Barack Obama, said: “I’m not aware of past cases like this — opening en route. That’d be a little bit concerning, where you have a rush hour. Then, with people standing in the vestibule, the risk is enhanced.”

It happened just after 8 a.m. Feb. 15 as the train left Naperville, the third station from the end of the line, on an express run to downtown, according to Gillis. The door “opened, then closed,” he said.

Metra conductors didn’t see it, Gillis said. But later a rider called the commuter rail agency to report what happened and said about 15 people were nearby when the doors opened.

“The caller said there were people standing in the vestibule,” Gillis said.

Crews from BNSF, the Texas railroad that contracts with Metra to operate the route, checked things out, confirmed the problem and fixed it, Gillis said.

The train “hadn’t built up to top speed yet,” he said, adding, “We’re not aware of this happening before in recent months.”

Andy Williams, a spokesman for BNSF, said, “This was an isolated incident caused by a mechanical issue. The door was open for three seconds. It was repaired immediately. The train was traveling at approximately 34 mph. We are not aware of any other issues.”

The cabs of Metra locomotives have lights to indicate when doors are open. Asked whether a light flagged the train’s engineer that there was an open door, Williams said, “The indicator light would have gone off for three seconds — the amount of time the door was open. It is reasonable to believe that the engineer was busy watching the tracks and didn’t see the light during that three seconds.”

Bob Guy, the state legislative director for SMART Transportation Division, the union that represents many Metra crew members, said that when engineers are pulling out of a station they’re often focused on “the track ahead.” A door light “can be easily overlooked,” Guy said.

Metra’s Naperville station. | Robert Herguth / Sun-Times

FRA spokesman Marc Willis said the incident didn’t “meet our threshold for reporting requirements,” so the federal agency isn’t investigating.

Chicago taxpayers have now spent more than $1.6 million as a result of a fight between a clout-heavy firefighter and a cop at a rescue scene five years ago, records show.

After years in court, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration recently agreed to settle a federal lawsuit that the cop, Joseph Smith, filed against the city and the firefighter, Mark Altman, whose father Edward Altman was fire commissioner under former Mayor Richard M. Daley.

But the legal wrangling isn’t over — and the city could end up paying even more.

Smith, 46, sued the city again in December, accusing the Chicago Police Department of wrongfully demoting him and cutting his pay soon after the judge signed off on his settlement with City Hall.

In the first court case, Smith accused the younger Altman, who was then a fire captain, of grabbing him and slamming him to the ground after the police and fire department were called to save two men who’d fallen into the north branch of the Chicago River in November 2011.

Smith went on disability leave after his run-in with Altman. He returned to work on light duty in September, less than two months after settling his case against the city and Altman.

“There’s no legal reason to demote him and decrease his salary,” says Smith’s lawyer, Blake Horwitz of Chicago. “The only reason you have is that it’s retaliation for having filed a lawsuit and won a lawsuit against a captain of the fire department. They’re messing with him.”

A spokesman for Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Law Department says City Hall will contest the new suit. “We are looking forward to vigorously defending against this lawsuit and are confident it will be found meritless,” Bill McCaffrey says.

Mark Altman.

Under the settlement in the original case, the city agreed to pay $1,122,449 in compensatory damages to Smith, who suffered back injuries in the altercation with Altman. The city also was on the hook for nearly $480,000 for Smith’s attorney costs and fees, court documents show.

“This case was settled in the best interest of taxpayers,” McCaffrey says.

Altman, 54, paid $5,000 in punitive damages under the deal.

Though Smith’s boss wanted to arrest Altman, the firefighter ended up not being charged with any crime.

Nor did the fire department take disciplinary action, according to city personnel records.

In 2013, while he and the city were still fighting Smith in court, Altman was promoted from captain to battalion chief.

Altman is now paid $149,502 a year.

A Chicago Fire Department spokesman declined to comment.

