Jay Westensee would have liked to see more complaints filed as well. He was the deputy chief investigator at the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA), the agency that took and processed complaints about CPD officers. Part of Westensee’s job was deciding which incoming complaints fell under COPA’s jurisdiction and referring the others to the CPD’s internal investigation agency. He said COPA representatives were going into communities on the South Side trying to demystify the citizen complaint process. The more complaints being filed, the better it was doing.
But Westensee also recognized that COPA’s main problem was not that people didn’t know what enough about it, but that many people knew it too well. The agency represented the fourth wave of police accountability reform to sweep Chicago, the third of which did not last ten years. He said that police misconduct would only go down once people saw COPA as a fair, and therefore legitimate, authority.