CITY HALL — About 80 Chicago Police officers are on disciplinary desk duty right now, waiting for investigations to play out, but that number's actually down from previous years, according to the Police Department.
Robert Klimas, Internal Affairs commander, told the City Council recently that about 80 officers are on administrative duty, pending investigations. The time an officer can be on administrative duty, he said, ranges from 30 days to years, with the longest current open cases going back almost a decade, to 2006.
"There are multiple reasons why people could be on desk duty," police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said. "It could be medical, it could be disciplinary."
According to Guglielmi, "The internal term is 'stripped.' Their police powers have been stripped. It's arrest powers, their ability to serve as a police officer — to arrest."
Discounting medical-related administrative assignments, disciplinary desk duty, Klimas said, relates to an open investigation of an officer in which he or she is stripped of those police powers until a decision is made. The investigation can be federal or local or in the hands of the Independent Police Review Authority or the Police Department's own Internal Affairs division.
According to Guglielmi, Internal Affairs handles few of the more serious disciplinary cases.
"We don't own the excessive-use-of-force investigations, and the more serious allegations against police," he said. "Those are all IPRA [Independent Police Review Authority]."
IPRA spokesman Larry Merritt confirmed that, saying the agency handles charges of excessive force or domestic violence, adding that all incidents in which an officer fires a gun or a stun gun are referred to IPRA, although those shootings don't necessarily result in a desk duty assignment.
But Mayor Rahm Emanuel last week announced plans to require any officer involved in a police shooting to serve 30 days on desk duty.
"It depends on the circumstances," Merritt said. "Each case is different."
Merritt emphasized that the department's Internal Affairs division also can assign an officer to desk duty for lesser offenses.
Still, as recently noticed in the case of Officer Jason Van Dyke, charged with murder in the shooting of Laquan McDonald, those investigations can be knotted and gnarly, with tangled jurisdictions and a willingness to let others take the lead until action is required.
"In a lot of cases, you have multiple investigative bodies looking at them," Guglielmi said.
Van Dyke is currently suspended without pay, according to Guglielmi, as is former Chicago Police Cmdr. Glenn Evans, even though he was found not guilty of excessive force in a recent court case.
The legal tangles of such cases can be extreme. Klimas said that the oldest open cases date from a 2006 incident in which some officers were charged, but others implicated never were — nor were they exonerated. So they remain on desk duty nine years later.
Even so, the number of officers on desk duty is down, according to Guglielmi, from the low to mid-100s in years past to the current 80.
Even as Mayor Rahm Emanuel was replacing IPRA Chief Administrator Scott Ando with Sharon Fairley last month, he was crediting Ando with winnowing an administrative backlog.
According to the Mayor's Press Office, under Ando the number of IPRA cases that were open three years or longer went from a high of 325 in 2010 to 32 a year ago and now 26. IPRA investigators closed 73 percent of the complaints registered last year within six months.
"There were different programs put together to close cases," Merritt said. "The focus in the beginning was on the quality of the investigations. Once the quality was established, then it was looking at the timeliness of the investigations."
Merritt added that there were 2,147 open investigations in 2012, but that number was cut to 672 by the end of third quarter of this year and was now under 600 — thus the reduced number of officers on desk duty.
Guglielmi said officers aren't put in a single detention unit, but are deployed wherever they might serve best.
"It really varies," he said. "It's anything that doesn't require arrest powers. It could be a telephone recording unit," taking down reports over the phone on "low-level crimes," or "they can be put in an administrative unit," such as one dealing with Freedom of Information Act requests or Police Department finances.
"They can also do administrative tasks in their own unit," Guglielmi added, "paperwork and things like that."
Guglielmi said he didn't regard desk duty as a stigma.
"Technically, my people who work in News Affairs are on desk duty, because they work in an administrative assignment," he said. "It just happens to be where they work."
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