Four years ago, 20 members of the Chicago City Council signed a letter to then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot, “vehemently” opposing her nominee to lead the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, Andrea Kersten, who was the agency’s deputy chief administrator at the time.
COPA, bound by the city’s municipal code, had recently released its report on the Chicago Police Department’s botched raid at the home of Anjanette Young in 2019. In that report, authored by Kersten, the agency recommended a three-day suspension for police Officer Ella French because she didn’t have a body-worn camera.
French was killed in an on-duty shooting after the raid but before the report’s public release. Kersten publicly apologized for not redacting French’s name from the report, and she spoke privately with the slain officer’s family.
But the pro-police wing of the City Council wanted its pound of flesh, and that group of 20 aldermen — two of whom were later convicted of federal crimes — held firm in its opposition. Still, the full council confirmed Kersten as COPA’s chief administrator the following year.
“I knew exactly what I was signing up for,” Kersten, who recently announced her resignation, said in an interview with the Tribune last week.
In the years that followed, Kersten often faced harsh criticism in the wake of high-profile police shootings and other misconduct allegations. Now, as she steps away from her role as leader of the agency, she says COPA is primed to effectively continue its oversight and investigatory work.
She said that leaving COPA was “on (her) mind and heart for quite some time,” and she knew 2025 would be her last year with the agency.
“The politics and the noise around my work in particular certainly set in motion a timeline by which I needed to make a decision,” she said.
Kersten led COPA for roughly half of the agency’s existence, and she said she leaves the oversight body in better shape than when she took over.
“I can honestly look back at the last almost four years of being at the helm of COPA and say I did what I came here to do, and I leave behind an agency that is much better positioned operationally, caseload-wise, (in) consent decree compliance (and with) a national profile,” Kersten told the Tribune. “Looking around the country, I can name off all of the major cities that look to COPA and what we do here in Chicago at COPA as the standard for what civilian investigatory oversight of police can look like.”
Kersten’s impact can be seen in data the agency collected during her tenure.
Since May 2021, the month Kersten was named interim chief administrator, the agency has opened more than 2,400 investigations based on complaints of police misconduct, according to figures made publicly available by COPA.
Since the start of 2021, COPA has called for the Chicago Police Department to suspend 1,074 officers, though the lengths of those proposed suspensions were not known. Meanwhile, the agency has recommended CPD fire 188 officers in the past four years, according to agency data.
A former Cook County prosecutor and domestic violence victim advocate, Kersten also reflected on her often fraught relationship with other entities in the city’s political, criminal justice and law enforcement apparatus.
“What I know to be certain about this issue is that society has forced it into this binary where you’re either for or against somehow, as opposed to understanding that, truly, to do this work, to do this kind of accountability reform work, it’s not one or the other. It’s not ‘either-or.’ It’s not pro-police or against,” Kersten said.
“It’s all of the above,” she added. “Supporting police means holding police accountable. Holding police accountable sometimes means exonerating or clearing an officer.”
More recently, Kersten has faced allegations — leveled by former COPA investigators — of harboring and fostering an anti-police bias within the agency. A whistleblower lawsuit against COPA, filed last year by Matthew Haynam, a former COPA deputy chief administrator, remains pending in Cook County Circuit Court.
John Catanzara, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, the union representing rank-and-file CPD officers, previously told the Tribune that the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability was preparing to hold a no-confidence vote to trigger Kersten’s ouster by the City Council.
The city’s municipal code stipulates that the CCPSA may call for a no-confidence vote in COPA’s chief administrator only if just cause exists. Following Kersten’s resignation, the Tribune submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the CCPSA for records relevant to Kersten’s exit. As of Friday, that request had yet to be fulfilled.
After Kersten’s departure was made public, the CCPSA announced a nationwide search to find the next chief of COPA.
“For Chicago’s police accountability system to succeed, people who bring complaints to COPA and members of the Chicago Police Department who are the subject of COPA investigations, must all believe that COPA’s processes are fair, effective, and equitable,” CCPSA President Anthony Driver previously said in a statement.
In mid-2023 COPA was at the center of another firestorm. In May, as the city was struggling to address the migrant busing crisis, the agency announced it received a complaint that accused a CPD officer of engaging in sexual misconduct with an underage migrant who was housed at a West Side police station. No victims or witnesses were found, and the accused officer’s name was never publicly revealed.
CPD’s frustrations with Kersten were put on full display during the February 2024 meeting of the Chicago Police Board. It was then that CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling excoriated COPA for, he said, leaning on “personal opinions and speculation.”
“When we speculate, when we add our personal opinions, then those penalties become punitive and unfair and unfair to the officers,” Snelling said last year. “What we’re seeing are egregious penalties for extremely minor infractions.”
Snelling and the Police Department’s general counsel, Scott Spears, noted, too, that in the first two months of 2024 COPA had recommended CPD fire dozens of officers, an unusually high total for January and February.
Kersten later explained that COPA, working to decrease caseloads for its investigators, had undertaken a “timeliness initiative” to close out older cases. What’s more, Kersten said, the recently approved collective bargaining agreement between the city and FOP forced COPA to conclude misconduct investigations more than 18 months old.
Weeks later, the fatal shooting of Dexter Reed — who shot an officer before he was killed in a hail of gunfire — proved to be another inflection point. In records released to the media, COPA disclosed that the Harrison District (11th) tactical team involved in the Reed shooting was under investigation for allegedly carrying out unjustified traffic stops.
Ald. Nick Sposato, 38th, later complained about Kersten’s media appearances in a letter to the city’s Office of the Inspector General.
COPA was created in 2017 to replace the Independent Police Review Authority after the U.S. Department of Justice investigated CPD following the killing of Laquan McDonald by former Officer Jason Van Dyke three years earlier.
It was McDonald’s death and the subsequent release of the dash-cam footage depicting the shooting that drew Kersten, an Evanston native, to work within the city’s police accountability structure.
“I don’t think anything about the last eight years of my time at COPA and almost four years leading the agency has in any way changed what brought me to this work,” Kersten said. “It’s just enhanced it and really crystallized the need, I think, to continue to have consistent efforts at reform.”