Scene where an incident took place in 2011 — North Avenue and the north branch of the Chicago River. | Brian Jackson / Sun-Times

The incident involving Altman and Smith took place at night. Smith was part of the police marine unit that responded to a call that two men were in the river near Goose Island, about 100 yards from the North Avenue bridge. The two men survived.

But in his personal-injury suit, Smith said Altman told him to “get the f— out of here and “get the f— back.”

“Without provocation, Captain Mark Altman from the city of Chicago grabbed [Smith] and threw him down to the ground,” according to the lawsuit.

Smith’s supervisor, Sgt. Eduardo Beltran, testified that he believed “a battery did occur” and that he went to Altman’s firehouse to arrest him.

But Beltran said other firefighters tried to dissuade him, and he left the firehouse without Altman after getting a call telling him that “higher-ups” in the police department wanted him to drop the matter.

Then-Fire Cmsr. Edward Altman with Mayor Richard M. Daley at a news conference in 1999. | Sun-Times file photo

Though a medical expert who was a witness for the city testified that Smith’s injuries were “relatively minor,” the officer underwent two operations, including a spinal fusion, and has worn a back brace.

In 2014, a federal court jury awarded Smith more than $1.3 million. The following year, U.S. District Judge Sara L. Ellis slashed that to under $400,000, calling the jury award “shockingly large.”

Another trial was scheduled for last year solely to determine the amount of compensatory damages.

Before that happened, the case was settled for nearly as much as the jury wanted Smith to get.

The total paid to Smith included $600,000 for pain and suffering, $300,000 for “loss of normal life” and $162,490 for lost wages, records show.

Smith’s attorney says the city has paid what it promised.

“The case settled for a reasonable amount,” Horowitz says. “It’s justice for Joe.”

He says that Smith, who declined to comment, “has physical limitation due to his injuries” and can never again be a diver in the police marine unit.

The lawyer also says Altman “should have been criminally prosecuted” and the fire department “should have engaged in a legitimate internal investigation” of Altman’s behavior that night.

“They would have determined that he used excessive force,” Horwitz says. “That’s what a jury found. He battered a Chicago Police Department officer while on duty and caused him to undergo two surgeries. It’s horrible.”

RELATED STORY: THE WATCHDOGS: Clout-heavy firefighter’s ‘shove’ proves costly to city taxpayers, Nov. 1, 2015

CTA bus drivers racked up more than 400 red-light-camera and speeding-camera tickets the past two years while on the job, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show — and taxpayers were stuck having to pay.

The bill for the citations totaled about $40,000 for 2015 and 2016, the records show.

Unlike Pace, the suburban bus service agency, which makes drivers pay when they run a red light or speed, the CTA pays when its drivers get caught by red-light and speed cameras.

CTA spokesman Steve Mayberry says that between 2006 and 2009 the agency made drivers pay for any tickets they got for speeding or running a red light. But the union representing bus drivers, the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 241, “filed grievances, an unfair-labor practice charge and a lawsuit,” and the two sides eventually agreed the CTA would pay the bill “as owner of the vehicles,” Mayberry says.

Drivers do face the possibility of disciplinary action over tickets, according to Mayberry. He says 268 full- or part-time CTA bus drivers faced some type of discipline — a written reprimand, a suspension or worse — the past two years over tickets. Sixteen were fired for reasons “that included but may not have been limited to having a red-light violation,” Mayberry says.

All of the CTA citations — which carried fines of either $100 or $35 — were issued as a result of buses being caught by the city of Chicago’s network of red-light or speed cameras, rather than traffic cops, according to Mayberry. Most were for red-light violations.

Red-light cameras at Belmont and Sheridan Road and Lake Shore Drive have caught CTA bus drivers running red lights more than any other camera location. | James Foster / Sun-Times

Those cameras have come under scrutiny in recent years amid a bribery scandal that saw a former top city transportation official and the former chief executive of the city’s red-light-camera vendor, Redflex Traffic Systems, get prison terms. And, as the result of a class-action lawsuit, City Hall faces the prospect of having to refund $200 million in fines and late fees to drivers denied due process after getting red-light and speed-camera tickets.

