ROGERS PARK — A community policing volunteer drew the ire of some Rogers Park residents by emailing them his thoughts on last month's raucous protest that shut down a police task force meeting, including calling protesters "self-centered egoists."
On Tuesday night, some residents who got Patrick Kenny's email came out to a different meeting to complain. And Kenny stood by his email, calling last month's protesters "goofs" who "danced around, and screamed, and chanted, and went into their rituals."
Kenny is a Rogers Park resident who volunteers as a liaison between the police and community as part of the Chicago Police Department's community policing initiative known as CAPS. He sent the email to about 40 people who had signed up for his email list.
He argued that protesters who interrupted Mayor Rahm Emanuel's Feb. 25 Police Accountability Task Force meeting in Rogers Park — forcing it to be shut down early — were not respectful.
In the email Kenny said his personal reaction was "disgust," and called the protesters "self-centered egoists." He said a speaker who addressed the panel of police experts "harangued" the panel with "nonsense."
"The speaker's diatribe was shouted at the panel," Kenny wrote. "The speaker's puppets shouted their chants on cue ... They always seem to know where the TV cameras are."
The main message of last month's protest was that the five-member task force, appointed by Mayor Emanuel in December after the release of the Laquan McDonald video, was a "P.R. stunt" that would ultimately ignore the wishes of everyday citizens in favor of police and politicians.
On Tuesday night, Megan Selby, an educator who teaches students about healthy relationships, said she came to a community policing meeting after reading Kenny's email. She said she was "concerned" the letter "painted the demonstrators in a negative light when bringing attention to real concerns."
Kenny, whose email made clear it did not represent the police department, said he stood by his letter and believed it was unfair the demonstrators did not allow everyone at the task force meeting to speak.
"Oh, you and your liberal stuff," he said as he dismissed Selby.
Kenny called the demonstrators "goofs" who "destroyed the meeting."
"They destroyed the meeting," Kenny said Tuesday night. "If they are goofs, they are a problem in the community and I'm going to call them goofs."
Kenny described the demonstrators as having "danced around, and screamed, and chanted, and went into their rituals."
"And I accuse them of perversion because of that," Kenny said.
Selby said she felt Kenny was belittling the demonstrators and their concerns by calling them names, and questioned his position as someone who facilitates communication between police and residents.
"It concerns me that you would use belittling remarks about people in the community," she said.
Officer Mike Stachula, also at Tuesday's meeting, said police were out in the community "doing the best we can" and said Kenny was a passionate citizen volunteer who cared about the community.
Selby said in addition to the community crime statistics given to residents at safety meetings, she wanted to see information on police misconduct in certain beats as well.
"It concerns me that systematic issues impacting our city are not being discussed at these meetings," Selby said. "That fact that police don't have to report that data to the community, that's problematic."
Stachula said that information was available to her, but through a Freedom of Information Act request to officials at police headquarters,.
Community safety meetings were not the place to discuss concerns over police misconduct, Stachula said.
"That's above my pay grade," he said.
Some other residents in attendance agreed, saying it's inappropriate to make sweeping generalizations about police misconduct, including racial profiling in the neighborhood, without "hard facts" to back it up.
"We don't know the whole story," some residents said.
Selby and others said it was because of the type of language Kenny used to describe demonstrators, many of whom were people of color, that relationships between certain populations and police continue to be strained.
After Selby pointed out the majority of attendees at Tuesday night's meeting were white, Kenny and Stachula suggested more people should get to know their local police officers and more people should come to safety meetings if they want relations to improve.
Selby said she invited a youth group to the meeting (which was held at the Rogers Park Police District headquarters) that consisted primarily of students of color, but they declined, saying the police station was a "scary place."
"The whole point of CAPS is to strengthen community relationships," Selby said. "CAPS should be sensitive to any perception of injustice in the city."
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