Your Welcome - Again

Frank and Fran blatantly stealing from the blog again:

• Chicago Police Supt. Eddie Johnson has quietly changed the rules governing merit promotions, casting another cloud over a process condemned by officers interviewed by the U.S. Department of Justice as a “reward for cronyism.”
  
  City Inspector General Joe Ferguson and Fraternal Order of Police President Dean Angelo aren’t happy they weren’t informed about Johnson’s decision to allow members of the five-member Merit Board to nominate their own candidates, provided they don’t interview or vote on their own nominees.
  
  Also troubling, they say, is the fact that Johnson made the change in a “verbal order” — and applied it to the last two waves of promotions — even though the change has yet to be finalized in writing.

The writing touches on the improprieties we've noted, the nominators having their nominees appear before the Board, the oft-repeated lie about "merit" being used to boost minority representation in the supervisory ranks (when it's so much easier to give girlfriends the test).

This part was highly suspicious though

• Johnson’s new rule applied to the two latest waves of promotions — one for officers who were promoted to detective on Jan. 2 and the other one for officers promoted to sergeant on Feb. 6.
  
  Starting with the merit promotions to sergeant, Johnson decided to make public the names of those who get merit promotions along with the names of the supervisors who nominate them, Guglielmi said.
  
  [...] Guglielmi refused to release the list of officers who received merit promotions to detective on Jan. 2, saying that promotional class was selected before Johnson decided to make merit-promotion nominations public. A total of 136 officers were promoted to detective, records show.

So why conceal the Detective "merit" people, especially as this "change" supposedly took effect two lists ago? We can think of one reason right off the bat:

• one of the names has some connection that would be embarrassing and/or humiliating should it become general knowledge. Perhaps the nominee was telling people how badly he did on the exam? And then through some miracle, began telling people how well he did, hoping that they'd forget he already told people he had done poorly enough that promotion was a distant (and fading) possibility. Someone whose relative would shortly be standing for re-election and then sitting in close contact with the City during the most important Contract negotiations in FOP history.

And that's just one theory - this is Chicago after all. Perhaps an FOIA request could pry the "merit" portion of the list out as it has in the past - but not before the FOP ballots were counted.