But “none of the citations” the CTA drivers got were tainted by questions over whether cameras were issuing tickets fairly, Mayberry says. Still, the CTA challenged some tickets, and 15 were thrown out on appeal.

Mayberry says the “type of red-light tickets CTA challenges generally involve cases where we believe the camera took a picture of a bus that was making a legal right turn which had stopped or where the bus is a bigger vehicle and doesn’t make it past the stop bar before the light changes to red.”

The number of red-light violations has been on the decline since hitting 779 in 2010 — with 321 issued in 2011, 222 in 2012, 300 in 2013 and 211 in 2014, according to the CTA, which says the number of tickets overall is small given how many miles its buses cover.

“The 27 speed-camera citations billed to CTA in 2015 equal approximately one citation for every 2 million miles traveled by CTA buses,” the CTA says. “The 2016 total of 15 citations equals approximately one citation for every three and a half million miles traveled by CTA buses.

“The number of red-light-camera citations paid in 2015 (166) equals approximately three violations for every 1 million miles traveled. Similarly, the (193) violations in 2016 equal about three and a half violations for every 1 million miles traveled.”

The red-light cameras that caught CTA bus drivers most frequently are at Belmont and Sheridan Road near Lake Shore Drive in Lake View on the North Side — 30 citations over two years, records show.

A sign at Sheridan Road and Belmont Avenue warns drivers they’re being watched by red-light cameras. | James Foster / Sun-Times

That’s also the spot where the most red-light tickets overall citywide were issued in 2015 — more than 16,000, according to Chicago Department of Transportation records. In 2016, nearly 21,000 were issued there.

There are roughly 300 red-light and 150 speed cameras across the city.

Other top spots for red-light tickets issued to bus drivers were: the intersection of Illinois and Columbus Drive downtown, with 13 citations over the two-year period, and Chicago and Sacramento, with 11.

The most speed-camera tickets given to CTA bus drivers were issued near Foster and Kedzie: 14 over two years, according to agency records. Altogether, there were more than 6,000 automated speeding tickets issued there in 2015, according to the city.

Roughly a block from the enforcement camera is a CTA bus garage, where buses are staged, housed and maintained.

As other members of his party were reeling from Donald Trump’s Election Day victory, Mayor Rahm Emanuel got moving.

In a return to his long-cultivated role as a national political operator, Emanuel filled his schedule with trips around the country and overseas, attending conferences, making deals, raising campaign money and dispensing advice.

Emanuel took 10 out-of-town trips in as many weeks following Trump’s election, according to a Chicago Sun-Times review of his daily schedules.

The mayor held meetings and hit parties with Obama administration officials in Washington, D.C. He met with Trump in New York, attended an international climate conference in Mexico City, spoke at a gathering of Democratic Party activists in Miami, and traveled to a fund-raiser at the Austin, Texas, home of one of the promoters of the Lollapalooza music festival.

The flurry of travel — paid for through a “mixture” of taxpayers’ money, campaign cash and private funding, according to City Hall — coincided with a stepped-up campaign fund-raising effort. His political committees took in $1.4 million during the second half of 2016 — nearly three times the $500,000 raised in the same period a year earlier, campaign-finance records show.

Even as he appeared more often on the national stage, the mayor scheduled fewer public appearances in Chicago’s African-American communities, his schedules show — another stark contrast to the year before.

In November 2015, the court-ordered release of the Laquan McDonald police shooting video triggered outrage and calls for Emanuel to resign. He was seen as politically untouchable even by longtime allies like Hillary Clinton.

So he went on an outreach tour of black neighborhoods, responding to the fallout of the McDonald video’s release with promises of reforms. Aside from a family vacation — which he cut short after another police-involved shooting — Emanuel didn’t travel for months, records show.

In December 2015, Emanuel stopped at five black churches and scheduled time for eight community events, including trips to restaurants with South Side and West Side aldermen.

