Officer Bob

So the word is the Amnesty International has got its undies in a bundle over de Chicago Police. They’re sayin’ that Chicago cops have a record of brutality and dat they’re considering protesting the International Oympic Committee about it.

Normally, their opinion would matter about as much as, well, ordinary Chicagoans’ opinions about the cops - little to none, thank you very much. But since the great City Dat Works is looking to host the 2016 games, and dat’s a lotta scratch thinking about coming to town, well, we’re all gonna pretend we care about brutality for a few months til’ this blows over.

Using Chicago’s Olympic bid as a pressure point and the alleged 2006 harassment of a gay man as evidence, Amnesty International turned up the heat on Mayor Daley today to fix, what it called the city’s “flawed approach” to investigating police brutality.

At a news conference outside the mayor’s office, civil rights activists reiterated arguments they made last summer, when the City Council approved Daley’s plan to sever the Office of Professional Standards from the Police Department.

They argued that the landmark ordinance is undermined by a union contract tailor-made to protect rogue officers.

The contract bars the agency now known as the Independent Police Review Authority from investigating anonymous complaints about “anything short of criminal conduct”—even though many victims “fear retaliation” from police—and limits the use of past complaints needed to establish a “pattern of conduct, said Wendy Park, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union.