Chief Kevin Sewell and Lorenzo Davis, both fired after standing up against injustice

Chief Kevin Sewell and Lorenzo Davis, both fired after standing up against injustice

Two seasoned and highly respected black men in law enforcement in two different cities were each fired this summer—not for corruption, not for misconduct, not for poor management, not for sexual harassment, but because they each stood up against injustice inside their own departments.

In 2007, the city of Chicago created an "independent" review board to monitor fatal shootings by police. I put those quotation marks around independent because the boards are often stacked with retired police officers who are often anything but independent in their views of their comrades. Of the 400 cases they reviewed, only one shooting of the 400 was found to be unjustified.

Lorenzo Davis was the supervising investigator for the review board and the facts in many of the cases just weren't adding up to him. He had been a Chicago police officer for 23 years and served as a commander, the head of a detective unit, then the head of an entire district, and eventually oversaw the entire public housing unit until he retired and joined the review board.

Soon, Davis began determining that many more police shootings in Chicago weren't justified at all. He found that six shootings were unjustified. That may not seem like a lot, but it's a 600 percent increase from the one shooting that was deemed unjustified in the previous eight eight years. His supervisors demanded that he reverse the rulings. He refused, and on this past July 9, he was fired. Chicago doesn't even deny that this is why they fired him. Here's their statement:



Davis’s termination came less than two weeks after top IPRA officials, evaluating Davis’s job performance, accused him of “a clear bias against the police” and called him “the only supervisor at IPRA who resists making requested changes as directed by management in order to reflect the correct finding with respect to OIS,” as officer-involved shootings are known in the agency.

Mind you, the man they are saying has a clear bias against the police is a decorated officer from the department with nothing but glowing reviews.

Below is an interview he did with WBEZ.