Compare that to December 2016, when he had one black church on his calendar — a Dec. 2 visit to a breakfast at the House of Hope, the large South Side church led by the Rev. James Meeks, chairman of the Illinois State Board of Education. Emanuel didn’t schedule any community meals or meetings that month.

Asked about Emanuel’s recent travel, City Hall spokesman Adam Collins says: “The mayor keeps a packed schedule, as you’ve seen, and works relentlessly on the key issues facing our city. While some of that work takes him to D.C. or New York, the overwhelming majority of his time and energy is spent the way it was this week — meeting with community leaders in Pilsen, going to Englewood to focus on economic development, bringing jobs to the West Side and working to improve public safety throughout the city.”

City taxpayers covered $3,733 for the mayor’s airfare and hotels during the 10 trips, according to records provided by the mayor’s office. But the records didn’t show other expenses, including the total travel costs for aides who accompanied the mayor.

Two days after the election, Emanuel flew to Washington, where he met with interior, defense and health and human services officials before attending an unspecified “non-city” event that evening.

The trip was paid for with a “mixture” of funds from city taxpayers and Emanuel’s campaign committees, according to Collins.

Michael Sacks. | Sun-Times files

On Nov. 17, Emanuel led a contingent of 80 aides, civic leaders and political supporters to Rome for the elevation of Archbishop Blase Cupich to cardinal. The trip was paid for by World Business Chicago, a private, not-for-profit economic development agency that’s partly funded by Chicago taxpayers and headed by Michael Sacks, one of the mayor’s closest advisers and biggest campaign contributors. The mayor returned on Nov. 21.

Back in Chicago, Emanuel went to a “non-city” event on Nov. 28 at the headquarters of GCM Grosvenor, an investment firm headed by Sacks.

Two days later, Emanuel headed to Mexico City for a climate summit that included mayors from around the world. World Business Chicago again covered the bill.

The mayor flew to New York City the afternoon of Dec. 6 and the next morning went to Trump Tower for a meeting with the president-elect. Trump unleashed a string of tweets that day, though none mentioned the mayor.

But Emanuel announced he’d delivered a letter signed by a group of mayors urging Trump not to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, launched by President Barack Obama to prevent the deportations of undocumented immigrants who came into the country as kids. Trump later appeared to back down from his promise to nix the program.

While in New York, the mayor also met with representatives of the credit-rating agencies Fitch Ratings and Moody’s Investors Service, as well as with Stephen Ross and Jeff Blau, top executives of Related Companies. The firm has built residential towers in downtown Chicago and is slated to redevelop the Lathrop Homes public housing complex on the North Side. Ross and Blau have given $30,000 apiece to Emanuel’s campaign fund since 2013.

The mayor’s New York trip was paid for with a “mixture” of taxpayer and campaign funds, according to Collins. Emanuel’s schedule shows he was accompanied by Carole Brown, the city’s chief financial officer, David Reifman, the city’s planning and development commissioner, and David Spielfogel, a former top City Hall aide.

After wrapping up in New York, Emanuel took a taxpayer-funded flight back to Washington. There he attended a ceremony for retiring Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and appeared on a Brookings Institution panel, where he critiqued Clinton and other Democrats for focusing too much on social issues during the campaign.

He also had a half-hour meeting with Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. The city later announced it would receive $1 billion in federal funding to rebuild parts of the CTA’s Red Line and Purple Line.

Lance Armstrong. | AP

The mayor returned to Chicago the evening of Dec. 9 but, after a day at home, took a trip to Austin paid for by his campaign fund. His first stop: a mansion owned by former cyclist and exposed doper Lance Armstrong, where the mayor did an hour-long interview for Armstrong’s podcast “The Forward.” Emanuel again advised Democrats to focus on an economic message.

They also discussed a March 2016 email, leaked to WikiLeaks, in which a Clinton ally advised her campaign staff to distance itself “big time” from Emanuel amid the Laquan McDonald fallout.

Emanuel dismissed the critic, saying: “I’m doing things in my public life that she talks about. And that’s what she does: talk.”

