Union spokesman is often first one to speak

Chicago officers work an alley off the 2800 block of West Polk Street after a fatal shooting by police. Photo courtesy John J. Kim, Chicago Tribune.
In Chicago when a big news story occurs related to the police, Pat Camden, the spokesman for the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, is often the first person to talk to the media. In a story from the Chicago Tribune, reporter Eric Zorn explains that for last several years, Camden has served as the primary explainer of why the officer had to shoot. Employees of the Chicago Police Department’s Office of News Affairs, the customary and preferred conduit for exculpatory accounts, are quoted far less often in these breaking stories even though they, too, are on the scene.
Why? Because Camden, the union guy, is talkative and forthcoming in the hours when authorities are still polishing their formal statements and running them through channels.
“It didn’t used to be that way,” said Camden, a former Chicago patrol officer who worked at News Affairs under six superintendents from 1985 to 2008. “Then they started to clamp down on releasing information quickly. But a statement issued three or four hours after the fact, given today’s technology, is ancient history.”