This story is a collaboration between Invisible Institute and IPM News
After lengthy delays, Illinois police regulators are one step closer to strengthening their ability to strip officers of their ability to work in law enforcement. The move aims to prevent officers who commit misconduct at one agency from simply moving on to another — a phenomenon sometimes called “wandering cops.”
Regulators with the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board (ILETSB) released draft administrative rules earlier this month that will allow the agency to begin tackling hundreds of cases in which a police department, prosecutor’s office or member of the public has filed a complaint seeking to strip a police officer of their certification.
The regulations are the first step in implementing several provisions around police decertification included in the 2021 criminal justice reform SAFE-T Act. The process has been “stalled” for years, according to Impact for Equity, a Chicago-based law and policy nonprofit organization.
ILETSB is seeking public comment in three hearings to be held in Springfield, Chicago and virtually. The first meeting is scheduled for Friday, Oct. 11 at ILETSB’s office in Springfield.
The proposed rules allow for “discretionary decertification” of officers, who were previously only subject to “automatic decertification” if they had been convicted of a felony or certain misdemeanors.
The rules would create a new Certification Review Panel of ILETSB, which would hear complaints about allegations against officers, such as excessive force, tampering with camera footage or other evidence, false statements, failure to intervene in another officer’s misconduct, or “other unprofessional or unethical conduct or practice harmful to the public.” The categories of misconduct are set out in the state statute but not the rules themselves.
The rules are a small but important step forward in increasing police accountability in Illinois, according to police reform experts.
“It’s good that some sort of regulations have been released by ILETSB,” said Amy Thompson, staff counsel with Impact for Equity. Their publication moves the state “one step closer towards actually effectuating the decertification system that was passed into law nearly four years ago now.”
Carlton Mayers II agrees. He’s an attorney and police reform consultant who has worked with lawmakers and community groups on the post-George Floyd legislation in Illinois and other states.
“It definitely provides meat on the bones” of legislative language regarding decertification, Mayers said.
After Sonya Massey’s death, public pressure mounts to prevent future hiring of problematic officers
The proposed rules are almost as notable for what’s not present in them as for what is.
Entirely missing are guidelines for what individual department background investigations should look like — what experts describe as the last line of defense before hiring an officer who has a questionable track record.
The draft regulations were in process long before the July 2024 killing of Sonya Massey, an unarmed Black woman who was shot and killed in her home by Sangamon County Sheriff’s Deputy Sean Grayson. But that tragedy amplified concerns about how police are hired, which have led to increased public pressure on ILETSB to establish its discretionary decertification process.
Advocates for police reform and Massey’s family have pointed to the fact that Grayson was hired at six central Illinois law enforcement agencies despite a history of DUIs, being involuntarily discharged from the U.S. Army for “serious” misconduct and racking up new complaints and allegations of misconduct at the various departments that employed him. They have raised concerns that the new SAFE-T Act provisions may not have prevented Grayson from being hired by the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office, which has hired multiple officers with histories of DUIs, according to other recent reporting.
“One of the key things is making sure that there is a system in place so that if something had been reported about Grayson to ILETSB that they would have had a process in place to thoroughly and swiftly investigate and move him through the discretionary certification process before any of this happened,” Thompson said.
“Outside of the scope of these rules, there need to be systems in place to make sure that departments are held accountable to their obligations under the statute to report to ILETSB, to make employment inquiries regarding their officers, [and] to submit information regarding their officers,” Thompson continued. “Those are amendments that likely will need to be made to the law to really improve the ability to enforce [it].”
The proposed rules could go farther, sources say
Thompson and Mayers both pointed to other key issues not present in the proposed rules.
The process by which ILETSB and the Certification Review Panel receive, investigate and determine whether a complaint should be presented for further action is not outlined in the draft rules, even though the agency has already received hundreds of complaints, according to ILETSB’s annual reports. Some of those have been waiting for the administrative rules to move forward, but hundreds of others have been dismissed or ruled unfounded.
“The public is left in the dark to understand this large section of consideration of decertification [and] what’s going to happen there,” said Thompson of the unaddressed complaint review process. “What we do see is essentially a regurgitation of what’s in the statute… There’s not much detail there that would explain to the public about how those actual recommendations or decisions are going to be made.”
Mayers also noted a provision empowering ILETSB to issue “emergency” suspensions of certifications in instances in which an officer has been arrested or indicted. He said this raises the question of what rights officers have to contest such suspensions.
He pointed to the case of an officer in Riverside, in Cook County’s west suburbs, who was decertified last year by ILETSB for a $15 misdemeanor theft conviction years earlier. The officer eventually was able to successfully appeal her decertification, after village officials, State Rep. LaShawn Ford and Gov. J.B. Pritzker called for the decision to be overturned.
Given that the appeal was of an automatic decertification, Mayers said it wasn’t clear how those cases would be impacted by the bodies and infrastructure set up in the new regulations. “That needs to be laid out more,” he said.