Emanuel attended a fund-raiser that afternoon at the Austin home of Charlie and Melanie Jones. Charlie Jones is one of the founders of C3 Presents, promoter of Lollapalooza, the huge festival held at Grant Park every summer.

Over the next couple of weeks, Emanuel’s campaign fund reported $55,950 in contributions from the Joneses, other C3 employees and people with Austin addresses.

Even when he was home, Democrats from throughout the country sought the counsel of Emanuel, who was the chief architect of the 2006 comeback that put the party back in control of Congress during the last term of George W. Bush. On Dec. 19, Emanuel scheduled 30 minutes for a call in his City Hall office with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a favorite of progressives.

The mayor resumed his travel soon after the holidays. On Jan. 6, he went back to Washington for a party celebrating Obama’s tenure. His campaign fund paid for the trip.

Three days later, Ford Motor Company picked up the tab for him to fly to Detroit for a lunch meeting with Mark Fields, the automaker’s president and chief executive. He also participated in a New York Times panel discussion.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel speaks with President Barack Obama during a ceremony at the White House in January at which the Cubs were honored for winning the World Series. | AP

A week after that, Emanuel flew to Washington for the Cubs’ visit to the White House, another meeting with Foxx and a gathering of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Before leaving town on Jan. 17, Emanuel met with Mike Pence, the vice president-elect. Collins says his travel expenses again were covered by a “mixture” of city and campaign money.

Two days later, during inauguration weekend in Washington, Emanuel used campaign funds to fly to Miami for a conference of Democratic campaign supporters and activists. Appearing on a lunchtime panel on Trump’s first 100 days, Emanuel argued in favor of working with the new administration on some issues rather than simply trying to obstruct it, according to The New York Times.

“My attitude is, there will be things that in the interest of the country we’re going to work on, and things we’re not because it’s not in the best interest,” Emanuel said.

READ MORE:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel fund-raising in Washington, D.C., Thursday

Chicago police Officer Clay T. Walker was accused of punching a 22-year-old woman in the face and pouring a can of Mountain Dew on her while she was handcuffed to a bench inside a police station after being arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol.

That was nearly 14 years ago.

But the case against Walker, a cop with a history of disciplinary problems, still hasn’t been resolved.

It’s one of the Chicago Police Department’s longest ongoing disciplinary cases, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation has found.

It’s also among more than 400 still-unresolved complaints lodged against Chicago cops between 1989 and 2011, during the administration of former Mayor Richard M. Daley, according to a Sun-Times analysis of the 130,905 complaints filed against the city’s cops since 1989.

The police department has closed 126,169 of those cases, half of them within 195 days, the Sun-Times found. Some were closed the same day they were opened. Others have slogged on for years — as long as 4,294 days — before being closed.

Chicago’s system for disciplining police officers has been under fire for years. In January, the Justice Department added its own criticism. In a 161-page report examining problems in the police department, spurred by public outrage over the Laquan McDonald police shooting, the federal agency said it found that cases often take years to resolve because of the multi-level bureaucracy for disciplining cops.

Some cases drag on because the police department is awaiting the results of a criminal investigation. But even seemingly uncomplicated cases not involving outside authorities can go on for years without some resolution.

Consider Walker. It took city officials three years to decide his punishment for punching the woman in May 2003, ordering him to serve a 15-day suspension.

Walker, 49, has yet to serve his suspension despite a letter city officials wrote the woman more than a decade ago to inform her the police superintendent had agreed to discipline the cop who hit her in the face.

By the time of the letter, Walker had taken disability leave because of back pain.

When Walker returned to work five years later, the department still didn’t make him serve the suspension. And he would continue to avoid punishment even as the police opened 11 more internal disciplinary investigations against him for various infractions.

One case involved Walker exposing himself to other officers at roll call, city records show.

Another involved a drunken dispute with a neighbor that ended with Walker naked in a jail cell, leading him to file a police brutality lawsuit against the city, records show.

In the summer of 2015, city officials finally decided it was time for Walker to serve his suspension for punching the 22-year-old woman.

