Oct. 29, 2021
Updated Nov. 17, 2021
Later in 2017, while he was assigned to Hubbard High School on the city's Southwest Side, Catanzara posted a photo of himself on social media, holding an American flag and a sign that read, “I stand for the anthem. I love the American flag. I support my president and the 2nd Amendment.” He was reprimanded for violating department rules that prohibit officers from making political statements while on duty, according to ProPublica, and removed from public view the initial flag post and nearly all posts before then.
The head of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police turns heads. The current one, John Catanzara, manages to attract attention and frame debates as if no one’s been watching him or his predecessors for years.
With the sly calculation of a Trump, Catanzara has turned law enforcement’s entrenched structural aggression on Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot. His banner of choice is freedom. Freedom to not vaccinate against a pandemic that only two weeks ago claimed the life of Dean Angelo, Sr., after succumbing to pneumonia complications from COVID-19, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office.
Angelo had also served as FOP president. Angelo’s tour of service included the period in 2014 when Black teenager Laquan McDonald was shot 16 times and killed by white police officer Jason Van Dyke.
Freedom for police to not vaccinate when the department has the lowest vaccination response rate by far
of any city department, according to city data (see chart above).
of any city department, according to city data (see chart above).
Catanzara has headed the FOP since May 2020. In only a year and a half, he’s invoked freedom to defend those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 and freedom to express frustration that the presidential election was stolen. He told WBEZ the day after the insurrection that there was no violence. What happened was an inconvenience and media hyperbole. “Never for the rest of my life will you ever convince me,” he declared, that that many people voted for Joe Biden.
Freedom is what is taken away, he said, when people are forced to vaccinate against a virus, just like people in Nazi Germany were told they wouldn’t be hurt by being forced into showers. He apologized for speaking off the cuff and mentioning showers.
He has invoked the freedom to apologize for his Jan. 6 observations too, posting a message on the union’s Facebook page.
Catanzara doesn’t throw around apologies lightly or often. He seems to prefer the comfort of the wiggle room.
In Jan. 2017, Catanzara wrote on Facebook of Muslims: “Savages they all deserve a bullet.” He’s said he wasn’t referring to Muslims. That fulmination surfaced in Dec. 2020, only months after Chicago’s rank and file police elected him their FOP president. It took only that long for the police department to consider if he should be terminated as a cop for multiple inflammatory social media musings he’d posted over the years.
Later in 2017, while he was assigned to Hubbard High School on the city's Southwest Side, Catanzara posted a photo of himself on social media, holding an American flag and a sign that read, “I stand for the anthem. I love the American flag. I support my president and the 2nd Amendment.” He was reprimanded for violating department rules that prohibit officers from making political statements while on duty, according to ProPublica, and removed from public view the initial flag post and nearly all posts before then.
This past February, Catanzara was suspended for a month without pay from the police department for authoring the obscene and inflammatory social media posts, and for filing false police reports. The suspension is an intriguing nuance since his salary as head of the FOP is paid by the union. Catanzara makes $96,060 in base pay as a police officer, according to Block Club Chicago, for which the union reimburses the department since he works for the FOP full-time. In 2018, two years before being elected to head the FOP, Catanzara grossed $115, 686 as an officer.
The head of the FOP speaks for the city’s 12,000 sworn police officers and thousands of retirees. It is particularly scary for Chicago residents that Catanzara was elected in a runoff election with 55% of the police vote. Among his credentials were that over his 25 years on the force, 50 complaints were lodged against him. He was punished for nine, resulting in seven suspensions, according to a 2020 story in Chicago Magazine.
How we the people and we in the media allow truly malignant public officials to seize political bully pulpits with impunity is a puzzle worth solving. Mainstream journalism can only do so much to muzzle a rabid dog who represents a few thousand constituents wearing uniforms and badges.
Police unions, at their best, have emerged as "one of the most significant roadblocks to change,"
as The New York Times put it. “The greater the political pressure for reform, the more defiant the unions often are in resisting it — with few city officials, including liberal leaders, able to overcome their opposition.”
With the Fraternal Order of Police as the voice of law enforcement and Catanzara as their mouthpiece, communities are left to fear, not trust, those who are to serve and protect them.
Maybe one way out is to recognize strategically that the FOP is, after all, a labor union (though it began in 1963 as the United Chicago Police Association, open to management as well as to the rank and file).
Recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that during the pandemic-drained year of 2020, the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions (the union membership rate) rose modestly from the year before to 10.8%. More than 14 million workers were unionized last year. Within the public sector, the union membership rate was highest in local government (41.7%), which employs many workers in heavily unionized occupations, such as police officers.
So far this year, the labor movement seems to be experiencing a resurgence. In a story this week, Bloomberg Law depicted today as “a moment with the flavor of 1945” and the specter of strikes by what we now call “essential workers.” The parallels are bottled up grievances (during World War II and during covid) being unleashed, and workers having renewed leverage to strike and demand higher wages. “To recapture that sort of leverage,” the story ventured that “U.S. labor will need a movement that mobilizes enough people to force reforms.”
It is worth musing on what might meld a labor movement now. Might it isolate public sector workers from private sector workers or in other ways divide workers to go after pieces of the same pies, or might sparks emerge from common goals? Are police unions integral to, or anathema to, a labor movement?
If the FOP looks like a union, bargains like a union, but squawks like bullies, is it a movement duck? Or is it an antagonist to a resurgent labor movement?
We might take a page out of the Minnesota playbook. In the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s murder there in May 2020, the affiliated unions of the Minnesota AFL- CIO banded together to call for the immediate resignation of Bob Kroll, the head of Minneapolis’ police union.
The statement read, with hyperlinks included, “Bob Kroll has a long history of bigoted remarks and complaints of violence made against him. As union President, he antagonizes and disparages members of the Black community. He advocates for military-style police tactics making communities less safe and the police force more deadly. Despite his conduct, Kroll was reelected with an overwhelming majority. If Bob Kroll does not value the lives that he is sworn to protect, then we can only expect more death under his leadership.”
Sound familiar?
The statement concluded: “The Labor Movement is rooted in the fight for justice. Bob Kroll’s actions and the ongoing lack of accountability in the Minneapolis Police union are not just. Bob Kroll must resign, and the Minneapolis Police Union must be overhauled. Unions must never be a tool to shield perpetrators from justice.”
The statement also noted: “The Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis is not, nor has it ever been a member of the Minnesota AFL-CIO.”
Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7 is the nation’s largest local FOP chapter, according to In These Times, and not among the 300 affiliated unions member of the Chicago Federation of Labor, the umbrella organization for Chicago and Cook County’s labor unions.
Injustice Watch, the nonpartisan, nonprofit journalism outlet that does in-depth research exposing institutional failures that obstruct justice and equality, recently published a well-documented timeline of Chicago FOP presidents’ turbulent relationship with race and police reform.
Keeping Chicago safe from the vestiges of a virus that calls for communal solidarity also calls for the FOP to become toothless and caged.
It is up to us, the public and the news media, to defang the police, and it’s up to the labor movement to disavow the FOP.
Update Nov. 17, 2021:
Catanzara used the police disciplinary case against him to make a public announcement on Nov. 15:
He is retiring from the police department, continuing as FOP president and planning to run for Chicago Mayor in 2023.
What that means is since he’ll no longer be a cop, the disciplinary action against him is officially dropped. He can continue as the official voice of the FOP. Though he will no longer receive pay as a cop, he will be paid as head of the FOP and he will receive his police pension. And once he forms a political campaign committee for mayor, Catanzara will reclaim a bully pulpit fueled by fundraising dollars.
Clever as a Trump.
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