Beavers to juvenile jail chief: ‘I don’t like the way you dress’

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Earl Dunlap at a 2008 County Board meeting, dressed too casually by Commissioner William Beavers' standards. | AL PODGORSKI~SUN-TIMES

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Updated: December 13, 2011 9:00AM

Three years ago, outspoken Cook County Commissioner William Beavers dressed down the head of the juvenile jail for testifying before the County Board in casual attire: a white polo shirt tucked into his Dockers.

“Do you own a suit?” Beavers asked Earl Dunlap in 2008 as he lectured that “your appearance commands respect” and told him he’s “supposed to be a role model.”

On Thursday, it was a virtual replay in the county’s downtown Chicago boardroom during a budget hearing that spiraled into a fiery, albeit brief, exchange about whether the man makes the clothes or the clothes make the man. In the blink of an eye, it seemed, Beavers went from chastising Dunlap about fractured relations between the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center and the Chicago Police Department to the two recalling how their own relationship soured.

“We started off on a bad foot, and you want to leave it that way,” Dunlap said.

Beavers fired back: “We started off bad because I don’t like the way you dress, and I told you that.”

Dunlap, not one to mince words, shot right back: “And I also told you, you ain’t my momma.”

Beavers quickly chimed in: “That’s exactly right — and your daddy either.”

The verbal tennis match drew snickers from the gallery of detention center staff, lobbyists, union leaders and commissioners’ aides.

“Your appearance commands respect,” the typically nattily dressed Beavers told Dunlap, who wore a black sweater with a juvenile detention center patch on the arm and black pants — similar to the uniforms worn by staff.

“That works both ways commissioner, because I don’t wear an $800 suit —” Dunlap said before Beavers cut him off. After the meeting, Dunlap told the Chicago Sun-Times: “There are more important issues going on than whether or not I wear Armani suits.”

“He doesn’t like me, and he doesn’t have to like me,” Dunlap told the paper. “I don’t like him.”

Beavers agreed: “We don’t like each other, OK?”

He said he didn’t like that Dunlap showed up in a work uniform.

“Hell no, he looks like a trailer tramp,” Beavers told the Sun-Times. “Who’s going to have respect for that?”

The blowup was triggered by Beavers, who served on the Chicago Police force for 21 years, criticizing Dunlap for the juvenile jail’s tense relations with Chicago police. The problems stemmed from a 2009 incident in which officers brought a bleeding teen to the West Side facility and staff refused to book him, saying he needed to be taken to a hospital, Dunlap recalled during the hearing.

“They [police officers] said ‘We ain’t doing it,’ ” Dunlap said.

Dunlap insisted police take the youth to the hospital, “I said ‘Well, OK, fine you’re not going anyplace until it’s done.’ ”

When officers attempted to leave the facility, juvenile jail staff refused to open the parking gates, triggering a standoff that Beavers described as a “kidnapping” — something Dunlap pooh-poohed.

Since then, police have refused to respond to reports of staff being attacked by detainees. Former Supt. Jody Weis argued that was the responsibility of the sheriff, Dunlap said. But the sheriff only has jurisdiction over the courtrooms in the juvenile facility, Dunlap told the Sun-Times.

Dunlap said he’s working with new Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy and hopes to resolve the issues in the coming months.