We invest a great deal of trust in the police.
We pay their salaries, give them guns and, for the most part, respect their authority because we know their hard work helps keep us safe.
So when police violate this trust and abuse their power — as two Evanston Police Department officers are accused of doing — their leaders must act swiftly to make sure such abuses never are repeated.
The two EPD officers, Gus Horemis and Michael Yorty, were charged Tuesday with several crimes in connection with the beating of Sayyid Qadri, a Chicago man who was arrested in March for driving with an expired license.
A lawsuit Qadri filed earlier this month claims the officers beat him in a bathroom stall at the police station, then falsely claimed Qadri resisted arrest to explain his injuries.
Chief Frank Kaminski of EPD took the first step toward addressing this embarrassment to his department by strongly condemning the officers’ actions. He said the pair “have disgraced their oath of office and their badge.”
Kaminski’s words are a welcome change from the usual police habit of deflecting blame and covering up for one another. Our surprise at his quick response is mostly a sign of our lack of faith in how police usually handle these situations.
Kaminski did the right thing, but he hardly deserves an award. And he has much more work to do.
When two officers — one of them a 12-year veteran of the force — are charged with beating up a suspect and inventing a story to cover it up, it’s worth asking if there aren’t more deeply rooted problems at play.
This is not to say that police brutality is a common problem at EPD. We have no evidence to support that claim.
But even one case of police brutality is too many, and there are a number of factors in this incident that should trigger a series of questions about how the department conducts business.
For example, surveillance footage from the station shows other people near Qadri and the officers before and after the alleged beating. These bystanders may not have been indicted by a grand jury, but could they have acted to prevent the incident from occurring?
Also, assuming the charges are true, why would a 12-year veteran such as Horemis — who presumably had dealt with difficult suspects before and had received thorough training — resort to force? How can an individual capable of such brutality last 12 years at EPD? Was he the right person to be working with an inexperienced probationary officer like Yorty?
It may turn out that this was simply a case of two officers who snapped and made a monumentally heinous decision.
Maybe there are no structural problems at EPD, and the risk of this happening again is almost nonexistent.
But the stakes are too high for Kaminski to assume this is the case. Only a rigorous examination of the circumstances surrounding this incident will convince Evanston residents that if they are arrested, they will be given due process and treated with respect.
Without an in-depth investigation, how can we trust that the police will not abuse their power? And without that trust from us, how can the police continue their all-important job of making sure our community is as safe as possible?
