A Federal judge stuck to his guns Friday, ruling the city cannot just admit that a code of silence exists within the Chicago Police Department -- he wants to hear Mayor Rahm Emanuel describe it for himself, Chicago's NBC5 reported.
The testimony was ordered for a case where two veteran police officers, Shannon Spalding and Daniel Echeverria, say they faced retaliation after attempting to expose corruption in the Ida B. Wells housing project on Chicago’s South Side.
“Officers and supervisors were involved with running the narcotics trade,” Spalding told NBC5 Investigates. “It became very clear that there was not going to be an unbiased investigation.”
After Emanuel spoke of an unwritten code in remarks before the Chicago City Council last fall, Spalding and Echeverria’s attorneys added the mayor to their potential witness list. City lawyers fought to exclude his testimony, even offering to stipulate to the existence of the so-called “code."
