The former administrator of the city’s Independent Police Review Authority says when he was ousted from his job by Mayor Emanuel he was told the city couldn’t have a white male in his position.
The revelation came in a sworn deposition in the case of another former IPRA employee, investigator Lorenzo Davis, who says he was fired because he refused to change his findings in controversial police shooting cases.
During testimony at the Daley Center, former IPRA administrator Scott Ando said Davis’s 2015 firing had been in the works for a year, because he “cherry picked” facts, and was insubordinate.
“He had an agenda,” Ando said on the witness stand Thursday. “I had no faith in his ability to be unbiased and fair.”
Ando was asked about an email he wrote to the mayor’s press secretary in the summer of 2015, where he said, “I’m glad I waited intentionally until after the election to fire him.”
“You intentionally waited until after the election to fire him?” he was asked.
“Correct,” Ando said, explaining that he had been in attendance at a mayoral cabinet meeting before the election, where it was made clear that department heads shouldn’t be making waves.
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“The mayor walked in and said, I better not get any surprises from any of you,” Ando recalled. “I was a political appointee---you don’t want to be the person who creates any controversy.”
Later that year, a few months after he fired Davis, Ando would be forced out at IPRA by Mayor Emanuel.
“It has become clear that new leadership is required as we rededicate ourselves to dramatically improving our system of police accountability,” the mayor said at the time. But in a sworn deposition in the Davis case, Ando specifically recalled what he was told the day he was asked to resign.
“I never spoke to the mayor at all,” he said. “They said we can’t have a middle-aged white male from law enforcement running the oversight agency.”
Ando said that declaration came from mayoral chief of staff Eileen Mitchell.
“At that point I just said, you know what, that is so wrong for you to even say that, and it’s offensive and I’ll resign,” he said. “I don’t want to work here. I don’t want to work for you people any more.”
In court Thursday, Davis’s attorney Torreya Hamilton established that he had received favorable performance reviews in past years, and that he had actually sided with police officers’ versions of events in over 87% of the cases his team investigated.
Ando was the last witness presented before city attorneys rested their case.