Then, Walker filed a grievance over the punishment, as permitted under the police union contract. Until that’s resolved, he can’t be forced to serve the suspension. His case has yet to be assigned to an arbitrator.

Meanwhile, Walker went back on disability in March 2016 — two months after a random drug test found he was using the narcotic oxycodone without a prescription, according to disciplinary charges Supt. Eddie Johnson filed in January, asking the independent Chicago Police Board to fire Walker.

Johnson’s filing came a month after a Sun-Times reporter asked to review the disciplinary case against Walker over punching the woman.

“It undermines the integrity of the accountability system to have cases . . . languish indefinitely,” says Lori Lightfoot, president of the Chicago Police Board. | Sun-Times file photo

“It undermines the integrity of the accountability system to have cases … languish indefinitely,” says Lori Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor appointed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel as president of the Chicago Police Board, which will decide whether Walker should be fired. She’s also co-chairman of the mayor’s Police Accountability Task Force.

Dean Angelo Sr., a Chicago cop who’s president of the city’s largest police union, says: “In this situation, you have a guy who has been investigated, the allegations have been sustained, and the department still doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do.

“When you don’t discipline in a timely manner, the behaviors continue,” says Dean Angelo Sr., president of the Fraternal Order of Police Chicago Lodge No. 7. | Rich Hein / Sun-Times

“Discipline is designed to adjust behaviors so you don’t repeat those behaviors. When you don’t discipline in a timely manner, the behaviors continue.”

The Justice Department report, issued in the waning days of President Barack Obama’s administration, blamed the city’s bureaucracy for dealing with these cases for the long delays.

“Having individuals at all levels weigh in on disciplinary recommendations, and even send cases back for more investigation, creates needless opportunity to undermine accountability,” the report said. “The city’s current process thus leaves both victims and officers unclear how, when, or if any officer will be held accountable for misconduct the officer committed, sometimes for years after a finding has been sustained.”

Some delays occur while an investigation is still with the police Bureau of Internal Affairs or the city’s Independent Police Review Authority, the Justice Department found.

But beyond that, its report said, “Once an investigative finding is made, the additional layers of review by the [police command channel review process], superintendent or police board can result in years of additional delay from the time when an allegation is sustained until discipline is actually imposed and served.”

Emanuel is hoping President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions will agree to seek a federal court order to enforce the reforms the report laid out for the police department. But the mayor has said he will make reforms with or without the Trump administration.

Asked about Walker, police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi would say only that Johnson is taking steps to improve police discipline, pushing for a hotline that will accept anonymous complaints against cops, trying to create “an early intervention system to identify warning signs of problem behavior” and outlining specific penalties for rule violations.

Terry Hillard was police superintendent when the Chicago Police Department began disciplinary proceedings against Officer Clay T. Walker in 2003. The case still isn’t over. | Sun-Times file photo

City officials declined to discuss outstanding complaints against Walker and other cops whose cases began under the police department’s previous regimes. The Walker case began under Supt. Terry Hillard and has dragged on under superintendents Phil Cline, Jody Weis, Garry McCarthy and now Johnson.

One city official says “it’s totally ridiculous” Walker has avoided serving his punishment for punching a handcuffed woman 14 years ago.

The woman, who asked not to be identified, declined to discuss the case.

Walker has amassed 26 disciplinary complaints during his career. Many cops have more. The data show that about a quarter of the officers in the police department haven’t faced a single complaint.

Walker had four complaints on his record when he was accused of hitting the woman. He has received 21 more since that incident, according to Internal Affairs records. Nineteen of his cases were dismissed. He served suspensions in four others. Three others remain pending.

In an hour-long interview, Walker says he never punched or hit the woman despite numerous police reports that say he did. How has he managed to avoid serving the suspension?

“I don’t know how to answer that,” says Walker, a Chicago cop since 1998, who says he didn’t know Johnson wants to fire him. “They’re dragging out coming to a decision on punishments they dole out. And I go on disability before they can get me. They take a long time. They haven’t resolved it because they have bad recordkeeping, laziness. My case gets moved to the back because they have something else they have to take care of.”