Finally, the regulations make few explicit promises of transparency.
Mayers said no process exists for the public or press to view hearings, and rules governing publicly accessible databases required to be published under the SAFE-T Act are not addressed.
Proposed rules leave room for inconsistencies in reporting and investigations
In his movement between small police departments across Illinois, Grayson is far from alone. In May, the Illinois Answers Project reported that since 2000, nearly 1,500 officers were rehired in Illinois directly after being fired by a different agency in the state. This number is likely an undercount due to departments sometimes failing to report accurate information to ILETSB — as experts said likely occurred with at least two of Grayson’s previous employers.
Even so, the Illinois Answers Project analysis showed the issue was largely concentrated in the southern suburbs of Cook County and parts of southern Illinois, including the St. Louis Metro East and Little Egypt regions.
Agencies are required to submit forms whenever an officer leaves an agency, which ILETSB collects as electronic data. This made the Illinois Answers Project analysis possible (as well as a public data tool maintained by Invisible Institute).
But that information is only as accurate as the information provided by the departments filling out the forms. Reporting about Grayson by Invisible Institute and IPM News showed that at least two agencies appear to have left out important information from those submissions, and failed to otherwise report misconduct to the secretive Officer Professional Conduct Database that ILETSB maintains. There could be even more wandering officers than the Illinois Answers Project found. The rules don’t address whether ILETSB will take any steps to verify information it receives from departments or enforce reporting rules.
Mayers said the inconsistencies in how different police departments handle internal complaints will also impact the discretionary decertification process, which in most cases will rely on the employing agency’s investigation. He pointed to states like Vermont, which he said puts forth clear guidelines on what internal investigations need to contain.
Previous reporting has highlighted how a lack of required internal investigations into police shootings led to officers in the Cook County suburbs easily finding new jobs after committing fatal shootings at their previous department that never underwent a review beyond the prosecutors considering whether the officer committed a crime.
ILETSB officials acknowledged but did not respond to questions submitted several days before publication, as did April McLaren, a spokesperson for Attorney General Kwame Raoul, a significant backer of the decertification provisions. Neither State Sen. Elgie Sims (D-Chicago), a sponsor of the legislation, nor Kenny Winslow, the executive director of the Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police, responded to emailed requests for comment.
Rules are only as good as the enforcement. Both could be strengthened
For the first time in Illinois history, it will be possible for police officers to be stripped of their ability to work in law enforcement without having been first convicted of a crime once the new discretionary decertification process is implemented.
When the SAFE-T Act provisions were first introduced in 2021, Roger Goldman, a longtime law professor at Saint Louis University and advocate for police decertification systems, said they represented a “huge step forward” for Illinois.
Goldman, who died in 2023, was prompted to push for rigorous police decertification by rampant department-hopping in the St. Louis region, in both Missouri and Illinois. After he successfully advocated for Missouri to institute a broad decertification law, allowing the board to decertify even without a criminal conviction, he turned his attention to other states.
In Illinois, he worked with Jay Hoffman, a former student of his who had gone on to work as a St. Clair County prosecutor before being elected to the Statehouse in 1990. Illinois already had a law that barred people convicted of felonies from becoming law enforcement officers, but that law did not address misdemeanors or non-criminal conduct.
Hoffman said in an interview that he understood the issue of “wandering officers” to be particularly serious for smaller, rural departments that face budgetary issues. He worked with various policing groups on the bill, which was filed during the 1999 session. Legislative records show that it was supported by most statewide policing groups, including the Illinois FOP.
According to Hoffman, discretionary decertification was discussed at the time, but given that the bill was “a negotiated attempt with all of the various police organizations,” the final bill did not include it.
The bill was what “we were able to garner… that would get the requisite votes to make sure that people who committed felonies and certain misdemeanors were actually decertified,” he said.
“I’m not saying that this discretionary decertification should not have been the law,” Hoffman added, when asked if he felt there was any work left to do after the passage of the 1999 law. “I’m just saying that, in Illinois, we had nothing, which was problematic, and we were able to pass this law that stood nearly a couple decades.”
In the coming legislative session, Hoffman said he and his fellow lawmakers will consider whether ILETSB has been fulfilling its duties and whether there are models from other states that Illinois could adopt.
“If the departments that [Sean Grayson] was working for would have complied with the mandatory reporting” under the law, Hoffman said, Grayson might have been prevented from working in Sangamon County. “We can pass laws, [but] they still have to be enforced by the requisite organization that is designed to train and enforce the laws. That whole process in Illinois has to be part of the re-examination.”
This story was produced in collaboration between Invisible Institute, a nonprofit public accountability journalism organization based in Chicago, and Illinois Public Media News, the NPR/PBS member station based in Champaign-Urbana. Sam Stecklow is an investigative journalist and FOIA fellow with Invisible Institute. Follow him on Twitter at @samstecklow or email him at sam@invisibleinstitute.com.