Like many small Chicago suburbs, Franklin Park bought its police department’s boilerplate shooting policy online with standard provisions declaring officers shouldn’t open fire in the direction of colleagues or shoot at moving cars. But both those policies were ignored the night of Jan. 11, 2010 when Sgt. Fred Dede’s finger was blown off in blaze of police gunfire intended to stop a mentally ill former music teacher from using his car as a weapon. It was not the first or the last time those or similar policies were disregarded in police work in Cook County suburbs, according to a review of 113 police shootings there since 2005. An investigation by the Better Government Association and WBEZ found more than a third of those cases involved decisions that raise new questions about how well those policies are written and enforced in small suburban departments. Those questionable shootings include at least 20 in which officers fired at moving cars, 30 where suspects were not armed and a half-dozen where police either shot each other or innocent bystanders, the BGA/WBEZ investigation found. In addition, seven suburban police officers stymied investigators by invoking their right not to speak about shootings they were involved in for fear of incriminating themselves, records show. “Isn’t that amazing?” said Peter Moskos, a policing science instructor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and a former Baltimore officer. “If there is shady stuff going on, it’s much more likely to happen both intentionally and unintentionally in small towns and counties where there is no oversight, everyone knows each other, and there’s a natural inclination to prove a shooting justified.”

As a national spotlight falls on what critics have described as a poorly trained and sometimes reckless Chicago police force, a BGA/WBEZ examination reveals a broader — and potentially more perilous — problem lurking just outside the city limits where smaller departments haphazardly adopt, and rarely enforce, required policies on use of deadly force.

The review included an examination of 44 policies used by police departments in Cook County suburbs, police records in shooting cases provided as part of records requests, as well as dozens of interviews with police experts, chiefs and training professionals. It found a lack of direction about how suburban officers are supposed to react under potentially deadly circumstances and an almost complete absence of any procedural investigations or post-shooting remediation.

This story is part of a joint project of WBEZ and the Better Government Association. See the stories here.

Suburban police chiefs and experts said a lack of resources and a fervent desire for community policing drives a system where departments — as well as the police officers they employ — are often asked to do too much with too little. “If you ask any chief, it’s very rare that they’ll say that ‘I have enough officers,’” said Robert Collins Jr., police chief in south suburban Dolton. “For the level of activity that we see here, we don’t have enough officers. And when you hire officers, it takes money to do that. Unfortunately, sometimes there’s not a lot of money to hire what you need, you have to make due with what you have.” Most police agencies have policies on the use of deadly force that mirror longstanding national legal standards and Illinois law in allowing officers to resort to it only when “necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or another, or the commission of a forcible felony.” That fear of imminent death typically serves as the basis for how police justify shootings. But there are also long-established police science, guidelines and training designed to mitigate tragedy. Academy training programs and police procedure textbooks are filled with methods to help officers cope with the stress of such decisions, to quickly survey surroundings, to de-escalate emotional confrontations, and to keep up with an ever-evolving police science that helps dictate when it is appropriate to draw a weapon, let alone pull the trigger. “Officers are taught that they are responsible for every round that goes down range,” said Raymond Cordell, a former director of the Suburban Law Enforcement Academy where many suburban police officers are trained. “They need to know what their target is and what’s beyond. The bad guys don’t really care. What’s behind them? Is there a brick wall behind them, is there a playground beyond them?” Of the 44 use of force policies examined by the BGA and WBEZ, many had boilerplate language downloaded from companies that act as a sort of cop version of LegalZoom, offering plug-and-play best practices for police departments. More than half of policies analyzed do not address the nuances of how to interact with people who are mentally ill, drunk or on drugs. “When you are dealing with someone who is mentally ill, because they are scared or whatever, they pick up a rock or a knife or a hammer or whatever it is, and they are scared,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. “You point a gun at them, you raise their anxiety level, it’s the exact opposite of what psychologists and hostage negotiators will tell you.” Use of force policies also vary from police department to police department. “I think the biggest problem we have in this country is that we have 18,000 police departments with 18,000 sets of policies and 18,000 ways of doing business,” said Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo, in a 2012 report on de-escalation and minimizing use of force from the Police Executive Research Forum. At the time Acevedo was chief in Austin, Texas. In Cook County suburbs, many departments that have use-of-force policies nonetheless may not always enforce them, the BGA/WBEZ examination found.

'Oh my God, he just shot me'

In response to an open records request, Franklin Park police provided its shooting investigation policy for 2017 that contained references to crimes occurring in “Name your jurisdiction” and numerous mentions of “Department acronym” and “[DistrictCountyAttorney]’s Office” that were never filled out.

Franklin Park’s use of force policy — which lacks any mention of dealing with the mentally ill — came into play the night of Jan. 11, 2010, when officers said they spotted Daniel Mojziszek, a 52-year-old former music teacher, driving erratically on Mannheim Road. After a low-speed chase that traveled into the neighboring suburb of Northlake, rookie officer Joseph Gulino used his patrol car to run Mojziszek off the road and then wedged the car against a snowbank, records show. Gulino was soon joined by several officers, including Franklin Park Sgt. Fred Dede, who approached Mojziszek’s car on foot, according to police reports. As Dede stood on the driver's side of Mojziszek’s car and Gulino remained behind the wheel of his vehicle, Mojziszek once again tried to get away by hitting the gas pedal, reports say. Reports say Mojziszek’s car began to rock back and forth and was stuck in the snow. Gulino told investigators he was afraid the car might break loose and injure other officers, so he fired at Mojziszek through the squad car’s passenger window and into Mojziszek’s car. Gulino later said in a lawsuit deposition that Mojziszek had an “uncontrollable look of outrage on his face,” gave him an obscene gesture with his middle finger and then hit the accelerator. Mojziszek’s ex-wife told police she believed he was bipolar.

Daniel Mojziszek (Courtesy of family attorney)

Although three officers opened fire at Mojziszek that night from different directions, police reports describe how Gulino’s passenger door window was blown out, how the suspect’s car was riddled with bullets, and how Mojziszek was shot in the head. In the chaos, one of the police bullets took off Dede’s right index finger, reports say, and Gulino was the only officer firing in Dede’s direction. Dede later said in a deposition that glass from the suspect’s car window exploded in his face in the blaze of gunfire. “I turned to the left thinking that my face was sheared off ... because the impact was so strong,” Dede said. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, he just shot me.’