One of Chicago’s newest police sergeants had been deemed “unfit to serve” after an investigation uncovered evidence that he created a fake Facebook account and spread a nude photo of a woman he was sexually involved with, then lied to investigators about it.
Another new sergeant had been found to have engaged in conduct that “seriously undermines public faith, credibility, and trust in the Department” after he was accused of sexual assault and domestic violence.
The conclusions were made by independent investigators from the Civilian Office of Police Accountability. COPA recommended firing both. The first officer ultimately negotiated a one-year suspension and was assigned to supervise officers downtown and in the West Loop. The second officer’s case is still pending; he was assigned to supervise officers patrolling neighborhoods on the city’s South Side.
The officers’ promotions this spring were not due to an oversight. Department officials knew about their disciplinary records, but those records could not be considered as the department evaluated their fitness for promotion.
The main qualifying factor was their test scores from a two-part exam.
That Chicago police officers can rise in the ranks in spite of significant problems in their records reflects a decadeslong failing that the Chicago Police Department has been repeatedly called on to fix, an investigation by the Invisible Institute and ProPublica found.
Chicago’s system of promotions remains out of step with other big cities. Police departments in New York City and Los Angeles consider disciplinary records before promoting officers, seeing their past actions as a critical factor in determining if they’re fit to supervise others. A survey conducted for the CPD of more than a dozen major departments found that only one did not consider discipline in promotions.
In New Orleans, the police department created a promotions policy that considers an officer’s disciplinary history after it fell under a federal consent decree stemming from decades of corruption and misconduct. The department took nearly four years to create and launch its new policy.
Chicago is nearly seven years into a state consent decree that is intended in part to address issues with the department’s promotions system. Between November 2023 and this April, the city has paid a consulting firm at least $430,000 to study personnel policies, including making recommendations on how to incorporate disciplinary histories into the process.
The problem, however, remains unaddressed by the department.
That means officers like Sgt. Ernesto Guzman-Sanchez, accused of distributing a nude photo of a woman he knew, and Sgt. Christopher Lockhart, whom oversight investigators found responsible for acts of domestic violence and sexual assault, can continue to move up the ranks despite their disciplinary records.
In 2020, COPA ruled that Guzman-Sanchez “went to great lengths to conceal” his actions regarding the photo. The officer challenged the proposed firing, and during a Chicago Police Board hearing, his brother claimed responsibility. Department officials said the evidence was inconclusive and negotiated a suspension. Guzman-Sanchez, who has denied the allegations, declined to comment.
COPA recommended in January 2024 that Lockhart be fired following its investigation into allegations of domestic violence and sexual assault. Investigators found evidence of violent incidents, including one in which Lockhart allegedly grabbed his then-girlfriend by the neck and slammed her to the floor, COPA records show.
Lockhart denied the allegations and blamed one incident in which his accuser was bruised on rough consensual sex. The case is still ongoing. Lockhart did not respond to inquiries for this story.
The Chicago Police Department declined to comment for this story. But during an August hearing, CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling said discipline should be considered during the promotions process.
In a statement, Mayor Brandon Johnson said he plans to work with Snelling and prioritize reforming policies.
“We must take a close look at the current promotion policies and make the necessary reforms so that we are promoting the best of our officers to set a strong example,” the mayor said.
Joe Ferguson, who was the city’s inspector general for 12 years, questioned whether there was the political will to enact reform.
“To me, the question really is, why isn’t this elevated as a priority?” said Ferguson, who now heads the Civic Federation, a civic accountability and research organization.
Ferguson, who described sergeants as crucial to modeling good behavior for younger officers, said the competing interests of the city and the Fraternal Order of Police, the union representing rank-and-file officers, may be partly to blame for a lack of progress. The union doesn’t want discipline to derail an officer’s career and for years has made that a central point in its labor negotiations with the city. The union did not respond to questions from the Invisible Institute and ProPublica.
CPD has struggled to identify troubled officers. In May, the two news organizations identified 14 officers who faced multiple sexual misconduct allegations in the last decade.
Elizabeth Payne, the legal director at the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, said she would like to see the department adopt stricter criteria for promoting officers. Elevating officers like Guzman-Sanchez and Lockhart to supervisory roles, she said, sends the wrong message to the public and to other officers.
“When you make a decision to promote somebody who has disciplinary history like this, you are consciously deciding to signal something about your priorities,” Payne said. “That’s really unfortunate.”
Ignoring Promotion Reform
Illinois Assistant Attorney General Abigail Durkin didn’t mince words during a hearing in August before U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca R. Pallmeyer. Durkin’s office brought the lawsuit that prompted Chicago’s police consent decree, and she expressed concern that the department had again failed to make changes to its promotions process.
“As I explained to this court almost exactly one year ago today, the vast majority of candidates promoted, CPD does not consider their prior discipline in deciding whether to promote them,” she told Pallmeyer.
She added: “But now where are we? … We stressed that action needed to be taken and discipline must be considered prior to an individual’s promotion. This court agreed.”
In 2019, the consent decree — prompted by the 2014 police killing of Laquan McDonald and its aftermath — required wide-ranging reforms that included new use-of-force policies, more robust police oversight and changes to training. The decree also required the department to develop a policy to review and consider an officer’s disciplinary history as part of promotions.
About 70% of promotions are achieved from what is known as a rank-order system, where top candidates are chosen solely by how they score on an exam, according to a report by the consulting firm the city hired.
