Will Chicago Act on Verdict in Cop Beating Trial?

Chicago Bartender Beating: City Ordered to Pay $850,000

Cops should not be allowed to eat their cake and have it, even if they pose a nuisance. A victory well served ill say......smiles.

Question is- Will the city act?

That's the question many Chicagoans will be asking Wednesday, a day after the dramatic conclusion of a civil trial that stemmed from a notorious 2007 beating of a female bartender by off-duty police officer Anthony Abbate. A video recording of the attack later went viral worldwide.

Jurors came back with a verdict Tuesday and gave voice to what has been whispered for years: That at least some Chicago police adhere to a code of silence to protect their fellow officers. And while the city all but promised an appeal of the verdict, Mayor Rahm Emanuel also suggested that anyone in the Police Department perpetuating a code of silence would face consequences.

The attorney for bartender Karolina Obrycka — whom the jury also awarded $850,000 in damages — described the verdict as a landmark, precedent-setting decision that proved the code of silence existed "at every level of the Chicago Police Department."

Now, Terry Ekl said, the onus is on Emanuel to end the culture of protection and silence.
"The question now becomes, 'What are they going to do about it?'" he said. "If there's going to be change, it has to come from the mayor's office."

 
Ex-Chicago Police Officer caught on camera during Bartender Beating.


After the verdict, Emanuel's spokeswoman, Sarah Hamilton said in a statement that the mayor is confident that the police superintendent he selected, Garry McCarthy, and his leadership team, "would not approve of, let alone participate in a code of silence." But, she added, "to the extent there are members of the department who have a different view, the mayor is confident that McCarthy and his team will deal with that."
The city's law department, at the same time, issued a statement that the city strongly disagreed with the verdict and all but promised an appeal.

The jury's decision Tuesday is another blow to a department that for decades has struggled to overcome a reputation for brutality and a willingness to cover up the mistakes and even outright lawlessness of its officers.
This civil trial at a federal court in Chicago was unusual. It was the first of its kind to focus almost wholly on the question of whether there is an ingrained code of silence — with most of the 2½ weeks of testimony devoted to that question.

In the end, jurors not only found that other officers and Abbate's superiors tried to cover up the attack at Jesse's Short Stop Inn, but they concluded that Abbate's knowledge of his fellow officers' willingness to cover him created an environment that led to the attack on Obrycka.

The surveillance video — which showed the drunk, hulking Abbate pushing Obrycka to the ground behind the bar, then repeatedly punching and kicking her — became a major embarrassment for Chicago police. Amid accusations that police dithered in the weeks after the beating, then-Superintendent Phil Cline retired and the department vowed to clean up its image.

Abbate was convicted of aggravated battery in 2009 and sentenced to probation. At the civil trial, Obrycka asked jurors to hold Abbate and the city liable for damages to compensate her for any pain or distress she suffered. And the core issue they had to decide was not whether Abbate beat her, but whether the police culture emboldened him and led him to act with impunity in attacking her.

During the civil trial, Obrycka's attorneys alleged that police sought to downplay and cover up the beating, in part out of an ingrained but shadowy culture among police of protecting their own.