Rancor among the staff at the Civilian Office of Police Accountability was the driving force behind the recent effort to remove the agency’s former chief administrator, Andrea Kersten, records obtained by the Tribune show.
The Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability — the city body overseeing the leaders of COPA, the Chicago Police Department and police board — wrote Kersten on Jan. 28 to tell her of a planned no-confidence vote regarding her overseeing COPA.
Persistent complaints and concerns about oversight within COPA, the agency’s workplace culture, the quality of investigations, as well as Kersten’s own public statements and appearances were chief among the reasons highlighted in the material, obtained via an open-records request.
The letter to Kersten also noted several alleged incidents in high-profile COPA cases that only fueled CCPSA’s concerns.
Among them, CCPSA claimed that COPA failed to properly document evidence and witness statements in the 2023 investigation of alleged sexual misconduct involving a CPD officer and an underage migrant who was sheltered at the time in a West Side police station. That officer was not charged or disciplined.
Kersten told the Tribune that year that no witnesses were located before that investigation was closed.
“If the police accountability system is or is reasonably perceived to be ineffective or unfair, it will erode public confidence in policing and police oversight,” CCPSA president Anthony Driver and vice president Remel Terry wrote to Kersten on Jan. 28.
“Over the past year, the Commission has had growing concerns about your leadership and judgment and the impact they have had on COPA,” Driver and Terry added.
“The Commission has also received a substantial number of serious complaints about COPA and your leadership,” the document states. “Most complaints came from current and former COPA employees, including high-ranking COPA staff members. Complainants have first-hand knowledge of specific incidents that raise serious concerns about your leadership.”
Kersten led COPA for about four years, after previously serving as the agency’s deputy chief administrator. She announced her resignation last month on the same day that several other city agency leaders left their posts.
In a recent interview with the Tribune, Kersten said 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.”
Meanwhile, a whistleblower lawsuit filed by a former COPA supervisor — containing similar substantial allegations as the CCPSA letter — remains pending in Cook County Circuit Court. The Fraternal Order of Police, the union representing rank-and-file CPD officers, has also filed several still-pending lawsuits against COPA and Kersten in recent years.
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.
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.