The other way to get a promotion is merit-based, which relies on supervisor recommendations and a review by a Merit Board made up of top department officials. The system was created in the 1990s following two decades of litigation to force the department to increase representation of women and officers of color in management.
Under merit-based promotions, candidates’ disciplinary histories can become a factor, but only complaints that are labeled “sustained” or lead to suspensions can be considered, according to a 2020 report from DCI Consulting Group.
Over the years, officers with a range of disciplinary findings have been able to rise in the ranks. Among them was an officer whom internal investigators recommended be fired after a 2007 off-duty incident in which he was found to have driven his motorcycle while drunk and crashed into another vehicle, killing his passenger, according to media reports.
The officer, according to Police Board data, was given a lengthy suspension but ultimately not fired. He was promoted to sergeant in 2017, according to Chicago police data. It’s unclear whether the promotion was rank-order or merit-based.
In 2020, the city hired DCI, a Washington, D.C., firm that helps organizations with human resources and personnel matters, to examine the department’s promotion policies. In its first report that year, DCI said updating the promotions policy to consider discipline was a “high priority.” Three years later, DCI made the same recommendations and noted the lack of progress.
“CPD’s non-consideration of discipline is not aligned with most other departments; only one other jurisdiction reported not considering discipline prior to promotions,” the 2023 DCI report said.
Ongoing tension between the city and the police union over how to handle discipline is never far from the discussion about promotions — even though promotions are not part of the union contract and instead are governed by the department’s general orders, policies that everyone must follow.
DCI said in one report that officers did not want discipline to be reviewed as part of promotions because of “issues with the discipline process.” Officers and the union have long argued that the disciplinary process is unfair and arbitrary.
Snelling did not respond to requests for comment. But he acknowledged at the August hearing that reforming the promotion policy to include discipline has been slow and said the department needed time to ensure the changes stand up to legal scrutiny.
“We want to make sure that if these things go to litigation, that we are airtight on what we’re doing to make sure that we have our policies in place,” Snelling said.
Alexandra Block of the ACLU of Illinois, which is part of a coalition of 14 community and civil rights groups that forced the consent decree, said she would like to see changes in the promotions policies. But the coalition has been focused on issues “primarily concerned with how people are experiencing policing on the streets of Chicago,” she said.
Block said reviewing an officer’s disciplinary record before promotion has lost priority to other pressing reforms and added that “there is not the political will to accomplish” it.
Flawed System, Flawed Results
In the Spring of 2023, Sgt. Isagany Peralta was promoted to oversee officers in Chicago’s 3rd Police District, which covers large sections of the Woodlawn, South Shore and Greater Grand Crossing neighborhoods on the city’s South Side.
Six and a half years earlier, internal investigators found that Peralta had sexually harassed a female colleague over six months. Shortly after they started working in the same tactical unit, Peralta told her he would “bend her over the desk” and sexually assault her, investigative reports show. Three officers told investigators they heard the explicit comment. Peralta also was accused of harassing the colleague over her sexual orientation.
Investigators described his conduct as “the very definition of sexual harassment” and “unbecoming” of a police officer, according to investigative files obtained by the Invisible Institute and ProPublica. He was suspended for 20 days.
Peralta challenged the suspension, but an independent arbitrator upheld it, stating that Peralta was “clearly guilty.” It is unclear whether Peralta was promoted through the rank-order or merit-based system in 2023. Either way, his punishment wouldn’t have been considered, according to the department’s policy.
Under the merit-based process, discipline history matters only when an officer has three or more sustained suspensions in the last five years or was suspended more than seven days in the year prior to the promotion, according to DCI’s 2020 report. Peralta’s suspension for sexual harassment wouldn’t have been enough on its own to count against him.
The female colleague also reported that their supervisor, Sgt. Robert Belczak, was made aware of Peralta’s troubling behavior but did not intervene, according to investigative files.
Belczak told investigators he spoke with Peralta about his behavior. Still, investigators ruled that Belczak “failed to take supervisory action” to stop Peralta. Belczak received a 25-day suspension. He resigned in 2015 before completing the suspension.
Peralta and Belczak did not respond to requests for comment.
Belczak is one of at least three CPD supervisors punished for failing to report sexual misconduct. Among them was an officer promoted to sergeant while under investigation for declining to cooperate with a Chicago Public Schools inquiry into a fellow officer who was arrested on charges of having a sexual relationship with a high school student. Both officers worked at the student’s school. At the end of the investigation, the sergeant was suspended for 10 days.
These sorts of cases highlight the crucial role supervisors play in shaping department culture and maintaining discipline.
“There’s probably nothing that impacts the handling of sexual misconduct complaints more than culture,” said Christy Lopez, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center who previously worked with the U.S. Department of Justice leading investigations into police departments, including Chicago beginning in 2015.
Justin Frake, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business who has studied CPD misconduct, said young officers learn how to police from their supervisors. “I think we model our superiors,” Frake said.
Even as the CPD continues to fall short of consent-decree expectations and reforming its promotions system to include discipline, Snelling has acknowledged the need for change — and the reason why it’s necessary.
“I do believe that disciplinary history should be taken into consideration when we’re making promotions, because these are people who are going to be leading other people,” Snelling said at the August hearing over the consent decree. “And just scoring well on a test is — I don’t believe that it’s enough to just lead other officers.”
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