INTERVIEWS

SHARON R. FAIRLEY: AN EXPERT ON CIVILIAN OVERSIGHT

by PIETRO JUVARA STAFF WRITER

TheUniversity of Chicago Law School is home to some of the foremost legal experts in the world. Among them is Professor from Practice Sharon R. Fairely, who has dedicated her life to transforming the landscape of police accountability in Chicago, as well as studying civilian oversight all across the country. A graduate from the Law School herself and a longtime public servant in the city of Chicago, she founded the city’s current police oversight office before eventually returning to the university to teach and research civilian oversight full time. I had the privilege of sitting down with Professor Fairley to discuss her fascinating path to professorhood and the field of police accountability and civilian oversight.

Sharon R. Fairley grew up in suburban Maryland, outside of Washington DC. Both of her parents worked in education, impressing on her a strong desire to work in the public sphere. “I was raised by two public servants”, Fairley explained, “and I was inspired by the work of my parents and so I went to law school with the idea of doing public service of some kind.” While she would make good on her service-oriented values throughout her legal career, her path to law was anything but straightforward. Professor Fairley initially graduated from Princeton University with a degree in Aerospace Engineering (“people are always like ‘whaaat?’”), before getting her MBA at Wharton School of

Business. Despite a successful initial career managing a pharmaceutical company, Fairley returned to school to study law. When asked about her diverse educational background, she asserted that it ultimately helped her: “I feel like I was at an advantage for a lot of reasons,” she laughed, “first of all being a lawyer having had the analytical skills of an engineer. Having had marketing experience, ences. She told me about one of her first cases, where a victim’s father embraced her after a successful trial, “I felt this weight come off my shoulder. The weight of responsibility to bring justice for this family…it was the only time I cried on the job.” After eight years working as a prosecutor, Fairley was appointed to be General Counsel for Chicago’s Office of the Inspector General. She described law is all about communication and selling…As a lawyer what are you doing? You’re selling your case.” Those skills were put to good use as Fairley graduated and went on to become a federal prosecutor in the Northern District here in Illinois.

As a prosecutor, Professor Fairley was exposed to life-changing experi- that “the mission of the Inspector General’s office is to root out waste and inefficiency and corruption in the city’s agencies. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Chicago has some issues there…” We laugh together. “The challenge was managing the work, deciding where you want to place the agency’s resources.” Fairley had several primary responsibilities: providing legal advice and lawsuit response, and then aiding with the legality of ongoing investigations herself.

All of this went on until 2014, when a young man named Laquan McDonald was tragically shot by a Chicago Police officer. The following year, footage revealed that the shooting was unprovoked and the officer was charged with first-degree murder. In the aftermath of the attack, and in the wake of an impending investigation from the Department of Justice, Fairley was appointed as the new head of the Independent Police Review Agency (IPRA), the city’s police accountability arm at the time. “IPRA was created in 2008,” Fairley tells me, “and if you look at the ordinance that created it, it sounds great on paper! It had subpoena power, jurisdiction over serious excessive force- all problematic areas. And it was meant to be an independent agency from the police department.” It became apparent, however, that IPRA had not lived up to its design. According to Fairley, the organization was “never fully independent from the police department”, it was “extremely under-resourced”, and as Fairley points out, “it was not very transparent, which is really important when it comes to an accountability system.” The mounting issues with IPRA eventually proved too insurmountable, which prompted Fairley to create a new agency altogether.

From the skeleton of IPRA, Sharon R. Fairley founded the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA), in the hopes of correcting its mistakes. She tells me that her office had four key themes that they wanted to implement into COPA: independence, “we didn’t want the mayor’s people telling us how to investigate our cases”; integrity, “to ensure the process that the agency took to investigate matters had integrity”; timeliness, since “complainants had felt with IPRA that their concerns would go into a black hole and never be addressed”; and transparency, which started with making cases publicly available with redactions when necessary. For Fairley, this was “the only way for the community to evaluate the quality of what we do as an agency.” The four key themes sought to correct all of the key issues with IPRA. All of it was in an effort to build trust with the Chicago community, as well as the law enforcement force. Building COPA was the culmination of Fairley’s life experiences: “everything I had done up to that moment prepared me for the role I had with COPA,” she tells me. “I was actually creating a large city department from scratch…I think most lawyers would not have had the kind of management experience that I had in the corporate world.”

In the nearly six years since she founded COPA, Fairley has kept a close eye on the organization’s activity through her connections, as well as her research. Ultimately, her core values and upbringing led her back into education. “I come from a long line of educators, it was kind of a natural evolution for me to go back to law school.” As a Professor from Practice, Fairley teaches the next generations of law school students, as well as conduct her own research on the multitude of existing civilian accountability systems. She was happy to give us a preview of some of her current work: “I’m working on a project right now that’s all about coming up with empirical evidence to support why [civilian oversight] agencies need more resources. Sometimes it’s hard when you don’t have some empirical evidence to show that if you give us this money to invest in, it’s gonna help us fulfill our mission even better, quicker, faster, and with greater integrity.”

For Shannon R. Fairley, “it’s all about enhancing public safety–that’s the endgame, to help support stronger accountability systems because that’s what makes us all safer.”