Contributing: Data Reporting Lab editor Darnell Little

How case against cop has dragged on

Officer Clay T. Walker pulled over a 22-year-old woman after she left this gas station at Elston and North avenues just east of the Kennedy Expressway.

May 6, 2003 — It was 1:30 in the morning when a 22-year-old woman left a gas station at Elston and North avenues after a fill-up and was pulled over by a Chicago cop, Officer Clay T. Walker, who told her that her license plates were suspended. After she admitted having a couple of beers earlier that night, according to police reports. a female cop showed up to search the woman, who was then handcuffed and taken by Walker to the Shakespeare District police station.

Her SUV was impounded, and her two passengers had to get a cab.

This is the police interview room where a 22-year-old woman said she was punched by Officer Clay T. Walker while handcuffed to a bench. | Evidence photo

Inside, the woman was handcuffed to a bench in an interview room. She told investigators Walker called her a “stupid-ass little girl” — which he denies — and the two began shouting at each other. She said Walker wouldn’t let her use the bathroom. A female rookie cop, Androniki Velisaris, showed up 20 minutes later to escort the woman to the restroom. Velisaris also got permission from the watch commander to give her a can of Mountain Dew.

When Walker returned, he was angry that the woman had the pop, according to police reports. “You’re my f—— prisoner, no one is allowed to do anything for you,” Walker told her, according to the reports. The woman said Walker grabbed the pop and spilled it on her shirt and pants. Walker said he reached for the pop, but she squeezed the can, spilling it on herself. Walker later said he didn’t want her to have Mountain Dew because it has too much caffeine.

Velisaris told investigators she heard screaming and returned to the interview room, questioning Walker about the spilled pop. “He said, ‘This is my prisoner.’ I said, ‘I did not ask you that. I asked you if you spilled the pop over her.’ Officer Walker did not respond to my question.”

The woman told Velisaris she had been hit in the face by Walker and that he had kicked a garbage can at her while she was handcuffed to the bench. Walker told investigators the woman grabbed his cell phone, dropped it and kicked him when he tried to get it. She said that’s when he punched her.

The woman was given a Breathalyzer test three times but “failed to provide enough air for the machine to register,” police reports say. Walker ticketed her for DUI and four other citations — for driving an uninsured car with expired plates, failure to wear a seatbelt and making an illegal turn or stop. All were dismissed within four months.

Walker also wanted to charge the woman with assaulting a cop, but his supervisor wouldn’t approve that after talking with her.

Another supervisor summoned the Office of Professional Standards, the now-defunct agency that investigated excessive-force complaints. OPS took photos of the woman, showing a “small, circular bruise to her left cheek,” as well as Walker’s right thigh, where he says he was kicked.

Oct. 20, 2003 — OPS found that Walker hit the woman and spilled pop on her. The case was turned over the police department.

Nov. 13, 2003 — The woman sued the city of Chicago.

April 26, 2004 — While at roll call in the Grand Central police station on West Grand, Walker unzipped his pants and exposed his penis after telling other officers, according to police reports: “I’m in a good mood today because I just had sex before I came to work.”

That resulted in another complaint against Walker and also against Sgt. Charles Halpern because he “failed to file a complaint in a timely fashion” against the officer. Walker said he exposed himself on a dare from Halpern, who Walker said asked the other cops to comment on the size of his penis. Halpern denied that but got a one-day suspension. Walker got a 20-day suspension — but it took nine years until the case was closed, in March 2013.

Sept. 1, 2004 — City Hall settled the lawsuit over the punch, paying the woman $50,000 without admitting Walker hit her.

Oct. 29, 2004 — Walker went on disability, saying he hurt his back years earlier while making two arrests but had never reported the injuries. He said the injuries were duty-related, entitling him to disability payments equal to his 75 percent pay, but he got 50 percent of his salary because officials said there was no proof he was hurt on duty. Walker sued but lost and also lost on appeal.

