Chicago’s Office of the Inspector General is calling on residents to tell it what they want to know more about when it comes to how their city operates and what matters to them. It’s the office’s latest attempt to get public input on the inspector general’s priorities for the coming year.

Reset sat down with IG Deborah Witzburg for more on how her office is soliciting input from residents and to learn more about her office’s latest report detailing misconduct among city workers.

Your latest report details several cases of misconduct among city workers. What were your biggest takeaways?

We have focused our efforts on investigating the kind of serious misconduct in city government that undermines public trust. The City of Chicago operates at a tremendous deficit of legitimacy with its residents. And so we focus our efforts on holding bad actors accountable when they break the rules. [Those] bad actions – the rule breaking – contributes to that deficit of legitimacy [and] undermines public trust in the government.

There are several cases of police cover-up issues where alleged misconduct was kind of brushed away or just not reported correctly. One involved a lieutenant that didn’t sufficiently investigate a sergeant who was accused of sexually assaulting a member of the public. Can you talk more about that?

That’s right. [A] member of the Chicago Police Department assigned to the Bureau of Internal Affairs was tasked with investigating another member of the Bureau of Internal Affairs for accusations of sexual misconduct. And we found that that investigation was mishandled and furthermore the subject of the investigation – the person who would mishandle that investigation – lied to OIG about it while we were doing our work.

That cannot be. We cannot be in a place where the police department cannot meaningfully competently investigate its own and lying to OIG means you don’t get to be a city employee. You don’t get to be a Chicago police officer anymore.

How much of this is ‘bad actors’ and how much of it is a systemic issue?

It is both of those things. I think, particularly in the police department, we think about this a lot. Institutional culture is a very powerful thing and I often say – and truly believe – about policing that the problem with the Chicago Police Department is not that it’s a good system with a few bad people in it. It’s a bad system with a lot of really good people in it.

We have to be doing two things at one time here. We’ve got to walk and chew gum. When it comes to reform, we have to both address the deep fundamental systemic structural problems and we have to appropriately discipline bad actors.

CPD does have a rule against making false reports, and disciplinary action is usually dismissal or at least it’s supposed to be. A report that you issued last year found more than 100 current and former police officials were allowed to remain employed after making false statements. How is that possible?

It’s possible because the implementation of that rule has not matched the intention. I think that’s sort of all there is to it. I think that lying should disqualify someone from being a member of the Chicago Police Department. I think that we cannot ask people to trust a police department which lets its members get away with lying.

If they’re not being dismissed, then what does accountability look like?

It looks like not enough. And if there are people who have lied out on the street, conducting police work, writing police reports and landing on the witness stand. That goes to the very core that undermines the administration of criminal justice in Cook County.

You’re rolling out listening tours. Who are you listening to? And what are you trying to learn?

We are listening to Chicagoans. They are the people who know Chicago best. The exercise that we’re doing here is to learn more about what Chicagoans are worried about, what they want to know more about city government, and what they think we should be looking closer at. There’s a great deal to do in government oversight in Chicago and we are frankly never going to do everything that needs doing. So all of the work we undertake is a prioritization exercise.

We have to be directing our resources at those problems which matter most to real Chicagoans. And so to make sure we are making those prioritization decisions in as well-informed a way as possible, we are out asking people to tell us, as I say, what they’ve seen go wrong in city government, what they want to know more about in terms of how it works and what city government could do to improve their quality of life to make things better in their neighborhood, on their block.

Chicago residents interested in taking part in the Inspector General’s listening tour survey can visit www.IGChicago.org between now and May 15.

This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.

Hit “play” at the top to hear the full interview.