June 24, 2005 — CPD’s command channel review — a panel of supervisors — concluded Walker had punched the handcuffed woman.

March 10, 2006 — While on disability, Walker got his 13th disciplinary complaint — over an argument at the police station in Maywood, where he had accompanied a relative bringing her daughter to the girl’s father. The complaint, filed by a Maywood police sergeant, took eight years to resolve, with Walker getting a 25-day suspension.

Tisa Morris, right, was administrator of the Office of Professional Standards when she wrote a letter in 2006 saying, “The superintendent of police has imposed disciplinary action” against Officer Clay T. Walker for punching a woman three years earlier. But Walker still hasn’t served the suspension. | Sun-Times file photo

April 20, 2006 — OPS administrator Tisa Morris wrote a letter to the woman who got punched, saying, “We have proven that the misconduct on the part of the department member(s) has been proven. We have, therefore, classified that complaint register as sustained. The superintendent of police has imposed disciplinary action against the accused member(s).”

The letter didn’t inform the woman Walker was on disability leave and couldn’t be disciplined until returning to work.

Oct. 14, 2009 — Walker returned to duty after collecting $162,447 in disability pay.

Officer Clay T. Walker was handcuffed and locked up at the Jefferson Park police station following a dispute with his neighbor in 2011. | Public Building Commission of Chicago

March 18, 2011 — Walker was arrested following a drunken dispute with a neighbor at his Northwest Side home. He had tried to remove the neighbor’s downspout, police reports say.

Walker was handcuffed and locked up at the Jefferson Park police station, where he threatened to hang himself. After officers took most of his clothes, Walker threw his underwear out of the cell, according to reports that say he was given a paper suit that he also threatened to use to hang himself. One officer said of Walker: “Very aggressive, very hostile. Yelling, screaming, violent. He was slamming his face and head into the glass and walls of the cell. Lots of profanity.”

Walker eventually got a 30-day suspension for being intoxicated off-duty.

March 18, 2013 — Walker and his wife sued the city of Chicago, saying several officers beat him while he was locked up. He dropped the suit in April 2014 as the department was preparing to close four of his disciplinary cases, including the episodes involving exposing himself and the drunken argument with his neighbor.

July 2, 2015 — The Independent Police Review Authority — which had replaced OPS eight years earlier as part of Mayor Richard M. Daley’s effort to improve oversight of police officers — sent a letter to Walker’s supervisors, saying the agency was “recently notified” Walker had returned to duty. IPRA asked Walker’s supervisors to have him to sign “Request for Review of Discipline” forms regarding the 2003 punch.

July 16, 2015 — Walker filed a grievance over the suspension he was issued for hitting the woman. The case is still pending.

“When I got back from disability, they ignored it for five years,” he says. “Then, they came at me. At what point is that not fair to me?

“They have to do this in a timely manner. You can’t wait years and years and say, all of a sudden, ‘We want to punish you for something that happened 12 years ago.’ Of course, I’m going to grieve.”`

Jan. 26, 2016 — Walker failed a random drug test, testing positive for the narcotic painkiller oxycodone without a prescription. The police department filed another complaint — Walker’s 26th.

March 14, 2016 — Walker went back on disability.

Supt. Eddie Johnson moved to fire Officer Clay T. Walker in January. Walker says: “It’s probably not going to go anywhere, like everything else.” | AP

Dec. 16, 2016 — The Sun-Times asked to review the outstanding complaint filed against Walker in the 2003 case. The police refused, saying its case remained open. The Sun-Times later obtained 181 pages of documents on the case from IPRA, which had wrapped up its investigation years ago.

Jan. 11, 2017 — Supt. Eddie Johnson moved to fire Walker, saying he’d ignored orders to provide investigators with a statement regarding his failed drug test.

“It’s probably not going to go anywhere, like everything else,” Walker says. “If they want to try to terminate me, it’s going to cost them a lot of money. And I’m going to win anyway.”